Sniffing the mail (an excerpt)

Here's a scene, late in the novel, which bears more than a passing resemblance to reality.  By no small coincidence, tomorrow marks my 27-year anniversary of being married to the most loving, most honest, most supportive, most beautiful Canada goose in the flock.  We've mated for life.  Jean, my love, this one's for you...


Lieutenant Colonel Vaughn Strong used to think it was a cliché you only find in movies when soldiers sniff letters from home for traces of perfume.  But here he was, sitting on his cot in his hooch at the hot edge of Baghdad, that day’s mail call spilled across his lap, and just like a character from a World War Two film, he was sticking his nose against a card he got from his wife.

Jesus, was this the silliest goddamn thing a lieutenant colonel could do, or what?

But when he’s over here and desperate for even the slightest sensory reminder of home, a man will quickly succumb to the cliché.  Since the deployment began, Strong’s wife had been daubing her envelopes with perfume and now he found himself putting his nose to the triangle tip of the flap and inhaling deeply.  Something primal stirred in the deep coils of his brain, calling up a memory which felt like something from as long ago as childhood, but actually only dated back six months to their parting at brigade headquarters.  He now regretted not giving over fully to the emotion of the moment, not relaxing his rigid stance against Public Displays of Affection, not pulling her to him in a neck-breaking hug, not mashing his lips against hers as if it was the last time they would be mashed.  No, he’d held himself in check that day—his men surrounded him, after all, and what would they think of a lieutenant colonel blubbering like a baby into his wife’s hair?  He’d kissed her quickly, drily, and said the appropriate words (something like “Buck up, kiddo—I’ll be home before we know it”), then turned back to the business of loading his men onto the bus.  As they pulled out, he’d watched her run alongside the bus for thirty feet, had lifted his hand against the window, but then they were fully pulled apart as the bus belched diesel and lurched out of Fort Stewart.

As they turned onto the highway and headed for the departure terminal, Strong imagined his wife running alongside the bus, even as they were rolling along at 55 mph, her hair come undone and whipping around in the wind, traffic honking and swerving, her throat screaming his name.  He even craned his neck to look through the window.  She was receding behind him, an ant-sized figure waving one arm at him.

He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes.  The bus, full of unusually-silent men already missing their wives and girlfriends, accelerated as it headed north on the highway toward Hunter Army Airfield where the transport plane waited.  Strong was already going somewhere else in his head.

It was their honeymoon and they were on the Oregon coast.  Once they’d arrived at Yachats and paid for the motel room, they were down to thirty-one dollars and some change.  That week, they did a lot of sitting on the beach, visiting the lighthouses, and staring mesmerized at the Devil’s Churn (was that the name, or did he misremember it as the Devil’s Punchbowl?).  They couldn’t even afford to go down into the Sea Lion Caves, so they stood at the top of the hill pressed against the chain link fence and listened to the distant bark of the sea lions, craning their necks to catch glimpses of the dark bodies going in and out of the waves far below.  Once, after a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a rest stop, they’d fed the flock of seagulls wheeling overhead, tossing stale breadcrumbs in the air.  He had a photo of her, laughing and flinching from one of the diving birds.  Shortly after he’d snapped that one, the gull had crapped in her hair.  She held up the strands of soiled hair, said, “Ewww, gross!”  Then he laughed and she laughed and they couldn’t stop.  Back then, laughing came easy to him. He’d taken her over to the restrooms to get a paper towel so they could wipe it out of her hair, but the dispenser in the men’s room was empty and he’d had to bring a small ball of toilet paper out to her.  Then he’d said something about “shit shampoo” and that had only made her laugh harder, so hard she peed her pants, and instead of being mortified at her darkening crotch, she laughed even harder, and he remembered that was the moment he knew they’d be together for a long time.  A long, long time.

Now, sitting in his wind-rocked hooch on FOB Triumph, he pressed the mail to his face and took her scent in through his nostrils, imagining his nose nestled against the hollow of her neck, his lips grazing the pulse of a vein.  He sat on his cot for a good five minutes sniffing this latest envelope, finding his wife somewhere in the fibers of the paper, before breaking open the seal and pulling out the card.

Typical flowers and pink curlicues and a Hallmark poem which glazed his eyes and brain.  He skipped the verse and went straight to the three-inch space at the bottom of the card where she’d written: “Just think, hon, HOME STRETCH.  There was a time when the whole year was looming before us.  One day at a time, they faded into yesterdays and so will the tomorrows of the coming months.  Soon, they’ll all be yesterdays and we’ll be back together again day-dreaming of our little home in the Rockies!  I’ll see you soon.”

There’s no shame in admitting this nearly broke Lieutenant Colonel Vaughn Strong in half, especially coming as it did on the heels of the Walt Whitman poetry he’d just been reading.  It was Sunday morning and he’d finally decided to give himself a rest and take advantage of the brigade’s half-day-off policy.  He’d brought Leaves of Grass with him on this deployment and he dipped into it every now and then, mainly for the Civil War scenes.  But this morning, his eyes had snagged on

A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking.
Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.

