This is the second of a four-part series of excerpts from chapter one of Fobbit, “Gooding.”
FOBBIT © 2012 by David Abrams; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
“Don’t wanna be no bullet sponge,” said Private First Class Simon Semple.
“Oh, hell, no,” agreed Private First Class Allison Andersen. She stuck her forefinger in her mouth and sucked with cheek-collapsing vigor because she was, at the time, eating a Ding Dong cupcake and the broiling Baghdad heat had melted the frosting onto her hand, the corners of her lips, and the tip of her chin. She was back in the cool oasis of the palace now but her skin still throbbed from the 110-degree temperatures outside, which she’d had to endure on the half-mile walk between the dining facility and headquarters. The heat was a bitch and she wondered again why they couldn’t just build a tunnel between the two places. For that matter, they should just dig tunnels everywhere, make this whole FOB a network of connected passageways so they could go around like moles and not come up until after the sun went down.
Pfc Semple watched Pfc Andersen suck the Ding Dong off her finger and felt the stirrings of a hard-on. Damn that girl!
Semple and Andersen had twice engaged in against-regulation, punishable by Uniform Code of Military Justice sex: once in a Porta-Potty in a remote corner of the FOB, sloshing the toilet to and fro and mashing their lips together to stifle their orgasms; the second time on guard duty shortly after midnight when the moon was waning and no one could see them thumping around the guard shack at the opening in the coils of concertina wire around the motor pool. That time hadn’t really counted, though—it was coitus interruptus because insurgents picked that particular night to send four mortars raining down on the FOB and the two horny privates quickly disengaged, clapped their Kevlars back on their heads, grabbed their M16s, and sought shelter in a concrete bunker thinking, oh, sweet Jesus this was the fucking end, not just the end of fucking. But then the mortars stopped, the all-clear siren blew, and the privates stood up, brushed themselves off, and, too embarrassed to look each other in the eye, finished their guard duty in silence.
Semple and Andersen worked in the division’s G-1 Casualty Section and were in charge of cataloguing the dead. They sat at their desks in headquarters and waited for e-mails to pop into their in-boxes, announcing the serious injury or death of another soldier who’d been scythed by the Grim Reaper while out on patrol. The reports came to them in capital letters, shouting in military jargon:
SOLDIER ON MOUNTED PATROL TRAVELING IN VICINITY OF AL-KARKH WATER TREATMENT PLANT FLAGGED DOWN BY IRAQI CITIZEN CLAIMING AN IED 200 METERS AHEAD. SSG HARDING AND TWO OTHER MEMBERS OF THE PATROL DISMOUNTED M1114 TO SEARCH FOR IED EVIDENCE. TWO ADDITIONAL SOLDIERS SEARCHED ADJACENT FIELDS FOR WIRES, BAGS OF GARBAGE, ANIMAL CORPSES, ETC. INDICATING LOCATION OF IED. SSG HARDING ALSO WALKED FORWARD, BUT REMAINED ON THE ROAD. IED WAS ONLY 30 METERS AHEAD OF SOLDIERS. AS TEAM MOVED FORWARD, IED EXPLODED, CAUSING IMMEDIATE AMPUTATION OF SSG HARDING’S FOUR LIMBS. FRAGMENTS OF IED ALSO PENETRATED SSG HARDING’S HELMET, RESULTING IN MASSIVE HEAD INJURY AND SUBSEQUENT DEATH. UNIT CONDUCTED IMMEDIATE CORDON AND SEARCH FOLLOWING THE ATTACK TO FIND RESPONSIBLE PARTY OR PARTIES AND DETAINED FOR FURTHER QUESTIONING ONE POSSIBLE WITNESS, THE INDIVIDUAL WHO ORIGINALLY WARNED THEM ABOUT THE IED.
When the e-mails with their wounds and smoldering body parts arrived in their in-boxes, it was up to Semple and Andersen to place a call to the Medical Treatment Facility that had received the casualty and verify a U.S. military doctor had officially determined the body was indeed dead. Until a doctor put his stethoscope on that blackened, suppurating chest and gave a tight, nauseous nod, it didn’t matter who was weeping and wailing over the corpse of Staff Sergeant Harding—not his loyal and sickened soldiers, not his commanding officer, not his mother, not even the Great White Bwana himself briefly pausing in the Oval Office to brush away a simpatico tear. Without the doctor’s nod, he wasn’t officially dead. And he needed to be officially dead before G-1 Casualty could enter him into the system and begin the transatlantic next-of-kin notification process, which ended with a chaplain and a casualty assistance officer, both of their necks tight and sweating against the collars of their starched dress uniform shirts, standing in the doorway of a home in Hinesville, Georgia, the sun having just swapped places with the moon, a porch swing knocking against the side of the house in the soft evening breeze, the crickets rubbing their legs together and bursting forth in symphonic prelude, the casualty assistance officer clearing his throat and starting his rehearsed speech: “Ma’am, I regret to inform you . . .”
Until then, there was nothing they could do except finish their cupcakes, wipe their fingers, and go back to playing computer solitaire (Semple) and leafing through the pages of an old People magazine (Andersen). Tom Cruise was, after all, in the midst of a very passionate, very weird affair with doe-eyed Katie Holmes. And then there was that vegetable girl, Terri Somebody-or-Other, who nobody had thought to ask before she went into a coma whether or not she would want her plug to be pulled. And Jesus, what was up with Michael Jackson going to court in pajamas? Day-um. America sure was a funny place to look at when you got far enough away, thought Private First Class Andersen.
Hovering unseen at the edge of the G-1 cubicle, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding watched the two privates toss a cupcake back and forth across the cubicle and thought, Oh, man, this isn’t going to be easy. He needed a word, a simple little word.
Confirmed.
That’s all. Just those two syllables.
His life, at this very moment, depended on it. If, that is, you could call press releases a matter of life and death. Which, at this point in time, he did.
Gooding cleared his throat. “Semple,” he said.
The private turned his head, saw the sergeant standing there, and quickly minimized the solitaire screen. “Hello, Public Affairs,” he said. “What can Casualty do for you this fine afternoon?”
“Same old, same old, Semple. Need to know if you have doctor’s confirmation of the latest one—the guy from Second Brigade. The press release is done and ready to send out to the media. I’m just waiting on you guys to give me the go-ahead.”
“Sorry, Sar’nt.” Semple shook his head.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Server’s down,” Andersen said, riffling the pages of People a couple of inches from her throat. As if that would cool her skin. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on ice cubes, Antarctica, a guy from Alaska she once dated.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Gooding said.
“Wish we was,” Semple said.
“It was fine when I left my cubicle on the other side of the palace.”
“Don’t know what to tell you, Sar’nt. Sandstorm must have come along in the time it took you to walk from there to here. Maybe a mortar hit. Whatever. We’re dead in the water right now.”
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