Authors: David Abrams
Okay, that’s it, I’m getting dressed and getting the hell out of the room—though if I think walking around outside, or even running to the office, is going to make me any less vulnerable to being hit by a rocket, then I’m as stupid as a man who enters a rainstorm without an umbrella.
I go to the chow hall, seeking safety in numbers and comfort in eggs and bacon.
When I get to work, the first thing I ask Specialist Carnicle is, “Just what the
hell
was that?”
“I
know
! Did you hear it, too?” She’s all eyeballs and slack mouth. Apparently her cage was rattled, too. “I mean, Double-U, Tee, Eff, Sar’nt?”
“How could I not hear it, Carnicle? What was it? A mortar? A car bomb just outside the wire?”
Carnicle shakes her head. “They were chattering over SMOG a few minutes ago. They said it was a little wake-up barrage from our terrorist friends in Sadr City:
Goooood Morning, FOB Triumph!”
“Jesus, they’re getting bold.”
“It’s like they can see our Deployment Clock ticking down. Bastards are going whole hog before we leave.”
“Any damage?” I ask.
“Yeah, I guess a mortar landed at the Fitness Center. Punched a hole clean through the roof.” She makes a whistling sound that ends with a saliva-burred explosion in her mouth. “SMOG guys say no casualties. Unless you count the deaths of a treadmill and two exercise bikes. Which, come to think of it, is no great loss for the lard-asses around the palace here. They’ll probably think it’s a good thing. One more excuse for them not to exercise.”
The fitness center? Isn’t that where—? Ho-ly fuck!
My blood turns to ice. The fitness center, the place where Captain Shrinkle worked, was just bombed.
So that’s it. Fate being what it is, he would have been killed anyway, no matter how many times I pulled him out of that pool in my dreams. Death is relentless and unswerving.
Carnicle starts grabbing her things. “Can I go now? I wanna get to the chow hall before the terrorists turn it into a pile of smoking rubble.”
“Sure, go ahead, Carnicle,” I say, but I’m not paying attention to her anymore. I’m thinking about the way those booms rattled my teeth. I’m thinking about a swimming pool full of blood, bone, gore. I’m thinking about mortar trajectories and how thankful I am that hajji’
s
numbers were off by .001, sparing me and the rest of Trailer City. I’m thinking about the minute hand on the Deployment Clock freezing at five till midnight, never to click forward again.
Then tonight, as I’m walking back to my hooch after work, I hear the war. I mean,
really hear
it.
Up ahead of me, somewhere just outside the wire, there’s a crescendo-ing boom. It’s a flower of sound opening its petals.
Five seconds later, a red tracer round shoots up in the air—a signal of some kind.
Then comes the gunfire. It’s Our rifles and Their rifles talking back and forth. For nearly three minutes, there’s a steady vomit of M4 and M240 gunfire:
Brrrrappp! Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut! Brrrrappp! Brrrrappp! Chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug! Tut-tut-tut-tut! Brrrrappp!
The war is Out There; but on nights like tonight, it sounds like it’s In Here.
The longer I’m in Baghdad, the more I’m convinced I’ll be leaving in a pine box.
In fact, the closer we get to redeployment, the faster the attacks seem to come—a horse increasing its gallop as it sees the finish line. It’s as if Death has a quota that must be fulfilled before the Seventh Armored Division leaves Iraq. I don’t know how the door kickers do it out there. Don’t they feel Death’s cold scythe grazing their shoulders every day?
I may be a mere Fobbit, but I feel it—that blade against my neck. Honestly, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
32
DURET
H
ow much more were they expected to take? First, Jerry the XO who got his legs cut off at the knees, then those three (what were their names, dammit?) eating burgers at the food court when the mortar struck, then that unforgivable rash of suicides (two in First Brigade, one in Third, and then another in HQ Company), then Major Woody with the sore groin that had turned out to be a problem with his prostate that turned out to be cancer and he was whisked off to Walter Reed, then the staff sergeant (name? . . . again, it was a blur) in Second Brigade who’d taken a sniper bullet in the neck, and now
this
—the gruesome death of Abe Shrinkle, parts scattered everyfuckingwhere.
Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret leaned over the toilet and puked again—this made three times since breakfast—and saw, with some small measure of relief, it had finally turned to bile. His stomach had nothing left to bring up. He flushed the toilet and, for a moment, stood watching his sour yellow anger swirl down and disappear.
He went to the sink and rinsed his mouth. There was no one else in the latrine, a small mercy of privacy. But, unbidden, the image and smell of what had been left of Shrinkle coming from the unzipped body bag—a solitary arm, rigor mortis fingers still clutching a can of beer—as the doc asked him, “Was he yours?” rushed back to Duret and he started gagging all over again. He spit one last bitter wad into the sink and willed himself to stop it,
just stop it
.
Ross was there again—his flaming body careening through the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, his screams choking off into a harsh, staticky crackle—but Duret pushed his brother-in-law away as well, putting all his concentration on something,
anything
else—how his wife’s nipple puckered beneath his tongue, for instance.
That’s better. Focus on the Real World. Grab what scraps you can and call them your own.
Duret’s wife was back there in Hinesville waiting for him and she was expecting him to get through this. She
demanded
he pull through in one piece. She didn’t care about whether or not he brought all of his men home (though
he
cared, oh, yes, he cared), but he damned well better return to her none the worse for wear. She told him this in so many words on the phone every week and, like it was one of their marriage vows, he would do his best to please her. For his efforts, he would be rewarded with her breasts at the finish line.
