Fobbit (38 page)

“Men, I don’t know how to break it to you any other way. He’s dead.”

“Who’s dead, sir?” asked Lumley, still hoping this crotch-cupping nightmare would end soon.

“Ah! Ah! My eyes, my eyes!” screamed Jacovich, still unable to find his towel.

“Captain Shrinkle,” said Lieutenant Fledger, barely controlling the tremor in his voice. “Your former company commander.” (As if they’d forgotten already, as if they could
ever
forget Shrinkle and his Bad Night in Adhamiya.) “He’s dead. Gone. Obliterated, actually. A terrible, terrible attack at the Australian pool.”

As if on cue, the hot water supply to the trailer ran out and twelve men started gasping and cursing at the shock of icy showers. “OhGodohGodohGod!” This was more like it, Lieutenant Fledger thought to himself. This was the reaction he’d been expecting.

Twelve men immediately started grabbing at the faucet handles, yanking them counterclockwise. “Holy shit!” “God
damn
!” “Ah! Ah! Aiieee!” “My eyes! My fucking eyes are burning!”

“I know, men, I know. I was devastated by the news, too.”

Lumley, his nuts shriveled by frigid water, knew he still had to speak for the group because this dingleberry standing in the doorway just wasn’t getting it. “Sir? If you could just give us a moment?”

“Certainly, Sergeant Lumley.”

“A private moment, sir—if you know what I mean?”

“Of course, of course. You all knew Captain Shrinkle longer than I—heck, I don’t even know the man, only his legend—and there are undoubtedly some strong feelings running through this company right now. I’ll be at HQ. You know where to find me when you need me.” He started backing out of the trailer as his soldiers reached for their towels.

“Oh, and men?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’ve asked the chaplain to address the company this afternoon at the sixteen-hundred hours formation. I’m sure whatever he has to say will bring comfort to the group as a whole.”

The trailer door pulled shut behind him and Lumley held up his hand. “Shh! Wait for it. Let him get out of hearing distance.” They waited five, six beats. Lumley lowered his hand. “Okay, go ahead.”

Their voices came in an overlapping chatter.

“What in fuckin’ hell?!”

“Who does he think we are? ‘Overcome by grief,’ my
ass
!”

“Did I hear him say ‘Australian pool’? I thought that place was off-limits.”

“Shrinkle gone? Wow. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Hey, does anybody have any Visine? My fucking eyes are still burning!”

And so they blustered and bluffed their hidden grief with hard, impervious comments as they tiptoed through the murky water and dressed themselves for another day’s patrol. They talked tough but there were, among those seventeen men, at least three or four who were genuinely shocked and saddened by the sudden loss of Captain Abe Shrinkle. They kept their heads down and contributed little to the macho talk pinballing around the shower trailer. These were the soldiers of the company who had once shared a kind moment with the late Captain Shrinkle—perhaps he gave them a smile and a thumbs-up when they were feeling down; or maybe there had been something about the way he handed their mail to them, treating the letters from home with the respect they deserved; or maybe he’d once sat down next to them, uninvited, at the dining facility and agreed, yes, the meatloaf here
was
pretty damn good. Yes, these few men in the shower trailer would miss their old commander. He may have been a doofus who made a lot of bad decisions but it still sucked that something like this had to happen to him. No one deserved to be “obliterated.” Not even the worst officer in the United States Army.

29

GOODING

From the Diary of Chance Gooding Jr.

1,996.

For those of you marking your scorecards at home, that’s the tally of Operation Iraqi Freedom as of right now, this instant, this nanosecond before the next bomb is detonated, before the next grubby thumb presses the remote-controlled cell phone trigger or the next zealous Muslim chanting
“Allahu Akbar!”
steers his car bomb toward a U.S. convoy and some unlucky soldier bites the bullet, dubiously privileged with his fifteen minutes of fame as Number 2,000.

But that’s four bodies down the road.

For now, the score hovers at 1,996.

Better mark it in pencil, though. And have an eraser handy.

The media are drawn like jackals to a watering hole by the number 2,000. These sharp-fanged saliva-lipped members of the Fourth Estate claim it’s a milestone—one to be marked with a top-of-the-fold story.They love the sensuous curve of the two and the plump satisfaction of those triple zeroes, lined up like perfect bullet holes—BAM! BAM! BAM!

2,000 is a number most Americans can hold in their minds and use it to remember the awful waste of this war, this overlong field trip to the desert where we got ourselves tangled in a briar patch and stuck to the tar baby of terrorism.

30

HARKLEROAD

T
he number 2,000 had plagued Eustace Harkleroad for weeks. Each day brought a fresh round of tick marks, inching closer and closer to that grand total score of two thousand American bodies killed since 2003—bullet-riddled, beheaded, and bomb-blown to smithereens.

Months ago—what now seemed like years—he had opened the latest issue of
USA Today
to read that fifty-eight American troops had died in Iraq in February, the fewest fatalities since fifty-four had died the previous July, according to the Pentagon. Translating the death count into a daily rate, February’s losses were down sharply from January and less than half those in November. The February figures now raised the total U.S. death toll in the war to 1,490.

Even as he had folded the newspaper, bent his head, and tucked into his sausage and eggs that long-ago February morning, the body-o-meter was clicking over to 1,500, thanks to a suicide bomber who rammed his truck into a U.S. checkpoint twenty miles south of Salman Pak.