By degrees, he fell into a light, soft nap.  His fingers holding the card went slack.  He dreamt of his wife standing in front of him. He was kneeling before her.  She was wearing a black dress with a zipper running down the front.  “Would you like me to?” she said.

“You have to ask?” he replied.

She smiled and unzipped the dress by slow inches.  Her breasts tumbled forth.  She pulled him to her.  His tongue darted out and tasted salt, her musk he’d been denied for what felt like decades.  He pushed himself deep inside her.  He was home.

Strong came awake with a jerk.  A Blackhawk passed overhead, dopplering from one side of his head to the other.

He sat up and reached for her card.  He held it in his hand for a few moments before bringing it up to his nose.  He inhaled so hard, he thought he could smell burning leaves and his Golden Retriever coming into the house after being out in the rain.

Soon, he’d have to put on his gear, leave this trailer, and face the latest bad news at headquarters—another Sunni roadside bomb, another sheik irate at Strong’s doorkickers, another inane directive from the command group, another ball of shit rolling downhill.  He’d have to face all of that with his lieutenant-colonel mask of stoic opinion and decisive leadership.  He’d have to go out there and face this war.

But not yet.  Not just yet.

He sniffed again.

Some Seriously Sick Sh*t (an excerpt)

Throughout Fobbit, I've peppered the narrative with faux blog posts from a profane, illiterate soldier who writes of hardship on the Baghdad streets and troubles with his squad leader, Sergeant Watters.  This morning (after my rigorous 45 minutes on the elliptical and two cups of coffee), I worked on the following "Whose Your Bloghdaddy" blog post.  Though it's swollen with the excess of fiction, it is--believe it or not--partially based on an actual incident which I heard about while I was in Baghdad in 2005.

SOME  SERIOUSLY  SICK  SHIT

Things are fucked up all over, here there and everywhere.  Aint that the truth.

Case in point, here’s what happened to Layfield this week.  In case I havent mentioned Layfield before he’s one of the straightest arrows we got in the company.  Wont even look at a Maxim or Stuff, wont touch the near beer in the chow hall, emails his old lady twice a day, hardly ever swears.  His ass is puckered so tight its practicaly inside out.  But he’s an okay guy I guess. He’s always there when we need him and he’s usually got something nice to say each and every day.  A real Mr. Sunshine and Daysies around here.  And I guess we need someone like him to balance out the rest of us jerkwads.  Hahaha

So anyway, Layfield and me and six other guys was out on mission for four days at the beginning of this week and we were like REE-MOTE, man!  Way the fuck outside the wire.  All the way up to Ramadi and beyond, escorting a beans-and-bullets mission to this bumfuck outpost in a place called Khutaylah that was pissing distance from Syria.  A day and a half out, a day and a half back, and one day to hang around long enough to know we got it good here in Baghdad.  Man, I seen some shit there—

—but I’ll save that for a later time.  The point here is, we was way the fuck out there with practically no commo—no internet, no phones, no nothing.  And so naturaly Layfield is like going apeshit that he cant call his wife and he pretty much spent most of the mission just sitting around moping.

Then we get back to the FOB late last night and first thing Sergeant Watters walks up to Layfield with this shiteating grin on his face and says, “Hey, Layfield, guess what?  Youre dead.”

“How’s that, Sar’nt?”

“You heard me.  Youre dead, dude.  There fixin’ to run your obitchuary in your hometown newspaper and everything.  They just need your body for the funeral.  Hahahaha.”

Layfield just stood there getting all red in the face and telling Sargeant Watters he better explain himself and quick or he was gonna go report him to the CO.

It took Sargeant Watters a couple minutes to stop laughing his ass off—along with about three other guys that was standing around with nothing better to do—but heres what we eventualy got out of him (which is the whole point of this blog post—sorry if I been rambling).

Two days ago, Layfield’s wife back in Hinesville gets a knock on the door and there’s this dude, dressed in a Class A uniform (but not wearing a name tag), and he’s got this sad, sick-to-his-stomach look on his face and right away Layfield’s old lady thinks this is it, the moment she’s been waiting for, and sure enough this dude on her doorstep tells her he’s the unit casualty assistance officer and he’s there with the sad duty of telling her that her husband has been killed in action in Iraq.  Aparently Layfield’s wife is a smart cookie because before she can start getting really choked up, some little warning bell goes off in her head.  Something about this guy just didn’t sit right with her.  First of all, why’s he not wearing a nametag?  And isn’t there supposed to be more than just one person doing this?  And isn’t there supposed to be a chaplain with them?  All these things is going through her head, so she decides to invite this guy in for a cup of coffee or some shit like that, but the guy immediately starts to get all nervous and says he’s got other notifications to make that night but, once again, he is really sorry to have to be the one telling her this news about her husband.  Motherfucker even tries to give her a little hug before he goes.  By this time, Layfield’s wife is really starting to lose it cuz now she doesn’t know what to think.  Is he dead or isn’t he?  So she finds her cell phone and calls the rear-detachment unit to tell them about the visit.  And Rear-D tells her that she’s not the first one to call in with something like this and they’re all over trying to catch this guy.  But just to be sure, Rear-D says there gonna get in touch with our unit over here and make sure that Private First Class Joseph Layfield is indeed alive and well.  Which they do and then right away call back and tell her not to worry, everything’s okay, and is there anything they can do, maybe send the president of the spouse’s club over to comfort and console, etc. etc.

