Fobbit (34 page)

“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.

After reading the letter, Abe had a bit of patriotic mist filming his eyes (and, truth be told, a bit of an erection tenting his khaki shorts), so he ended the day with a good cry and a repeat viewing of
Rambo III
. This helped erase the day’s lousy turn of events.

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

O
n 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.

Chance Gooding Jr. was sitting on the edge of his bed reading
Don Quixote
when he felt the urge to start clearing his throat. Then he noticed it was getting harder to breathe, as if the air was thickening. He got up and opened his door. He was met with a wall of orange-brown air. It was a dust blizzard.

He couldn’t see his neighbor’s trailer fifteen feet away. At some point while he had been deep in Cervantes, the wind had kicked up, stirring all the talcum-powder dirt around Baghdad. Now it was filtering through the vents in Gooding’s air-conditioning and laying a fine grit over everything in the room, starting with his respiratory system. He turned off his air conditioner and tried to go to sleep. But he woke two hours later, burning with the heavy air; each particle of dust was an ember, each breath was a suck of stifle. In the morning, his throat was raspy and there were mucus flakes in the hollows of his eyes.

He wasn’t the only one to suffer through the simoom. Plenty of other Fobbits spent the day choking, complaining, and walking with an exaggerated forward hunch. By lunchtime, the air was hot and thick with turmoiled dust. The sky turned orange as cream of tomato soup.

Major Flip Filipovich had been in the fitness center when the simoom hit, the wind howling and scraping across the Quonset hut’s metal curve. The guy who ran the fitness center —a real prick who hardly ever spoke to Filipovich—dashed around the room, stuffing towels into the gaps between walls and floor, saying in a contrived British accent, “Oh, bloody hell, bloody hell!”

When Flip emerged from the moist, stenchy interior, his skin slicked from fifty minutes of intense carb burning on the treadmill, he had a nasty surprise. He was instantly coated with the airborne dust, his chocolate skin turning orange in a matter of a minute. He wasn’t wearing goggles so he was forced to put an arm in front of his face as he made his way back to his hooch, looking for all the world like goddamn Laura Ingalls Wilder in goddamn
Little House on the Fucking Prairie
during a blizzard. He was not happy, not in the least fucking little bit. Now he’d have to shower all over again before reporting for his shift at Headquarters. And no guarantee he wouldn’t get caked with orange again during the short walk between his hooch and the palace.

Two days after the start of the simoom, Chance Gooding’s sand-wracked throat and serial sneezes had turned to the flu and then one day he woke up with a cramped stomach and waves of nausea whirling through his body. He simultaneously gritted his teeth to keep the rising bile
down
and clenched his buttocks to keep the descending liquidity of his shit sucked
up
.

He knew exactly what had happened. The previous day, he’d come back from a morning run around Z Lake and, gasping strings of saliva, had headed straight for the water distribution point where the Twees handed out bottles of water from the depths of their chilled trailer, which was crusted with thick frost.

“You wanting water, yes?” asked the young brown man (Filipino? Pakistani?) standing in the frozen doorway.

“Yes,” Gooding panted.

“You wait. I get.”

Seconds later, the Twee came back out, holding a bottle by its screw cap between his begrimed fingers. Gooding was too winded and drained from the run and the flu to care about this lack of hygiene. As he grabbed the bottle and unscrewed the cap for a series of throat-pounding gulps, he was also too endorphin-delirious to realize the cap had not been sealed and was most likely a reused bottle that the pecan-colored Twee—another ambitious young entrepreneur forced to take cost-cutting measures where he could—had refilled with water from a garden hose.

Gooding hobbled back to his trailer, wrote a few lines in his diary concerning the mists rising off the lake “which dissipated like Saddam’s regime itself,” then showered and headed for the palace, where he faced another thirteen hours of keyboard banging and answering Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad’s beck and call.

He didn’t make it through the entire thirteen hours, however. His bowels had been clenched by hot, scaly fingers shortly after the morning Battlefield Update Briefing. Gasping and groaning, he rushed down the hallway to the latrine, barely getting his drawers around his ankles and settling his ass on the seat before he released a tooth-grinding torrent of shit into the toilet bowl. For a few seconds, his head went dark and stars prickled his vision. He sat there moaning on the toilet seat for fifteen minutes before he thought it was safe to stand up and leave.

And so it had gone for the rest of the day until he’d been certain there was nothing left inside—but no, wait . . . here it came again!—and he’d walked back down the hall as fast as he could with a clenched asshole, which by now was thoroughly abraded and exhausted by the repeated wiping it had endured throughout the day.

Major Filipovich had been his usual cheery, concerned self: “Fucking A, Sergeant Gooding, you’re about the greenest white guy I’ve ever seen. What’s gotten into you? Or, should I say, what’s gotten
out
of you?”

“Har, har, sir.” Chance swallowed to suppress the bile rising in his throat like a hot thermometer. “Bad water is my guess.”

“I told you to stay away from the Twees and their tap water, didn’t I?”

“You did, sir.”

“Well now you’re finding out the hard way.” Filipovich grinned and held up his lunch in the Styrofoam container he’d just brought back from the dining facility. “Hey, want a bite to eat?” The sausage link and boiled cabbage were still steaming and entered fully into Chance’s nostrils as Filipovich held it out to him.

That’s when Gooding completely lost it, grabbing for the garbage can and
hurking
a stringy yellow stream of bile onto a sheaf of discarded press releases and Sig Acts.

Harkleroad sent him home, saying they’d “get by somehow” until Specialist Carnicle came on shift in five hours, and insisted he go on sick call in the morning if he wasn’t feeling better.

Fifteen hours later, he was
not
feeling better, no, not at all. His body brought him back awake at 4:30, a full two hours before the medics opened for sick-call patients.

Later, he would type these words into his diary:

To write about one’s bowels is an embarrassing thing. But in this case it is necessary, in order to understand how I came to shed blood for the first—and hopefully the last—time here in Iraq. I woke up at 4:30, my body weakened from having continuously emptied itself for the last twenty-one hours. At any minute, I expected to start crapping out my stomach lining since there wasn’t so much as a crumb of food left inside me. Because the medical aid station didn’t open for another two hours, all I could do was lay there, moaning and writhing. There might have even been some gnashing of teeth. There was certainly much cursing of Twees who fill water bottles from garden hoses. Finally, when it was time, I got dressed and walked down to the aid station, which was in a trailer nine rows away. The wind was howling—okay, maybe not quite howling, but certainly letting out a mournful moan or two—and visibility was down to fifteen feet. We were smack dab in the midst of the season of dust storms that transform our little American enclave into a foreign landscape. There was so much dust (and particles of whatever crap—literally—had been stirred up and carried here from the city) that the morning sun burned everything a bright salmon-orange. Baghdad was in full-on Mars mode. I was forced to walk hunched over (which was okay by my already sore abdomen) and hold my arm in front of my face. I felt like an actor in an old MGM movie wandering the desert in search of the Lost Platoon, or maybe he’s chasing some Arab marauders who have made off with a distressed damsel, and for every two staggering steps forward he is forced to take one back, and all the time the actor is thinking to himself that if he can just make it through this scene, then C. B. DeMille will yell “Cut!” and the studio grips will turn off those giant fans and the back lot will return to normal and they can all go to the studio commissary and have midmorning martinis. I struggled through the storm and finally made it to the aid station, worried I might have contracted emphysema en route.