Authors: David Abrams
From: [email protected]
Subject: Dispatch from a War Zone, Day 223
Mother,
I write to you at the end of another long and difficult day, sitting on my cot in near total exhaustion. I still have the stench of blood in my nostrils, and my mood has been elevated only temporarily by tonight’s meal at the Dining Facility (it’s Thursday, so that means it’s Mexican Fiesta Night; the cheese enchiladas were almost as good as yours—but only “almost”).
Our day here at FOB Triumph began with the news of a planned attack on the northwest perimeter of the FOB. I need not remind you that everything I tell you is of a CLASSIFIED nature and is completely and utterly HUSH-HUSH until I give further notice. Only when I get home in December will I be able to give you a full declassified briefing; only then will you be able to hear the full tale of Stacie Harkleroad’s exploits over here in Saddam’s Sandbox. I know you likely have already contacted Jim Powers down at the
Murfreesboro Free Press,
and I suppose there is no talking you out of arranging for me to give an interview to Jim and his paper. While it’s not something I’m chomping at the bit to do, if I must be in the local spotlight, then I’ll go along with whatever you’ve arranged. I’ve learned long ago there’s no arguing with Mrs. Eulalie Harkleroad when she gets her mind set on a thing.
—but back to the supposed attack today on one of our entry checkpoints. We first learned something like this might be brewing in the terrorist network around Baghdad last night during our daily Intel briefing. General Bright was in fine fettle. It must have been something he ate at the DFAC (it was Wednesday—Polynesian Night—and perhaps the pit-roasted pig with mango-pineapple sauce did a number on him). All I know is, you did NOT want to be in his path last night—his WARpath. If you were, heaven help you! Heaven help that poor Intel officer, in particular. From where I sat at the back of the room, I could hear his knees knocking together as he gave his daily report, which, as I have mentioned before, is mainly conjecture and rumor and hearsay picked up on the street and off Al-Jazeera, all of it cobbled together with safety pins, bubble gum, and string. Believe me, I have nothing against my brethren in G-2, but sometimes they do make life harder for the rest of us. Many is the day when they’ve briefed the Old Man (General Bright) on Red Level Forecasts in the morning and he, General Bright, has made us scramble to pull miracles out of our ass (sorry, Mother, that’s just the way the rest of them talk over here and I can’t help slipping into it sometimes), only to stand there at the evening briefings and say, “Whoops! Our bad. Sorry about that, guys.” By that time, General Bright is too tired to lift an objection—or else maybe he’s just distracted because Polynesian Night is banging a gong in his bowels. But it’s maddening to think about all that work we scrambled to get done during the day, based on their Red Level Forecast—all the contingency planning, the dispensing of extra ammunition at the checkpoints, the drafts of press releases Staff Sergeant Gooding and I prepare for the Old Man’s approval, all the ad hoc meetings to discuss the whyfores and wherehows—all for naught. All for “Whoops!”
Sorry, Mother, I know I’m getting a little tight under the collar, but I’ve been chafed one time too many by Intel and, I’m sure you can understand, it’s enough to wear a man down after a while.
So . . . back to last night . . . Intel tells the Old Man they’ve heard rumors and rumblings about Sunni reprisals against the United States. (Remember, Sunnis are the bad guys, Shi’ites are the good guys—I know, it’s hard for me to remember, too, because the bad guys sound “Sunny” and the good guys sound “Shitty”—oops, language again). Intel tells us the Sunny Sunnis will be trying to infiltrate our FOB sometime in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours and, allegedly, they’ve gotten their hands on a stockpile of U.S. uniforms. This will make it even harder for our guards to recognize them—assuming they shave their beards and ditch the AK-47s in favor of M4s, of course. General Bright asks if the source is credible, to which Intel says something along the lines of “credible as the guys who told us about the WMDs,” which immediately throws the whole meeting into an uproar. The Intel officer tries to backpedal, saying he meant that in a
good
way, but it’s no use at that point, General Bright has already moved on to the next briefer, has given him the old hand-flick of dismissal, and Intel can do nothing at that point but clamp his lips and sit the heck down.
