Fobbit

by David Abrams

  The Delta Company commander had just called the PAO cell to let them know there was bad news concerning Specialist Pilley. While out on patrol yesterday, Pilley’s Humvee had run over an IED. The force of the blast split the Humvee into two pieces. The engine block landed a hundred yards away in someone’s backyard. One soldier was killed, two others injured. One of the injured was Pilley: leg blown clean off below the knee. He was on his way to a hospital in Germany and wouldn’t be returning to the combat theater of operations. The whole company was devastated by the news because they all loved the guy who’d been killed, but they were especially upset about Pilley. He’d seemed—what was the word? impervious?—to whatever the enemy tried to throw at them. Bounce-Back Man, they’d called him. The captain thought PAO should know about Pilley because of all the interviews they’d been lining up for the boy.

  Gooding wanted to ask why in the world the company had sent their most valuable moneymaker out on patrol before he’d even started doing his obligated rounds on the media circuit. But what was the use? Dead was dead, injured was injured. There was no bringing back Specialist Kyle Pilley.

  Gooding thanked the half-sobbing captain and hung up. He was holding his head in his hands when Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad arrived to begin the day’s work. Harkleroad bounced into Gooding’s cubicle on the tips of his feet and chortled, “A great day to be in the Yoo-nited States Army, eh, Staff Sergeant Gooding?”

  Gooding looked up and, with a once tan but now pale face, said, “Not so great, as it turns out.”

  The curl went out of Harkleroad’s smile. “Oh? What is it now?”

  “Bad news, sir. Real bad news.”

  18

  SHRINKLE

  Towels. Now his life was nothing but towels: morning, noon, and night. No UCMJ, no court-martial, no execution by firing squad. Three weeks after that unfortunate night in Adhamiya, his life had been reduced to towels.

  Abe Shrinkle pulled another one from the pile and, with a one-two-three rhythm, gave it an Army regulation fold, then added it to the stack on the counter. It was a genuine waste of motion and effort, this folding. When the soldiers smelling of sweat, dust, and musk came through the door of the gym, they snatched his fresh towels off the stack and wrapped them around their necks with nary a care about his precisely measured, eyeball-calibrated folds.

  Abe didn’t let this deflate him. He was just happy to be alive. For now.

  He knew what this gym duty really was: a prelude to his execution. First Qatar, now this. Lieutenant Colonel Duret had all but said the words when he stood outside Abe’s trailer three weeks ago. Abe could see the final outcome swimming behind his commander’s eyes. Duret didn’t have to say it but Abe knew that when he returned to the States there would be a court-martial, ending with him standing in front of a firing squad, one of his (former!) soldiers offering him a cigarette.

  A series of too many bad events had been piling up and now he’d come to the end, either of his life or of his command (or both!). He’d seen too many of his fellow officers administratively replaced or transferred to new assignments when their units performed poorly not to think it wouldn’t happen to him. He saw it in his men’s faces, heard it in his commander’s voice. The trust was gone, replaced by doubt and fear he would get someone (or many someones) killed before they left Iraq. No, he thought as he folded another towel, he was done for. He was Defunct City.

  Lieutenant Colonel Duret thought he’d been doing Captain Shrinkle a favor by quietly relieving him of duty and demoting him to gym manager (“lifestyle coordinator,” in Army terms) instead of sending him up for trial but Duret hadn’t known about the towels and the rough manner in which perspiring men immediately broke the pristine folds upon entering the gym, had he?

  Abe didn’t know how he’d done it, but the battalion commander had circumvented the system with all the stealth of a white snake gliding across snow. No explanation was ever given for what must have been some extraordinary under-the-table deals cut between colonels (and at what personal cost to Duret?). One day Abe was looking down the barrel of a firing-squad rifle, the next he was staring at a Quonset hut full of squeaking, clanking metal machines. If he was a man with less self-control, he would have shit his pants.

  Each morning, Shrinkle unlocked the front door of the gym (“lifestyle fitness center”) precisely at seven a.m. and each evening he doused the lights and relocked the door at ten p.m. or when the last patron had climbed off the stationary bike, rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck and top of his crew cut, and thrown the crumpled towel into the bin. It was an easy life, too easy. But it was one that Abe Shrinkle accepted with a matter-of-fact resignation, with only a trace of regret and resentment simmering below the surface.

