Fobbit

by David Abrams

  “Uh, Roger . . . we’re here at the objective, but don’t have any reports of skies falling, over.”

  “Affirmative, Clover. Go ahead and return to rally point, over.”

  “Roger, Shamrock X-ray.”

  And don’t forget to make way for ducklings.

  Now it’s summer and so the operation namers in Task Force Baghdad Headquarters are commemorating it with baseball-themed titles (Operation Babe Ruth, Operation Khadhimiya Shortstop, Operation Home Plate). At last count, we’d rounded up more than four hundred bad guys in two days thanks to Operation Squeeze Play. Of course, not all of them are guilty of crimes—there is a certain amount of collateral damage when we make these raids and trap insurgents in our net, sometimes we pick up a few innocents along the way . . . to whom we later apologize and send on their merry way. Yesterday alone, I put out three press releases on Squeeze Play and the media started calling when they heard one raid on a house in Mansour turned up $6 million in cash—stacks and stacks and stacks of U.S. $100 bills. I have pictures—unreleasable and stored on my hard drive—of American soldiers grinning and pointing at the loot. By the end of the day, I was exhausted, having spent the entire time going back and forth from my computer, answering media queries via e-mail, and being interviewed on the phone. It’s like running on a treadmill. And every day is the same thing. Groundhog Day redux.

  6

  DURET

  Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret had come to the point where he hated Fobbits: self-preservationists who never admitted to the fear inside, and instead found ways to stay busy within the boundaries of the triple-rolled concertina wire and walls crenellated with shards of glass. Duret knew of an entire platoon’s worth of officers who clung to the security of headquarters, their asses gradually molding into the shape of a chair. Their aftershave reeked of self-importance and at any given moment of the workday, you could find them standing at a SMOG workstation, arms akimbo, grim-faced and intent as they stared at the unit icons on the Area of Operations maps. Periodically, they’d point and redirect one of the icons with the tip of a finger—just like that, flicking a company from Mahmudiyah to Diyala. These were the idiots shat out by West Point, turds in starched uniforms and glistening high-and-tight haircuts, shiny-foreheaded future corporate executives who used words like envisionment instead of vision. These officers never came right out and said it (in fact, it was much better for the conscience if it was never verbally expressed), but they were content to spend their entire thirteen-month tour inside the womb of fluorescent lights, air- conditioning, and three hot meals a day.

  These dicks never had to face the nut-shriveling terror of careening through traffic, never certain whether or not the car pulling up behind them was trunk-loaded with explosives or just carrying a beheaded corpse to be dumped in the Tigris; never had to paste a forced smile to their lips while having tea and sautéed camel entrails with the province’s sheikh, all while trying to unlock the enigmas of the sheikh’s labyrinthine way of speaking—not approaching a subject head-on but entering the true heart of the matter through a series of side doors and secret passageways known only to Local Nationals; never felt the despair of visiting an electric substation one day and congratulating the mayor on his remarkable progress in the last three months, only to revisit that same substation a week later to inspect the damage from the bombing, which set the project back eighteen months and forced the mayor to impose a daily quota of two hours of electricity. What was that saying the Local Nationals had? “We’re blowing into a punctured bag.”

  No, Duret thought as he dug his pen into his notebook, tracing the words “Continuous Process Improvement.” Fobbits would never know any of this.

  Not like Vic Duret, who was knee-deep in the shit day after day.

  And when he wasn’t out there in it—when he was trapped in air-cooled, fluorescent-lit briefings like this one—he got itchy and drifty. Influence Targeting Meetings, Casualty Evaluation Briefings, Effects Assessments Huddles, International Engagement Team Planning Sessions. Ass-numbing hours and hours of PowerPoint and laser pointers and the complacent drone of midcareer staff officers. Duret never let himself get comfortable, for fear he would morph into a Fobbit. He could already feel his ass spreading—and that scared the shit out of him.

  The brigade commander, Colonel Quinner, was on a roll this morning with a new program the Pentagon was trying to integrate at the lower-echelon level. “Continuous Process Improvement, gentlemen, is a strategic approach for developing a culture of upticking positives—particularly, I’m told, in the areas of reliability and process cycle times. CPI will ultimately eventuate in less total resource consumption. Deployed effectively, it increases quality and productivity, while reducing waste and cycle time. So what do you think about that?” Quinner’s face always reminded Duret of an owl who’d run into an electric fence. Now when Quinner glanced around the room at his slack-jawed battalion commanders he looked like he understood the Pentagon directive even less than they did. “I, for one, am excited by the potential possibilities in this new program. We overlay it on current ops here in theater and I fully believe it will eventuate into something tangible, something for which the Iraqi people will praise us for years to come.”

