Fobbit (15 page)

But the truth is, I am wrung dry inside and out with the daily cycle of activities over here. I do not want to burden you with too much in the way of worry, but you’ve heard that old expression “War is hell”? Well, hell has nothing on this place, let me tell you! I am kept awake each night by the scream of mortars streaking across the sky. It is worse than the semis on I-24. Last week, the enemy finally got lucky and one of the rockets landed on FOB Triumph. You may not have heard about it on the five o’clock news on WSMV because we try to keep a lid on those kind of tragic incidents over here—my boss is a big one on “good news” and besides, there’s only so much tragedy we should burden the American public with, right? But, yes, a rocket did fall—smack dab in the middle of the post exchange courtyard in the smack-dab middle of the day. And guess who happened to be there at the time, patronizing one of the little shops run by the local Iraqi vendors who sell rugs and jewelry and discount copies of the latest DVD movies? Yes, yours truly. DO NOT WORRY, MOTHER—I am not writing this to you from the hospital—I was not at the site of impact, but was on the other side of the courtyard paying for my purchase from a friendly little rug merchant named Benzir (by the way, I will be shipping back a nice surprise to you—and just to confirm, the dimensions of the living room floor are such that they will accommodate something that is, oh, say, 18 by 24 feet?). The explosion knocked me forward into the arms of Benzir and after we had dusted each other off and he had given me my change, I rushed directly over to the smoking crater to see what I could do to help. Would you believe no one else was running toward the impact zone? That’s right, not a single blankety-blank person. Everyone else was running
away
and it turned out your son was the only one to move forward to give comfort and aid to the wounded. I could hear other folks yelling at me to take cover and save myself, but I put my hearing loss to good use and just continued to walk toward what I could immediately tell was a very bad scene. I will spare you all the horrific details but do you remember that movie we once watched, the one with Brad Pitt and the serial killer and you had to cover your eyes during that one scene until I told you it was okay to look again? Well, what I saw there in that PX courtyard was ten times worse. Maybe even eleven times worse! I could right away see at least two, maybe even three, of the soldiers who had been sitting at the picnic table eating their Burger King sandwiches were goners—and not just goners, but completely gone—disintegrated, if you will. (No, thank goodness, I did not know any of the victims in this vicious & brutal enemy attack!) I knelt and said a brief prayer for their departed souls and then I brushed aside whatever feelings were welling up in me and hurried to do what I could for the rest of the wounded. I felt a little like Clara Barton on the battlefield (or was that Molly Pitcher?) As I said, no one else was coming out from behind the protective concrete barriers to help, so I had to do the best I could all by myself. I will spare you the burden of knowing what all the specific wounds I treated were like, but many of those poor soldiers turned out to be so bad off they had to be shipped out of Iraq, back to Germany, and then all the way to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in our nation’s capital, where they will have to undergo months of recovery and rehabilitation —that’s how bad their injuries were! So, there I was, moving from victim to victim, dressing wounds and stopping the bleeding with tourniquets and, in one case, performing CPR to bring one young girl with especially plump lips back to life! It was a real mess and suffice to say, the uniform I was wearing that day is no good anymore and I had to toss it away. I’m not going to lie to you, Mother—I was quite sickened that day by the horrors of what I saw, but I take comfort in knowing I saved some lives and those soldiers will go on to fight another day.

In anticipation of what I know you will ask, no, I do not know if I will get a commendation or medal of some kind for my actions that day. I
do
know the chief of staff, Colonel Belcher, is quite proud of me and even the commanding general himself interrupted yesterday’s staff meeting to make mention of what he called my “unselfish act of courage.” I tend to think I won’t receive any specific award for what I did—not because they think I don’t deserve it but because, like so much of what we do here, we’re trying to keep all this on the hush-hush and down low. It would only give comfort and aid to the enemy if they knew they succeeded in a bull’s-eye hit on our PX at FOB Triumph. So that is why you won’t see me on the evening news or in the
Daily Tennessean.
In fact, there was a
Stars and Stripes
reporter who happened to be on the scene when the rocket hit, but I ordered her to delete the photos on her digital camera and hold the story until given approval by the proper authorities in division headquarters (which—ha ha, joke’s on her—is me, the PAO).

