Kelly Kennedy in Iraq: Getting it Right

St. Martin’s Press, $24.99, 319 pages

Dart Society fellow Kelly Kennedy introduces us to people we won’t soon forget in “They Fought for Each Other” – and we’re just reading their story, not living it.

She was embedded with Charlie Company 1-26 as its 138 men transformed a violent Sunni stronghold into a secure neighborhood. Through her words, we watch as their lives take twists and turns that tested them in unimaginable ways.

They lost best friends, watched them die and blamed themselves for not being able to save them. And every day, those left behind died a little bit, too.

Kennedy tells a story about courage and loss, of men who bond in a way most of us will never understand. It doesn’t take long to connect with this unit, to want to know more about these men, to hope they beat the odds, even though you know in your heart that they won’t.

We meet amazing soldiers, including Ybay, who “served as platoon daddy for the second platoon.” DeNardi, who had “big gray-blue eyes and the biggest mop of hair the army allows,” who became the “company cruise director.” Wood, a “wiry bundle of ornery under a blonde crew cut.”

We meet Hendrix, “First Sergeant Mama,” whose biggest triumph was getting his men out of Adhamiya and says he will never go back: “There’s definitely a limit to to what a person can take.”

And we meet Baka, who shared pieces of his own life with the Iraqis to build trust in the neighborhood, always taking off his helmet inside their homes so he’d appear more human. Building trust will help keep his soldiers safe. He is the ultimate soldier, the perfect officer, whose men were everything to him. “Baka seemed unaware of his effect on the men, probably because he so obviously loved them back,” Kennedy writes.

Kennedy’s foreshadowing keeps you reading, wondering what’s going to happen next, and how our guys will react. In setting up an IED blast that would take the life of a second soldier, she describes the scene:

With two words – dead quiet – Kennedy has us on edge. And we stay at attention throughout the book, as more soldiers die, and Charlie Company’s battalion loses more men than any battalion since the Vietnam War.

Kennedy puts us in Iraq in every way. We feel it – soldiers compare Kuwait to “living inside a hair dryer.” We smell it – the decaying bodies and filthy garbage in Adhamiya. We see it – in the burned charcoal appearance of best friends who died in attacks.

And we ache. After a brutal IED blast that killed five, the soldiers say goodbye to body bags of their fallen brothers, saying one last “I love you,” getting a final touch before the soldiers are taken for the Honor Flight back to the Green Zone.

The subtitle of this book is “The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq,” promising us that not all is lost in the men’s efforts. By following the unit out of the darkness of Adhamiya, Kennedy shows us that life goes on. It’s not without cost nor without pain: alcohol and drug abuse, PTSD, nightmares, mood swings, marital strain, long recovery from severe burns and wounds.

No one came home as the same person they were before.

But there is hope, too. Baka, who now works with cadets at West Point, keeps stories about the Charlie Company under glass on a desk in his office. “All I do is talk about honor and courage and integrity,” he says.

Those words, and Kennedy’s book, are a tribute to every soldier in the unit.

Kelly Kennedy’s book is based on Blood Brothers, a series that ran in the Army Times, where she works as a reporter. She also served as a soldier in Desert Storm and Mogadishu, Somalia.

Tina Croley is the 2007 Mimi Award honorable mention and a vice-president of the Dart Society Board of Directors. Formerly of the Detroit Free Press, she led a Dart Award-winning reporting team for the series “Homicide in Detroit.”