  He had no one to blame but himself. As he superfluously folded the white towels, he replayed the film in his mind on an endless loop: the coiled-spring strength of his legs moving toward the truck in Adhamiya, the determined pull of the pin, the hard pitch of the grenade, the slow bloom of flame inside the cab, the way he’d said “mission complete” to his men—break—the coiled-spring of his legs, the pin pull, the flames, “mission complete”—break—legs, pin, fire, complete—and so on, ad infinitum, until someone would come in and ask him if the treadmill had been fixed yet and he’d snap back to the job at hand: one-two-three, fold, stack . . . one-two-three, fold, stack.

  The FOB Triumph Lifestyle Fitness Center sat among a cluster of hastily constructed buildings on Perimeter Road, which housed the rest of the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation facilities: the Internet café, the library, the game room with its Ping-Pong tables, and the “movie theater” with its VCR and big-screen TV. MWR had built the little complex quickly and inefficiently shortly after the United States had taken control of Baghdad in 2003 (and when President Bush’s own lips were still warm with the words mission complete). The gym and the other MWR programs were housed in Quonset huts with plywood floors that kept them six inches off the sandy soil. The doors had springs that pulled shut with a clattering slap each time someone entered. The Quonsets reminded Shrinkle of something out of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and he could hardly resist drawling at least once each day as he walked to work, “Goll-ly, sarge!”

  Shrinkle worked in a small, low-ceilinged room with a front desk, a small stereo system that tinnily blasted the stack of donated CDs (Power Rock Ballads, Disco Fever Hits, and—surely someone’s idea of a joke—The Best of Barry Manilow), one weight bench, a pyramid of barbells, four stationary bikes, two treadmills (one broken), three jump ropes, and one Nautilus machine (circa 1995). A soldier had to have a fertile imagination and plenty of ambition in order to get a “workout” hard enough to break a sweat with this equipment. Total muscle failure was just a fantasy at this particular gym; most soldiers came to the Quonset hut to sham an hour away from their desks in the palace. Nobody was too serious about bulking up or toning physique or losing dining facility flab here at the FOB Triumph Lifestyle Fitness Center. It was all about the momentary distraction of pedaling fifteen miles per hour on a bike going nowhere while listening to Bell Biv DeVoe and, whatever they did, not thinking about the PowerPoint slides due to the battle captain by 1630 hours and by all means not thinking about the slow tick of the Deployment Clock; better to contemplate why Donna Summer’s career as a disco queen ended so suddenly, or—even better—what that first bite of home-cooked lasagna would taste like six months from now, or—best of all—what it would be like to have their lips fully fastened around the dome of their wife’s breast. Happy homecoming thoughts, rather than the real possibility of a mortar shell crashing through the roof of the Quonset hut.

  And then the bike would beep, signaling the end of the session, and the soldier would climb off to go wait in line for the one and only treadmill in this goddamned sorry excuse for a gym.

  The Quonset huts had been assembled so quickly there were still gaps where corrugated metal met plywood, gaps that allowed a healthy amount of sand and star sparkles of sunlight to
stream inside. In addition to folding towels, Abe’s other main duty was to keep the floor swept clean of the drifts of sand that worked their way inside. It had been nearly two years and still no one had come to fill the cracks in the Quonset huts. Abe thought about stuffing towels to block the windblown sand, but that would never do because the towel-to-sweaty-patron ratio was heavily favored on the sweaty-patron end of the scale. Abe sent complaints up through the chain, via corps headquarters, and MWR headquarters back in the States had repeatedly claimed more towels were on order and would arrive in due time, but in the three weeks Abe Shrinkle had been on the job, he’d yet to see evidence of fresh terry cloth making its way to the FOB Triumph Lifestyle Fitness Center. So, for now, each afternoon he carried a sack of soiled towels to the laundry center run by the unnaturally happy Filipino contractors who chattered like parakeets, and each morning he picked up the load of fresh washed towels on his way to unlocking the gym.

