Fobbit (8 page)

Then, three hours into his shift, there came a sharp rise in the level of voices and an increased frequency of clicks from dozens of computer mice. One minute later, the phone in the PAO cell started ringing.

Chance snatched up the receiver and gave his usual sing-song butter-smooth answer: “Division Public Affairs, Gooding here.”

It was Justine Kayser from CNN asking about the explosion in west Baghdad she’d just heard about. Gooding was taken aback, momentarily dislodged from his official veneer of confidence-at-all-costs. He didn’t have a Sig Act report of any such incident at that time, which he told CNN in so many words: “Ma’am, right now, I’m not showing any Significant Activity reports regarding this incident. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, I just don’t have anything official sitting in front of me. If you can give me thirty minutes, I’ll see what I can dig up.” The instant he hung up, he swung around in his chair and started clicking the computer mouse at the SMOG station.

The Secure Military Operations Grid was the heart and soul of the U.S. military command in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq. Using wireless technology, commanders from places as far-flung as Basra, An Najaf, and Mosul linked their computers to the central hub at Task Force Baghdad Headquarters on FOB Triumph and, among other things, participated in a twice-daily conference call with the commanding general and his staff. SMOG allowed a lieutenant colonel in the Lower Mesopotamian Valley to scroll through his PowerPoint while, in Baghdad, the commanding general clipped his toenails into the wastebasket beside his desk, no one the wiser, as he grunted, “Mmm hmm” or “Tell me more” or “Okay, next.”

All Sig Acts were filtered through SMOG and recorded in the system’s deep, wide database. During the day, G-3 Operations tracked battlefield activities on SMOG in real time so Fobbits like Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr. could sit in front of the three computer screens at his air-conditioned workstation and watch tiny icons popping up on the map of downtown Baghdad to mark where IEDs had gone off or where patrols had been ambushed in a small-arms attack or where another group of headless bodies had been found in a troubled neighborhood.

After getting the phone call from CNN, alerting him to a possible explosion across the river from the Palestine Hotel, Gooding had been scrupulously checking the Sig Acts on SMOG. It wasn’t until an hour after Justine Kayser’s call that the KIA Sig Act had popped up on his screen. Chance bolted from his chair and sprinted through the cubicle maze to G-1 Casualty to see what they could confirm, only to be stonewalled by Semple and Andersen. At this point, all he had to go on was the unofficial, “He’s road meat.”

On top of that, there was the earlier incident when a suicide bomber in Sadr City had rammed into the ass-end of a tank but failed to detonate. After a tense standoff at a place headquarters had dubbed Quillpen, the would-be terrorist had been shot by either the battalion commander or a platoon sergeant—Gooding was still trying to verify all the facts—but then headquarters started getting calls from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior telling them the Iraqi police who’d recovered the body reportedly found papers indicating the man was from Switzerland not Syria as originally reported, and wouldn’t that just be the fuck-a-roo to end all fuck-a-roos if this hajji turned out to be a peace-loving Swiss Muslim who’d gone rotten somewhere along the line and decided to quit yodeling with Heidi and jihad his ass on over to Iraq.

Either way, the whole thing was a mess and Gooding’s public affairs cubicle in Task Force Headquarters had turned into Mess Central because, for the last two hours, CNN had been airing footage captured at the scene where someone had put an end to the alleged Swiss terrorist at Intersection Quillpen. The Ministry of the Interior had already called an impromptu press conference in Firdos Square, the Iraqi minister telling reporters that the terrorist was not from Iraq, Syria, or even Iran, but from a European country, yet he refused to confirm which one, sending the press corps off on wild tangents of speculation. Within minutes, Gooding’s office was besieged with phone calls from all the wire services and networks wanting a comment, any comment, even a crumb of a tidbit they could print or air—anything he could give them to confirm the MOI statement would be most helpful and most appreciated because, after all, they were on tight deadline and the story was getting more and more stale every time CNN aired its tape, they just needed something to freshen up the earlier reports.

