by David Abrams
Duret had to forcibly bring himself back to SMOG and listen to what the battle captain was saying.
“At approximately twenty-fifteen hours last night,” Monkle droned, “we got a call from the 442nd Transportation Company, which was on a convoy from Taji to Adhamiya when they were involved in a traffic accident with a vehicle carrying some Local Nationals. One of our fuel trucks swerved to avoid a herd of goats and slammed into a city bus. We have three injured Local Nationals and two injured U.S.—nothing serious, a broken arm, lacerations to the face. They’re all being treated at the nearest aid station. Nothing a little Motrin and a splint won’t cure. But—and here comes the fun part, gentlemen—back on the scene, the convoy commander, a lieutenant, decided to call for backup. Even though Iraqi police were already on the scene, the looey calls for a U.S. QRF to come help him out. I guess he felt like he couldn’t handle a half dozen angry goatherds by himself. At this time, we don’t have any reports of the Local Nationals on the scene getting unruly or out of hand. I guess this lieutenant just panicked. So he brings in backup.” Here, Monkle looked at Duret.
“My guys, huh?”
“Roger, sir. As you know, ever since the incident at Quillpen—”
Why, when the battle captain said it like that, did it sound like “Incident at My Lai”?
“—Company B has been on QRF duty—”
“Sir? Excuse me, sir, but could you define QRF?” It was the PAO staff sergeant.
Monkle leveled a gaze at this pale noncom as if he were the class dunce who had just interrupted his lecture on atomic principles. “Quick Reaction Force.”
“Got it. Thanks, sir. Just wanted to make sure I had everything squared away for the press release.”
Lieutenant Colonel Duret looked at the staff sergeant’s name tag: Gooding. He opened his little green notebook and wrote “Gooding Two Shoes.”
“As I was saying, gentlemen,” Major Monkle continued. “A platoon from Company B out of Lieutenant Colonel Duret’s battalion was rolling through the area, led by Captain, uh—” Monkle shuffled through his notes.
“Shrinkle,” Duret said.
“Right, sir. Captain Abe Shrinkle. He arrived with his men on scene at approximately twenty-one-thirty hours—full dark and getting a little rough in that part of Adhamiya. The natives were restless, as they say. I don’t know if there were any pitchforks and torches at this point, but the Transpo guys were sure getting nervous. They would have pulled out but they were waiting on the Iraqi police to finish their report and there was the issue of the disabled fuel truck, which I’ll get to in a minute. So, Captain Shrinkle arrives and stands around with his thumb up his ass. The 442nd lieutenant had already put his men in a defensive perimeter—which totally confused the IPs, by the way—they thought they were under attack and they scrambled for their vehicles and got the hell out of there before finishing their report.”
“Typical hajji bullshit,” muttered Civil Affairs.
“So, Captain Shrinkle takes charge and, for whatever reason, he determines the banged-up 442nd’s fuel truck wasn’t recoverable. So he decides to throw a thermite grenade in the cab of a perfectly good Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck in order to completely disable it and render it useless to the enemy. Yes, you heard me right: one of our illustrious, school-trained captains threw a grenade at a U.S. fuel truck. Whoosh-kaBOOM.”
Eyebrows raised and note taking paused. Jungle drums beat inside Vic Duret’s skull.
“Wait—it gets better,” Monkle said. “The fuel truck doesn’t blow up. No Whoosh-kaBOOM. More like sizzle and fizzle. The grenades just burn the cab of the truck and so Company B and the Transpo team decide to carry on with their missions. They figure the truck is out of service, everyone’s been treated, no goats were killed, and everything’s hunky-dory. They leave the scene. At which point, the flames start to get bigger.”
Duret closed his eyes. Abe, Abe, what the fuck are you trying to do to me?
“Pretty soon, another patrol comes along—a military police unit from Tenth Mountain Division who’s not up on our sheriff net and who just happen to be passing through the sector—which, right there, presents a problem in and of itself. We’re still trying to figure out how these guys got on your turf, sir.”
Duret nodded, swallowing this additional headache, and allowed the battle captain to finish his back brief.