As I said, I don’t want to burden you with all my horror stories but I thought you should know what your son is doing over here in the name of democracy and freedom. Because this is TOP SECRET information I am telling you, I beg you not to contact Jim Powers down at the
Murfreesboro Free Press
and blab about all your son’s accomplishments and heroism over here in Iraq, though I understand how you must be longing to do so—as you would say, you’re “fairly bursting the buttons with pride and joy.” No, Mother, we must keep this between ourselves.

I suppose if you want to share it with the other ladies in your Sunday circle, then I would understand, but those First Redemption ladies must UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES tell their husbands!

Shifting gears, did I ever tell you about the swimming pool? If I already did, then bear with me (being in such close, intense combat has made me a little scatterbrained of late); if not, then here goes: Some of the men here like to venture over to the other side of FOB Triumph on hot days, to where there is a pool. The pool is “owned” by the Australians—whose illicit drinking I think you’ll remember me writing about in my previous e-mail—and until recently there was a sort of international agreement between the division’s staff and the Aussies regarding use of the pool. I myself have never been there but I have heard the stories—some of them were pretty salacious, let me tell you! Liquor! Half-clothed women! Taking an unauthorized break from combat duties in the middle of the day! Still, a man must do what a man must do to blow off steam in such a hostile combat environment, that’s what I believe. Though I could never afford to allow myself such a luxury, I understand why some of the lesser class of officer would want to explore the sinful delights of the Aussie pool. Anyway, all was well with the pool arrangement until last week. Something happened—I am not exactly clear but I believe it had to do with a female private from our Army fraternizing with a lieutenant from the Australian Army—and whatever it was, the commanding general (ours, not theirs) got hopping mad. Little puffs of steam actually coming out of his ears. And now he has expressly forbidden us to use the pool. If you’ll remember, the Old Man does not think partially unclothed female soldiers properly represent the United States, especially in mixed-nation company. And so he has issued a new general order that we were ordered to publish in
The Lucky Times,
but I tell everybody, don’t shoot the messenger, all right? Now morale has plummeted to a new low—lots of men are moping around the headquarters with long faces and sullen mouths, all because they can’t go swimming with females from another nation anymore. Not yours truly, though. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Mother, that I have better things to do with my time than to commingle with girls in bikinis. I’ll leave that to officers who are not serious about their careers.

Well, Mother, I have rambled on long enough and you are probably tired of staring at the computer screen, so I will sign off now.

By the way, if you could see fit to slip a couple pairs of black socks, the over-the-calf variety, into your next care package, they would not go unappreciated. Also, some more dried apricots.

Your loving son,

Stacie

9

DURET

L
ieutenant Colonel Vic Duret liked to come to his office in the palace early on Sunday mornings, well before the fan cranked up and shit started hitting it.

He’d been given a small room off the once ornate reception area and, because of his rank, he’d been privileged with a door. The office had belonged to Saddam’s chief gamekeeper and Duret had left everything on the walls just as he’d found them when he moved in six months ago. The head of an ibex, spiral horns stabbing upward, stared glassily at him while he worked, as did a warthog, a zebra, and, most unnervingly, an Afghan hound. The opposite wall held a stone mask, which the division’s cultural liaison said dated to 3000
BC
, and a portrait of the old goat himself, beret jauntily cocked and His Dictatorshipness, smiling like a loon beneath his thick, black porn mustache. Duret had tried to remove the portrait from the wall but the frame was securely screwed into the concrete and, in the end, it had been more trouble than it was worth, so he left Saddam alone. Even with the leering presence of Hussein and his animals, Duret’s office space was a refuge from the clatter of keyboards, men’s voices, and echoing footsteps just outside the door.

