Fobbit (24 page)

The girls bobbed and whispered in the shallows, pointedly not looking at the muscle-bound show-offs.

On the far side of the pool, Chance Gooding Jr. looked like he was deeply engrossed in his book but his eyes peeped over the top of the pages as he watched the disgraced company commander float in the water.

Abe dog-paddled to the deep end, then stopped there, treading water as he listened to the music from the CD the MWR staff had been piping across the pool through speakers concealed behind tiki statues. Abe recognized the CD,
Boston’s Greatest Hits
. “More Than a Feeling” started pouring out of the tiki men’s mouths. Abe bobbed up and down in Qatar, the pool water lapping at his skin, and tried to put everything in perspective. Despite the war to the north, this felt good.

Closing his eyes, he was in another place, another time. The music rippling over the pool time-traveled him. As he floated, the water turned warm as blood, hot as memory.

1987. Mid-May. A Friday night. The ballroom of the Ramada Inn in Colorado Springs.

At that precise moment, Abe was in love with Cathy Kessel but he was consigned to a date with her best friend, Mona (whose last name has been lost over time). Cathy had a face like a hatchet blade, dark circles under piercing blue eyes. Her brown hair was curled and teased and feathered into a Farrah ’do (changes in hair fashion for Coloradans were at least a decade behind the rest of the country). Cathy hung with a tough crowd but Abe sensed a tenderness at her core, which gave him hope she’d at least notice him, a ghostly nobody in the halls of their high school.

Summoning every shred of courage, he’d asked her to the Spring Jamboree dance in a stuttering phone call so horrific it was blotted from his memory within a month’s time.

Unfortunately, by the time he’d screwed his determination to the sticking point, he was too late. She’d already been asked by another eighth grader—Scott DiSoto (who, it turned out, would steal two other girls from Abe later in high school).

But Cathy’s girlfriend Mona was available. Would Abe like to go with her?

Sure, he said, supposing he should be happy with leftovers.

Mona was tall and blonde and her hair was cut short, flaring at the ends like a little skirt around her neck. She’d pasted on too much mascara the night of their date and her breath smelled funny—harsh and decadent. She stood tall and stiff beside Abe at the dance and kept looking around the room like he wasn’t there. She was probably feeling like she got leftovers, too.

“You want some punch?” she asked after five songs had gone by with the two of them standing there, pinned against the wall.

“Sure,” he said, then watched her walk away to the refreshment table. All these years later, he still remembered the dress she was wearing—it was made of thin cotton and was tied in a neat little bow at the back of her neck, just under the skirt of her blonde hair. The dress was backless and, yes, it filled him with a hot pulse to know she wasn’t wearing a bra and, oh, how that tempting little bow at her neck called to his fingers, begging to be untied. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall of the Ramada Inn ballroom for support.

“Here’s your punch.” Mona was back in front of him, holding out a glass of syrupy red liquid.

“Thanks.” Abe swallowed and suppressed a gag.

“I heard some kids were going to spike it with Everclear. I don’t think they did.”

“Chickens,” Abe said.

“Pussies,” Mona said.

Abe didn’t know what to say to that. They both looked out at the crowded, wriggling dance floor. He could see Cathy with Scott DiSoto across the room. Cathy was all fluid arms and elbows and hips; Scott was doing a sweaty finger-point dance move (which, until this moment, Abe thought he himself had patented). The air of the ballroom was humid with teenage perfume and the sad smear of thick makeup. Abe didn’t know what to do with his hands. The drink felt slippery between his fingers.

“You want to dance?” he blurted.

Mona gave him a sideways glance from between her slits of mascara. “Ummm . . .” She looked out on the dance floor. Cathy and Scott came closer, moving to the outer edge of the dance floor. Cathy’s hips swirled like a cobra coming out of a basket; Scott seemed intent on pointing at a spot on the carpet while at his neck a gold chain lifted and fell, lifted and fell. They circled and boogied ever closer. Cathy winked at Mona, who then turned to Abe and said, “Ummm, how about we dance later? Okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.” He pretended not to see the wink.

Cathy and Scott moved toward the side door of the ballroom, which led out to the forest at the base of the mountain where the Ramada Inn had been built.

“I’m gonna go out and smoke,” Mona said. “You wanna come?”

As those words washed over his face, Abe knew what that wickedness on her breath had been. It had been mystery and desire and danger—most of all danger. Play-it-safe alarms went off in his head. Bad, adult-level things would happen in the forest. His parents would never approve. He told himself he’d better stay in the ballroom with the non-Everclear punch.

“No, that’s all right. I’ll just wait here for you.”

Mona laughed. At the time, Abe thought it was a harmless laugh; two hours later, he realized it was a cruel, harsh, mocking laugh of dismissal. Mona never returned to the ballroom. She slipped out the door after her friends and together they went into the darkening woods to smoke their cigarettes and mock authority and, most of all, to mock Abe, still standing there at the edge of the humid dance floor, holding up the wall and wondering what Scott DiSoto had that he didn’t—though he knew all the while it was Scott’s willingness to not play it safe, to plunge into danger and sin.

The fast song ended and another record dropped onto the turntable. “More Than a Feeling” filled the air of the ballroom. Abe closed his eyes and let Boston carry him away from the dance floor on this, the most miserable night of his teenage life so far.

How was he to know, eighteen years later, that that precise moment would be cupped in his mind as a golden memory? How was he to know he’d be drifting in a pool in a hot land three hundred miles south of a combat zone, listening to that same song and regretting all the chances that had slipped away from him?