“Anyway, when they see the fire, they stop to investigate. By this time, the Iraqi police have gotten over what frightened them and they’re back on the scene. Local firefighters are there, too, unrolling their hoses. The MPs help cordon the area and keep the pitchforks at bay. When they finally get the flames doused, they discover the body of a dead Local National under the truck.”
“What the fuck?”
Monkle grinned like the Cheshire cat. “Now you know why I called you all for this little Sunday morning prayer meeting. Anyway, how hajji got there is anybody’s guess, but you can imagine how Al Jazeera will spin this if they get their hands on it.”
The lawyer from JAG shook his head. “Of all the lame-ass, cockamamied things for that captain to do. Somebody must’ve sprinkled stupid dust on his Cheerios that morning—” He stopped when he saw the look on Duret’s face. “Sorry, sir. Didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t worry, gentlemen,” Duret said. “By this time tomorrow, Abe Shrinkle will be shitting out of two assholes. I’ll be ripping him a new one today as soon as I get done here.”
“Aw, sir, go easy on him,” Monkle grinned. “It is Sunday morning, after all.”
“Sir, if I might—”
Major Monkle’s grin faded and he turned to Staff Sergeant Gooding. “What now, PAO?”
“Sir, I just have a couple of clarifying questions. Do you know the status of the Local National’s body?”
“How the fuck do I know? What the fuck do I care? Put down dead as doornails in your report.” Monkle had little patience or respect for pale, quivering types like this PAO puke (and by the looks of it, this was the staff sergeant’s first deployment—no combat patch on his right shoulder). “Probably already buried the guy—you know how these Muslims are about getting the body in the ground before sunset.”
“And, uh, second: what is Captain Shrinkle’s status? Are there plans to relieve him or put him on R&R until this blows over?”
Monkle shrugged and turned to Duret. “You’d have to ask the colonel here.”
Duret tightened his lips. “No comment.”
Gooding nodded and scribbled several words in his notebook, then retracted his pen with a click.
“Anything else, PAO?”
Gooding shook his head and Monkle looked at the rest of the group. “Gentlemen?”
No comments, no alibis.
“All righty then. I’ll keep you updated as I learn anything new. PAO, I’m sure the CG will want to see some sort of press release as soon as he gets out of church, so be prepared.” Gooding reclicked his pen and wrote in his notebook. “Okay, that’s all, gentlemen.”
The group broke up.
“Sir, if I could have a private word with you?” Major Monkle pulled Lieutenant Colonel Duret to a close huddle.
“Sir, if I could be frank?”
“Go ahead,” Duret said.
“Sir, is your captain a complete and utter idiot prone to eating Stupid Sandwiches at every meal?”
Duret couldn’t meet the battle captain’s eyes. “Something like that, I guess.”
10
LUMLEY
Sergeant Brock Lumley and his men lived in metal shipping containers on the hot edge of FOB Triumph, ovenlike boxes that sat in the middle of a windswept field next to an Army Reserve unit’s motor pool, which had once, a long regime ago, been the site of a sewage collection pool. The Connex shipping containers were packed together side by side, each of them generating their own solar heat and reflecting it onto the neighboring container. On the hottest of days, Lumley and his men were buffeted by the stink of shit ghosts—all that waste and
effluvia that had once fudged out from the assholes of assholes like Saddam and Uday and Qusay.
The Connexes were just another example of the sharp division between grunts and Fobbits. While Headquarters staff soldiers who worked in the palace were given air-conditioned trailers to call home, the infantry took its lumps with living in something akin to a Dumpster. The softies got cushy quarters, but the ones doing the real work of Operation Iraqi Freedom suffered the indignity of cleaning out the packing material—the wooden crates, the metal straps, the bubble wrap—and making a nest in what had once held tents, cots, MREs, field desks, office supplies, and a certain sergeant major’s stash of soft-core porn DVDs, very cleverly concealed in a false bottom of his footlocker (beneath an equally healthy supply of Our Daily Breads).
