by David Abrams
In anticipation of what I know you will ask, no, I do not know if I will get a commendation or medal of some kind for my actions that day. I do know the chief of staff, Colonel Belcher, is quite proud of me and even the commanding general himself interrupted yesterday’s staff meeting to make mention of what he called my “unselfish act of courage.” I tend to think I won’t receive any specific award for what I did—not because they think I don’t deserve it but because, like so much of what we do here, we’re trying to keep all this on the hush-hush and down low. It would only give comfort and aid to the enemy if they knew they succeeded in a bull’s-eye hit on our PX at FOB Triumph. So that is why you won’t see me on the evening news or in the Daily Tennessean. In fact, there was a Stars and Stripes reporter who happened to be on the scene when the rocket hit, but I ordered her to delete the photos on her digital camera and hold the story until given approval by the proper authorities in division headquarters (which—ha ha, joke’s on her—is me, the PAO).
As I said, I don’t want to burden you with all my horror stories but I thought you should know what your son is doing over here in the name of democracy and freedom. Because this is TOP SECRET information I am telling you, I beg you not to contact Jim Powers down at the Murfreesboro Free Press and blab about all your son’s accomplishments and heroism over here in Iraq, though I understand how you must be longing to do so—as you would say, you’re “fairly bursting the buttons with pride and joy.” No, Mother, we must keep this between ourselves.
I suppose if you want to share it with the other ladies in your Sunday circle, then I would understand, but those First Redemption ladies must UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES tell their husbands!
Shifting gears, did I ever tell you about the swimming pool? If I already did, then bear with me (being in such close, intense combat has made me a little scatterbrained of late); if not, then here goes: Some of the men here like to venture over to the other side of FOB Triumph on hot days, to where there is a pool. The pool is “owned” by the Australians—whose illicit drinking I think you’ll remember me writing about in my previous e-mail—and until recently there was a sort of international agreement between the division’s staff and the Aussies regarding use of the pool. I myself have never been there but I have heard the stories—some of them were pretty salacious, let me tell you! Liquor! Half-clothed women! Taking an unauthorized break from combat duties in the middle of the day! Still, a man must do what a man must do to blow off steam in such a hostile combat environment, that’s what I believe. Though I could never afford to allow myself such a luxury, I understand why some of the lesser class of officer would want to explore the sinful delights of the Aussie pool. Anyway, all was well with the pool arrangement until last week. Something happened—I am not exactly clear but I believe it had to do with a female private from our Army fraternizing with a lieutenant from the Australian Army—and whatever it was, the commanding general (ours, not theirs) got hopping mad. Little puffs of steam actually coming out of his ears. And now he has expressly forbidden us to use the pool. If you’ll remember, the Old Man does not think partially unclothed female soldiers properly represent the United States, especially in mixed-nation company. And so he has issued a new general order that we were ordered to publish in The Lucky Times, but I tell everybody, don’t shoot the messenger, all right? Now morale has plummeted to a new low—lots of men are moping around the headquarters with long faces and sullen mouths, all because they can’t go swimming with females from another nation anymore. Not yours truly, though. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Mother, that I have better things to do with my time than to commingle with girls in bikinis. I’ll leave that to officers who are not serious about their careers.
Well, Mother, I have rambled on long enough and you are probably tired of staring at the computer screen, so I will sign off now.
By the way, if you could see fit to slip a couple pairs of black socks, the over-the-calf variety, into your next care package, they would not go unappreciated. Also, some more dried apricots.
Your loving son,
Stacie
9
DURET
Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret liked to come to his office in the palace early on Sunday mornings, well before the fan cranked up and shit started hitting it.
He’d been given a small room off the once ornate reception area and, because of his rank, he’d been privileged with a door. The office had belonged to Saddam’s chief gamekeeper and Duret had left everything on the walls just as he’d found them when he moved in six months ago. The head of an ibex, spiral horns stabbing upward, stared glassily at him while he worked, as did a warthog, a zebra, and, most unnervingly, an Afghan hound. The opposite wall held a stone mask, which the division’s cultural liaison said dated to 3000 BC, and a portrait of the old goat himself, beret jauntily cocked and His Dictatorshipness, smiling like a loon beneath his thick, black porn mustache. Duret had tried to remove the portrait from the wall but the frame was securely screwed into the concrete and, in the end, it had been more trouble than it was worth, so he left Saddam alone. Even with the leering presence of Hussein and his animals, Duret’s office space was a refuge from the clatter of keyboards, men’s voices, and echoing footsteps just outside the door.