By this time, though, Layfield’s not even listening to Sargeant Watters anymore.  He’s making a beeline for the phone center where he spends the next thirty minutes crying on the phone with his wife, really letting go with these big loud sissy sobs, to the point where everyone else in that trailer is starting to get annoyed with him cuz they can’t hear there own wives bitching at them on the other end of the line.

But hey you can hardly blame Layfield for getting all moist like that.  I mean that is some really sick shit, isn’t it?  Who in there right mind would go around telling soldier’s wives—already weak and vulnerable—that there husbands were KIA.  In my opinion, they can’t catch this sick bastard fast enough and ram the judicial system up his ass.

A Voice Through the SMOG (an excerpt)

Lightening things up (hopefully), here's a small chunk from the novel.  "SMOG" is the Secure Military Operations Grid, a fictional version of the system we actually used in Iraq.  In Fobbit, commanders from places as far-flung as Basra, An Najaf and Mosul link their computers to the central hub at Multi-National Division-Baghdad Headquarters on Forward Operating Base Triumph and, among other things, participate in a twice-daily conference call with the commanding general and his staff.

The morning Battlefield Update Briefing was winding down.  Tremulous baritone voices had had their say, broadcasting from their various remote SMOG locations; the commanding general had had his usual responsive grunts of approval (or was it disapproval?  Sometimes the two types of grunts were indistinguishable); the Chief of Staff had had his requisite chime-ins, reinforcing what the CG had grunted, adding his own strenuous giddy-up-and-go admonitions.  The overall tone of the briefing was one of, “Okay, hold on, keep it together, we’re almost through with this, just pray he doesn’t single me out.”  (“He” being the Old Man himself whose raspy commanding-general voice could reach right through the SMOG speakers and choke even the most hardened artillery officer into incoherent stutters.)  Deep inside the BDU pants of the most nervous staff officers crowded around SMOG stations in the palace, assholes were starting to unpucker—if not quite all the way, then there was certainly a little more sphincter breathability in the wedged-up cotton Hanes; or, in the case of those who went commando, the sandy folds of BDU’ed butts. A couple of pent-up farts were ripped.

The next-to-lowest person on the division totem pole, the Civil Affairs officer, had just finished reporting on yesterday’s successful Beanie Baby mission to al-Khadhimiya: “the indigenous population was so receptive to our cultural handouts that they had to be restrained with a hasty-perimeter we quickly established using Force Protection measures 1 through 3.”

Now it was the chaplain’s turn.  Each day’s BUB was brought to a close with the daily homily—by order of the CG, a semi-religious man himself—and these 90-second sermonettes could sometimes get out of control, stretching to three or four minutes, which the CG allowed without interruption.  The chaplain’s voice over the SMOG loudspeaker would continue to chirp away unabated while all around the division’s Area of Operations—from Baqubah to Mahmudiya—staff officers at remote computer stations shifted their semi-relaxed butt cheeks on their chairs, many of them rolling their eyes or silently mouthing things like “waste-o-time” or “yea, though I walk through the valley of knee-deep shit,” all of them eager to get on with the day’s business.  The CG had issued plenty of marching orders during the BUB and now the staff officers’ minds were racing ahead to PowerPoint briefings, Op Orders, crisis management plans, and—in one specific case—ensuring enough lobster was procured in time for Friday night’s Bounty of the Sea dinner menu at the chow hall.

