Fobbit (18 page)

Shrinkle was still conferring with the 442nd lieutenant, pointing to the crumpled bus and the dozen passengers who were standing off to one side, two of them lying on the ground moaning and a kid, his nose bloodied, who was walking around holding his arm and screaming something that sounded like “
Dick Rabbit! Dick Rabbit!
” The bus driver trailed after him, trying unsuccessfully to calm him down and get him to take a seat on the curb until the medics arrived. Shrinkle and the lieutenant flinched every time the kid with the broken arm came near them.

At that point, Lumley knew this night would probably not turn out the way any of them were expecting.

Shrinkle and the lieutenant had finally reached a decision after walking slowly, cautiously up to the front of the truck, pointing here and there at the busted engine, nodding once or twice, then playing two rounds of “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Shrinkle mince-stepped back across to Lumley and the team.

“Give me a grenade, Sergeant Lumley.”

“Say again, sir?”

“A grenade.” Shrinkle snapped his fingers impatiently. “You got any thermites on you?”

“Back in the Humvee, but—”

“Well then, go grab ’em, Sergeant.”

“Roger, sir.” Lumley looked back at his men but they glanced away as if they weren’t privy to the conversation, and that’s the story they’d stick to if they were ever called to the witness stand.
Yeah, well, fuck them. And fuck Captain Shrinkle. Fuck everybody.

Lumley returned to the Humvee, went around to the back, and unlocked the ammo box that held the red canisters. Later, Lumley would replay how his hand reached for the thermite grenades and he’d think about how he should have paid better attention to the color. Red for fucking danger.

But no, he grabbed one and carried it back to Captain Shrinkle. “Sir, I really don’t think this is a good—”

“I appreciate your input, Sergeant Lumley, but in this instance, I’m going to override you. Lieutenant Middlecamp and I determined their truck was inop and it would take too long to get someone out here to tow it away. So we’re gonna take care of it, then get the heck out of here and call it a night. I don’t like the look of that crowd.”

“I don’t either, sir. But—”

But Shrinkle was already walking back toward the truck with the grenade in his hands. Lumley looked at his men.

“Awwww shit,” someone said.

“
Dick Rabbit! Dick Rabbit!
” from the kid with the flapping arm.

Shrinkle was no longer mince-stepping but moving forward with determined purpose, not caring what he crunched beneath his boots. He’d reached the tipping point and was on the other side now. With a one-two flick of his hand and arm it was done. The grenade sailed through the air. The crowd of Iraqis collectively flinched. Then came the blooming explosion and the truck cab was briefly filled with white light, a cloud of smoke, and a small lick of flame, which Lumley and his men could see climb the seats and spread to the dashboard. The driver’s window burst in a tinkle of glass and flames erupted outward, crawling down the doors to the undercarriage. Someone screamed and everything fell silent until one of Lumley’s men said “Awwww
shit
” again.

Then the fire sputtered and dwindled to a chemical hiss.

Shrinkle stood facing what he’d done, arms akimbo, the bluish flames silhouetting him in the night. Then he backpedaled several feet and, regaining his old decomposure, walked back to the rest of the American soldiers. After shaking hands with the 442nd Transpo lieutenant, Shrinkle rejoined his dumbfounded soldiers and said, “Okay, let’s call it mission complete, men.” He climbed back into his Humvee and sat there as if waiting for his chauffeur to whisk him away.

Lumley and his squad had no choice but to follow, after stubbing out their cigarettes on the sides of their boots and saying “Shitfuckdamn” several times.

On the ride back to Triumph, Lumley stared out the window, eyes scanning the pools of darkness, the alleys, the silhouette of rooftops, looking for the outline of a grenade launcher, two men hunched over a spool of wire, anything out of the ordinary. Zeildorf swung his ass back and forth like a nervous tic. Captain Shrinkle continued
tsip-tsip-tsipp
ing all the way to Triumph.