That’s how he thought of her: there at the end for him, whooping and smiling. Not how she really was—moody, glazed with Prozac, listless—but how he wanted her to be. How he
needed
her to be. His bouncy cheerleader.
Duret wiped his mouth again, steadied himself against the sink, then picked up his helmet and left the latrine. He had a memorial service to lead.
Vic Duret sat in the front row, his battalion arrayed in solemn rows behind him. The sun oven-baked his bare head but, inside his uniform, forks of cooling sweat ran down his shoulder blades, through the forest of his chest hair, along his inner arm, into the canyon of his ass crack.
In front of them, under the speckled shade of camo netting, on a raised platform of nailed plywood and two-by-fours: Abe Shrinkle’s combat boots—all that remained of the man (unless you count the care-package bounty of his trailer which, according to the Brigade Ops S-3 who’d spent the afternoon inventorying the contents, included thirty-five rolls of toilet paper, eighteen packages of teriyaki beef jerky, a complete set of Louis L’Amour westerns [unread], two Harlequin Silhouette romances [read], eleven tubes of ChapStick, a bag of dried prunes, two jigsaw puzzles [kittens, a snow-covered barn in Vermont], two dozen cans of unsalted peanuts [“enough to choke a fucking elephant”—S-3], a whoopee cushion, assorted crayon self-portraits from third graders at George Washington Elementary in Des Moines, Laffy Taffy, Altoids, Certs, Starbursts, Sprees, fifty-three bars of individually wrapped soap from a Holiday Inn, an equal number bottles of shampoo, six toothbrushes, two tins of boot polish, and a series of letters from a Mrs. Norma Tingledecker [“contents of which were being analyzed by DIV G-2”—S-3]).
But they were here to mourn Abe Shrinkle, not praise the contents of his trailer. The man and his boots deserved a few words in his honor—even if he
had
come close to ruining the brigade’s legacy with his clownish command and general idiocy.
Duret shook his head. No, he’d vowed not to go there. Nitwit or no nitwit, Shrinkle was still an officer in the U.S. Army—
had
been an officer until Duret had demoted him to Towel Wrangler—and he deserved the standard Army farewell due to all those who lost their lives over here in battle.
But what to say, what to say?
Duret thought back to his regular Barbecue Mondays at Fort Stewart and the staff officers and company commanders who stood around his backyard, sweaty PBRs in one hand, waving away grill smoke with the other. Had Shrinkle been there with them? Duret had thought so, but now he couldn’t be sure. His least-trusted company commander had a way of melting into the background, rarely contributing anything to conversations about the Falcons or the Braves. Not that there was much to say about anything. These Monday night get-togethers were an attempt on Duret’s part to “bond” with his officers—something his West Point textbooks had once suggested—but when they were all there in the backyard swatting smoke and staring at the burned patches of lawn, what did they have to talk about? Work? Training schedules? Mutual acquaintances they’d heard were killed near Bagram? Duret had kept himself busy rotating the spitting brats and burgers, letting his men fend for themselves in awkward knots of twos and threes around the lawn. He closed his eyes and pictured the backyard but he’d be damned if he could see Shrinkle there nervously sipping a beer.
Under the sun dapple of the camo net, the chaplain was winding up his Scripture verse (“though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day”) and throwing in a Bach reference (“sheep may now safely graze in Captain Shrinkle’s pasture”) then turning it over to Colonel Quinner who took the podium with an electric squeal from the microphone and started in on a too-long sermonette of his own (“At times like this, I’m reminded of what the great war journalist Ernie Pyle once wrote on the occasion of the death of a certain Captain Waskow: ‘He carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him’”), which had nothing to do with Abe Shrinkle.
Soon, it would be Duret’s turn to step up and face the rows of his soldiers. What he would say about the dead officer (
dead meat
) still remained a mystery. He’d spent the last two days agonizing over the eulogy (in between parlaying with an al-Dora sheikh and monitoring an especially tense situation in New Baghdad), the words somersaulting in his head. He eventually pulled a few choice clichés out of his ass for this memorial service. He’d gone around all day scribbling a line or two at a time in his notebook, trying to come up with the best way to describe Shrinkle that didn’t involve the words “reckless,” “lily-livered,” or “wishy-washy.” What could he possibly say about incompetence that didn’t sound too harsh at a funeral? What were the good, decent qualities of Abe Shrinkle? What was the best that could be said of a man who was known more for his inaction and indecision than he was for unflinching leadership? How do you analyze the content of a man’s character by the way he invisibly sips his beer?
Maybe he’d start by talking about Abe’s care packages.
Quinner wrapped up with a Thought for the Day (“
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
”) then sat down. There was a prolonged silence as they all stared at the boots. The rows of soldiers rustled. Someone farted softly and off-key.
With a start, Duret brought himself out of his reverie, shook off the torpor of heat and lack of sleep, then rose and stepped to the front. He looked at the blurry rows of beige uniforms, the red pulsing faces, the winking sheen of sweat-dewed buzz cuts. They were waiting for him to open his mouth and get this over with so they could all return to their hooches, their motor pools, their dining facilities. Duret clenched his jaw.
Say something, say anything.
Jungle drums and boot stomps and falling mortars pounded in his head.