Fobbit (12 page)

“You better be meeting me at the door wearing an apron and holding a martini when you ask me that, Sar’nt. Oh, and you better have a decent pair of boobs, too.”

Browning laughed as he stripped naked. “No, really,” he rasped. “Any exciting shit rock your world today?”

“Oh . . .” Gooding thought about telling him it was all sunshine and furry kittens. Instead, he said, “Rough one today. Suicide bomber. They say they’re not sure if he was wearing a vest or not, but I know for a fact he was. I saw the pictures.”

“Damn,” Browning said, shaking his head and testing his stall’s water in the palm of his hand.

“Guy walks into a restaurant full of soldiers.”

“Sounds like the start of a bad joke.”

“Except no one was laughing at this one.”

Gooding squeezed past him—always a very delicate choreography in order to avoid the dreaded penis graze—and got into his own shower stall.

“He fuck it up pretty bad?”

“Bad enough,” Gooding said over the hiss of water. “Twenty-three dead. Lots wounded. So, yeah, it was a pretty rotten day for a lot of folks.”

Browning hawked a loogey and spat it into his shower stall, watched it wash down the drain. “I dunno…These guys sure are getting . . . what’s the word? . . .
ambitious
.”

“Yeah, that’s one way of putting it, I guess.” What were the words he used in his press release?
An isolated, desperate attack
. Which was bullshit, of course. Gooding wasn’t allowed to use the words
cunning and calculated
.

He poured a tablespoon of body wash into the palm of his hand, sniffed it in a private moment of aromatherapy, then rubbed it across his chest, his shoulders, his legs. He scrubbed and scrubbed. But it was no use. Nothing could mask the smell of melancholy.

From the Diary of Chance Gooding Jr.

Early morning. Another Groundhog Day in Iraq.

I run. I take up a light jog, traveling down the dirt service road passing in front of the chow hall (where I can smell them baking the cream pies for today’s lunch), onto the paved road that follows the shore of Z Lake. Bats swoop overhead.

My brain unravels as my legs reach forward along the road. I think about how my ex-wife, Yolanda, had shown up at my door two nights before I shipped out, driving to Georgia all the way from Reno in what she later said was a sentimental weakness, and invited herself in. I think about how she stood there and said she couldn’t fucking believe I was actually going to war and how, even though we’d been broken up for nearly ten years now and she’d had two husbands in the meantime, she would worry about me every day. I think about how one thing led to another. I think about how I unbuttoned her shirt and buried myself in the familiar valley between her breasts, hiccupping with sobs. The tears came because I was afraid of dying from al-Qaeda bullets, and because I was shocked with joy at Yo’s generosity, and because I hadn’t had sex with anyone but myself for more than three years.

The dawn air hangs like a miasma over the FOB, carrying with it something that smells like deep-fried tires, dog shit, and month-old bananas. If I take too much of it into my throat and lungs, I’ll start gagging.

I run. There is a scarf of gray smoke, at least three miles in length, hanging low over the city. The lake laps softly against the reeds on my right. I think about Saddam and his cronies crouched here on the banks, rifles cocked, waiting for the servants to start beating the brush a half mile away, scaring the wild boars in their direction. Were the bats also under his dictatorial sway? Did they nip the insects from the air around his face, clearing a sting-free zone for his imperial visage? My mouth open and panting, I pass through small clouds of those same bugs and I start choking and spitting.

The sun isn’t even over the horizon and it’s already scorching the earth.

I decide to press on, waste as much time as possible circling Saddam’s alphabetical lake. I’m due at the palace in an hour but I try to push it off as long as possible. Just more of the same crap waiting for me at the cubicle: churning out more tree-killing reams of press releases for jolly ol’ Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad.

The division task force is now heavily engaged in an offensive against the terrorists, called Operation Squeeze Play. Over here, a tactical operation is not a tactical operation until it has been christened with a code word. There are entire offices in the Pentagon and here in Iraq whose job it is to sit around and come up with clever names like Operation Righteous Fury or Operation Coffin Nail. Once, during cold and flu season, one of our brigade commanders came up with Operation Influenza and Operation Barking Cough.

Just this week, the task force commander decreed: “Every time a platoon-sized element or larger rolls out the gate, it’s to be a named operation.”

