Fobbit (6 page)

Later that night, Brock Lumley would dream he was standing in front of a Whac-A-Mole, sponge-rubber mallet in his hand. Each time the Syrian’s head popped up, Lumley smacked it with the mallet. The head would burst like a balloon and drench Lumley’s shirt with blood and viscera. Then another head, and another, and another.

The tank crew emerged from the hatch, their beige uniforms dark with sweat. They’d been told what had happened and now they looked over at Lumley, cheered, and gave him a thumbs-up.

He waved weakly and pulled his shit together.

One hour later—after the Abrams had pulled itself free of the Opel with a groan-shriek of metal, the EOD team had gone out to render the explosives completely neutral and retrieve the battery-dead robot, the Iraqi Security Forces had arrived on the scene to disperse the crowd and take charge of the dead terrorist, CNN had packed up their camera and microphone and zipped away in their shiny up-armored SUV, Lieutenant Colonel Duret had ordered Captain Shrinkle to have a preliminary after-action report on his desk no later than 1700 hours, and the infantrymen were allowed to piss and smoke before departure—the platoon was riding back to FOB Triumph and its population of soft-bellied Fobbits.

Lumley was a big guy who had to fold and stuff himself inside the front passenger seat of the Humvee every trip outside the concertina wire, but his eyes were small (“like two pieces of rabbit shit on snow,” his granddaddy used to say) and he kept his mouth so tight it was hard to tell what was going on inside. Even so, each time he came back from patrol, driving through the main gate of the FOB, his spleen rose between his teeth at the thought of all the coddled soldiers who never went beyond the wire. Fuck those high-ranking desk jockeys fat, dumb, and happy with their air-conditioning and the illusion they kept things under control in Iraq just by clicking a few icons on the computer screen, moving units around with a tidy drag-and-drop.

Lumley and the rest of the soldiers in his platoon were the ones making a difference in Iraq, not those lazy slugs. He’d be surprised if any of those support soldiers had ever pulled a trigger in their lives, apart from the annual trip to the M16 qualification range. They wouldn’t know a mosque from a mosquito.

Lumley’s men stared with glazed eyes out the windows of the Humvees, always scanning, scanning, scanning the rooftops, doorways, ditches for suspicious activity. Nobody said anything but a few cracked half-contained smiles when they thought about the way ole hajji’s head had popped like a blood-filled balloon when Sergeant Lumley’s bullet had done its work.

Soon they would pull into Triumph, clear their weapons at the checkpoint, ratcheting the bolts with a ka-
ching,
and reach down to pick up the ejected rounds. They would park at the motor pool, perform the post-op Preventive Maintenance Checks and Services, then head for showers, chow, and the soothing calm of an after-dinner cigar. Some would gather for the ongoing Xbox Halo tournament, some would e-mail their families, some would open
Maxim
to a wrinkled, dog-eared page and commence the nightly masturbation session, and some would lie on their cots in the spreading ink of night, stare at the ceiling of their hooch, try to push away the burst of a blood balloon now playing on a loop in their head and know it was no use—they’d have to deal with this for the rest of the deployment . . . and beyond.

The officers would also sit in the dark, variously watching Marx Brothers movies on their laptop (Shrinkle) and chewing Tylenol like candy (Duret).

One by one, they would all give way to the discomfort of restless sleep.

Just before the sun’s yolk broke over the horizon and the muezzins started singing from the mosques and the Blackhawk blades took to the sky with pulsing thumps and the morning’s mortars came down with metal shrieks, they would face another day—Duret, Shrinkle, Lumley, the three thousand soldiers, and even the Iraqis themselves—all prepared to meet more known unknowns.

3

GOODING

T
hat morning, he had crept up behind Specialist Cinnamon Carnicle and then, just before a prankster giggle broke out of him, he coughed like a cat with a hair ball.

Cinnamon leaped up and yelped, “Jesus Harvey Christ!”

“Why so jumpy, Carnicle?” Staff Sergeant Gooding looked at her through narrow, amused eyes.

