by David Abrams
The chief, grunting and satisfied that he’d just single-handedly managed to turn the tide of public opinion, walked away without another word, fingers still jingling the coins in his pockets.
When he had disappeared up the stairs, Gooding said, “It’s safe now, sir. He’s gone.”
Major Filipovich’s cubicle puffed an audible sigh and said in its most contrite cubicle voice, “Okay to finish my game of solitaire now?”
“Have at it, sir.”
And so they went about their daily routine. Gooding read e-mails, he saved photos to the archive, and he lingered long enough in the bathroom to read a chapter in his current novel (Hard Times by Charles Dickens). The Fobbits carried on, business as usual. They went to lunch and ate their celery sticks and parmesan chicken breast and blueberry cheesecake, they came back to their desks and fell into the torpid slumber of postlunch lethargy, they passed around e-mail jokes, they compiled reports, they copied, they collated, they stapled.
Then the Bad quickly morphed into Worse.
Back at the marketplace near the al-Kadhimiya mosque, teeming with one million devout pilgrims, in an already edgy crowd still cleaning up after the mortar attack, someone yelled, “He’s got a bomb! Watch out! He’s going to blow himself up!”—Arabic words to the effect of “Fire! Fire! Fire!” in the proverbial crowded theater. Only a few dozen pilgrims actually heard the warning, but that was enough.
Hours later, a grim-faced interior minister would step up to a porcupine bristle of microphones and issue a statement, saying one person had “pointed a finger at another person, claiming he was carrying explosives . . . and that led to the panic.”
The beast with eight thousand feet had buzzed and murmured, started churning, then a wave of panic rippled outward from the ground zero of whoever had sounded the alarm (which, according to later reports, in all likelihood was a false alarm planted by a terrorist). The eight thousand feet pivoted on eight thousand heels and stampeded outward like a spreading stain. The huge mob of pilgrims pushed and screamed, shoved and ran, jostled and tripped, the fallen trying to rise but being kicked down by more and more feet fleeing the feared blast zone, those at the edge seeing the surging human tide and turning, walking rapidly at first, then, as they felt the hot breath on their necks, also starting to run and also tripping and falling and lying flat to be stomped and suffocated by all those sandaled feet, the eight thousand sandals now running, running, running with blind panic. Only to find Iraqi police had blocked off roads around the mosque, anticipating attacks on the hundreds of thousands of Shiites who were converging on the capital.
Dust clogged the air, swirled by screams and flailing limbs. The mob funneled onto the bridge, all of them squeezing toward the other end only to find their way choked by an impenetrable Iraqi police checkpoint. People were crushed, the breath pushed from their lungs, their ribs cracked, their organs compressed, the legs and arms and necks of young children snapped like thin, dry twigs.
Then, somewhere along the bridge, the pressure of human bodies grew too great and the railings broke and burst open, spilling body after body into the murky brown Tigris River forty feet below. Women covered in black from head to toe toppled over the edge and hit the water, their long abayas dragging them under with the sound of smacking lips. The current sucked and licked up the young children falling like little drops of flesh from the bridge overhead. And still the bodies pressed outward from the imaginary bomber, the pressure of the crowd at last finding an opening, a relief valve. Hundreds of bodies were jettisoned out of the break in the railing to the dirty, roiled water below.
Back among the palace’s air-conditioned cubicles, all laughter came to an abrupt halt as the SMOG speakers delivered the grim news.
CNN started reporting wildly exaggerated figures of six hundred dead, then after just one commercial break, it climbed to 650 dead. Apparently, they’d heard from someone at the scene who said they heard someone had heard on Al Jazeera that Iraqi police were handing out those figures.
Other reports filtered in, saying fifty people eating at the mosque had been sickened and killed by rat poison. Gooding and Filipovich drifted over and watched al-Huriya television broadcasts. They were joined by Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad, who had nervously emerged from hibernation, his fingertips glowing with neon-orange cheese dust. They pointedly ignored him as he stood behind them and coughed softly every time a new death tally scrolled across the screen.
