Fobbit (30 page)

Gooding shook his head. “IA couldn’t find its own asshole with a flashlight and a map.”

At that moment, Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad came be-bopping down the sidewalk.

“Speaking of . . .” said Filipovich.

“Play nice, sir.”

Filipovich spat another shred of tobacco. “The fat fuck.”

Harkleroad’s Kevlar was askew and his pistol belt all but disappeared beneath the overlapping folds of fat at his waist. As he got nearer, Gooding could see a gravy stain slopped in the shape of Italy on the front of his uniform.

“Lord, just kill me now,” he muttered, then raised his voice and gave the Division motto, “Luck of the Seventh, sir!”

“Luck of the Seventh, Sergeant Gooding,” Harkleroad returned as he neared. He nodded at Flip. “Major Filipovich.”

“Sir.” Filipovich was rapidly smoking down his last cigarette without reaching for another—a sure sign he was about to bolt on Gooding.

“Looks like Salisbury steak for lunch again, sir.” Gooding said.

“It is indeed,” Harkleroad said. “How did you know?”

“Just a guess, sir. Never mind.”

Beside him, Flip broke into a laugh-concealing cough.

“I’ve got the daily news clips on your desk—printed, stapled, and front-and-center,” Gooding said.

“Very good, very good.” Harkleroad was still panting and red-faced from his walk back from the dining facility. He was practically spritzing sweat just standing there. Gooding could see he was anxious to get inside the cool bath of the air-conditioned palace.

“Well, I won’t hold you up, sir.”

“That’s all right. By the way, I’ve got something I need to talk with you about. Er—” He looked at Filipovich. “Inside, whenever you’re done here.”

“Will do, sir.”

Harkleroad resumed his trot along the sidewalk to the guard shack at the palace entrance.

Filipovich waved his cigarette at Gooding. “All right, then. Off you go to suck some eggs.”

“Yeah, the soft-boiled kind,” Gooding said, then hurried after Harkleroad.

Three minutes later, standing at ease in front of Harkleroad’s desk, Gooding asked, “What’s up, sir?”

“I need to let you know about one thing that came up at the staff meeting this morning.”

“All right.” Inside:
Here we go again. Another tale of woe-is-me-nobody-loves-me. I never get to sit at the Big Boys Table and they always pick me last for dodgeball.

“From what I could hear from my seat along the wall—because the CG’s aide is
still
forgetting to put my name card anywhere on the table, and he knows how difficult it is for me with the bum ear—I guess PAO will never get the respect it deserves, huh?”

“Be that as it may, sir . . . You were saying?”

“Right, yes. Well, anyway, from what I gather, the CG is getting pretty torqued about what he perceives is a lack of discipline among the lower-enlisted troops.”

“Sloppy soldiers? Really?”

“Well, not the soldiers, per se. It’s more a problem with the allowances we’re giving them here at FOB Triumph.”

“Such as?”

“He’s targeting Morale, Welfare, and Recreation in particular. He has nothing against soldiers relaxing and having a good time, per se. But it’s the level of activity that has him concerned.”

“Yeah, let’s make this a no-fun zone,” Gooding grumbled under his breath.

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘He’s right, this
is
a combat zone.’”

“Right. Well, it seems he’s got MWR in his sights these days. Things like the Hispanic Heritage Month salsa-dance competition, and the All-Brigade Pinewood Derby, and the talent show, and the women’s basketball tournament. By the way, I had no idea there were organized leagues here—when do these people find the time?”

Some people like to do things on their downtime other than grazing at the pastry table, Colonel Lardass
.

“Anyway,” the PAO said, leaning back and straining the threads on his buttons. The gravy Italy shifted and expanded to the size of Africa. “All this extracurricular activity is a thorn in the CG’s craw because, as he puts it, these kind of sanctioned MWR events distract soldiers from their combat mission and lead to potential cases of misconduct and violations of General Orders Numbers One and Two.”

“But, sir, they allow soldiers to dance up at Camp Taji, so why not down here at Triumph? It’s like they’re American Baptists and we’re Southern Baptists.”

“No, no, that’s not it,” Harkleroad interjected. “It’s a matter of perception. And that’s where we come in. The CG wants us to put a tight lid on our coverage of noncombat-related activities in the
Lucky Times
. And I can see his point.”

Of course you can. Try not to choke on the lint in the CG’s pocket, you old ass kisser
.

Harkleroad continued: “For instance, let’s say you’re a spouse sitting at home back in Hinesville and you turn on the NBC Nightly News and there’s your husband doing the John Travolta with some other female on Disco Night, how will that look?”

“It’ll look like they’re blowing off steam. I say they’re entitled to that.”

“And
I
say it’s a battle we’re going to lose, Sergeant Gooding. And frankly, it’s a battle where I’m willing to raise the white flag. I’m not about to go toe-to-toe with the CG over something like this.”

“But—”

“But
nothing
. This is not something I’m going to back down on. We need to keep a tight rein on what our journalists are covering, and,
especially,
what we’re allowing external media to see. Remember, we control the agenda and it’s up to us to steer them in the right direction.”

Chance said nothing, just stared straight ahead at the continental gravy stain on Harkleroad’s belly.

“So, are we singing on the same sheet of music here, Staff Sergeant Gooding?”

Gooding sighed. “Roger that, sir. I’ll tell the brigade journalists to steer away from anything that looks like soldiers are having the least little bit of fun.”

“No need to get sarcastic with me, Sergeant.”

“Sorry, sir.”
You fat fuck, you.
“I meant no disrespect.”

“None taken.”

“If there’s nothing more, sir . . . ?”

“No, nothing more. That’s all. Just wanted to give you a heads-up about which way the CG’s wind was blowing.” He paused. “Wait a minute, that didn’t sound right, did it? But you know what I mean.”