The subdued, religious hush of Sunday mornings was his favorite time of the week: a cool oasis in the otherwise hot, clanging chaos of the nonstop war. Sure, bad shit still went down on Sunday mornings, but Duret’s head was able to handle it because there weren’t so many American voices ringing off the palace walls, barking self-important directives, arguing the merits of PowerPoint, and speaking in alphanumeric code—the kind of Fobbity chatter that drove him right out of his skull with madness.
God knows, Duret didn’t want to end up like them, like the lieutenant colonel he knew from another battalion, a decent guy who had somehow gotten sucked into working out of the palace more than he’d wanted to. This guy had been fast-tracking—he was only thirty-nine but he already had a battalion (and a damned good one at that). But then someone somewhere had a visit from the Good Idea Fairy and came up with the brilliant notion of moving this guy off the line and into SMOG central where he could bring valuable “real world” expertise to the decisions made there in the nerve center.
“It’s driving me crazy,” the other officer had told Duret. “I spend three-quarters of my day going from meeting to meeting. Then, when I get done with those and go back to my office, people are stacked up outside my door.”
This particular officer, Duret joked, had once been “hale and hearty,” but now he was just “pale and farty,” holed up in the palace and subsisting on the cabbage and beans and yogurt from the dining facility. The two of them had laughed about it but Duret saw something he didn’t like in the other guy’s eyes: a vacant, bottomless insanity that now placed the edicts of SMOG above anything else, including the welfare of the men he’d once commanded in the battalion.
Duret vowed he’d self-ventilate with a 9mm before he ever let something like that happen to him. He made it a point to spend as little time in the palace as possible, sacrificing the air-conditioning and the security of four walls for the intolerable heat and the intolerance of the sheikhs—both of which only served to turn up the volume of his headaches.
But Vic Duret did like Sunday mornings at the palace.
The commanding general, a devout man, had told the division he wanted minimal staffing—key-and-essentials only—until 1300 hours each Sunday in order to allow each soldier to practice his or her faith in whatever manner they saw fit. Most saw fit to get gorged on near-beer and beef jerky on Saturday night and play Xbox or watch the bootleg porno DVDs they bought from Local Nationals at the vendor stalls just outside the Triumph checkpoint; most saw fit to catch up on their laundry and hooch dusting; most saw fit to honor their Sunday mornings by sleeping until noon.
Not Lieutenant Colonel Duret. Sunday mornings were the only time he could get some peace and quiet in his office, a little po
ol of silence broken only by the occasional lazy squawk from the SMOG computers giving a weather report or an update on a suspicious vehicle the unmanned reconnaissance planes were tracking. Vic Duret could even sit in his padded leather chair behind his desk, have a casual conversation with the ibex, and leave the door open without fear that another pucker-assed do-gooder would come bouncing in on the balls of his feet with another situation report gripped tight in his hand.
Monday through Saturday, Duret could rest assured he’d be besieged with complaints about ammunition shortages, petty rivalries between company commanders, or, God forbid, impetuous officers like Abe Shrinkle shooting innocent, mentally handicapped Local Nationals who went around wearing snowpants in the middle of June. This particular captain was starting to feel like a popcorn husk caught between Vic’s molars.
Duret closed his eyes and forced Shrinkle from his mind. When Abe was replaced by Ross with his flaming arm torches running through the halls of the North Tower, Vic opened his eyes and stared at Saddam’s moth-eaten zebra until his head simmered down to a low boil.
He liked to keep his door wide open on Sunday mornings and listen to the low, unhurried hum of the large outer room, which was filled with a cubicle maze of staffers from personnel, intel, ops, logistics, and civil affairs, as well as the chaplain, the lawyers, and the computer network gearheads. If they knew the CG was at church and wouldn’t walk in unexpectedly, someone might even have a football game tuned in on satellite TV, keeping the volume low but just loud enough for the cheers of the crowd to rise and fall like fuzzy waves. Duret always took surreal comfort in the sound of the thousands of people back home roaring open-throated at a couple dozen men who moved a ball back and forth. He liked to think those cheers were also for the work he and his men were doing over here in Baghdad where, it was true, they were also, in a sense, moving a ball back and forth across a limited field of play.
The reality was, of course, that of those thousands packed into the stadium, only a couple hundred knew what was happening over here in Iraq; and of those two hundred, only a dozen actually gave a shit—and those twelve were probably the wives of the men who were over here listening to the game on a Sunday morning. America, the beautiful ostrich—Oh, beautiful, for heads buried in the sand, for amber waves of ignorant bliss. There were times when, given the choice, Vic thought he’d disown his country, chuck it all and live the life of an expat in some neutral European country. If it weren’t for his wife and his dog, he might give serious consideration to the thought of spending the rest of his days snacking on Swiss cheese.