The subdued, religious hush of Sunday mornings was his favorite time of the week: a cool oasis in the otherwise hot, clanging chaos of the nonstop war. Sure, bad shit still went down on Sunday mornings, but Duret’s head was able to handle it because there weren’t so many American voices ringing off the palace walls, barking self-important directives, arguing the merits of PowerPoint, and speaking in alphanumeric code—the kind of Fobbity chatter that drove him right out of his skull with madness.

God knows, Duret didn’t want to end up like them, like the lieutenant colonel he knew from another battalion, a decent guy who had somehow gotten sucked into working out of the palace more than he’d wanted to. This guy had been fast-tracking—he was only thirty-nine but he already had a battalion (and a damned good one at that). But then someone somewhere had a visit from the Good Idea Fairy and came up with the brilliant notion of moving this guy off the line and into SMOG central where he could bring valuable “real world” expertise to the decisions made there in the nerve center.

“It’s driving me crazy,” the other officer had told Duret. “I spend three-quarters of my day going from meeting to meeting. Then, when I get done with those and go back to my office, people are stacked up outside my door.”

This particular officer, Duret joked, had once been “hale and hearty,” but now he was just “pale and farty,” holed up in the palace and subsisting on the cabbage and beans and yogurt from the dining facility. The two of them had laughed about it but Duret saw something he didn’t like in the other guy’s eyes: a vacant, bottomless insanity that now placed the edicts of SMOG above anything else, including the welfare of the men he’d once commanded in the battalion.

Duret vowed he’d self-ventilate with a 9mm before he ever let something like that happen to him. He made it a point to spend as little time in the palace as possible, sacrificing the air-conditioning and the security of four walls for the intolerable heat and the intolerance of the sheikhs—both of which only served to turn up the volume of his headaches.

But Vic Duret
did
like Sunday mornings at the palace.

The commanding general, a devout man, had told the division he wanted minimal staffing—key-and-essentials only—until 1300 hours each Sunday in order to allow each soldier to practice his or her faith in whatever manner they saw fit. Most saw fit to get gorged on near-beer and beef jerky on Saturday night and play Xbox or watch the bootleg porno DVDs they bought from Local Nationals at the vendor stalls just outside the Triumph checkpoint; most saw fit to catch up on their laundry and hooch dusting; most saw fit to honor their Sunday mornings by sleeping until noon.

Not Lieutenant Colonel Duret. Sunday mornings were the only time he could get some peace and quiet in his office, a little pool of silence broken only by the occasional lazy squawk from the SMOG computers giving a weather report or an update on a suspicious vehicle the unmanned reconnaissance planes were tracking. Vic Duret could even sit in his padded leather chair behind his desk, have a casual conversation with the ibex, and leave the door open without fear that another pucker-assed do-gooder would come bouncing in on the balls of his feet with another situation report gripped tight in his hand.

Monday through Saturday, Duret could rest assured he’d be besieged with complaints about ammunition shortages, petty rivalries between company commanders, or, God forbid, impetuous officers like Abe Shrinkle shooting innocent, mentally handicapped Local Nationals who went around wearing snowpants in the middle of June. This particular captain was starting to feel like a popcorn husk caught between Vic’s molars.

Duret closed his eyes and forced Shrinkle from his mind. When Abe was replaced by Ross with his flaming arm torches running through the halls of the North Tower, Vic opened his eyes and stared at Saddam’s moth-eaten zebra until his head simmered down to a low boil.

He liked to keep his door wide open on Sunday mornings and listen to the low, unhurried hum of the large outer room, which was filled with a cubicle maze of staffers from personnel, intel, ops, logistics, and civil affairs, as well as the chaplain, the lawyers, and the computer network gearheads. If they knew the CG was at church and wouldn’t walk in unexpectedly, someone might even have a football game tuned in on satellite TV, keeping the volume low but just loud enough for the cheers of the crowd to rise and fall like fuzzy waves. Duret always took surreal comfort in the sound of the thousands of people back home roaring open-throated at a couple dozen men who moved a ball back and forth. He liked to think those cheers were also for the work he and his men were doing over here in Baghdad where, it was true, they were also, in a sense, moving a ball back and forth across a limited field of play.