  Fold. Stack. Sweep. Repeat. Fold, stack, sweep, repeat.

  Step-pin-flames-mission-complete.

  To conserve on towels, he kept a tub of baby wipes on the counter for anyone who needed to properly cleanse the sweat from their brow after a workout on the bikes or the weight bench or the jump-rope station. Abe himself used the baby wipes to clean the equipment during lulls in the clanking-huffing-puffing activity, which always seemed to peak in the hour just after the evening brief to the commanding general.

  Captain Shrinkle rarely saw any of the men from his company—his former company, that is. He had to keep reminding himself he no longer had a company—just a small platoon of towels that needed to constantly be filed in rank and precise order. He would never again have the honor of standing in front of four perfectly rowed blocks of men hanging on his every word. He was no longer worthy of a uniform—just a pair of khaki shorts and an MWR polo. He stood at the counter inside the slapping-clapping front door, folded his towels, monitored the stationary bikes with their twenty-minute time limits, and tried not to think of (accidentally) burning an Iraqi civilian to death with his incompetence. That’s what Lieutenant Colonel Duret had called it, incompetence. More precisely, he’d clarified, “The last link in the chain of his overwhelming incompetence, which led to what could be an international disaster if it ever hit the press—which, lucky for you, Captain Shrinkle, it has so far avoided doing, against all prediction.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Duret had been right, Abe thought. Sweeping the floor of a leaky Quonset hut was not the worst thing that could have resulted from his (accidental) murder of a Local National. Death by firing squad was definitely worse.

  But now he was dying a slow death here at the gym, withering from shame each time the door creaked open, blasting him with a brief faceful of sunlight. Though he knew only a few of the men who came in for their daily dose of sweat and Donna Summer, he was sure they all knew him. He was the impetuous captain who’d done the unthinkable: destroying government property, with the unforeseen bonus of killing an innocent Local National. He was the poster child for the National Klutz Foundation and they all knew it, those men who snuck glances at him while sitting on the weight bench doing barbell curls.

  Furthermore, now that he was stuck on FOB Triumph all day long, Abe Shrinkle had become the very thing his men despised: a Fobbit. If his soldiers ever came into the gym, he would have a hard time looking them in the eye. But, except for one time when Suarez and Zeildorf came in to run the treadmill and then left after only fifteen minutes, none of his company—his former company—had stopped by the Quonset hut. Shrinkle didn’t blame them for wanting to cut their ties. He himself didn’t even want to be associated with the killer klutz called Shrinkle.

  One day in the dining facility he’d seen Sergeant Lumley but had looked away before their eyes met. Lumley had just come in from patrol and his uniform hung on his body like a dirty potato sack. There was a dark smear—dirt? grease? blood?—on one cheek. Captain Shrinkle could practically smell Lumley from where he sat on the opposite side of the room. Shrinkle’s own uniform (khaki and polo) was freshly laundered and he now carried the unblemished glow of someone who led a coddled life inside the wire. He finished his lobster au gratin and left the DFAC before Lumley saw him and was forced to make the moral decision about whether or not to sit down with his—former—company commander.

  Save for the times he was working at the fitness center—fold, sweep, wipe, stack—Abe avoided other soldiers as much as possible. He spent the days hiding in his hooch, rereading care package letters from good, decent Americans who had no idea of his current status or that he was the perpetrator of Crimes of Atrocity, and who still kept sending him gum and jerky and lavender-scented stationery. Eventually, however, he got a little stir crazy in his hooch and set out to walk the roads that angled around Z Lake, fully unprotected in his civilian attire.

  That’s how he discovered the pool in the Australian sector of FOB Triumph. Now at night, and on every second Wednesday (his one day off), he walked to the other side of Z Lake to swim laps.