“They don’t call it the graveyard shift for nothing, Sar’nt,” she said as she scraped herself off the ceiling and settled back into her chair. Carnicle was the other enlisted soldier in the public affairs cell and was responsible for monitoring Significant Activity reports, restocking supplies, fielding phone calls from reporters in other time zones, and editing the Shamrock Division’s weekly camp newspaper,
The Lucky Times
. Most nights, it was quiet here in Saddam’s old palace, and that’s just the way she liked it. Peace and quiet in the middle of a loud war. “What are you doing here now, Sergeant Gooding? Isn’t it, like, two hours before shift change?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” He shrugged off his flak vest and dumped it in the gear pile next to the M16 rack. “I stayed up late watching the
Star Wars
bootleg and ended up eating a whole bag of care-package licorice which, let’s just say, didn’t sit too well with me.”

“You can eat the prunes my grandmother sent me last month, if it’ll help.”

Gooding ripped a fart, made a face, and said, “Sorry. Licorice is still backing up.”

“You couldn’t leave it outside, Sar’nt?”

“It comes and goes, Carnicle. Doesn’t let me have a say-so.” He sat down and logged on to his computer. “Anything interesting pop up on SMOG?”

“Not much. 1-3 was out on some neighborhood-knock mission that started at twenty-two hundred and didn’t really wrap up until an hour ago. SMOG was antsy all night long—kept interrupting my sleep to give updates over the loudspeaker every thirty minutes.”

“Poor girl. I’ll be sure and tell them to keep it down in there so they don’t bother you so much.”

“Hardy-har-har.”

Gooding walked over to the SMOG station. “So, any casualties?”

“One guy got bit in the nuts by a rottweiler but that’s about it.”

“A rottweiler? Where were they, South Harlem? What kind of Local National keeps a guard dog?”

“Apparently one who’s had his door kicked in one too many times. They had to zip-tie this guy and his wife just to get them to calm down. This, of course, after our guys shot the dog.”

“Nice.”

“Hey, the guy thought his nuts were bit clean off. Turns out he just got a bad bruising, that’s all. Didn’t even break the skin. He’ll probably get bed rest and an ice pack for a day, then he’ll be back on the street. Can’t keep a good man down, right?”

“This coming from someone who never had to walk around with a sack of nuts.”

“I never told you about my sex change, did I?”

“No, but it’s pretty obvious to everyone who meets you.”

“Ha,” Carnicle said, not a trace of laughter in her voice. “So, you’re releasing me from prison two hours early?”

“Sure,” Gooding said. “Go ahead and treat yourself to an extra course at breakfast.”

Carnicle logged off her computer and gathered her gear. When fully bundled into her military uniform and load-bearing equipment, she waddled like a beige penguin. She was short, with bowl-cropped hair and a face compacted with only the suggestion of a chin. She forbade anyone to call her “Cinnamon” but asked they keep it at “Carnicle, just Carnicle.” She wouldn’t even go by “Cindy,” as her hippie parents still called her, just as they called her sisters Nutmeg and Allspice by their cutesy nicknames “Meg” and “Allie.” On the surface, Specialist Carnicle came as close to a manly man as someone with D-cup boobs could get, but no one knew her little secret: in the privacy of her hooch she spritzed the air with lavender room spray, slept in silk pajamas, and cuddled with a teddy bear (floppy neck, loose button eye, name of Chopin). Lord help the person who discovered this Jekyll to her Hyde because Carnicle stood at just the right height to deliver a crippling punch to the balls. Yes, she had plenty of secrets, but she kept them corralled behind her constricted features; she’d crack a smile every now and then but it was never just a smile; it was a controlled, crescent chink in her armor. After three months of working all-nighters her face had gone pasty and oily and she was still plagued with the coffee jitters but she wouldn’t trade the midnight peace of the palace for what she’d heard went on during the day. All that phone-jangling, cubicle-buzzing, KIA-peppering vibe coming from the Sig Act reports made her skin crawl and, if she’d had them, her nuts shrivel. No, thanks, she’d stay right here in the calm of the night shift, if it was all the same.