Then, in the midst of dealing with the assassination of the failed bomber who may or may not be from Switzerland, Gooding learned of the IED in al-Karkh and the probability of high U.S. casualties. As it turned out, only one U.S. soldier was killed—a hot chunk of scrap iron finding that two-inch sweet spot between the helmet and the collar of the flak vest and ripping away half of the kid’s neck, causing him to stumble and trip into a puddle of ignited gasoline. Three others had been wounded with the usual assortment of burns, partial amputations, and concussions. Gooding needed to throw a bone to the news networks with this release about the soldier killed in action—if nothing else, it would distract them from the earlier incident at Intersection Quillpen—but he could do nothing without the official confirmation from Casualty.

Now, still sweat-slicked from his run through the palace, Gooding’s fingers flew across the keyboard like he was playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 11 and only had two minutes to finish the damned thing. In fact, he only had one minute. The division’s public affairs officer Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad hovered at Gooding’s elbow, watching every keystroke of the press release unrolling across the computer screen.

Harkleroad was a thick man. Thick in the way a bowl of risen dough is said to be thick. He filled his uniform amply; in truth, there was more flesh than fabric. When he leaned back in his chair, other soldiers flinched, afraid a button would pop off, come flying across the room, and put out an eye.

Furthermore, Eustace Harkleroad—forever shortened by his mother to “Stacie,” which had caused him no end of agony over the past forty-odd years—was a spontaneous nosebleeder. Gooding knew if he didn’t get this killed-in-action press release done quickly and to the exacting standards of the commanding general, the PAO’s nose would start dripping red like a spigot.

Gooding didn’t tell his boss he was writing this release based on the barest, unsubstantiated nod from G-1 Casualty. What Harkleroad didn’t know wouldn’t hurt either him or the rest of the world. Besides, this press release had already been ping-ponging around division headquarters for the past fifty minutes—at least four hours and ten minutes after the charred body had cooled somewhere out there in al-Karkh—and the Task Force Baghdad Public Affairs Office merely needed to tell the media what they thought they already knew. The press release was just another useless, redundant scrap of information in the reporters’ e-mail in-boxes and eight times out of ten would be deleted without being read. But to the majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and generals running around division headquarters in a constant state of ass-pucker, the press release was as important as an edict from the pope.

In its life cycle, the press release went through several layers of approval and sometimes contradictory editing by the various staff officers along the way. From Staff Sergeant Gooding it went to Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad, who would red-pen the sentences, give it back to Gooding for corrections, then distribute it to several other staff officers—Intelligence and Security, Plans and Operations, staff judge advocate, provost marshal, sometimes even the chaplain got a say-so—before hand carrying it upstairs to the command group, where Harkleroad would give it to the chief of staff’s secretary—fingers trembling, nose already tingling with the threat of blood—and wait outside the chief’s office door while the secretary ventured inside to place the press release on the colonel’s desk. He would be blasted with either a bark of, “What the fuck is it now?!” or a battle-weary, “All right, let me have it. And for God’s sake, tell Harkleroad to stop sniffing out there.”

Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad did his best to suck the beginning drips of blood back into his nostrils and prayed the chief read the press release before he couldn’t snuffle it up anymore and he had to walk in there to retrieve the paper with a tissue wad sticking out of his nose.

The chief of staff, a colonel named Belcher, had lost his temper right around the time he lost all of his hair—age thirty. He was known (and feared) on Army staffs as the man whose bald head perpetually glowed like an overheated thermometer.

While he waited, Harkleroad kept the left side of his body angled toward the chief’s office door. Stacie’s right eardrum had been punctured when he’d stepped too close to a howitzer during artillery training eleven years ago. Then-Captain Harkleroad had been thinking about his mother’s church group in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and how at their Wednesday Bible study meetings Eulalie Constance Harkleroad (“Connie” at her insistence) would announce to the other ladies fanning themselves with
Our Daily Bread
the latest accomplishments of her son Stacie as he made a name for himself in the United States Army. Most of what his mother relayed to the First Church of Redemption ladies were half-truths Stacie Harkleroad kneaded and pulled like Silly Putty for her benefit.