One of the Iraqi generals came on and said not to believe any of the numbers that were being reported. However, no matter what anyone said, it was plain to see there were lots and lots of dead—too many corpses for such a non-IED incident. No one knew if there had even been a suicide bomber in the first place. At that point, it didn’t matter.
An hour later, the number crunchers from G-2 came up on SMOG and announced that more people had died in the past half an hour than in all of the previous month.
It was the shout that killed, the words that devastated more than any shrapnel or flames could ever do.
The Fobbits, watching from their sterile distance, struggled to make sense of it. They tried to separate truth from fiction, rumor from confirmed reports. Sham Div sent teams of military police to neighborhood hospitals and the mosque to count bodies and report back as soon as possible.
Chance stared at the TV screens. Al-Arabiya TV was showing footage from the scene. Bodies were stacked like cordwood along the pavement. Some were covered with sheets, some were draped in tarps of gold foil (perhaps some building material dug out of the trash nearby). When they ran out of materials to use, mourners just pulled shirts up over the dead faces. Still, as the camera panned along the sidewalk morgue, the breeze lifted the corners of the blankets and the gold foil and the dead looked at Gooding through the camera—the open mouths with their teeth dirtied by river water, the rolled-back eyes, the knitted brows, the look of confusion. A young boy in a T-shirt, flies walking across his eyeballs, reached out his arms for his mother, her face up on the bridge rapidly receding from his field of vision. The camera panned. The buckled limbs, the splayed feet, the hundreds and hundreds of shapeless mounds beneath the sheets: it was almost too much for Gooding to bear.
He watched the still living walk among the newly dead, lifting the corners of blankets, taking a fast peek, then moving on to the next body. Every so often, a woman in black collapsed and started wailing, rocking back and forth over the news she didn’t want confirmed—the “Yes, it’s me” face of her sister, her mother, her husband, her child. One woman fainted completely away and several men rushed up to splash water on her face. The water was carried in plastic bags, as if they’d just come from a pet store with a few goldfish. They splashed the cold, clear water on the woman and picked her up by the still-limp arms and pulled her into the shade. One of the men yelled and waved to an ambulance crew. Two stretchers came—one for the woman, one for the dead body she’d just identified. They were both carried away, the stretcher bearers picking their way carefully through the miles of bodies that had been fished out of the Tigris and dumped along the road.
In time, the crowds dissipated, leaving the bridge to bear its sorrow alone—the span of pavement littered with trash, handbags, and the empty sandals of the dead.
Gooding went to his computer and typed his longest diary entry since he’d arrived in Iraq.
That night, when he returned to his hooch, he let his battle-rattle gear thump to the floor. He sat on his bed and stared at nothing for a full five minutes. Then, not knowing what else to do, he picked a DVD out of his collection and inserted it into his computer. It’s a Wonderful Life.
25
SHRINKLE
Abe was in the PX trying to decide between Doritos and Funyuns when three of his former soldiers walked in, boasting loudly about how this was their first day off in three weeks and, by fuck, they were gonna get them some pogey bait before all the fuckin’ Fobbits emptied the shelves. They smelled of sweat, unwashed uniforms, and, if one strained
hard enough, the undermusk of blood that always reminded Abe of sniffing warm pennies.
He ducked to a crouch—down to the level of the Ruffles potato chips—so he wouldn’t be seen by Lumley, Zeildorf, and Miller. Abe was wearing his now-standard work uniform: shorts and a T-shirt. He wasn’t even wearing a helmet, let alone a hat. These days, he walked around the FOB as bare-headed as any KBR contractor. Rather than a 9mm pistol, he was now made to carry an M16 rifle like a lowly enlisted Fobbit. Shrinkle cowered in the aisle, his head crinkling against the Ruffles as he listened to the Bravo Company soldiers make their way through the PX, their smell and swagger clearing a path of Fobbits before them. They were now two aisles away from Abe, browsing through the PX’s pathetically small DVD section.
