Authors: David Abrams
“Let me get this straight,” Gooding said. “You took your own bandage—the one other soldiers are supposed to use on
you
when
you
get hit—and you put it on the very guy who had tried to kill you ten minutes earlier?”
“Yeah, I guess I wasn’t even thinking about any of that. I just saw a guy with a hole in his armpit and I knew I needed to help him, no matter who he was.”
“Dude, this is a
great
story,” Gooding said in a half-shout that carried across three cubicles. His heart was pounding hard and he could only imagine the moist state of Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad’s underwear when he heard about this moneymaker. “I can’t see anything but good news coverage coming from it. It’s all about
love thy enemy
and so on.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Pilley said. “I wasn’t even thinking about any of that. I was just all reflex—
bam, bam, bam
—it all happened so fast. And then there was my thumb to think about, of course.”
“Of course,” Gooding agreed. “I tell you, the media is gonna eat you up with a spoon. You need to be ready for that.”
“Sure,” Pilley said. He, too, was now jazzed with adrenaline from the retelling. He was already starting to wonder if he would get one of those babes from CNN to do the interview and what she would think of him. Eating him up with a spoon sounded like a
good
thing. He grinned, but then caught himself and tried to look all patriotic and shit for this staff sergeant sitting across from him. “It’s no problem, really. My company commander said I should go around telling the story as much as I could. If nothing else, to give hajji
a kick in the nuts, right?”
Gooding looked up from his clipboard, unamused. Pilley wiped the grin off his face. “Sorry, guess you don’t want to hear it.”
“Hey,” Gooding said, “it’s not me who doesn’t want to hear. Just remember about Mr. and Mrs. America—heck, your own parents—sitting in their living room watching you over their morning toast and eggs. What you say needs to reflect proudly on the Army. I don’t think
nuts
is exactly what we’re looking for.”
“Okay, got it. No
nuts
. I’ll even try to keep
balls
out of it.” Specialist Pilley started gathering his things to go.
Gooding clapped Pilley on the shoulder before he left the cubicle. “Like I said, America’s gonna love you.”
Pilley laughed and there was a gleam in his eye that was one part eagerness to sniff a CNN babe’s hair and one part bemusement at all the fuss everyone was making over him, Kyle Pilley, war hero.
When he’d gone, Gooding started typing up his notes for Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad.
Now, two short weeks later, it had all gone bad in an instant and Gooding was feeling the roots of depression take hold.
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
T
owels. 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.”