Roger that, sir. Pretty soon, we’ll have “Operation Go to the Bathroom” or “Operation I Just Need to Gas Up the Humvee.”

No, but really, the dweeby guys in the planning cell come up with the
cutest
names for these daylong or weeklong combat operations where Iraqi and U.S. soldiers go into the neighborhoods to flush out terrorists. Yesterday, it was Drake, Pintail, and Mallard; today, it was Chicken Little.

I can just hear them now on one of their door-kicking searches of the neighborhoods:

“Shamrock X-ray, this is Clover 3-2, over.”

“Go ahead, Clover.”

“Uh, Roger
. . .
we’re here at the objective, but don’t have any reports of skies falling, over.”

“Affirmative, Clover. Go ahead and return to rally point, over.”

“Roger, Shamrock X-ray.”

And don’t forget to make way for ducklings.

Now it’s summer and so the operation namers in Task Force Baghdad Headquarters are commemorating it with baseball-themed titles (Operation Babe Ruth, Operation Khadhimiya Shortstop, Operation Home Plate). At last count, we’d rounded up more than four hundred bad guys in two days thanks to Operation Squeeze Play. Of course, not all of them are guilty of crimes—there is a certain amount of collateral damage when we make these raids and trap insurgents in our net, sometimes we pick up a few innocents along the way
. . .
to whom we later apologize and send on their merry way. Yesterday alone, I put out three press releases on Squeeze Play and the media started calling when they heard one raid on a house in Mansour turned up $6 million in cash—stacks and stacks and stacks of U.S. $100 bills. I have pictures—unreleasable and stored on my hard drive—of American soldiers grinning and pointing at the loot. By the end of the day, I was exhausted, having spent the entire time going back and forth from my computer, answering media queries via e-mail, and being interviewed on the phone. It’s like running on a treadmill. And every day is the same thing. Groundhog Day redux.

6

DURET

L
ieutenant Colonel Vic Duret had come to the point where he hated Fobbits: self-preservationists who never admitted to the fear inside, and instead found ways to stay busy within the boundaries of the triple-rolled concertina wire and walls crenellated with shards of glass. Duret knew of an entire platoon’s worth of officers who clung to the security of headquarters, their asses gradually molding into the shape of a chair. Their aftershave reeked of self-importance and at any given moment of the workday, you could find them standing at a SMOG workstation, arms akimbo, grim-faced and intent as they stared at the unit icons on the Area of Operations maps. Periodically, they’d point and redirect one of the icons with the tip of a finger—just like that, flicking a company from Mahmudiyah to Diyala. These were the idiots shat out by West Point, turds in starched uniforms and glistening high-and-tight haircuts, shiny-foreheaded future corporate executives who used words like
envisionment
instead of
vision
. These officers never came right out and said it (in fact, it was much better for the conscience if it was never verbally expressed), but they were content to spend their entire thirteen-month tour inside the womb of fluorescent lights, air- conditioning, and three hot meals a day.

These dicks never had to face the nut-shriveling terror of careening through traffic, never certain whether or not the car pulling up behind them was trunk-loaded with explosives or just carrying a beheaded corpse to be dumped in the Tigris; never had to paste a forced smile to their lips while having tea and sautéed camel entrails with the province’s sheikh, all while trying to unlock the enigmas of the sheikh’s labyrinthine way of speaking—not approaching a subject head-on but entering the true heart of the matter through a series of side doors and secret passageways known only to Local Nationals; never felt the despair of visiting an electric substation one day and congratulating the mayor on his remarkable progress in the last three months, only to revisit that same substation a week later to inspect the damage from the bombing, which set the project back eighteen months and forced the mayor to impose a daily quota of two hours of electricity. What was that saying the Local Nationals had? “We’re blowing into a punctured bag.”

No,
Duret thought as he dug his pen into his notebook, tracing the words “Continuous Process Improvement.”
Fobbits would never know any of this
.

Not like Vic Duret, who was knee-deep in the shit day after day.

And when he wasn’t out there in it—when he was trapped in air-cooled, fluorescent-lit briefings like this one—he got itchy and drifty. Influence Targeting Meetings, Casualty Evaluation Briefings, Effects Assessments Huddles, International Engagement Team Planning Sessions. Ass-numbing hours and hours of PowerPoint and laser pointers and the complacent drone of midcareer staff officers. Duret never let himself get comfortable, for fear he would morph into a Fobbit. He could already feel his ass spreading—and that scared the shit out of him.