“So,” Gooding said, “besides Luthor-the-Nut-Crunching-Dog, anything big happen?”

“By ‘big,’ do you mean things like Captain Kilgore in G-6 spilling coffee on his desk and fritzing out half of G-3 Ops computers? Or one of the checkpoint guards coming down with what he thought was food poisoning and ralphing his guts all over the front desk and then for some reason feeling the need to broadcast this news over the loudspeaker? That kind of ‘big’?”

“I was thinking more in terms of casualties or captured terrorists.”

“Oh,
that
. No, nothing much to report, Sar’nt. All quiet on the western front.” This was the same thing Carnicle said every day at changeover and Gooding supposed she thought it was funny.

She handed him the shift report, along with a half dozen Sig Acts (no KIAs, no WIAs, only a few weapons caches discovered during Salman Pak night patrols), and asked, “So, I’m free to go?”

Gooding skimmed through the reports, saw nothing alarming, and nodded at the other public affairs soldier. “See you in fourteen hours.”

“I look forward to it like a dog to a fire hydrant.” Another daily catchphrase.

And then she was gone, waddling and clunking out of the palace. Gooding listened to the soft click of computer keys and the
hum-buzz
of the overhead lights for a minute, centering himself in the calm of the adagio, before pulling out his desk chair and beginning the day two hours early.

Taking advantage of the lull at the start of his shift, Gooding sat at the computer, cracked his knuckles, swiveled around to make sure no one else was looking, then opened his diary, a document he kept buried in a labyrinth of folders and subfolders on the hard drive. It was here he kept a detailed record of all the sights, smells, and sounds of camp life. This was how he’d be able to remember the war years down the road when it started to fade from his head. If, that is, he ever made it out of here alive.

From the Diary of Chance Gooding Jr.

Forward Operating Base Triumph is an American city unto itself. A small, rustic American city of tents, trailers, Quonset huts, and dust-beige rectangle-houses (leftovers from the regime), but a city nonetheless. Not unlike what you would have seen 150 years ago in Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, or Montana—slapdash communities nailed together by railroads, miners, and lumberjacks, swollen with a flood of prostitutes, grocers, haberdashers, and schoolmarms, then just as quickly deflated as the mines dried up, the railroads moved on, and the forests were depleted. Like frontier America, FOB Triumph has the buzz of newborn excitement, tempered with the understanding that it is, politically speaking, impermanent. Its eventual doom foretold in its name, FOB Triumph will one day wither away when the United States is victorious in Iraq.

That day is still far in the future, however.

For now, soldiers, Local Nationals, American contractors, and Third World Employees (known as “Twees”) move through the gravel streets engineers have quickly and roughly laid between the fifteen rows of trailers. Triumph’s residents move like ants, orderly and focused, as they go about the business of supporting a war that crackles across Baghdad, well outside the sandbag-fortified entry control points where guards check ID badges, hold mirrors on poles like giant dentist tools to look at the undercarriages of trucks, and German shepherds pull against leashes as they sniff for bombs. Vehicles are forced to navigate a quarter mile of concrete barricades, slowing them to a crawl as they wind their serpentine way onto the base. By the time a suicide bomber cleared the last barrier, he would have been killed five times over by the soldiers at the gate. He’d be riddled with bullets—turned to a bleeding wedge of Swiss cheese—before his lips could even form the words
“Allahu Akbar!”

FOB Triumph is located in west Baghdad, caught between the pressure points of the airport and Abu Ghraib prison. Soon after the United States took control of the city in 2003—securing first the airport, then gradually expanding the ring of safe real estate outward—FOB Triumph grew in increments. Hastily dug foxholes next to tanks turned into tents, tents turned into shipping containers tricked out with cots and air-conditioning, shipping containers turned into trailers with windows, doors, and small wooden porches—the kind of tin-sided mobile home that have made more than one soldier from Hog Wallow, Tennessee, weep with homesickness.