Miller—the die-hard movie geek of the platoon—was rhapsodizing about the History of Breasts in the Cinema. The PX was crowded with Fobbits taking a long lunch hour, but that didn’t stop Miller from proclaiming, loud as a bullhorn, the merits of big-screen sweater meat: Jennifer Connelly in The Hot Spot. Demi Moore in Striptease. Julie Andrews in S.O.B. (now, there was a surprise! Mary Fucking Poppins ripping off her blouse and popping right out into your face, even if it was only for two seconds). Kim Basinger in 9½ Weeks.
Zeildorf said, “What about Holly Wood Hills?”
“Who?” Miller asked.
“Holly Wood Hills. You know—Sperms of Endearment, Glad He Ate Her, Lawrence of a Labia. Any of those ring a bell?”
“I’m not talking porn here, Zeildorf. Porn is completely out of the question, off the table, man. This is strictly mainstream milk muffins.” He paused and held up his counting fingers. “Now, where was I? Kim Basinger, Nine and a Half Fucking Weeks . . . Erika Eleniak popping out of the cake in Under Siege . . .”
Lumley piped up: “Don’t forget about whatzername—Miss Tit-a-licious—Rosalee Somebody-or-Other—who was in Up the Wazoo and then the sequel, Out the Wazoo.”
“Hell, yeah. Classic eighties teen sex comedy,” Miller said. “My mother couldn’t figure out why I was always washing my bedsheets after I saw that on HBO.”
They fell silent as they browsed through the DVDs in the PX. Abe low-crawled through the aisles, trying to make it to the front entrance before they spotted him.
“Shit,” he heard Zeildorf say. “Nothing but Disney and Adam Sandler.”
“Well, what’d you expect?” Lumley said. “A boxed set of Little Whorehouse on the Prairie?”
“I still say we’re wasting our time here,” Miller said. “We should go to Hajji Mart for the bootlegs.”
“All right, then,” Lumley said. “Stop talking about it. Let’s go do it.”
They headed for the door but were stopped by the sight of their former commander crawling on his knees and elbows across the floor near the cash registers.
At that same moment, Abe Shrinkle also came up short as he ran into a pair of shoes, which were attached to a stout pair of legs in plaid-checked pants, above which were a pair of wide hips cinched with a belt, upon which were knuckled two fists on either side, all of which was topped by a swollen red face that loomed over Abe like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. It was the PX store manager and he seemed a little pissed to find a customer low-crawling to the exit.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said in a God-to-Moses voice, “but I’ll take that from you now, if you don’t mind.”
Abe raised his head. “Huh?”
“The merchandise.” The manager pointed at Abe’s chest where he cradled a bag of potato chips in his arms. “Hand it over, sir.”
What?! How did that get there? Abe got to his feet with a loud bag crinkle and a crunching-to-crumbs of the merchandise. “Allow me to explain . . .”
The store manager’s face crimsoned like a thermometer. “I’m sure there’s a very good one and I’m sure the MPs will love to hear it.”
“You see, I—” Abe faltered when he looked over at the front doors and saw Lumley, Zeildorf, and Miller watching him.
“C’mon guys,” Lumley said. “Let’s get out of here.” They left, shaking their heads.
At that moment, Abe felt like someone had just taken a shit in his helmet.
Eight hours later—after convincing the manager, the two MPs, and, ultimately, the division Provost Marshal that he was not a common thief but, rather, an incompetent galoof who’d made an innocent goof—Abe sat on the bed in his hooch, the Greatest Hits of his care-package letters spread across his lap.
He’d just finished taking inventory of this week’s care packages—macaroni and cheese (eleven boxes), Hot Rod magazine, ChapStick (five tubes), tuna fish (twenty-two cans), shampoo (six bottles—two for dry scalps), playing cards (four decks), a pair of slippers, newspapers from small towns in Indiana (seven issues, three missing the sports section), beef jerky, two packages of plaid boxers, Lifesavers (eighteen rolls), pencils (sixty-eight), pens (one hundred and twelve), a bottle of soap bubbles, nail clippers, ramen noodles, peanut butter, two dozen toothbrushes, toothpaste (one dozen tubes), crossword puzzles, a handheld fan, a box of Cheez-Its carefully blanketed in Bubble Wrap, a Three Stooges DVD, and a whoopee cushion.