The chaplain nattered on, unleashed.  His too-kind, too-melodious voice washed out from the SMOG speakers, winding its way hither and yon across Baghdad and the surrounding vicinity, wherever men’s souls were tattered and in need of spiritual mending.  Today, it went something like this: “Do you often lie awake at night worrying about the burden of responsibility you’re carrying around?  We have all felt the weight of grief, the anguish of frustration, the gut-twist of impatience.  Maybe it’s a language barrier between you and the local sheik…perhaps it’s that young sergeant who insists on doing things ‘his way’ and tries to buck the system…or maybe you’re knotted up with problems from back home—the wife who let the car run low on oil and now your beloved ‘75 Mustang has thrown a rod, the son who is ‘acting up’ during kindergarten recess, the high-school daughter who adds a new body piercing every month.  Whatever your burden, please know that we all carry them around with us in our knapsacks.  Talk about your Load-Bearing Equipment, eh?”  The chaplain chuckled and paused, expecting that his unseen listeners would also be having a little chuckle at his joke, forgetting the Army had phased out the LBE while Clinton was still in office.  “But seriously, folks…Too many times, we hold everything inside rather than following the simple rule of ‘Let go, let God.’  I’m sure you’ve all heard that one.  Now, let’s put it into practice. Tonight, instead of trying to count sheep, maybe you should lie there and talk to the Shepherd instead.”

He paused, allowing this to sink in to its full effect.  The division staff scattered across central Iraq listened to the static crackle across SMOG, most of their ass cheeks now squirming with frustration and impatience.

The chaplain clicked his microphone again: “Today’s Scripture reading is taken from 1st Corinthians, Chapter 15.  You may follow along in your pocket-sized King James.”  (Save for a devout supply clerk at FOB Eagle and three die-hard Catholics over in Legal Affairs, none of them carried around the little Bibles handed to them during their Welcome to Iraq in-briefing.)

“'Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.  Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.'”

The chaplain droned on, burrowing like an insect into his listeners’ ears.  Alone in his office on the top floor of the palace, the commanding general clipped his toenails, aiming (not always successfully) for the wastebasket.  Three doors down, the Chief of Staff sifted through reports, sorting them into piles according to brigade.  On the ground floor of the palace, Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad leaned closer to the computer screen of his SMOG workstation, hanging on the chaplain’s every word because, he feared, he might be quizzed later on the sermonette by the CG and he wanted to get all the answers right this time.  Two cubicles away, Major Flip Filipovich napped lightly, depending on the sudden absence of reports from the SMOG loudspeakers to wake him when it was all over.  And, two miles across FOB Triumph, Lieutenant Colonel Strong sat with the rest of his staff in front of the SMOG screen, thinking not about 1st Corinthians, but about his wife and his dog—though not necessarily in that order.

At last, the chaplain reached his crescendo: “'Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.  O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory?'”

The chaplain left that word, “victory,” hanging in the air like the echo of a trumpet blast.

When the hissing SMOG silence had stretched to an uncomfortable length, the CG clicked on, cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, chaplain.  As always your words of inspiration are…are inspirational.  Now—”

“Sir, if I might—?”

“Yes, chaplain, what is it?”

A thousand butt cheeks groaned in agony.

“Sir, I almost forgot to put in a plug for this Sunday’s service at Lakeside Chapel: 8 a.m., Protestant; noon mass for our Catholic brethren.  I’m calling this week’s sermon ‘Good Grief.’  As you know—” his voice shifted into melody-mode again “—we have all experienced sorrow during our time here in Iraq, but we each handle it in different ways.  How one deals with ‘small grief’ from challenges and disappointments relates to how one handles ‘big grief’ such as the loss of a loved one or a particularly good soldier.  Be sure to come out this Sunday to hear the full prescription for Good Grief.”

Another extended pause, during which could be heard what sounded like the soft snick of a nail clipper.

“Okay, thanks again, chaplain.  Is that all?”

“Yes, sir.  Thanks for allowing me to jump back in with that.”

“Okay.  Well, if there’s nothing else, and no alibis…?”  Several staff officers clasped their hands in supplication, silently willing no one to utter a peep which would prolong the BUB with a bit of forgotten business.  “In that case, go forth and do great things.  Keep your chinstraps tight.  Nothing further.  Luck of the 7th!”

From a hundred SMOG stations came the echo of the division motto, “Luck of the 7th!”  They all clicked off and set about the day’s business.

From his concealment in the PAO cubicle maze, a groggy Major Filipovich lifted his head from the desk, then muttered, “And don’t let death sting you out there, motherfuckers.”

The Soggy Surprise of Baghdad (an excerpt)

That's a photo of the guard shack outside our division task force headquarters in Baghdad, March 2005.  Notice the rain leaping upwards from the sidewalk.  Notice the huddled misery of the two guards on duty.

Rain was an unexpected fact of life for many of us Fobbits during the deployment.  Rain...desert...those aren't two words we ordinarily put in the same sentence.  Unless of course, you'd already been to Iraq or Kuwait; unless you had experienced a Middle Eastern winter; unless you knew to expect the unexpected.  Which most of us under-deployed Fobbits had not.

I was thinking about this particular soggy surprise as I was working on Fobbit this morning.  Here's an excerpt from the work-in-progress.  (Note: a "Twee" is the novel's slang for "Third World Employee," the contracted international workers who helped keep the Forward Operating Base humming along on a daily basis).

*     *     *

That night, the rain started.

