Fobbit

by David Abrams

  The way it rang off the side of the palace like a deep, throaty bell made Abe Shrinkle’s blood run even redder. Quillpen or no Quillpen, he thought, this war was going pretty good so far.

  5

  GOODING

  Chance Gooding juggled IED reports like they were flaming tenpins. The IED and vehicle-borne IED rate was on the rise, spiking within the past week. They were now coming at Gooding at such an alarming rate he was unable to keep track of them. With each Significant Activity report, he opened another press release template and started typing, trying all the time not to get events confused.

  Only the body count kept the Sig Acts straight in his mind—that and the many typos peppering the Sig Acts. A squad patrolling along Route Vulcan was said to be on “Route Vulva.” A staff sergeant rounding up suspected bomb makers grabbed them by their “shits.” And, Gooding’s favorite, a private first class injured by the concussion from an IED blast was said to have suffered “a loss of conscience.”

  Another time, as his glazed eyes were skimming through all the IED, VBIED, and small-arms-fire attacks, he stumbled across this in a description of a platoon coming under an RPG attack: “Unit also observed peanut-butter colored Mercedes, which left scene right after attack.” Peanut-butter colored. Who says Sig Acts can’t make for interesting reading?

  Quirky details of IED attacks usually helped make Gooding’s job easier. On an otherwise quiet night two weeks ago, three VBIEDs were detonated within the space of a few minutes in a west Baghdad district filled with small, Mom and Pop businesses. The terrorists set off one bomb, then sat back and waited for the Iraqi police and firefighters to respond before they set off the other two. Complex multistaged ambush, G-3 called it. Several IPs were killed, dozens of civilians wounded. One car was blown into the air and, like a flaming metal meteor, landed on top of the row of shops, destroying an electronics store, a barbershop, and, ironically, an auto parts store.

  Reporters routinely called Gooding on the phone, wanting more information about, for instance, “the explosion on Airport Road,” and he would ask them for more information—time of explosion, number of killed and injured, any unusual body parts, et cetera—to pinpoint the event. His press release headlines all sounded the same with vanilla-oatmeal predictability: “Iraqi police, Army secure bomb blast site” or “Baghdad explosion kills eight, wounds twelve” or “Iraqi security forces, U.S. Army mop up blast site.”

  At one point, Gooding got so frustrated that, in his confusion, he turned to Major Filipovich in the next cubicle and said, “Sir, can’t we start naming these attacks, just like we name hurricanes? I mean, I could keep them all straight if we could call them IED Martha or VBIED Larry.”

  Major Philip “Flip” Filipovich, never one to crack a smile, even at his weakest moments, leaned back in his chair, yawned, rubbed his black billiard-ball head, and said, “Fan-fucking-tastic idea, Sarge. Why don’t I propose it to our Most Esteemed Leader at the next staff meeting? I’m sure Harkleroad will treat it like every other brilliant idea I’ve brought his way: he’ll drop it straight into the toilet and give it a good flush.”

  Filipovich was the deputy public affairs officer, a lazy-ass midlevel field grade officer who hated Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad with a vein-throbbing passion. He often dreamed of “Harklefuck” meeting his death in any number of abrupt, violent ways: choking on a fish bone during the dining facility’s weekly Bounty of the Sea dinner; seeing a snake on the ground while running to board a Blackhawk, which scared him so much he untucked from his hunched run and shot straight up into the chopping blades; or riding in the lead Humvee of a convoy that strikes an IED, sending 245 pounds of PAO skyward in a geyser of blood, bone, and government-subsidized hearing aid.

  “Now, if you don’t mind, some of us have work to do—important, global-level, earth-shattering work.” Filipovich chair-scooted back into his cubicle to finish the local media assessment that Harkleroad, the fat fuck, would be wanting on his desk precisely two hours from now.

  Gooding gritted his teeth and turned back to his headline. “Al-Dora blast kills eight, injures three.” No, wait, it was supposed to be “Al-Dora blast kills three, injures eight.” Now he was confused and he pawed through the pile of Sig Acts on his desk to get everything straight in his head again. He was near the end of his shift and it hadn’t been a good one.