  Duret should have been listening to Quinner but he couldn’t stop staring at what he’d written in his notebook three minutes earlier.

  Tanks for the mammaries.

  As Quinner talked about the timely need for SitReps to populate the daily BUB slides, due no later than oh-five-forty-five hours to the adjutant in the SMOG room, Duret couldn’t stop thinking about his father. Tanks for the mammaries.

  The word mammaries naturally took Duret back to his wife and the recurring fantasy with which he consoled himself while an ocean sloshed between them. Her breasts were waiting for him at the finish line so, head down, arms pumping, Duret ran the marathon toward the end of the deployment.

  Duret thought of his wife straddled atop his torso, negligee pulled off her shoulders and puddled around her hips as she leaned forward, breasts swaying like wind chimes, left nipple dropping into his mouth, his tongue rolling the little button against his teeth until it hardened like candy . . .

  He stopped himself with a sharp intake of breath, which caused some of the other battalion officers to shoot a glance in his direction. Duret stared straight ahead at Quinner, as if he hadn’t made a sound. He really shouldn’t be doing this to himself during the brigade briefing. He crossed, uncrossed, and recrossed his legs. He traced the words in his notebook and put his mind back on his father.

  His old man had been Armor, too. Like Vic, he was built like a Bradley: all neck, swollen-red head, a fierce way of leaning forward from the chest when he walked. The old man took no shit from pansies and organized his family along the battalion structure, from dinnertime to Yellowstone vacations. He could be a hard man, but he also loved a good story. Goddamn, he could spin a yarn. And that’s what Vic Duret was thinking about now instead of the morning Battlefield Update Briefing to the commanding general: the time his father leaned close, man-to-man, and poked fourteen-year-old Vic’s chest with the two fingers that held his ever-unlit cigar. “I ever tell ya about the time Bob Hope came to Fort Knox?” (Yes, he had. Many times) “This was, oh, sixty-five, sixty-six, somewhere around there. Armor school was tough back then, son. It’d eat you for breakfast and shit you back out at lunchtime then grind you to mayonnaise by dinner. Anyway, it was tough, tough, I tell ya. Like John Wayne toilet paper: tough as nails and don’t take shit off nobody. Ha!” (A weak, agreeing ha from Vic.) “Anyway, we needed a little comic relief. So here comes Hope on a USO tour and he brings with him a bevy of Playmate bunnies. That’s not the only thing we called ’em—a ‘bevy’—but I don’t think your mother would appreciate me repeating what we really said. So there they are, these bunnies with their tits onstage, shimmy-shaking to some Ike and Tina song and we’re hootin’ and hollerin’ like all get-out cuz by that time we’d had nothin’ but weeks and weeks
of classes and turret exercises and getting up at four fucking o’clock for rifle drills in the rain. Then one or two of us try to climb on the stage, but the MPs hold us back, the fuckers. Man, those girls were something! You could have put us facedown on the ground and twirled us around on our boners—that’s how bad off we were for women by that point in Armor school.” The old man put the cigar in his mouth and sucked on it, ruminating about decades-old hard-ons. “Then Mr. Bob Hope walks on stage, swinging his golf club and he grins at the bunnies doing their thing. When the song was over and they were bouncing off the stage, he looked at all us Armor students sprawled on the grass in front of him and then he leans into the microphone and calls out, Tanks for the mammaries!”

  Each time he’d told it, and those times were too many to count, his father laughed until his eyes squeezed shut and a single tear tracked down his face.

  Sitting in the briefing, Vic traced the words in his notebook again, etching the ink deeper. Bob Hope was dead, his father was dead, and there sure as shit weren’t gonna be any Playboy bunnies coming over here to Iraq anytime soon. Nervous politicians and moral majority do-gooders had drained the Army of all that blood a long time ago. No, the most his men could hope for was a visit from a NASCAR driver and some guy in a black hat who was climbing the country charts back in the States.

  Bob Hope, dead. Pops, dead. Ross, dead.

  Fuck! Here it came again. He held his breath as the hot red tidal wave swept upward from his neck.