As Fobbits slept in their tin trailers, the noise of the accelerating drops crept in with a gradual hiss until it filled their dreams with static.  Those light sleepers who were awakened by full bladders (surfacing from subliminal dreams about rivers) tugged on their boots and stumbled to the door, forgetting even their mandatory rifles in their groggy haste to get to the latrines.  But when they were stopped short in the doorway by the startling sight of the rain, billowing in curtains across the Life Support Area, they reacted with a variety of “Shits!” and “Fucks!” and “Day-ums!”  No way were they going out into that, no way no-how.  Desperate and curling at the waist, they dug through their trash can until they found an empty Gatorade bottle, and let loose the flood as they drained the snake with an “Aaahhhh….”  Those brash males who couldn’t find an empty bottle, simply stood in their doorway and pissed an arc over the porch.

Females, not so lucky in the anatomy department, bundled into the three layers of uniform and, hands clutched down on their helmets, made a dash for it.

The rain continued through the night until breakfast, didn’t stop for lunch, and showed no sign of relenting for dinner.  It rained for three days and four nights, pausing only once on the second day to take a brief drizzly break before plunging back into a full torrent.

This was a freezing, needle-sharp rain that pounded against the sand with such a fury the ground was unable to withstand the assault and closed its pores.  Rain now bounced back into the air 18 inches, so that soldiers walking to the dining facility were drenched from above and from below.

Rainwater refused to penetrate more than an inch of the Iraqi topsoil and it was not long before puddles grew to ponds and ponds enlarged to lakes 200 feet in diameter.  Soldiers, contractors, Local Nationals, and Twees alike walked around the FOB trying to find anything that looked like “high ground” in the expanding puddles—even medium-sized pebbles were good enough for dry places to set down a boot.  Soldiers unable to walk anywhere but along the side of the paved roads, slowed traffic to an impatient crawl.  Frustrated drivers from infantry squads swerved as close as possible to these Fobbits who were stepping along so dainty to avoid the mud.  Served them right, the fuckers, if they had to move over into the muck for once and get a little shit-splash on their starched BDUs.

Everywhere you walked in the FOB, it was Mud City.  This was no ordinary chocolate-pudding mud—it was thick as wet cement which clung to your boots in gathering clumps.  When you stepped onto the gravel walkways, the rocks stuck to the mud, aggregating with every step until you felt you were wearing Frankenstein’s boots.  At the entrance to the palace, you tried to scrape off the mud-gravel glue, but it refused to come off easily and when you did get some of it off your boots, you end up stepping in someone else’s scrapings and that stuck to you.  For a few days, it was like watching a silent film comedian struggle with flypaper stuck to his fingers.  The Army thoughtfully provided boot scrapers with bristle-brushes at each entrance; but, just like a Laurel and Hardy gag, as you ran your boot over the bristles, the mud flicked up and peppered your face; and when you try to wiped it off with the heel of your hand, it smeared across your cheeks and chin.  Another fine fucking mess indeed.

After spending the first two days darting from doorway to doorway, seeking shelter in the occasional concrete bunker or nearest Port-a-Potty, most Fobbits gave up and allowed themselves to be drenched because at that point it seemed there was no end to the rain.  Many of the most miserable Fobbits had no one to blame but themselves.  They were the ones, after all, who had scoffed at the wet-weather gear on the packing list back at Fort Stewart—"We’re going to the desert for God’s sake!  Sun, sand, and more sun!  They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about”—and had made the impetuous and later-regrettable decision to leave the water-proof jacket and trousers back in Georgia (along with the compasses, water-purification tablets, and Arabic-English dictionaries).  Those Fobbits with equally-green NCOs were able to slip through the shake-down inspections by saying they had the wet-weather gear, but they must have left it in the car and yes, sergeant, they would go fetch it right after the inspection, you betcha.  And so the Fobbit NCOs, their heads already stuffed with the last-minute details of deploying troops for the first time, herding the cats into some semblance of routine and discipline, trusted them and believed they would go overseas with wet-weather-outfitted soldiers.  Meanwhile, the privates secretly pumped their fists and said, “Yesss!”  These were the undeployed, the combat virgins, who for the first time in their Army careers were taking their first serious look at a packing list.  They believed they knew better than the list, that the items on it were mostly suggestions anyhow.  And so, they tossed the wet-weather gear into a corner (or did indeed leave it in their cars).  They filled the extra space in their duffle bags with hair dryers, Frisbees, contoured memory-foam pillows, teddy bears given to them by their one true love at the senior prom, espresso machines, extra bottles of Jeri-Curl, scented stationery, and—in the case of Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding—the Complete Works of Charles Dickens.

Yes, Gooding was pretty fucking miserable, thanks for asking.  As he walked to chow on the Third Day of Rain, he hunched his shoulders and tried to angle his head so the water ran off his Kevlar in such a way that it avoided the open space at the top of his collar.  He had varying success with this technique—apart from looking like Quasimodo’s cousin, the rain had made a rivulet down his spine, streamed over his ass-crack and now there was a squishy mess between his legs where his soaked underwear had bunched up.