The brigade commander, Colonel Quinner, was on a roll this morning with a new program the Pentagon was trying to integrate at the lower-echelon level. “Continuous Process Improvement, gentlemen, is a strategic approach for developing a culture of upticking positives—particularly, I’m told, in the areas of reliability and process cycle times. CPI will ultimately eventuate in less total resource consumption. Deployed effectively, it increases quality and productivity, while reducing waste and cycle time. So what do you think about that?” Quinner’s face always reminded Duret of an owl who’d run into an electric fence. Now when Quinner glanced around the room at his slack-jawed battalion commanders he looked like he understood the Pentagon directive even less than they did. “I, for one, am excited by the potential possibilities in this new program. We overlay it on current ops here in theater and I fully believe it will eventuate into something tangible, something for which the Iraqi people will praise us for years to come.”

Duret should have been listening to Quinner but he couldn’t stop staring at what he’d written in his notebook three minutes earlier.

Tanks for the mammaries.

As Quinner talked about the timely need for SitReps to populate the daily BUB slides, due no later than oh-five-forty-five hours to the adjutant in the SMOG room, Duret couldn’t stop thinking about his father. Tanks for the mammaries.

The word
mammaries
naturally took Duret back to his wife and the recurring fantasy with which he consoled himself while an ocean sloshed between them. Her breasts were waiting for him at the finish line so, head down, arms pumping, Duret ran the marathon toward the end of the deployment.

Duret thought of his wife straddled atop his torso, negligee pulled off her shoulders and puddled around her hips as she leaned forward, breasts swaying like wind chimes, left nipple dropping into his mouth, his tongue rolling the little button against his teeth until it hardened like candy . . .

He stopped himself with a sharp intake of breath, which caused some of the other battalion officers to shoot a glance in his direction. Duret stared straight ahead at Quinner, as if he hadn’t made a sound. He really shouldn’t be doing this to himself during the brigade briefing. He crossed, uncrossed, and recrossed his legs. He traced the words in his notebook and put his mind back on his father.

His old man had been Armor, too. Like Vic, he was built like a Bradley: all neck, swollen-red head, a fierce way of leaning forward from the chest when he walked. The old man took no shit from pansies and organized his family along the battalion structure, from dinnertime to Yellowstone vacations. He could be a hard man, but he also loved a good story. God
damn,
he could spin a yarn. And that’s what Vic Duret was thinking about now instead of the morning Battlefield Update Briefing to the commanding general: the time his father leaned close, man-to-man, and poked fourteen-year-old Vic’s chest with the two fingers that held his ever-unlit cigar. “I ever tell ya about the time Bob Hope came to Fort Knox?” (Yes, he had. Many times) “This was, oh, sixty-five, sixty-six, somewhere around there. Armor school was tough back then, son. It’d eat you for breakfast and shit you back out at lunchtime then grind you to mayonnaise by dinner. Anyway, it was tough,
tough,
I tell ya. Like John Wayne toilet paper: tough as nails and don’t take shit off nobody. Ha!” (A weak, agreeing
ha
from Vic.) “Anyway, we needed a little comic relief. So here comes Hope on a USO tour and he brings with him a bevy of Playmate bunnies. That’s not the only thing we called ’em—a ‘bevy’—but I don’t think your mother would appreciate me repeating what we really said. So there they are, these bunnies with their tits onstage, shimmy-shaking to some Ike and Tina song and we’re hootin’ and hollerin’ like all get-out cuz by that time we’d had nothin’ but weeks and weeks of classes and turret exercises and getting up at four fucking o’clock for rifle drills in the rain. Then one or two of us try to climb on the stage, but the MPs hold us back, the fuckers. Man, those girls were something! You could have put us facedown on the ground and twirled us around on our boners—that’s how bad off we were for women by that point in Armor school.” The old man put the cigar in his mouth and sucked on it, ruminating about decades-old hard-ons. “Then Mr. Bob Hope walks on stage, swinging his golf club and he grins at the bunnies doing their thing. When the song was over and they were bouncing off the stage, he looked at all us Armor students sprawled on the grass in front of him and then he leans into the microphone and calls out,
Tanks for the mammaries!
”