How had this happened? How had the haves once again triumphed over the have-nots? Sergeant Lumley could only imagine a scene in the Pentagon once upon a short time ago: a logistics general, his mind warped in equal measure by Army regulations and a lifetime subscription to Psychology Today, must have been talking to his attentive staff of majors and lieutenant colonels—men who, yes, were themselves softened around the middle, bellies spilling over belts—telling them, “This is how war functions, gentlemen. Keep the infantry uncomfortable, miserable, numb to hope. Fill their lives with sharp angles, rough surfaces. Bring to bear the most extreme of stresses and be relentless in your cruelty. When they are fully engaged in combat, allow them no relief, no downy pillow. Make them want to go home and, I guaran-damn-tee it, gentlemen, you will soon have a fighting force of insatiable men bent on the art of killing. Their desire to fight will be in direct proportion to their desire to end combat and return to the arms of their wives, their girlfriends, their mistresses, their hookers. Pillows and pussies will be their lights at the end of the tunnel.
“Support staff, on the other hand, needs to be coddled on a daily basis while in a combat zone. If you make their lives miserable, they’ll become distracted. They’ll drop a stitch as they knit one, purl two. Make them sleep on the hard ground in a frozen rain and they’ll sure as shit fuck up a battle order or relay an eight-digit grid coordinate when what we really need is a sixteen-digit coordinate. Yes, men, if we ever fail to tuck the REMFs good night with a kiss and a teddy bear, we’ll have only ourselves to blame when someone gets killed thanks to a distracted desk jockey in G-3 Ops. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
(Murmurs of “No, sir, wouldn’t want that,” and the collective hitching up of pants among the Pentagon staffers.)
And so, this unofficial dispensation of sleeping quarters spread throughout the Army with the end result of Bravo Company at the edge of FOB Triumph sweating themselves to sleep every night, lullabied by the echoing clang of a loose door on a Connex somewhere down the line blowing in the wind, a wind that carried Saddam Hussein’s turds right up their nostrils.
The official story handed to Bravo Company: the Connexes were all the Army could afford to give them at this point in time. The surplus deluxe air-conditioned trailers were on order but had been delayed due to scheduling conflicts with the Kellogg, Brown and Root contractors. Something about a golf course in Dubai, but Captain Shrinkle said he couldn’t be entirely sure.
“Buck up, men,” he told his company during morning formation soon after their arrival in Baghdad. “We’ll get through this as best we can. Before you know it, we’ll be living in style.” When Shrinkle said we, he meant you because his address, of course, was 232 Lap of Luxury Lane. He had a trailer with the aforementioned air-conditioning and a floor that didn’t sound like a hollow metal drum every time you put your boot down. Still, he had the nerve to stand there and tell them, “Buck up, men.”
Shrinkle’s men stared back at him with the eyes of prisoners watching the warden’s every move, waiting for the merest slip, the smallest lapse in concentration, for the moment they could rush in and devour him with homemade knives and forks. Some of the men in the company still clung to a few threads of respect for Captain Shrinkle but, for the rest of them, respect had stepped across the line to resentment a long time ago. Now they were resigned to patiently biding their time until things were different. And they would be different. If there was one thing the men of Bravo Company had learned in the last half year in Iraq, it was this: change was always on its way, in shapes large and small. All they had to do was watch Shrinkle, obey his commands, no matter how brutal or boneheaded . . . and wait.
There was the matter of Bravo pride, of course. They weren’t about to let any of the other companies in the battalion, or any of the other units on Triumph—especially those dickheads from Tenth Mountain—think they were anything but kick-ass Warriors with a capital W. They had a legacy stretching back to doughboys that needed to be preserved and upheld—their military ancestors had been at the fucking Rhine for God’s sake and kicked Kraut ass all the way from hell to Hamburg. You couldn’t just let bravery like that get tarnished by one indecisive officer who didn’t know shit from Shinola. If it was up to them, the enlisted soldiers, the cogs, to keep this machine running, then so be it. No matter how ill-conceived Captain Shrinkle’s plans might be, the men of Bravo were determined, for the sake of appearances, to carry them out to the fullest extent allowed by law and common sense.
Who were they to bitch (publicly, at least) about living in oven boxes?
Shrinkle was already a ghost, a nothing man on his way out, and not soon enough if you asked Brock Lumley. The company commander had reached a new level of useless on this last Quick Reaction Force mission to rescue the 442nd fuel truck in Adhamiya. Sergeant Lumley was finding it harder and harder each day to mask his contempt for Shrinkle. He tried to put on a loyal face in front of his men—good order and discipline and all that crap—but Shrinkle made it too easy to sneer and jeer. Practically gave it a red-carpet invitation.