  Ross dead Ross dead Ross dead. Vic’s wife, Dawnmarie, unable to bear up under the weight of the news and screaming, crashing down in a heap of hair and robe, their dog Ginger anxiously sniffing the bottoms of her feet, Vic simply standing there numb before the onset of pain, staring at the cell phone dropped on the floor just beyond Dawnmarie’s curled hand, a howl of empathy coming from his mother-in-law through the phone’s speaker grille, the tinny sound of grief filling the whole of their family housing unit at Fort Bliss. And then his own cell phone buzzing, his sergeant major telling him in a fear-struck voice that he needed to get to the office quick because it looked like some bad shit was going down in New York.

  Sitting in Colonel Quinner’s briefing, there now came a pounding in Duret’s head that drained him of all thought except for that image of his brother-in-law’s body launched in an arc away from the tower, a parabola of pain, blackened skin crackling, disintegrating to ash in the buffeting wind.

  Falling Burning Man. Duret’s pen traced the words again and again.

  Every week, he added a new phrase to his notebook during Quinner’s meetings: It’s a marathon, not a sprint or Drinking from the fire hose or The voice of the bullets. He also wrote words that he just as quickly scratched out with hard strokes of his pen: Quagmire and A kluge of contradictions and Nonpartisan binding irresolution. Falling Burning Man was not the latest addition but it was the most traced. He outlined the words in little licking flames. He flipped the page and tried to turn his attention back to Quinner and his blinking owl eyes.

  He started the relaxation breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth—that his wife had urged him to give a try after she’d read about it in one of her magazines. It only dulled the headache, didn’t erase it. But dull was better than nothing and, at this particular moment, Vic Duret was surrounded on all sides by Dull.

  As the Baghdad sunlight bore through the fly-specked windows and you could hear the crinkle of men sucking the water dry from plastic bottles, Quinner told his commanders about the congressional delegation scheduled to arrive next week. “You can expect the pucker factor to be very high around here, gentlemen. Very high indeed. Word from above is that the area around the palace is to be in a state of spit-and-polish unlike any seen before. We will whisk these four members of Congress in, and we will whisk them back out again. Whisk in, whisk out—got that? But while they are touring the brigade headquarters, they will be stunned into silence by the sparkle coming off the brass doorknobs. They should be forced to wear their sunglasses indoors. Do I make myself clear, gentlemen?”

  There were grumbled assents from around the room of “yessir, right sir, got it sir.”

  Quinner was a man who talked tough to his staff but, Duret suspected, deep down inside he was irresolute as a child given two choices for dinner: pepperoni pizza or chicken nuggets with barbecue dipping sauce. When faced with a fork in the road, Quinner probably wrestled with himself for hours on end, wondering if he should take the high road, the road less traveled, or if he should just stop by the woods on a snowy evening. This didn’t mean Quinner was necessarily a cautious, prudent man; no, just a dumb one who couldn’t tell a fart from a turd.

  Was he a quitter? No. Was he a winner? No. He was Quinner!

  To his men, though, he bully-bluffed his way through his leadership, betraying not the slightest iota of namby or pamby. He made a particular point of ending each briefing with a Thought for the Day, certain he was sending his officers out into the world armed with inspiration and fortitude.

  The drone stopped. Quinner really was wrapping up this time. “All right then! Any alibis?”

  No one had anything else for the group that hadn’t already been brought up.

  “All right then. We reconvene at sixteen-thirty for the BUB prep . . . Oh! And gentlemen?”

  The ones not lucky or smart enough to have already escaped the room stopped and looked back at their commander.

  “The Thought for the Day.” He pulled an index card from his pocket. “War is not polite. It is not fought on ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous.’ Remember that when you’re out there, men. And good luck!”

  Duret lingered behind, adding that phrase to his notebook as something to be mocked later at the O Club back on Fort Stewart.

  As the rest of the men streamed out of the room, a captain from brigade operations pushed his way against the tide, walked over to Quinner, and cupped his hand to his ear. With a sidelong glance at Duret, the captain gave a terse, whispered report then left. Duret didn’t like the way Quinner’s owl eyes snapped open like window shades. He especially didn’t like it when Quinner held a finger in the air, then pointed it at Duret.

  “Hold on,” he said. “We have a situation that I think you need to be aware of, Vic.”