  The morning had started with a terrorist sabotaging water lines at a water treatment plant outside Baghdad at 4:40 a.m. The bomb burst the pipes at a crucial joint and sewer water had flooded the control room. Iraqi Department of Water officials rushed to the scene and shut off water for everyone in Baghdad west of the Tigris River. The government reported it could take up to three or four days of round-the-clock work to repair this latest sabotage. Citizens were riled and started venting on Al-Jazeera, mouths chewing the microphones and spittle misting the camera lens.

  Then, shortly after one p.m., a VBIED detonated behind an Iraqi police patrol, killing two Iraqi Army soldiers and two IPs and wounding twenty-seven others. Gooding named that one IED Vaporized Cop.

  The worst was yet to come. There was still plenty of daylight left on the clock.

  Before three p.m., a man wearing a suicide vest packed with explosives walked into a restaurant. He killed five Iraqi soldiers and thirteen civilians and wounded at least thirty-four civilians. These were just the initial reports Gooding received over the SMOG’s Sig Acts. The Associated Press later tallied it at twenty-three dead, thirty-six wounded.

  Nobody on the scene saw the bomber carrying anything into the café. According to a group of Iraqi soldiers inside the restaurant at the time of the explosion, they had just ordered their lunch when the suicide bomber entered and detonated the device. Survivors at the scene said the majority of the patrons were soldiers who were fond of the special goat gyros served there for lunch every day, guaranteeing there would always be a large group of Iraqi military at the restaurant at any given mealtime. Area residents knew the café would be targeted for this reason and most of them tried to avoid it whenever possible, taking a wide detour around the block during the noon hour.

  Gooding’s e-mail dinged. It was a series of photos from the brigade public affairs team that had rushed to the scene in the smoky aftermath.

  Gooding clicked on the attachments.

  The first photos showed the hole-in-the-wall (now literally) restaurant gutted by swift, lethal fire. Part of the ceiling was gone and sunshine flooded the charred interior. Viscera was smeared across the floor. Tables and chairs, inextricably married in a tangle of chrome legs and plastic cushions, rested against a back wall where they’d been propelled by the blast. Bright packages of crackers, tins of tea, and cellophane-wrapped candy were still neatly arranged on a shelf next to a register, waiting for someone to come along and make a purchase. A man, presumably the owner, stood in a still-smoking door frame—the door was gone, thrown halfway down the block. His eyes were glassed with shock as he stared at what remained of his café.

  Gooding clicked into the next e-mail, subject line: “The remains of the suicide bomber.”

  A head. Two legs that appeared to be sprouting from his neck. A hand, fingers twisted and broken, in the region where normally the right hip bone is located.

  That was it. Nothing more. Everything else—skin, bone, muscle, organ—had vaporized in a red splash through the dust and rubble of the restaurant.

  In the blackened head, the eyes were squeezed shut, as if in the final reflex before the bomber pulled the det cord. His feet on the end of those neatly severed legs were turned in opposite directions—one forward, one backward. If you didn’t know better, you might mistake his legs for arms, his feet for hands. He looked like a meaty jigsaw puzzle of parts—with those feet-hands, he looked like a child’s drawing of a traffic cop, one hand saying “Stop!” the other beckoning “Go!”

  Gooding decided to zoom in on the ragged end of the shoulder. His cursor changed to a magnifying glass. The closer he got to the sheare
d-off torso, the less his stomach churned. Soon it started to look less like meat, less like the abrupt ripping away of life, and more like strawberry jam. That was okay, right? Strawberry jam was delicious under the right circumstances.

  He zoomed back out and—damn!—started gagging again. Saliva flooded his mouth and he prayed he didn’t ralph all over his keyboard.

  Gooding closed the photos and rubbed his eyes.

  When Specialist Carnicle showed up for shift change, Gooding handed her the day’s stats—the death tolls tallied and compartmentalized into means and manner—reminded her to sweep out the entire cubicle area when she had nothing else to do, then started to leave the office without saying another word to Carnicle or Major Filipovich.