Today, as Duret walked along the gilt-edged passageway that led to his brigade’s area of operations in the east wing of the palace, he saw two men playing Frisbee. They were tossing the disk back and forth—rather sloppily—and it banged against the walls and the thick marble columns, then landed in the goldfish pond Saddam had built in the middle of the foyer. The two officers laughed as they scooped the Frisbee out of the water and kept tossing it, sprayed droplets catching the sunbeams that knifed through the overhead windows. There must not have been any deaths last night, Duret thought. The Frisbee tossing was a good sign the war was in a temporary overnight lull.
This happy, airy mood lasted only long enough for Duret to reach his office, settle back into his leather chair, boot up his computer, and pick up the packet of Early Bird news stories public affairs had compiled overnight. Then the voice of SMOG broke through his Sunday sunshine.
“The following staff representatives need to report to the battle major in the Ops Center immediately: G-5, IO, JAG, and PAO. That is all, thank you.”
Duret closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the leather. He started to count and, sure enough, had not quite reached twenty before another pucker-ass poked his head into the office.
“Sir?” It was Major Leon Fisher, his executive officer, knocking softly against the door frame. “Sir?”
“Yes, Leon.” Duret kept his eyes clamped shut, gripping the last few evaporating seconds of peace. He braced himself against the oncoming knife stabs that would attack his brain without mercy. In just a few moments they would come, yes, they would come, blades sharpened and ready to cripple him.
“Sir, I don’t know if you just heard the SMOG—”
“I did.”
“From what I gather, sir, you might want to head to the Ops Center, too.”
“One of ours?”
“I believe so, sir.”
Duret opened his eyes and allowed the day to come back into his head. “Bad?”
“Don’t know yet, sir. But I believe so.”
“Fuckity-fuck.”
“Just thought you should know, sir.” Fisher hesitated. “If you’d like me to go and assess the situation, I—”
“No, Leon, no. Go back to what you were doing. I’ll take this one. But be ready for whatever might be coming our way.”
“Roger, sir.”
Fisher vanished and Duret rubbed his temples. Please, Lord, he prayed on this Sunday morning, don’t let the shit be bad. He tried to shove aside everything but the images of his wife’s naked breast, the aureole tip glowing in a sunbeam, and his dog running through the yard to crash into an autumnal leaf pile with a series of throaty yelps, begging Vic to rerake and repile so they could do this all over again.
Then he rose and walked to SMOG.
On this particular Sunday morning, Major Cletus Monkle was at the helm. He stood at his station, patiently waiting as all who’d been summoned flowed to him from their workstations in the palace.
Lieutenant Colonel Duret, little green notebook gripped in his left hand, slowly made his way up the steps to the battle captain’s desk, passing soldiers in various stages of activity: some clicking cards on computer solitaire, some reading battered Tom Clancy novels, some speaking into phones while repeating phrases like, “I know that already . . . Yes, I’m fully aware . . . But what you don’t understand is . . . ,” some graveyard shifters just sitting there glaze-eyed and waiting for the morning shift to come relieve them from this drudgery. A female soldier from G-1 sat in the middle of her empty section of the amphitheater, filing her nails. The sound buzzed across the room like a small hacksaw. Two Iraqi officers, liaisons on loan to the division, huddled together at the back of the room, rolling what looked like a cigarette.
“Sir, glad you could make it,” Major Monkle said, breaking off in midsentence as Duret joined the huddle. “I was just telling the rest of the group here—” he gestured to the civil affairs, information operations, judge advocate general, and public affairs pucker-asses who were already standing there, pens poised over notebooks “—about what went down earlier this morning.”
“Give it to me,” Duret said.
“Roger. Uh, as I was just saying, this is a hot one. I wanted to give all of you a heads-up because this situation has the potential to be really spun against us with some negative public perception. IO, PAO, I’m looking at you.”
The IO officer nodded and kept chewing his gum. The PAO rep—a staff sergeant with dark circles under his eyes—went pale and noticeably gulped.
Lieutenant Colonel Duret disliked people like this battle captain using the words spun and negative in the same sentence. He braced himself and wondered if it was a little Shiite girl raped by some GIs in a back alley or if one of his units had tossed a case of pork rib MREs to some hungry Muslims during a humanitarian mission. Whatever the “situation,” he really hated that word spin. He thought of the CNN camera crew back at Quillpen last month, then—without warning or prelude—he was back in the moment, once again seeing that terrorist’s head burst open. He could smell the blood carried on the dust particles swirling through Intersection Quillpen. It was musty and coppery and made his nostrils flare. There was also the tang of piss from Abe Shrinkle’s undies, which hung beneath all other smells.