To reach the dining facility, he had to pass through a Life Support Area of another brigade which had just arrived in Iraq and whose engineers had not had time to lay down gravel paths.  The LSA was a sea of churning mud.  Humvees had barreled through the roads, slip-slopping from side to side, digging deep ruts and throwing spatter along the sides of the trailers.  The rain hissed down with particular fury on this neighborhood of the FOB.  It was a particular hell Gooding had never bargained for when, in that impetuous moment three months ago, he’d flung aside his wet-weather gear, hoping his fellow NCOs wouldn't notice the bulge of Dickens in his duffel.

Gooding passed a soldier down on his hands and knees in the middle of the brown-black paste.  His arm was elbow-deep in the mud and he didn’t look happy.

Gooding called to him, “What’s the matter?  You need help with anything?”

The soldier raised his mud-streaked face and grimaced.  “Lost my fucking boot, sarge.  Fucking thing just came right off my fucking foot and now I can’t find it.”  He shoved his arm down into the mud again.  “It’s really fucking deep!”

Gooding waved, shouted over the wet hiss, “Sorry to hear that,” but kept right on walking.  No need to multiply his own misery.  Besides, Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad was waiting for his dinner to be delivered.  Once Gooding had finished with his own meal, he was to build a to-go plate for his boss and bring it back to the palace where the PAO cell was working overtime on a little counter-intelligence mission involving multiple reams of press releases.  Gooding was walking from one hell to the next.

When he emerged from the dining facility forty minutes later--Harkleroad’s meatloaf, mashed potatoes and strawberry shortcake carefully covered in plastic wrap--Gooding stopped short.  He even let loose a little gasp.

The rain had stopped and the sun was slicing through the clouds, already drying the mud into hardened peaks and valleys that, for weeks to come, would be treacherous for weak ankles.

Gooding started to walk back to the palace, already feeling lighter in mood as his uniform began to steam and dry out.  He walked past a particularly large pond in the LSA.  A Twee (Korean, by the looks of him) emerged from the barber shop trailer, walked to the edge of the water and released a boat made from folded paper.  He stood there with his hands in his pockets smiling at his little boat as it rocked across the surface of the mud-puddle pond until it soaked up too much of the rain water and sank.  He grinned at Gooding then walked back inside the barber shop.

Gooding stood there a moment longer, also smiling at the thought of how the toy boat had managed to stay afloat for a brief happy minute.  Then he turned and slopped his way back to what waited for him.

Don't Know Much About Guns, Pt. 2 (an excerpt)

Here's another excerpt from Fobbit, similar to the previous "Don't Know Much About Guns" section I posted.  This was today's early-morning writing exercise.  I'm physically halfway through this second draft now; charging ahead, bayonet unsheathed, yelling at the top of my lungs.

It is the sixth of eight weeks at basic training and you are standing chest-deep in a foxhole on the M-16 firing range.  You have placed the rifle on the sandbag, as instructed, ejection port side up, and are under no circumstances to touch the weapon until told to do so.  You take all instructions from the tin voice crackling from the speaker with the loose wire—the one dangling from the side of the range tower like an eyeball popped from its socket.  You dare not make one move—left, right, back or otherwise—unless given explicit permission.  Else, the wrath of the drill sergeants will come thwapping down on the crown of your helmet in the form of a metal rod similar in size and heft to a martinet’s riding crop.  The drills stalk the line of foxholes looking for the weak and disobedient whom they can smite with the holy fury of The Rod.  Two groups ago, your battle buddy Kidner came wobbling off the line saying his head was still ringing like a bell.  You're prone to migraines so you are determined not to let yourself get thwapped.

It is bitter cold on this Kentucky morning, three weeks before Christmas.  An icy fog still grips part of the firing range, the white tendrils slowly melting from a too-distant sun.  The skin on your hands is pinched, numb, and the bed of your fingernails sting with the pain of the constricting cold.  You are so paralyzed with obedience that you dare not even bring your cupped hand to your mouth for a puff of warm breath.

You have just completed firing the first half of your forty rounds, sprawled prone in the gravel just outside the foxhole.  The rocks have cut so hard and deep into your elbows you’re certain that blood is trickling down your forearm right now as you stand, muscles jumping, near the back of the foxhole.  You know you have done poorly thus far in the qualification exam, the results of which will determine whether you graduate from basic training or remain behind in the barracks at Fort Knox for an extra two weeks of remedial training before having another go at the firing range.  You know you have done poorly in the prone because even though the ill-fitting helmet kept tipping forward onto the bridge of your nose, you could see well enough through the rifle’s two sights that a very, very small percentage of your pop-up targets were falling backward in response to your bullets.  They came and went in a narrow line in front of you, 25 meters to 300 meters: sneaking from behind berms, barely visible through bushes bullet-stripped of leaves, jumping up from rocks.