  “Hey, Sar’nt.”

  Gooding turned. “Yeah?”

  Carnicle pointed to the weapons rack in their cubicle. “Forget something?”

  Gooding felt the odd absence of weight around his neck. “Damn.” He grabbed his M16 from the rack. “Thanks, Carnicle. Fine NCO I am, walking around the FOB without a weapon, huh?” He left the palace and stepped out into the brassy moonlight.

  All soldiers, including Fobbits, were required to carry their M16s with them wherever they went: back and forth to work, when they took a shit, even if they were just stepping out onto their porch for a smoke.

  Gooding cradled his rifle like a newborn. If he set it down, he kept a watchful eye on it, worried someone might come along and snatch it. When he walked around the FOB, he hung it from his neck, muzzle pointing at the ground, one arm and shoulder through the sling so his hand could rest on the stock or trigger housing. You never knew when you might be called to action.

  Yes, the handgrips were starting to get sticky from all his palm dirt and sweat. And the tip of the barrel was scratched from all the times he banged it against a doorway. And, okay, once a week he had to take the rounds out of the magazine and clean off the accumulated dust, but what of it? This was war, after all, and he was in the hot middle of it.

  Walking home through the dark Life Support Area dotted with pale puddles cast by porch lights on the gravel, Gooding passed three soldiers sitting around a plastic table outside their hooch. They laughed and slapped dominoes on the table with triumphant Boo-yahs. The smell of cigars hung thick in the sludgy air.

  A few trailers down, a young black man, blending with the night, leaned over a young black girl sitting on her porch. He crooned persuasive words to her, working his charms while she put up a noncommittal wall. Her posture all but said, “Talk to the hand, playah!”

  Three trailers down on the right, a mother sat on her porch, talking on a cell phone to her kids. “Heather, sweetie, I know the Cookie Monster shampoo is your favorite, but I don’t think your little sister spilled it on purpose . . . No, she didn’t . . . Heather, honey, listen to me— . . . Listen— . . . Okay, okay, sweetie . . . I know, I know she is . . . Listen, can you put your daddy on the phone?”

  Two buff white guys passed Gooding in their PT uniforms, neon-yellow safety belts glowing in the dark, reeking of sweat and talking about how nothing compares to the kind of muscle failure you get at the gym.

  Gooding grabbed a towel at his hooch, then headed to the shower trailer, hoping he would have the place to himself. Light spilled from the frosted window in the door, barely illuminating the NO DEFICATION IN THE SHOWER sign. A puff of humid steam hit Gooding as he opened the door and stepped in.

  Sergeant First Class Browning from G-5 stood at one of the sinks, scraping a razor across the stubble on his throat. “Evening, Sar’nt,” Gooding said.

  Browning, one hand still pulling his skin taut, looked over at Gooding. “Just coming off shift?”

  “Yep. Just going on?”

  “Yep. Same shit, different day.” Browning had a voice like the scratchy end of a phonograph record.

  “I hear you.” Gooding found a place on the bench in front of his favorite shower stall.

  Browning finished shaving and walked over to the bench, sat down, and started untying his boots. “So, how was your day, honey?”

  “You better be meeting me at the door wearing an apron and holding a martini when you ask me that, Sar’nt. Oh, and you better have a decent pair of boobs, too.”

  Browning laughed as he stripped naked. “No, really,” he rasped. “Any exciting shit rock your world today?”

  “Oh . . .” Gooding thought about telling him it was all sunshine and furry kittens. Instead, he said, “Rough one today. Suicide bomber. They say they’re not sure if he was wearing a vest or not, but I know for a fact he was. I saw the pictures.”

  “Damn,” Browning said, shaking his head and testing his stall’s water in the palm of his hand.

  “Guy walks into a restaurant full of soldiers.”

  “Sounds like the start of a bad joke.”

  “Except no one was laughing at this one.”

  Gooding squeezed past him—always a very delicate choreography in order to avoid the dreaded penis graze—and got into his own shower stall.