It all came back to bite us this morning, right around dawn, when the SMOG system started sputtering with radio reports from Gate Two. The guards there were taking fire from a band of terrorists they’d let slip through the checkpoint . . . they thought it was a truck full of U.S. soldiers . . . didn’t even see the ones who forgot to shave their beards . . . a U.S. soldier shot in the leg . . . a grenade thrown . . . a Quick Reaction Force on its way . . . and so forth. All of us were crowding around the SMOG station, holding our breath. Well, everyone else was holding their breath. Me? I was already suiting up with my flak vest and Kevlar, telling the rest of them I was heading out to Gate Two to assess the situation and see what I could do to help. I was raring to go, Mother, and would show those Sunnis some what-for (especially after what they did during the PX attack last month). Unfortunately, I didn’t make it any farther than the palace courtyard, because there came the chief of staff, Colonel Belcher, yelling in my direction. “Harkleroad! The Old Man wants to see you,
pronto
!” I tried to pull the old deaf-in-one-ear trick and keep moving through the palace courtyard—that’s how determined I was to join the fight at Gate Two, I would actually dare to turn a literal deaf ear to Colonel Belcher—but in the end, discretion won out over valor and I stopped in my tracks and came trotting back to the chief of staff, who insisted I take off my flak vest, put away my M16, and go up to see General Bright. It turns out he wanted me to hang around the palace all day just to shepherd the press releases from start to finish. Oh, I tried to protest. I told him Staff Sergeant Gooding is quite capable of the task with supervision from Major Filipovich, but General Bright would hear nothing of it and gave me a direct order to “man my post,” as he put it.
So there you have it, Mother—my bravery has once again been thwarted by my duty as a Public Affairs Officer. Oh, I know you are infinitely proud of the work I am doing in this “battle for control of the media” as we “take the fight to the enemy,” but I’m sure you can appreciate the disappointment I felt at not being able to go lend a hand for our men who were under attack. Oh, the damage I could have inflicted on those blasted Sunnis!
As it turns out, nine of the thirteen attackers were killed by the Quick Reaction Force, the other four are in deep lockdown at Abu Ghraib. Two of our soldiers were injured—flesh wounds, really—and one Iraqi bystander, a four-year-old boy, was killed by a ricocheting bullet (the official story is that it came from the barrel of an enemy gun, but I can tell you,
completely
HUSH-HUSH, there is some doubt to that story).
So, that pretty much sums up my day. How are things back there with you and Pap-Pap? Is he still giving you a fuss about taking his diabetes medicine? Tell him I said to behave or I will sic some Sunnis on him. Ha ha, that was a joke.
Write back when you’re able.
Your ever-loving son,
Stacie
He was standing outside Colonel Belcher’s office—
again!
—waiting to hear the scratch of the pen: just those two little letters, the chief’s initials, followed by a rough, defiant circle corralling the scrawl, and he’d have the official blessing to launch the press release out to the world. This was a no-brainer press release: a weapons cache uncovered by a patrol in Salman Pak earlier this morning. Three simple paragraphs, fourteen simple sentences, three hundred and twenty-four simple words. So why was he, Eustace L. Harkleroad, quaking so violently? Was it fear of the chief’s bark? Was it paralysis while standing at the edge of the precipice? Was it knowledge of his complete and utter failure as a valiant officer in the United States Army, coupled with the understanding that he was a total success as a weenie? Was it a potassium deficiency?
He made a mental note to eat more bananas in the future. But still he quivered.
“Harkleroad!”
“Sir, yes, sir?”
“Move away from my doorway. I can’t hear myself think over your knocking knees.” The chief seemed to have a grin in his voice; he was enjoying himself at Stacie’s expense.
“Moving, sir.”
“Thank you.” The chief resumed his humming as he read the press release. How long did it take one man to decide whether or not three hundred and twenty-four words passed muster?
Stacie Harkleroad took up a new position on the other side of the division commander’s reception area, pretending to study the photographs on the wall, just as he’d pretended to study those same photographs twenty-eight times before. Fire arced from the barrel of an Abrams tank, streaking the night sky. A female medic, a tear pooling in the corner of one eye, helped a deformed Iraqi boy put on a pair of shoes. Three infantrymen kicked down a door in a dusty back alley in Mosul. The photos had all been taken by Combat Camera soldiers, the roughshod and ill-tempered sergeants Harkleroad watched come and go from the neighboring Information Operations section each day. There he’d sit, sometimes stuffing a powdered donut in his mouth, as the Combat Camera guys rushed in and out in their full battle rattle, downloading images from their cameras, recharging batteries, cleaning dried blood from the backs of their hands with baby wipes, and talking among themselves about whether or not they got “the money shot” of the suicide bomber’s head, which had rolled thirty feet away from the body—“right into the gutter, where it belongs,” said one. Harkleroad listened to the murmur of their conversations and (no matter what he told his mother) gave thanks for the hundred thousandth time he wasn’t out there on patrol in the heat, dust, and blood.
