The Good Soldiers

When President Bush announced a new military strategy for Iraq in July 2007 dubbed “the surge,” it immediately drew both supporters and critics. Yet few are as intimately familiar with the surge as journalist David Finkel, who spent eight months embedded with the 2-16 infantry battalion deployed on the outskirts of Baghdad as part of this new strategy. Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post, will discuss his book, The Good Soldiers, which provides his account of the war as experienced on the ground. He details the successes, struggles and psychological traumas of soldiers on the front lines, while underscoring the cognitive dissonance between the violent reality taking place on the ground and the abstract policy debates back in Washington.