Fobbit (7 page)

There are dangers here, too. Lest you forget, you’re smack dab in the middle of a combat zone. While, horizontally speaking, the FOB is well fortified by concrete barriers and guard towers, this is not to say death cannot and will not fall from the sky at any given moment. There is no Kevlar dome over FOB Triumph, no invisible force field off of which mortars or 107-millimeter Chinese rockets will rebound. Why, just last week, one Second Lieutenant Zipperer had a 7.62 round crash down in his hooch. It punched through his tin roof in the night and this Zipperer must have been one hell of a heavy sleeper (or zonked out on Valium) because he didn’t flinch, not even so much as a fluttery pause in his REM. When he woke, there was the round sitting on the floor of his hooch. He sat up on the edge of his cot, groggy and cobwebbed, and stared at the metal shards for the longest time, not fully comprehending, until finally he uttered the phrase that he would repeat once every two minutes for the rest of the day (much to the irritation of his co-workers): “Holy Mother of
Fuck
!”

But what Lieutenant Zipperer was
really
Holy-Mother-of-Fucking about was the fact that just the day prior he had done some interior decorating in his hooch, moving his cot from the east wall to the north wall and
that furniture shift had made the difference between a round punching through the roof and landing in the middle of the floor and the same round coming down and sizzle-slamming through his skull, his head bursting into a gory fountain. Thanks to feng shui, he might just make it home alive.

Walk the gravel paths and dirt streets of FOB Triumph and you will come across a post office, a medical clinic, a library, a movie theater, a bowling alley, two churches, five dining facilities, and four fitness centers.

There is a phone center: a single-wide trailer with a loud-banging door that snaps back on a spring getting looser by the day as thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilian contractors walk in and out of the one place on the FOB offering a tangible link to the comforts of home. The trailer is lined with three rows of wooden-walled cubbyholes where soldiers grip receivers grimed from two hundred thousand sweaty, homesick palms, and murmur into mouthpieces that have by this point heard it all: the sex talk, questions about the dying relative, the soft weeping when the news is not good, the
coo-coo
ing to babies and puppies, the profanity-laced blowhard stories for the drinking buddies left behind, the calculated, casual dismissal of combat zone danger to soothe worried parents. At any given time, a choir of babble fills the phone center, punctuated by the occasional slam down of a receiver. The voices rise and fall, rise and fall. As they ride the waves of sound, some soldiers doodle on the wooden cubbyholes with knives and pens, carving names and anatomies of certain girls left behind. Even today, if you go over there, you’ll find—just below the motto
SADDAM SUXX
—an impressive nude study of a Miss Sammie Grafton of Gillette, Wyoming.

The knives whittle, the boots tap on the plywood floor, the voices swell and ebb, swell and ebb.

“What’s this about a court summons?”

“And then you put it in your mouth while I
. . .
”

“No, no, it ain’t too bad—we haven’t hit an IED in almost a week.”

“She took her first steps today?
Day-
um!
. . .
I know, I wish I could have been there, too.”

“I’m fine, really!
. . .
No, really, Ma, that ain’t necessary
. . .
Ma,
really,
I—
. . .
Okay, put her on
. . .
Hello, Jangles. Is you being a good widdle kitty?”

Leave the phone center, spring-hinged door banging like pistol shot behind you, and keep walking, keep crunching through the gravel until you reach the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Quonset hut where, tucked in one corner, you’ll discover a disco club that in 2005 allows soldiers to take off their helmets and weapons and (males only) strip down to their T-shirts as they boogie up gallons of sweat each night after work, bathed in the light from the disco ball whose refracted light moves like bright moths across their faces. It has been twenty-five years since disco died but the soldiers at Triumph don’t mind. It may be KC and the Sunshine Band, but fuck it all it’s a beat that grabs their legs and gives them permission to fling away all the ill will that has built up during the day. Not to mention it is the only officially sanctioned way boys and girls can get close enough to touch, an excitement elevated whenever a female soldier, daring to flaunt the rules, strips away her Desert Camouflage Uniform top and dances in her T-shirt, shake-shake-shaking the bootie so hard and with such abandon her breasts take on a mind of their own to the delight of every male lucky enough to be in the club that night.

If you exit the club, half-drunk on near-beer and hormone turbulence, take a left turn, and continue down the main thoroughfare for another mile, you’ll hit the post exchange. The entrance to the PX is lined with a series of small trailers that house a Burger King, a What-the-Cluck Chicken Shack, and a Starbucks, where you can purchase a venti caramel macchiato and, with the first sip of the froth and sugar, be transported to within an inch of java heaven.

The PX, run by the U.S. military, is the equivalent of the Old West general store. Its aisles are stocked with potato chips, beef jerky, cases of soda, sunglasses, baby oil, panty hose, tennis shoes, magazines (sans the porn, in deference to host nation Islamic sensitivities), video games, tins of sardines, nail clippers, one big-screen TV (which can be yours for only $1,695.99), stationery, music CDs that tilt heavily toward country-western, value-packs of chewing tobacco, T-shirts (“My Daddy Deployed to Iraq and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt”), brooms, fishing poles, cheese-in-a-can, crackers, compasses, canteens, bras, socks, paperbacks that lean heavily toward Louis L’Amour and Nelson DeMille, desk lamps, Frisbees, pillows, and Insta-Gro planters in clear plastic globes whose promise of fresh vegetation in just two weeks makes them a big seller to soldiers hoping for a little green in this dusty hellhole.

