Authors: David Abrams
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
S
ergeant 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 Bread
s).
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.
“Shouldn’t these fuckers be home in bed with their wives? What the hell are they doing here this time of the night?”
“Easy now, Rodriguez,” Lumley said.
“Yeah, I thought there was a curfew,” Boordy said.
“Apparently not in Adhamiya. At least not tonight.”
“I don’t like the look of this,” Zeildorf said quietly as he started to pace. “This is nucking futs.” He came from New England stock and usually released his words with reluctance. Tonight, they came in short bursts, flying into the night like bullets. He was starting to make all of them uneasy.
“None of us like the looks of it, Zeildorf.”
“Hey,” said Boordy, “I heard a good one the other day.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Rodriguez.
“Yeah. Mickey Mouse may be nuts, but Minnie is fucking goofy.”
None of them laughed. They’d already heard that one. From Rodriguez last week.
Zeildorf had not stopped pacing. “I say let’s show ’em some good old infantry ingenuity.”
“And
I
say,” Lumley shot back, “we just wait and see what the commander wants to do.”