Authors: David Abrams
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 larger 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. God
damn,
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.
The battle captain sits in the midst of it all, at a desk larger than anyone else’s—perched near the top of the amphitheater and built on a wooden platform that juts out like the prow of a ship. Any given day might find him waving his arms left and right like a symphony conductor, or—on the grimmest days—using those same hands to rub the muscles on his neck.
Vic Duret climbed the stairs to the battle captain’s station. “Okay, what’ve we got?”
Major Zimmerman straightened in his chair at Duret’s arrival. “Hard to tell at this point, sir. About ten minutes ago, we saw something over the blimp feed we didn’t like. We were able to zoom in on this Loco Nat ranting and raving and generally making a nuisance of himself around ten thousand pounds of fuel. Take a look.”
Duret watched the silent blimp feed on the big-screen monitors at the front of the room. A thickset man windmilled his arms above his head and moved his mouth like he was singing. He played hopscotch in and out of the gas tanks. Though it was easily 110 in the shade, the man was dressed in a heavy parka and what looked like snowpants.
Who the fuck sells snowpants in Iraq?
Duret thought.
“You’re sure he’s packing a vest?”
“Not
sure,
sir. But as close to it as we can be. Why else would he be wearing a parka on a day like today? And honestly, sir, those snowpants? Where the hell do you get snowpants in Baghdad?”
“Exactly what I was thinking, Major Zimmerman.”
“G-2 thinks this guy is consistent with anti–Iraqi Forces behavior. They say he fits the profile.”
“Who do we have on-site?”
Zimmerman pointed at the screen. “They just showed up. Let me zoom in.” He toggled his joystick.
And there, coming into focus and looming large, was a face Duret immediately recognized.
Fuck me,
he groaned to himself.
It’s Shrinkle.
7
SHRINKLE
C
aptain Abe Shrinkle was working at the desk in his no-bigger-than-a-breadbox office just off the company orderly room when word came in of another Something Bad going down in his area of responsibility. Word didn’t actually come to him directly—he overheard the chatter between First Sergeant and the platoon sergeants. The NCOs were finishing their weekly training meeting and First Sergeant was in full-bore preaching mode, wound tight with another cocklebur up his ass.