“Well, Mother, today I led my men on a twelve-mile road march in the pouring rain.” (He’d stopped to tie his bootlaces at the three-mile mark, telling his first sergeant to continue on with the rest of the company and he’d catch up, then surreptitiously slipped back to headquarters.)

“Next month, I’m taking my company on a joint training exercise to Italy.” (The three-day command post exercise had taken place right there at Fort Knox, Kentucky; the staff officers sat at a bank of computers and moved icons around a map of the Italian Alps, while a group of Air Force officers at Warren AFB in Wyoming and Marines at Twenty-Nine Palms in California did the same thing—each of them trying to outmaneuver the other until the exercise observer-controllers called “game over.”)

“Yes, Mother, yes, the brigade commander is certain I’ll be promoted this year, it’s just a matter of checking the right blocks on my annual evaluation form.” (The colonel barely knew Stacie existed—called him
Harrison
every time he saw him, despite the fact
Harkleroad
was embroidered above the breast pocket of his uniform.)

Eustace had gotten so deep into the habit of lying to his mother to fuel her Wednesday evening Bible studies that he wasn’t sure how to stop, except to one day actually do something that, if not exactly brave or significant, would at least have the truth as its foundation.

This is what he had been thinking as the gun crew prepared the artillery round for deployment on that day eleven years ago. The idea entered Harkleroad’s head that if he was the one to pull the lanyard and fire the howitzer, he could actually give his mother something to bust her buttons over.

He started walking toward the gun crew with his great idea, but he was half an idea too late. He was three paces away and in the midst of saying, “Here, Sergeant, let me—” when the squad leader gave a huge tug on the lanyard, the rest of the crew having already bent over, plugging their ears. There was a belch of smoke, the howitzer recoiled, and Harkleroad’s right ear popped like a hot tomato. He was thrown to the ground in inky silence.

Since then, he was forced to cock his head in order to catch the mumbled words that fell off his superiors’ lips, hoping he could fake his way through the conversation with a nod or a grimace, as seemed appropriate from his best guess of what had been said.

And so, three-quarters of the way through the life cycle of a typical press release, he would wait outside the division chief of staff’s office, straining to catch a meaningful cough, sigh, or an outright “what the fuck is this shit?”

Once the chief had read and initialed the press release, it went one of two places: back into Harkleroad’s hands for more corrections and a subsequent review or to the commanding general’s desk for his approval. Harkleroad would then have to position himself outside the CG’s door and pray
he
was a mercifully fast reader, too. Stacie Harkleroad had, on too many occasions, stood in front of the CG’s desk with one nostril plugged and a dried delta of blood on his upper lip, the general trying not to look at his pathetic face because it would only make him scowl and want to kick his PAO’s ass from here to Ankara. The majority of Harkleroad’s time in Baghdad had been spent anxiously dabbing at his nostrils while waiting for pieces of paper to be initialed and approved.

On every Army division staff there is always at least one officer who is the object of pity and/or ridicule. He is the one who sits stranded around the polished mahogany table before the briefings to the CG while the others from G-1 Personnel, G-2 Intelligence, G-3 Operations, G-4 Logistics, and G-5 Civil Affairs (the Gee-Whiz Gang) scoot their chairs closer together and talk with blustery guffaws and manly winks and conspiratorial nods; he is the one who sits there fiddling with the clicker on his ballpoint pen and pretending to find something of great interest in the sheaf of PowerPoint slides he printed and brought to the meeting; he is the one who begins his daily update to the CG with a choked, squeaky wheeze before clearing his throat and trying again while the commanding general stares hot impatience at him, chewing his spleen and wondering how in the good goddamn he ever ended up with this doofus on his staff.

In Task Force Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad was that designated staffer—even the chaplain was held in higher esteem—but there was little Harkleroad could do to penetrate the burly, hairy-chest circle of colonels ringed around the commanding general, except to try harder—flap his wings and hope he flew.