“Loud and clear, sir.” Gooding all but clicked his heels and gave a snappy salute before he walked out.

Harkleroad opened his e-mail. It was from one of the brigade PAOs who’d submitted a batch of photos to Specialist Carnicle for the
Lucky Times
. Eustace had been cc’ed in the e-mail; what’s worse, so had Corps PAO. The e-mail’s subject line: MWR Fun Events.

Even before he opened the attachments, Harkleroad knew he’d be calling down to brigade to give the PAO a what-for and advising him not to be wasting his journalists’ time like that in the future, then calling up to Corps to apologize for letting one slip through that didn’t adhere to Recruit, Rebuild, Restore.

He clicked on the first photo. The photographer had caught a male and female, both dressed in PT uniforms, doing the salsa, standing at intimate proximity. Their fingers were curled, so it was hard to tell if they were wearing wedding rings. Harkleroad clicked the magnifying glass icon several times to bring the hands in closer. Sure enough, there was the wink of gold coming off the male’s hand.

Eustace Harkleroad leaned back in his chair, knowing that by deleting this photo he was probably saving a soldier’s marriage. And that’s when the last thread on the middle button gave up the fight and flung itself off his uniform, clicking twice against the floor before coming to rest in the dust beneath his desk. Eustace looked down and saw—for the first time—the gravy stain, which now had a cleft running across the northern half of Italy.

21

DURET

W
ith the demotion of Abe Shrinkle, life in Bravo Company had taken a left turn onto a downhill street. They’d been pulling longer days and more Quick Reaction Force missions. No more “ghost patrols” off the brigade’s books, no more biding their time until the plane ride home, no more delivering lollipops and soccer balls to Shiite schools. It was the real deal now and, as Zeildorf had said on more than one occasion, “It sucked the dust off my granddaddy’s balls.”

The new commander assigned to fill Shrinkle’s vacancy was a West Point grad called First Lieutenant (Promotable) Matthew Fledger who came to them from Echo Company. Lieutenant Colonel Duret knew he was scraping the bottom of the barrel but this was the best G-1 could find for him. His only other option, the major in Personnel told him, was a Presbyterian chaplain who, due to an overstaffing bungle back at Fort Stewart, was temporarily working as a motor pool officer in Third Brigade.

At Echo Company, Lieutenant Fledger had been the executive officer whose primary duties involved operations at the dining facility and the mail room, tasks that tapped into his natural inclination toward logic, order, and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. This is what he told Duret when the colonel paid a scouting visit to Echo.

“I’m big on organization, sir,” Fledger said. “I’m what you might call married to my day planner.” He held up his leather-bound binder, neatly zippered and sheened with an oil that could only be palm sweat, Duret guessed.

Fledger was horribly disproportioned—skull too big for the stalk of his neck, arms foreshortened like a dinosaur. You took one look at that lightbulb-shaped head of his and one word came to mind: thalidomide.

That bulbous, knotty head, however, seemed to be filled with all the tactics, techniques, and procedures his professors had stuffed into it back at West Point. Fledger looked like a man who vigorously highlighted his textbooks.

“It’s not like the men are undisciplined,” Duret told Fledger as they stood outside the Echo Company ops tent. “It’s just that Captain Shrinkle had his own unique way of taking charge. Not one that fit into Brigade standards of conduct.”

“I see, sir.”

“You would be inheriting a morale mess, but otherwise things are okay with the men.”

“That sounds like a pretty big
otherwise,
if you don’t mind my saying, sir.”

Duret realized his assessment of Bravo Company must have sounded like a weak endorsement, so he tried to get back on course. “I’m just trying to undersell the job so you won’t be surprised when you show up on your first day of work.”

“Roger that, sir.”

But when First Lieutenant (Promotable) Matthew Fledger, accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Duret,
did
arrive at Bravo Company on the very afternoon Captain Shrinkle was banished to Towel Land, he seemed to be overselling himself as the savior of the unit. Fledger radiated a ballsy confidence that only came from someone working really hard at it. The young officer thought a lot of himself and his untested ability to lead a company of men into battle. If there had been some water handy, he would have walked on it.

Sergeant Lumley and the other platoon sergeants watched with wary, cautious looks as Fledger and Duret threaded their way through the coils of concertina wire surrounding the company headquarters trailer. A heavy backpack strapped across Fledger’s shoulders bent him nearly double. The straps and buckles on the backpack jingled as he mounted the steps of the wooden porch and looked up at the NCO welcoming party. Fledger tried to smile but it came across as a trembling mess on his lips.

The lieutenant shook hands with his NCOs and said, “You can call me Fledge.” Lumley and the others nodded and said, “Okay, sir,” but Duret knew they would never ever call him that, not even if someone held the muzzle of an M4 to their heads and rotated the selector switch from
safe
to
semi
. It would always be “Sir,” the one syllable drawn out and dripping with thinly disguised contempt. He himself had been on the receiving end of this kind of acceptable disrespect back when he was a young, striving lieutenant—a time in his life that now seemed like something seen at the wrong end of a telescope.

As Duret led Fledger inside his new company headquarters, he could see the NCOs giving each other wordless looks.

Fledge walked into the orderly room and shrugged off the burden of his backpack (filled with Army regulations, field manuals, a stapler, two dozen choco-chip energy bars, and, yes, a box of yellow highlighter pens). The backpack hit the floor with a sound like a harness of bells on a horse-drawn sleigh traveling through snowy woods.

Duret cleared his throat. “Well, lieutenant,” he said. “Now that I’ve delivered you into the capable hands of your NCOs, I’ll be making my exit so you can settle in without me looking over your shoulder.”