  The pool offered the only relief from the temperatures that climbed to the triple digits by noon and stayed there until evening chow. The heat was a Thing to be endured while walking between oases of air-conditioning. It pressed on his skin, scorched the lining of his nose, and withered his lungs. It was a mile between his hooch and the swimming pool. Around about the half-mile mark, his tongue would swell and he’d think of those words Jesus croaked on the cross: “Father, I am thirsty!” In his heat delirium, he started chanting a mantra: “Cold water, air-conditioning, cold water, air-conditioning, cold water, air- conditioning.” Once he passed a group of female soldiers and heard one say to the others, “It’s so hot even my sunburn is getting sunburned!” He started thinking about when he’d been stationed in Alaska and the times he’d take out the trash wearing nothing but flannel pajama bottoms, a pair of slippers, and a T-shirt when it was twenty below zero. He thought of bitter Decembers in Fairbanks, when he would drive out near Ester, along a desolate side road, into a deserted forest in search of that year’s Christmas tree. When he stepped out of his truck and into the subzero icebox, the air was so still, so frozen he could hear pine needles tinkling to the ground two miles away. A raven crying overhead was like a sonic boom. Walking across Triumph, Abe started thinking of how his hands, even inside the cocoon of gloves, started freezing after five minutes of hacking away at the trunk of a tree frozen hard as concrete. He thought of how, when your hands are truly cold, the skin of your fingers starts pulling away from the fingernails and you think you’re being tortured by Viet Cong soldiers. He thought of how miniature icicles used to form on the tips of his nose hairs, and then—at last, at last—there he was, he’d arrived at the pool. He could hear the cheers and minty splash of water inside the security fence and he nearly wept with joy.

  Though patronizing the pool was a violation of General Order Number Five, Abe felt he had nothing to lose at this point (he had already faced the execution squad in his mind) and, besides, he liked the companionship of the soldiers from Down Under. So, Wednesdays and evenings found Abe floating in the Aussie pool, draped on an inflated inner tube, sipping a Foster’s through a straw (in violation of General Order Number Two) while holding court with the tanned, muscled sergeants from Sydney and Adelaide. None of them knew Abe was an American because he spoke with a British accent (a slippery British accent but he hoped the Aussies would be drunk enough not to notice or care).

  As he had walked to the pool for the first time a week ago, he’d decided to adopt a new identity—start over with a clean slate, as it were. Walking the dusty road with his swim suit rolled up on one hand, he practiced with a few phrases like “blimey!” and “pip-pip cheerio!”

  He told them his name was Richard Belmouth and that he was a London contractor who was there to advise the United States on historical preservation. Oh, how he could drone for hours on end about the horrors the Iraqi museums and libraries had suffered during the 2003 invasion at the hands
of those barbarous Yanks.

  “Save any statues today, mate?” they would ask, rubbing oil on their torsos and pulling the sunglasses off their heads and over their eyes. They were cheeky and seemed to be of the opinion that the war was one big winky joke, and soon enough the Americans would realize they had become the actor who flubbed his lines on the world’s stage. They were just waiting for the day when GWB (“Great White Bwana,” they called him) admitted defeat, packed up his billion-dollar toys and went home. Then they could all call it quits and let the hajjis resume their centuries-old holy war. In the meantime, it was all a big nudge in the ribs, eh, mate?

  “That bloody Great White Bwana has no regard for the treasures of civilization,” Abe would yell across the pool, working his face to a beet-red fluster—to the great amusement of his new mates. “Why, just look at how he allowed the Iraqis to mindlessly loot the National Museum back in 2003. Bush’s jackanapes just stood back and did nothing, saying they didn’t want to get involved. Well, it was a bloody rape, is what it was. A rape of history!”

  “Calm down there, Dickie old man. You’re likely to burst a blood vessel, you are.” They’d toss him another beer and he’d catch it effortlessly, floating there in his rubber ring in the middle of the pool. The can was frosty in his hand and it felt so good to snatch it out of the air. When he opened it, the hissing snick was like a miniature blast of arctic air.

  Abe was not himself at the Aussie pool. It wasn’t just a matter of the British accent and the anti-American bluster; Abe Shrinkle had never been a man given to drink or decadence. When, during Friday afternoon safety briefings back at Fort Stewart, he’d preached to his company about the punitive consequences of DUIs, he’d sounded like a man in the pulpit. His soldiers had known him as someone who held himself far above the grime of liquor, sexual deviancy, and profanity. Apart from hoarding a few care packages, Abe Shrinkle had never thought of himself as a man of habitual sin.