A fly-by-night bazaar rings the dusty concrete courtyard outside the PX, a hodgepodge flea market of folding tables, open-bed pickup trucks, and outspread blankets full of wares Local Nationals have brought to the FOB for sale, having first gone through a rigorous security scrubbing at the entry checkpoints. This, U.S. military officials believe, serves two purposes: it gives the soldiers a taste of “real life” outside the FOB wire, and pumps good old American dollars into the local economy. It is here that Fobbits can buy the false souvenirs that will later corroborate the equally false stories of their adventures “outside the wire.” That same jagged piece of metal that gets slapped down on the bar at the American Legion with the claim that it’s from the hull of a Republican Guard tank blown to bits “while out on patrol one day” is actually scrap scavenged from a local auto junkyard by an enterprising merchant by the name of Emad T. Hamad who whaled away at it with a ballpeen hammer in his garage the night before, offering it up for sale to one Specialist Bert Huddleton, a computer specialist in Task Force Headquarters who, after spending 341 days growing pasty-skinned by the light of his workstation monitor, was looking to buy his way into combat authenticity four days before he redeployed to the United States. Bert went away $44 lighter in the wallet but secure in the knowledge he now had something to show and tell for the story he’d been spinning in his head regarding a (nonexistent) patrol that had “gone bad” one terrible day outside the wire; Emad T. Hamad pocketed the forty-four Yankee infidel dollars with a grin, muttering the Arabic equivalent of “Suckah!”

Walk through the bazaar and you’ll find plenty of Fobbits like Bert and plenty of Local Nationals like Emad. In the PX courtyard, the nut-brown vendors chatter like monkeys as they try to pull the pale, blinking American boys and girls to their tables and blankets. “Mister, mister! Here, mister! You like? You buy?” This, then, is where the discriminating shopper can find scarves (gaily patterned with camels and palm trees), musty-smelling Oriental rugs, pirated blockbuster movies, carved wooden camels, elaborate glass-and-metal contraptions that look suspiciously like hookahs, black-velvet paintings of Jesus, Elvis, and Ricky Martin, and silverware once used by Saddam Hussein (authenticated with a computer-generated certificate by a “Dr. Alawi Medrina, History Professor Emeritus, University of New Baghdad”).

Did we mention this military city was constructed on the former site of Saddam Hussein’s palace and hunting preserve? It’s true. FOB Triumph has overtaken the grounds where Insane Hussein once treated his guests to weekend hunting parties. Nervous staff officers would join the dictator when he walked through the fields, knee-high weeds
whisk
ing damply against his pants legs as he flushed the stocked pheasants and quail from their nests and killed them in a bloody burst of feathers before their little beaks had a chance to form the words
“Allahu Akbar!”
On some weekends, when he was feeling especially jaunty, Saddam would place an order to the Baghdad zoo and they would deliver pairs of lions or jackals or foxes for his guests to hunt. As the integration handbook given to newly arriving soldiers will tell you, “Wildlife is abundant on the compound in the forms of rodents, snakes, deer, fox, golden jackal, and gazelle to name just a few.” It goes on to advise: “Do NOT, ever, ever, EVER, at any time, feed wildlife or domesticated animals such as dogs; report sightings of loose dogs on the compound at once, so they can be disposed of properly. The keeping of pets for personal pleasure or profit is STRICTLY prohibited.”

Beyond the realm of menageries, in the midst of the Humvees rushing to and fro and the helicopters buzzing through the air like prowling insects, you will come across a large, shimmering pool of greenish water. Reflected in that water is a many-tiered building, white as a dozen new moons. This is the palace, lined with cobalt-blue tiles and topped with impossibly beautiful minarets, built by Saddam in the glory days of his reign. Walk inside and you’ll likely gag on the excess of marble, crystal, and gold leaf. Right down to a kitchen the size of a football field and the bidets that once cleaned Saddam’s asshole, it is a testament to wealth. Now it serves as headquarters for the American forces who defeated the dictator and pulled down his statue with a quick yank. Type A, ass-pucker lieutenant colonels now scurry through the halls with the
tock-tock-tock
of boot steps where Republican Guard aide-de-camps also once skittered, fearful of the firing squad’s bullet and Uday’s beheading sword.

The palace is perched on the banks of a shallow, boggy lake that, decades ago, had been hand-dug by those disloyal to Hussein or his brothers. The thirty-acre lake, built in the shape of a
Z,
is now prime breeding ground for disease-laden mosquitoes. In the mornings, bats swoop overhead, near the end of their night shift. The stillness of the green water is broken every so often by carp leaping for breakfast bugs. Mallard bob in the reeds along the shore, only taking flight when they’re disturbed by the muffled
whoompf!
of a car bomb downtown.

Gooding devoted nearly all his spare moments to capturing what he saw around him. Sometimes he jotted in his little green notebook, sometimes on an index card, sometimes on a cardboard scrap torn off a box of MREs. And sometimes, when he was most daring, he would type the events of the day into the computer at his workstation in the palace, making sure he erased his digital footprint by saving the file to a thumb drive. He was cautious about using his work computer and picked his “diary moments” carefully.

Today had seemed like a good time. When the morning began (before the hot seep of dawn), it had been cloaked in a subdued murmur rising from the cubicles. This was a rare oasis of peace from the typical shout and bark of “Take
that,
hajji-san!” or “Coffee! STAT!” or “Who the fuck fucked with my PowerPoint?” that punctuated the palace work space. Today felt like an intermezzo before a storm of screaming Shostakovich strings (or so Chance Gooding Jr. noted in his journal).