11

SHRINKLE

S
ix months before that ill-conceived grenade toss, when they were in Kuwait waiting to move north into Baghdad, they tested Captain Abe Shrinkle’s mettle by shitting in his helmet. At least
some
one did. Maybe it wasn’t an entire company of “theys,” maybe it was just one rogue hater who had it out for him. No one ever confessed and the CID investigation, launched by an irritated Lieutenant Colonel Duret who had better things to do at the time, never found the Culprit of Shit.

Nonetheless, the incident altered the character of Bravo Company.

Sure, Abe was rattled. Who
wouldn’t
be, coming back to the tent from the shower trailer to find your helmet upside down, front-and-center on your cot with a fresh coil of human waste on the padding inside and a crudely written note (“Have a Nice Day, Shithead”)? Abe stood there, towel around his neck, staring with slowly seeping comprehension at the gauze of steam rising from his helmet.

Sunlight from the early dawn filtered into the sleeping quarters, burning off the night chill. Behind him, the tent—large as a circus big top and filled with more than a hundred cots, footlockers, duffel bags, and sleeping soldiers, mouths agape—was quiet,
too
quiet. It was their fourth day in Kuwait, nearly a week out of the States, ten days until they ventured north into Iraq, and Abe knew his men were feeling a stew of homesickness and fear of what lay ahead across the border. The soldiers were loud with braggadocio, quick to punch and wrestle each other to the ground, and stony with their silences when they stopped to think they were now “men at war.” Abe cut them some slack because they were all feeling the threat of snipers and mortars that came to them in invisible, pulsing waves from the restless land to their immediate north. They read the headlines in
Stars and Stripes;
they knew what waited for them.

So yes, for the time being Abe would grant them their little moments of indiscipline—the day-growth of beard stubble, the smuggled-in issue of
Playboy
to which he’d temporarily turn a blind eye, the unauthorized stash of pogey bait (the Cheetos, the Oreos, the Slim Jims), the sloppy way they stood in his formations. Yes, he’d give them an inch for the next ten days they were here in the waiting room of Kuwait because, he truly believed, he was a kind and generous commander, a leader who looked out for his men.

But
this,
the steaming stink of shit in his helmet,
this
was something else entirely. It was a personal, “fuck you” message direct from the heart of those he’d trusted and loved (and whom he thought felt the same about him). What was he to do with this?

Without turning around, he strained to hear the muffled snicker, the unsuppressed chuckle, but heard nothing except the even more meaningful silence filling the tent.

Not once did he look at his men, who pretended to sleep in their cots. Not once did he try to ferret out the conspiratorial glance, the wink, the suddenly averted eyes. No, Abe simply picked up the helmet with both hands and carried it to the nearest latrine where he dumped the turds into the gaping hole. Then he scrubbed the inside of his helmet with hot water and an old toothbrush. He went about his business, never once saying anything that would give the shitter the pleasure of seeing his commander rattled.

But when, three days later, someone from another company reported the graffiti in the Porta-Potty—“I can hardly wait until I get to Iraq and get me some live ammo so I can kill Capt. S.”—well then, there was no getting around it. Abe Shrinkle was frightened of his own men.

Lieutenant Colonel Duret took the only reasonable course of action available to him: he forbade Abe to go on the convoy to Baghdad that was scheduled to leave in a week for fear his stalker would take him out during the trip north. Instead, Abe was forced to catch a ride with a later convoy from another unit.

So, because some crazy sonofabitch (or sonsofbitches) scrawled death threats, Abe’s company moved through enemy territory without a commander.

Worst of all, his men seemed to be okay with that.

12

DURET

V
ic Duret agonized over the Shrinkle problem. This was the fuck-a-roo to end all fuck-a-roos, he told himself. The indecision at Quillpen, then shooting that kid—an innocent Local National—and now the impetuous toss of a grenade (when indecision would have been a
good
thing) in Adhamiya. This particular company commander was starting to feel like a hot poker rammed up Duret’s pecker.