  “He fuck it up pretty bad?”

  “Bad enough,” Gooding said over the hiss of water. “Twenty-three dead. Lots wounded. So, yeah, it was a pretty rotten day for a lot of folks.”

  Browning hawked a loogey and spat it into his shower stall, watched it wash down the drain. “I dunno…These guys sure are getting . . . what’s the word? . . . ambitious.”

  “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it, I guess.” What were the words he used in his press release? An isolated, desperate attack. Which was bullshit, of course. Gooding wasn’t allowed to use the words cunning and calculated.

  He poured a tablespoon of body wash into the palm of his hand, sniffed it in a private moment of aromatherapy, then rubbed it across his chest, his shoulders, his legs. He scrubbed and scrubbed. But it was no use. Nothing could mask the smell of melancholy.

  From the Diary of Chance Gooding Jr.

  Early morning. Another Groundhog Day in Iraq.

  I run. I take up a light jog, traveling down the dirt service road passing in front of the chow hall (where I can smell them baking the cream pies for today’s lunch), onto the paved road that follows the shore of Z Lake. Bats swoop overhead.

  My brain unravels as my legs reach forward along the road. I think about how my ex-wife, Yolanda, had shown up at my door two nights before I shipped out, driving to Georgia all the way from Reno in what she later said was a sentimental weakness, and invited herself in. I think about how she stood there and said she couldn’t fucking believe I was actually going to war and how, even though we’d been broken up for nearly ten years now and she’d had two husbands in the meantime, she would worry about me every day. I think about how one thing led to another. I think about how I unbuttoned her shirt and buried myself in the familiar valley between her breasts, hiccupping with sobs. The tears came because I was afraid of dying from al-Qaeda bullets, and because I was shocked with joy at Yo’s generosity, and because I hadn’t had sex with anyone but myself for more than three years.

  The dawn air hangs like a miasma over the FOB, carrying with it something that smells like deep-fried tires, dog shit, and month-old bananas. If I take too much of it into my throat and lungs, I’ll start gagging.

  I run. There is a scarf of gray smoke, at least three miles in length, hanging low over the city. The lake laps softly against the reeds on my right. I think about Saddam and his cronies crouched here on the banks, rifles cocked, waiting for the servants to start beating the brush a half mile away, scaring the wild boars in their direction. Were the bats also under his dictatorial sway? Did they nip the insects from the air around his face, clearing a sting-free zone for his imperial visage? My mouth open and panting, I pass through small clouds of those same bugs and I start choking and spitting.

  The sun isn’t even over the horizon and it’s already scorching the earth.

  I decide to press on, waste as much time as possible circling Saddam’s alphabetical lake. I’m due at the palace
in an hour but I try to push it off as long as possible. Just more of the same crap waiting for me at the cubicle: churning out more tree-killing reams of press releases for jolly ol’ Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad.

  The division task force is now heavily engaged in an offensive against the terrorists, called Operation Squeeze Play. Over here, a tactical operation is not a tactical operation until it has been christened with a code word. There are entire offices in the Pentagon and here in Iraq whose job it is to sit around and come up with clever names like Operation Righteous Fury or Operation Coffin Nail. Once, during cold and flu season, one of our brigade commanders came up with Operation Influenza and Operation Barking Cough.

  Just this week, the task force commander decreed: “Every time a platoon-sized element or larger rolls out the gate, it’s to be a named operation.”

  Roger that, sir. Pretty soon, we’ll have “Operation Go to the Bathroom” or “Operation I Just Need to Gas Up the Humvee.”

  No, but really, the dweeby guys in the planning cell come up with the cutest names for these daylong or weeklong combat operations where Iraqi and U.S. soldiers go into the neighborhoods to flush out terrorists. Yesterday, it was Drake, Pintail, and Mallard; today, it was Chicken Little.

  I can just hear them now on one of their door-kicking searches of the neighborhoods:

  “Shamrock X-ray, this is Clover 3-2, over.”

  “Go ahead, Clover.”