You think of all that the drills have—excuse the expression—drilled into your head about proper firing technique: firing-side knee cocked at 45-degree angle, left hand loosely cupping the forward handguard, resting the rifle on the heel of the hand in the V formed by the thumb and fingers, butt of the stock placed in the pocket of the firing shoulder, cheek welded to stock, tip of nose to charging handle, steady breath in, steady breath out, steady breath in—don’t hold it—out, in, out, ride the crest-and-trough waves of the oxygen, that’s it, that’s it…then, slow steady squeeze of the trigger with the meaty tip of your forefinger.  BAM!!

The pop-up men were not obeying your bullets.  They were not dying, one by one.

They were coming too fast, too fast, these green, hunched men with their plastic rifles.  How were you supposed to relax and breathe when they came up and fell back down at the rate of prairie dogs doing the pop-and-duck from their holes?

The gravel bites at your elbows, your chest presses into the ground, you cannot breathe, you cannot see, you cannot hear around the sponge of the earplugs.  You are encapsulated in your own world of sinus breath and muffled gunshot, watching the little hump-shouldered men spring from the earth, mock you for ten seconds, then melt back earthward long after you have pulled the trigger—impudent, disobedient players in this game.

Now you are standing in the foxhole which, you are certain, will soon be filling up with the blood from your elbows and knees.  Your brain is swelling beneath the helmet and you can already feel the prelude of a migraine roaring toward you.  A drill sergeant crunches past in the gravel and you flinch, waiting for the metal thwap.

Now the tower is telling you in its rattley voice to step forward, secure one twenty-round magazine, lock and load, then get a good sight picture downrange.  It is telling you to rotate your selector switch from SAFE to SEMI-AUTOMATIC and “Scan.  Your.  Lane.”

You breathe.  You squint.  You squeeze.

You suck.

This is the beginning of your Army career and, seventeen years later when you deploy to Iraq, you will still suck at putting rounds downrange.  There will be better qualification scores than the one from this first trip to the range at Fort Knox.  There will also be worse scores when, to your humiliation as a mid-level NCO, the battalion training sergeant will hand you the computer print-out and in a too-loud voice in front of your subordinates and peers announce you’re a “No-Go.”

But this is your first time and you will carry this moment with you the rest of your life, this first humiliating “No-Go.”  And later that night you will be sitting bent over your tray of food in the chow hall, not able to look any of your fellow basic trainees in the eye—not even your best bud Kidner.  You’re having a hard time swallowing the mashed potatoes for the lump that is lodged in your throat because you will not be going home for Christmas break but will remain at Fort Knox, Kentucky, remedially practicing over and over the essentials of breath and trigger squeeze.  That day, you hit twenty-one targets, two short of the minimum required to pass the qualification exam.  You are a failure, a wash-out, lower than a snake’s belly in a ditch.

You think as how you’d better start liking these mashed potatoes because you’ll be getting more than your fill of them over the next three weeks.

You hear a noise behind you, a warm breath on the back of your neck, and the next thing you know, the drill sergeant—the bug-eyed one who seemed to have it out for you from the first day you stepped off the bus—is leaning over, his voice in your ear: “Congratulations, private.  One of Santa’s reindeer just shit in your stocking.”

You gasp and straighten.  “What does that mean, drill sergeant?” you squeak.

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know, drill sergeant.”

“It means you passed the qualification range.  Merry Fucking Christmas, private.”

“For real, drill sergeant?”

“Yes, for fucking real, private.  You calling me a liar, private?”

“No, drill sergeant.”  The squeak in your voice has been joined by a shake.

“Private, are you calling me a liar?”

“No, drill sergeant.”

“If I say strings were pulled, then strings were fucking pulled.”

“Yes, drill sergeant.”

“Now finish your food and get the fuck out of my chow hall.”

The drill straightens and continues stalking the chow hall.  He bellows: “Awright, privates, get a move on, shovel it in, you got five minutes before you gotta be standing outside front and center in formation.  FIVE MINUTES, HEAR?  Don’t even worry about breathing, just shovel it in, shovel it in, privates!”

Such relief and exhilaration and, yes, Yuletide joy floods your chest that you slap the table with the flat of your hand.  The others at your table look at you, at the visible tears standing in your eyes.  “What’s wrong with you?” they ask, but you shake your head, unable to speak around the mashed potatoes which have gone dry in your throat.

You have gotten the first—and probably the last—break in your Army career.  That bug-eyed bastard of a drill sergeant has just broken some sort of rule on your account, finagled a dope deal with the training NCO—all for a thin, anxious private who will leave this place still not knowing how to properly fire an M-16 rifle or kill a pop-up target.