17

GOODING

W
hen Staff Sergeant Gooding returned from Qatar, his tan was the envy of all the cubicle rats whose skin was the color of paper. With his beige glow, Gooding strolled into the palace, feeling radiant and refreshed (the
real
R&R, he thought). He felt like an actor in a toothpaste commercial who shows up with new breath and all his female coworkers swoon when he passes them in the hall.

The palace was filled with an odd buzz when Chance came on shift his first day back—and it wasn’t just because he was bright with Persian Gulf sunshine. It turned out that most of the staff was distracted by a preseason NFL game.

By the time he walked through the marbled hallways and entered the work area, it was the fourth quarter. As he passed the cubicles, everyone—officer and enlisted alike—was clustered around the satellite TVs or the computers with streaming live video feeds, all eyes focused on the little men in helmets bashing each other. Sitting at his desk, he could hear voices like rising sirens: “go, go, gogogoGO—aaawwww!”

Even later, during General Bright’s morning brief, the officers had their chairs swiveled away from the SMOG station and turned toward the TV screen in the Information Ops section, only half-listening to the G-staff drone on with their reports: “Sir, we expect AIF activity to resume at April levels within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The majority of attacks are expected to be comprised of harassing small-arms fire and IEDs. Targets are likely to be—”

There was a blast from the referee’s whistle and a cry of “What the fuck was that? Did you just see what happened? What the fuck was that?” from one of the officers throwing up his hands in dismissal at the quarterback on the screen.

Even the CG seemed abnormally distracted while he sat in his third-floor office, SMOG earphones clapped to his head. Gooding figured he probably listened to the G-staff reports with one eye on his TV. At one point, he grunted his approval for G-4 to retrofit a fleet of uparmored Humvees with sheepskin seat covers because the soldiers in one unit had been complaining of hemorrhoids—and when was the last time you heard the CG give a tinker’s damn for the luxuries of life when soldiers should be focusing their attention on the immediate mission at hand (“cleaning up the streets by eradicating Sunni ruffians and foreign troublemakers”)? That the CG seemed to care about the inflamed rectums of infantry soldiers showed he definitely had something else on his mind at the time.

By midmorning, the football game was over and everyone had returned to their normal routine of plotting future operations and cataloging the results of current ops.

In his cubicle, Gooding sat holding his forehead in one hand. The glow of his Qatar tan was already starting to fade. He was depressed because he’d just hung up the phone after learning one of their moneymakers had been hit with an IED, which had sheared off the lower half of his left leg. This meant Staff Sergeant Gooding would have to reschedule all the media opportunities he’d lined up for the guy, a specialist named Kyle Pilley. The specialist’s moneymaker days were over.

That was Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad’s term for them: moneymakers. These were the soldiers caught at the crossroads of luck and bravery, the door kickers who rose to the occasion and did something true and honorable in the eyes of the U.S. Army, who participated in moments of selfless action that could then be packaged into a heart-stirring story and delivered to the media.

Maybe it was shielding a little schoolgirl from the blast of a suicide bomber, taking the brunt of the shrapnel, which embeds in your flak vest but doesn’t kill you, just leaving a nasty set of green-brown bruises.

Maybe it was befriending a Local National, a down-on-his-luck restaurant owner plagued with vandalism and robbery, someone in whom you take a personal interest and so you bring your squad back to the restaurant and spend your week’s one half-day off scrubbing away the graffiti. Still on your own time, maybe you set up a guard shift at night to catch the Sunni bastards who are doing this to the poor guy, and forever earn the Local National’s gratitude,
winning his heart and mind
.

Or maybe, like Specialist Kyle Pilley, you are shot at close range by a sniper’s bullet and you bounce right back up onto your feet and, still sucking at oxygen you just thought was lost to you forever, you give chase to the would-be assassins, tackle them in a back alley, zip-cuff the bastards, and bring them to justice.

If, as in Kyle Pilley’s case, the entire episode is filmed by the insurgents from their hiding place in the back of a van—the resulting footage intended for a propaganda “victory music video” loaded onto the jihadists’ Web site that afternoon but instead played and replayed by CNN in the ensuing days—well then that’s just icing on the gravy as far as Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad was concerned.

Kyle Pilley was one of the best moneymakers the division had seen in the past six months and Harkleroad was practically piddling his pants with glee at the thought of all the goodwill his story would buy them in the mainstream media. He was already laying plans for Pilley to be interviewed, via remote satellite, by the Big Three morning-breakfast news shows (
Good Morning America
was on board,
Today
and
CBS This Morning
were teetering on the brink of a
yes
), not to mention features in the
New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
and, if Harkleroad was really, really lucky,
Time
and/or
Newsweek
. Yes, Kyle Pilley was the best thing to happen to Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad and the rest of the Shamrock Division since they’d entered Iraq.

First, however, Specialist Pilley needed the short course in Media Interview Tips 101, the preparatory briefing the Public Affairs Office liked to give to all soldiers, from colonel to private, before they spoke to major news outlets. A week before Gooding’s Qatar vacation, Harkleroad had given him this task because, he reasoned, the specialist might be more receptive to a lecture coming from an NCO than he would from a lieutenant colonel.

“The first thing you have to remember,” Gooding told the twenty-year-old infantryman after he’d brought him into his cubicle and sat him down, “is that
you
are in control of the interview, not the reporter. This is
your
story and you’re going to tell it in the way that feels most comfortable to you—with a little coaching from us, of course. We’re here to help you smooth it out and make it sound more dramatic for the folks back home.”

Pilley, a nervous kid with hair the color of bread crusts, wiped his hands on his pants, licked his lips, and croaked, “Sure.”

“Take your time and don’t just blurt out the first thing that comes into your head.”

“Okay.” Pilley tried to loosen something in his throat with an abrupt cough.