When Harkleroad got to his office that day in February, booted up his computer, and read the e-mail from G-3 Ops, he stared at that figure—the one standing at attention, the slouching five, the zeros with their empty, shot-out innards. It was such a nice, perfectly shaped number—deceptively pretty, falsely clean. Then he thought about trying to count 1,500 people (heck, let’s not even make it people—say, Popsicle sticks, instead) and he realized how hard it would be to count, how exhausting to tally that volume of Popsicle sticks. He was sure he’d lose track halfway through—distracted by the image of sitting on the back porch with his mother, slurping a Fudgsicle evaporating in the Tennessee heat—and he’d have to start over from the beginning. One thousand, five hundred. That was nearly half the number of soldiers in the entire division.

Now the figure seemed quaint, already antiquated.

An additional 496 bodies—plus another three unlucky souls this morning—had been added to the pile since February and this was rapidly becoming a problem, a whopper of a problem that lay across his shoulders like an iron harness.

For the last two weeks, the Public Affairs Office had been besieged by phone calls from reporters, begging to be embedded with task force units that had suffered an unusually high body count. This, the reporters said, would give them a greater chance of being on the scene when number 2,000 meets his (or her) fate.

The reporters are deplorable, yes, but who can blame them?
Harkleroad thought.
They are merely fueled by ratings, which, in turn, are stoked by the American public, who, in turn, self-righteously lament the media’s obsession with this grim milestone.

When, during a recent staff meeting, Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad proposed embedding the Associated Press with a particularly unlucky battalion so the reporter would be there to capture firsthand the two thousandth instance of death in theater, the chief of staff went bright as a fire engine. “Not only
no,
but
HELL
no
! I’m not embedding those goddamn jackals just for that reason. That’s just sick, plain and simple!” Other officers looked at Harkleroad and softly
tsk-tsk
ed. “Jesus, get your head out of your ass, PAO.”

“Yes, sir.” Meekly.

“And while we’re on the subject, I’m still waiting on that Comprehensive Analysis Report on how our press releases have been faring in the Iraqi media.”

“Yes, sir. You’ll have it today, sir.” Harkleroad slumped farther into his seat as the chief of staff moved on to his next target, G-4 Logistics. The beans-and-bullets clowns had just misdirected a shipment of MREs, supposedly bound for FOB Weathervane but which ended up at a remote village of camel herders who, reports claimed, had found the dried beef patty with mushroom sauce surprisingly tasty.

Later, on the phone with the reporters, Harkleroad’s voice was as gentle as could be. He tried to let them down easy. “Look—first of all, there’s no guarantee you’ll be with a unit that will have a casualty, nor do we even know if the two thousandth casualty will come from our task force. It’s not like we can produce a death on demand. Second, we’re not particularly fond of the idea of the media making a big deal out of Number Two Thousand. What about Number 556 or 1,998? Have you stopped to think about them? They were just as significant to us,
they
had fellow soldiers who agonized over their deaths,
they
had families back home who will forever feel the gaping loss of their loved one. And now you tell me you want to put this family—the loved ones of Number Two Thousand—through even more pain and trauma by making a big deal out of it in front of the cameras for all of America to watch? I understand what this will mean to your ratings and, yes, I know the producers back in New York are breathing down your neck, and, trust me, I have taken your request under serious advisement. I have done due diligence and run it all the way to the top of the chain here at headquarters. But I’m afraid the answer is most definitely
No
.”

Okay, he hadn’t said exactly all
that
. Speeches like that never came easy for Eustace, he was a man of stutter and fumble. What he’d actually said was, “Hi, um, this is Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad over at Task Force Baghdad and I, uh, have a bit of bad news to report. Remember that, uh, embed request you sent over our way? We-ell . . . I ran it up the flagpole here at headquarters, and . . .” Et cetera, et cetera.

When Eustace
did
run it up the flagpole all the way to the Old Man trimming his toenails in his penthouse office overlooking the SMOG floor, the chief of staff accompanied Harkleroad and did his talking for him.

General Bright’s hunched back was to them; he was intent on making sure the nail slivers made it to the garbage can. They fell like white rice kernels and plinked against the metal.

“Sir, PAO here is asking for permission to put the
New York Times
with 4-23, to let the reporter spend a week with the unit, twenty-four/seven, get to know the soldiers, touchy-feely shit like that.”

“Hmm.”
Snick plink snick plink snick plink
. “Well, isn’t that what we pay PAO for—to engage the media in telling the Army story?”

“Yes, sir, sure. But this one has a little different spin on it.”

“Oh?”

“PAO here says the
New York Times
is primarily interested in 4-23 because of their mortality rate.”

“And?”

“And they want to be there on the scene when Number Two Thousand’s luck runs out.” Colonel Belcher grinned lopsidedly at the CG’s back. “Apparently, these dickwad reporters have got a crystal ball and they know, without a doubt, that our two thousandth KIA will come from 4-23.”

“Is that so?”
Snick plink snick plink.
The CG raised his head and half-turned toward his two officers.

“That’s what PAO here says they say. I haven’t personally seen any evidence of said crystal ball.”

“Well, I’d sure as shit like to get my hands on their crystal balls,” the CG said gruffly, catching and sharing the chief’s grin.

“Squeeze ’em till they break, right, sir?”

“Pulverize ’em into little itty-bitty shards.”

The two men laughed as Harkleroad stood there, hands clasped behind his back, endlessly wringing his fingers.

“So, sir,” the chief said, bringing his laughter to a sudden halt. “About this request from the
New York Fucking Times
. . .”