Other staff officers were coming up the marble stairs of the palace and gathering in the reception area outside the chief’s door for the morning briefing. Harkleroad stayed where he was on the other side of the room, staring at the fiery round erupting from the tank while the others clustered in tight knots behind his back and, he assumed, talked about him. He surreptitiously glanced down to see if he had any donut powder on the front of his uniform, then went back to straining his one good ear for the
scritch-scratch
of the chief’s pen.
His stomach gurgled and his mind wandered, as it was wont to do in these moments, to the dining facility. He wondered what was on the menu for tonight’s meal and hoped it would be a gravy-smothered veal patty and pie, oh, yes,
pie
, and please, Lord, let it be coconut cream pie. Stacie pulled the excess saliva back into his mouth with a hissing sip. A couple of the officers on the other side of the room glanced his way, then put their heads closer together, mumbling and chuckling.
Thoughts of food continued to tumble through Harkleroad’s mind. He thought back to that morning when he had stood halfway through a line snaking around the dining facility. Sizzling meat and yeasty breads perfumed the air, driving Harkleroad insane with desire. He kept trying to silently urge the soldiers ahead of him to move faster, go forward, don’t dawdle, for goodness sake! They seemed impervious to the kitchen smells, the billows of steam rising from the serving line. Instead, they were gabbing on and on about sights they’d allegedly seen outside the wire.
“Didjoo hear about 3-25 out in Diyala yesterday?”
“No, what happened?”
“They was on foot patrol, going door-to-door—”
“Hello, Avon calling!”
“Exactly. And they was, like, near this town square when all of a sudden bullets started falling out of the sky.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, no shit. Falling straight out of the sky like some freaky rainstorm, man. One guy’s arm got grazed and he, like, fell to the ground, screaming like a pussy while all the other guys fanned out and tried to find out what the fuck was going on. All the while, the shit is bouncing off their Kevlars.”
“Like that old song, ‘Bulletdrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.’”
“Egg-zactly. Anyway, turns out it was just a wedding party up in the town square. The patrol gets up there and finds a bunch of drunk locals firing guns straight into the air and whooping it up. They didn’t know about that old rule, what goes up must come down. Man, I tell you, hajji can be dumb as a sack of rocks sometimes.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
Harkleroad endured all this with the impatience of a dying man who sees his salvation—food—in front of him but it stays just an inch beyond his grasp. He kept sucking the saliva back into his mouth with loud, obvious hisses but the two soldiers were, apparently, oblivious to anyone but themselves.
Now, standing outside the chief’s office and staring at photos of “soldiers in action,” just thinking about the dining facility made Harkleroad’s stomach turn somersaults of delirium. He closed his eyes and basked in the memory of meals past.
For many soldiers—not just Eustace Harkleroad—daydreaming about food was an effective way to mentally take themselves out of Iraq. Say you’re walking to dinner and the hot evening air is thick with the dust-fog and, like Eustace, you’re wondering what’s on the menu tonight, all the while thinking about those fresh shrimp your wife in her last e-mail said she’d prepared for her own dinner three thousand miles away, the night before, and your mouth is watering simultaneously for those shrimp and the fresh skin of your wife, and you’re walking through the gravel-crunch of the path you’ve worn between your hooch and the dining facility, and all around you soldiers are gathered in groups, some joking about something some guy thought some girl said about another guy, some of them sharing cigarettes, some tossing a baseball down the lane between trailers, and you’re starting to think this isn’t a combat zone after all, it’s just another summer Sunday night back in Des Moines where the livin’ is easy and the beer is cool—that’s about the time a VBIED explodes in the distance beyond the dust haze, beyond the laughing soldiers, beyond the concertina wire of your camp. It makes the sound of a heavy door slamming, like a thick metal door in a dungeon that echoes through the bowels of the earth. Nobody seems to notice. The laughter doesn’t dip, the baseball doesn’t waver in its trajectory between glove and glove. Life goes on, same as always. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, life tastes like coconut cream pie.