The battalion commander didn’t need any more trouble than he would normally attract in the course of business in a combat zone. There would always be the regrettable decisions, the logistical shortages, the unplanned deaths, but they were something he could handle—or, at the very least, delegate to someone else to handle.

Abe Shrinkle, on the other hand, was not some hot potato he could pass to another battalion to resolve. Duret wasn’t like one of those grease-fingered Fobbits who let bad things fall slick out of their hands for someone else to catch before they hit the floor. He’d always been a do-unto-others-as-you’d-have-them-do-unto-you kind of guy, and he went to work every day in this war zone trying to put that into effect, despite the challenges of confronting a faceless enemy who couldn’t give a gnat’s fuck about karmic Good Samaritans.

No, he wasn’t going to toss Shrinkle away like a snot-soaked Kleenex. That just wouldn’t be right in the whole scheme of the universe.

Besides, Duret owed it to the men of Abe’s company to get things squared away. He’d seen the look on the faces of the soldiers in that company when they were crouched there eyeballing that sedan embedded in the back of the Abrams tank. Those guys had been scared to death he wouldn’t step in and save them from their commander. As it turned out, that NCO—what’s his name, Bromley? Brumley?—had taken matters into his own hands with that one clean shot.

No, he needed to mop up this latest mess quickly and quietly. He also owed it to Abe to do it in a manner that was honorable and subtle. As much as he couldn’t stand the guy’s jellied spine, Duret had a hard time just kicking him to the curb without so much as a how-dee-doo.

Relief-for-cause was inevitable—Shrinkle’s and, if Duret wasn’t fast and wily enough, his own. That particular shitball was already headed his way from the brigade commander, gathering sticks and stones as it rolled downhill. Relieved, investigated, arrested. It was coming, unless—

Unless he could pull a fast one to make it look like he, Vic Duret, was the one to make the first move—fire Shrinkle’s ass, publicly and loudly avow he was a worthless piece of shit, and make a big show of cleaning house. Beat the brigade commander to his own punch, grab the wind from the commanding general’s sails. It could be done, but only if he was a Houdini—and a quick one at that, since that battle captain in SMOG had already filed his report and sent it up the chain. The CG was probably already grinding his molars.

Then again, maybe the CG would see it his way and stifle the noise of this incident before it leaked out and grew to Abu Ghraib proportions. He was, after all, in line for a third star. Yes, indeed, there would be a lot of gamesmanship and hush-hush huddles going down in the next few days.

Duret sure hoped that PAO weenie—Sergeant Goody-Two-Shoes—knew how to string together words in order to spin them all out of this steaming pile of fucked-upedness.

Duret sat at his desk, under the watchful gaze of Saddam Hussein’s taxidermied animals, working himself into a bone-cracker of a headache until finally, temples throbbing, he thought of something that would buy him a little time to sort it all out. One magic word: Qatar. Which rhymed with “R&R.”

The Good Idea Fairy had landed on Vic’s shoulder with a stop-gap solution: send Shrinkle off on a four-day jaunt to Qatar, the sun-washed country on the Persian Gulf, for a little rest and relaxation. Brilliant. Brill-fucking-yant.

He left the palace and went in search of Captain Fuck-a-Roo.

13

GOODING

A
t the same time Lieutenant Colonel Duret was on the warpath for his nincompoop commander, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr. sat in his cubicle trying to figure out the best way to tell the American public about how a member of the U.S. Army pulled the pin on a grenade, Nolan Ryan’ed it into the cab of a fuel truck, and destroyed $250,000 worth of government property. Not to mention the life of an anonymous Iraqi.

Gooding pulled up a fresh document template on his computer. Even though his fingers typed phrases like “full cooperation of Iraqi police and local firefighters” and “minor injuries” and “unavoidable accident,” he couldn’t help thinking about that charred body under the truck and how it got there.