Of the letters and postcards he’d received, there were messages from a fourth-grade class written in inch-high block letters (“I am studying to be a ninja when I grow up. As soon as I gradjuate from school, I will come over there and help you kick some Iraqi butt!”), a Sunday-service bulletin and a postcard from a church in Arizona (“We here at Wayfield Baptist appreciate your supreme sacrifice as you go about the business of ridding the world of evil”), and the latest in what had become a weekly correspondence from Mrs. Norma Tingledecker of Laramie, Wyoming:
My dearest Abe,
I pray this finds you alive and as happy as can be over there in the desert. I think of you often, especially when I gaze up into the cerulean blue sky, which arcs from horizon to horizon and I wonder if you, too, are looking up at that cerulean sky and thinking of me. Of course, in your case, there is most likely a terrorist rocket following the arc of the sky, carrying a payload of death for another group of soldiers. Am I right?
It’s been a hectic close to summer here on the prairie, with the tragic crash of a tour bus of seniors on their way to Las Vegas, a hiker lost in the Snowy Range who was eventually eaten by a grizzly, and the shocking revelation by one of our most long-standing school board members that he/she is a transvestite. On the home front, Ray insists on remaining married to me, which is a tragedy in and of itself. But none of this comes close to describing what you and your men are going through Over There [Abe hadn’t had the heart to tell her of his demotion to towel duty].
You are doing the indescribable, the job no one else wants to do—leastwise men like Ray. The United States could learn a thing or three from what you are doing, my dear Abe. Each year, we spiral ever downward into economic and moral decline. We’re a ship without a rudder, an airplane without a compass. As a country, we need to rise to the occasion to get the job done at the level of soldiers like you who are getting it done in Iraq and Afghanistan. For this we can only thank you for setting the example, showing us the way to move forward to our goal of reclaiming our place as the #1 Nation.
Honor, fidelity, sacrifice.
As for Ray, the only sacrifice he’ll ever know is having to settle for Schlitz when they run out of Coors at the Gas-n-Go. The no-good bastard. He’s half the man you are. No, that’s giving him too much credit. He’s no better than the toenail on your left foot (no offense to your toenail). If only . . .
Ah, if only wishes were horses, you and I would have a herd of them. And, if my dreams ever came true, we’d be watching them graze at pasture as we sat on the front porch of our cabin in the Snowies, sipping Chablis and watching the blaze of sunset in our cerulean sky.
Ever yours,
Norma
P.S. I hope it doesn’t shock or upset you to know that as I’ve been composing this letter I reached under the waistband of my sweatpants to touch myself.
His men may be ashamed of him, he may be temporarily barred from shopping at the PX, and he may even be a complete fuck-up at running a fitness center. But at least he had the camaraderie of the Aussie pool and the love of a distant, unmet woman, Mrs. Norma Tingledecker.
That night, Shrinkle dreamed of a pool, blue as the Caribbean, full of floating bare breasts. He also dreamed of wine and horses, wind-snapped flags and green parade fields, Rambo and Afghans. In his sleep thoughts, he was filled with might and power, bursting with muscles and rage. Sometime in the middle of the night, he slur-mumbled, “I’m your worst nightmare, Iraq.”
26
GOODING
On the 283rd day of his deployment, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr. nearly bled to death. It came at the tail end of a chain of events that was invisible to the naked eye—it began with seasonal winds and finished with Gooding staring at a spreading crimson puddle beneath his feet, thinking to himself, “This is not how it was supposed to end.”
For several days, all of FOB Triumph had suffered from a collective misery.
Most of the Americans had not read deep enough into their Iraq Orientation Welcome Packets—or, if they had, they hadn’t retained it—to know there is a fifth season that hits the Middle East each summer with the kind of fury only a pissed-off Mother Nature can muster. The locals called the storms simoom, or “poison wind.” When the wind reaches sustained speeds of fifteen knots, walls of dust five thousand feet high advance across the desert and dry lake beds, gathering microparticles of grit and silt as they boil across the landscape. The storms clog engines, cut visibility to a few feet, and line nostrils and lungs with something that feels like baby powder.