  Two minutes later, Duret was speedwalking the polished hallways of the palace en route to the SMOG room.

  Situation. Another fucking situation.

  There were reports of a Local National disturbing the peace at a gas station in Quadrant 7 of Duret’s area of responsibility. G-2 in SMOG was pretty certain the guy was packing a ball-bearing vest and was ready to pull the det cord when a big enough crowd had gathered.

  Duret ground his teeth, molars squeaking, when he thought of the ridiculous redundancy of his time here in Iraq. Another Day, Another Bomb. Maybe it’s a Swiss-Syrian halfway up the ass of an Abrams tank . . . or maybe it’s a pair of Sunni teenagers crouched behind a berm waiting for a U.S. convoy to roll past . . . or maybe it’s a disgruntled Republican Guard holdout pedaling into a crowd of police recruits on his bike, the frame packed with nails, the explosives triggered by a bell on the handle that the hajji fucker thumbed with a pleasant jingle at the police candidates one second before taking himself and nineteen others skyward to Allah. Only the locations and body parts changed. No, scratch that—there was always an arm. A charred, blood-ooze stump, sometimes in a knot-hard rigor mortis fist, sometimes splayed in a five-finger starfish hand releasing all responsibility for the act just performed.

  These martyrs were speed-bumping the brigade’s real work in and around Baghdad: the nation rebuilding that was, in itself, a constant struggle, suicide bombers or no suicide bombers. There were sewer lines to patch, electric substations to rewire, schools to build, backpacks to distribute to solemn-faced boys and girls, local sheikhs to convince that what America brought to the table really was better than anything Saddam had offered during his decades of tyranny. That was the mission that was supposed to consume the l
arger percentage of his time, according to the Division’s Tactical Ops Blueprint, which had been so dearly cherished before they left Fort Stewart and headed into the Great Unknown.

  But no, Duret and his men spent their days running from one molehill to the other, whacking anything that moved with their amusement-park mallets. He’d picked that up from his soldiers—Whac-A-Mole—and soon was letting it slip into his daily reports, much to the grunting, frowning consternation of Colonel Quinner. But Quinner could go choke himself with all his esprit de corps Thoughts for the Day, as far as Duret was concerned. Quinner wasn’t out here running around with a hammer, was he? No, that would mean leaving the security of air-conditioning and neatly patterned workdays. And Colonel Quentin P. Quinner was, despite all his bluster and blather to the contrary, nothing but another card-carrying member of the Fobbit Club.

  Vic Duret stopped himself outside the door to SMOG, took a yoga breath through his nostrils, and tried to dissolve the throb hugging the base of his skull. He couldn’t afford to get worked up over the clowns in the command group.

  Vic breathed in, breathed out . . . in, out, in. His head continued to turmoil. Goddamn, how he wanted his wife’s milky tit in his mouth right now!

  He yanked open the door with the force of a man determined to kick the situation’s ass from here to the Tigris.

  The Command Operations Center (informally known as “The Cock”) can be overwhelming to the unsuspecting visitor. It is a place of calculated chaos—like walking into NASA Control seconds before a launch. Against one wall are three TV screens, each ten feet by fifteen feet, which are the eyes to the COC’s brain. The main screen displays a battle map of Baghdad, red diamonds marking Items of Interest (IIs or “Eyes”) such as IEDs, small-arms fire, ambushes, enemy forces, friendly forces, and “neverminds” (mistakes on the part of the computer operators that flash green for two minutes before blinking off the screen). The screen on the right cycles through PowerPoint slides for the upcoming Battlefield Update Briefs and reminds viewers to “Get your agenda input to the battle captain no later than 1600 hours, thank you kindly.” On the left-hand TV screen are fuzzy-gray images of a live video feed from one of the many blimp-cams floating over Baghdad, panning and zooming around the streets to keep an eye on shoppers, schoolchildren, and little knots of terrorists digging holes for their IEDs along the highway. These floating cameras are known as Triple Bs (“Big Brother Blimps”). Facing the screen are four steep tiers of desks stretching across the entire room. Each staff section and unit has a seat in this gallery. It’s like the United Nations or Congress or the control room in that 1980s movie WarGames. Most of the desks have computers, phones, and headsets with which to communicate with the rest of the room. The men press their TALK buttons and chatter in milspeak to their neighbors, who are often only a few desks away: a self-contained language full of words like OPSUM, BDA, LSR, MSR, and AIF.