It was maddening the way he stuttered when he stood in front of the company formation, his hands clasped behind his back where, Lumley suspected, he was wringing his fingers like they were little damp sponges. The way he started most of his sentences with “So, uh . . .” The way he kept all those care packages to himself and never shared with the rest of the company—pretended, in fact, he wasn’t even receiving any care packages at all. The way he never let anyone, not even the first sergeant, inside his trailer. The way he stared you up and down if you bumped into him in the shower trailer. The way he’d so typically cowered at the Quillpen standoff with the half-dead terrorist, not even bothering to hide his fear from the battalion commander. The way he just whipped out his pistol and capped that short-bus hajji at the gas station without so much as a blink of common sense. The way he walked with little mincing steps as if he were following a dotted line on the ground. The way he kept nervously sucking in his breath on the Humvee ride to Adhamiya eight hours ago.
Lumley had been crammed behind Captain Shrinkle’s seat, face pressed against the window to avoid getting knocked around by Zeildorf’s ass as he swiveled in the gunner’s seat, scanning the building-slant shadows for terrorists.
As they rode through the streets, Lumley could hear—even above the roar of the Humvee engine—the tsip . . . tsip . . . tsip of Shrinkle’s nervous breathing. Every pile of roadside trash, every broken chunk of concrete, every dead dog they passed, Shrinkle would flinch from the potential IED and emit a louder TSIP before settling back. Lumley almost felt sorry for the guy. Almost.
When they pulled up to the accident site in Adhamiya, Shrinkle was the last to emerge from the Humvee. When the captain finally unfolded himself from the vehicle, you could practically hear his teeth rattling in his head.
“Stand fast, Sergeant Lumley, while I go assess the situation.”
“Roger, sir.” Brock looked at his men and said, “You heard the man.”
Someone lit a cigarette and kept it cupped in the dark hollow of his hand. Someone else softly tapped the beat of a song on the butt of his M4. Noise and light discipline.
They stared at the
two crumpled vehicles and the injured who stumbled around or were curled into balls on the ground.
“Somebody should go help those fuckers,” Zeildorf said.
“Yeah, somebody should,” Rodriguez agreed.
They stared and smoked.
There was a quick slam of car doors and a vehicle pulled away roughly from the site.
“There go our good buds, the IPs,” Boordy said.
“Weenie cops.”
“Damn straight.”
The men watched their captain half-walk, half-crouch across the street to talk with the 442nd lieutenant. The young Transportation officer—another member of the Ass-Pucker Club—had put his men in a defensive perimeter around the site and they were swiveling the barrels of their M4s in careless swings, which made Lumley and his men even more nervous.
It was an hour past twilight and the dark had snuffed the neighborhood, save for a lone bare bulb that spilled a yellow cone of light above the doorway of an auto parts store, struggling to hold back the shadows by itself. There was no wind and it smelled like one of them had picked up dog shit in the waffles of his boots.
“Someone’s gonna get killed here tonight and it ain’t gonna be hajji,” Zeildorf muttered.
Zeildorf, Rodriguez, and Boordy quietly snicked their selector switches from safe to semi. “What the fuck you doing?” Lumley said.
“Nothing,” Boordy said. But all three of them went back on safe. No way were they gonna piss off Lumley on a night like this.
“Jesus, let’s not get carried away,” Lumley said. “This is a traffic accident, nothing more than that.”
“So far,” Boordy said.
Ever since Quillpen, and then that thing with Hajji Snowpants, everyone was a little twitchy around crowds. Too many bodies, too many sullen stares to keep track of. Now, ants to sugar, Local Nationals were gathering at this accident site, dark blobs bobbing their heads in the shadows. A weak moon spread thin light across the scene. Three men in their early twenties watched the Americans sullenly, hands in their pockets as they leaned against a corrugated steel curtain pulled across the front of a butcher’s shop. They didn’t speak, just stared from beneath black locks of hair. Another hajji, a teenager in a Nike T-shirt, pedaled his bike back and forth along the edge of the street. Other knots of men, muttering and smoking cigarettes, watched the American soldiers from the corners of their eyes.