You will never, ever forget those hot, grateful tears rolling on the rim of your lower eyelids.  Or the happiness you feel when Kidner takes one look at you and calls you a pussy.

Standards and Discipline in a Combat Zone (an excerpt)

Here's another section from the novel (Fobbit) on which I've been working this week.  This is fiction--combat-zone satire--but it's not too far off the mark of what I saw during my eleven months in Iraq.  (P.S. Don't try e-mailing CSM Tupplewhite; there is no such person)

To: DIV NCO Leadership Group
From: marvin.tupplewhite@us.army.mil
Subject: Notes from Command Sergeant Major Tupplewhite

Fellow NCOs,

As discussed at this morning’s weekly CSM meeting, we—the CG and I—have certain expectations of our enlisted Shamrock Division when deployed to a combat zone and, to date, those expectations have not been fully met, let alone exceeded.  I already ripped you guys a new one at this morning’s meeting, so I won’t thrash you again here.  Not my purpose or intent.  This is simply what I already gave you, but this time in written format.  Here we go:

1. Uniform Standards.  This topic is brought up repeatedly and was addressed by the Commanding General during the morning update today.  I’m just reiterating.  Uniform standards are not being enforced by our leaders and are clearly visibly lacking in the soldiers we see walking around this FOB.  And not just here, mind you.  The majority of soldiers I observe in my visits all around Iraq display multiple violations of AR 670-1 and governing uniform policies.
     Just a few examples off the top of my head:
          a)  Sleeves Down. The standard for uniforms sleeves is down.  There is nothing from any reg in Sham Div that authorizes the wear of the uniform with sleeves up, so where the soldiers are getting this idea from I don’t know.  Sure it’s hot out there.  Deal with it.
          b)  Eyewear.  Unauthorized eyewear is clearly defined in AR 670-1.  It says, and I quote: “Conservative prescription and nonprescription sunglasses are authorized for wear when in a garrison environment…Soldiers may not wear lenses with extreme or trendy colors, which include, but are not limited to, red, yellow, blue, purple, bright green, or orange.  Lens colors must be traditional gray, brown, or dark green shades.”  I don’t want to see one more pair of hippie-flower-child, John-Lennon-style glasses. I will personally rip them off the soldier’s face and stomp them to death in the dirt beneath my boot.
          c) Do-Rags.  Completely unacceptable.  Nowhere in AR 670-1 does it authorize the use and wear of bandanas tied, pirate-fashion, to the soldier’s skull.  The Kevlar helmet has undergone extensive testing and meets exacting design standards to fully soak up whatever sweat our soldiers emit.  From now on, I’m calling these Don’t-Rags.  Nuff said.
     Soldiers will continue to disobey orders and ignore uniform standards simply because first sergeants (or any sergeants for that matter) and company commanders choose to make them up as they go along.  Or is it that you’re just purposely choosing not to fulfill your contract not just with America but with the sons and daughters of our great country?  Look in the mirror and ask yourself:  Do I really truly achieve high levels of professionalism each and every day, or am I just happy “doing my own thing”?  Are you a “Toe-the-Liner”?  Which is it, Sergeant?  Will you choose Rigorous Discipline or Sloppy Standards?

2. Acts of Indiscipline.  We are all senior leaders and we should be farther ahead in some cases than we are.  The division has settled down into steady-state operations and that’s our focus now (combat ops).  It is our duty to ensure Soldiers fully understand standards of conduct.  And yet, every day the CG and I receive reports from staff leadership indicating otherwise.
     Let me give you a little example, a little tidbit which came to our attention during a staff briefing just yesterday.  This is what G-2 briefed, and I quote: “Good morning, sir.  Yesterday at zero-nine-hundred hours, adjacent to Baghdad International Airport, we discovered an abandoned shed which we have since dubbed ‘The Love Shack.’  Inside, we found several blankets, used condoms and empty beer cans.  We placed the shed under observation for the remainder of the day and at twenty-one-hundred hours last night, our efforts paid off when we caught a Special Forces sergeant first class and a specialist—one male, one female—entering the shack with backpacks.  Upon search and seizure, we discovered those knapsacks contained blankets, pillows, candles and one paperback book [The Greatest Love Sonnets of Shakespeare], but no other contraband.  We took both individuals into custody.”
     I don’t know about you, but I call that “sufficient evidence indicating intent to violate General Order Number Two.”  Especially that Shakespeare book.  I mean, who in the good goddamn would carry around something like that if it wasn’t for policy-violating behavior?
     I won’t say anything more on this subject except this (and, ladies please pardon my bluntness):  Tell your goddamn soldiers to keep their peckers in their pants.

3. Negligent Discharges.  The Shamrock Division has had an average of one negligent discharge per day ever since we rolled into town.  This epidemic of sloppy inattention is entirely unacceptable.  The latest incident involved a lieutenant teaching one of his soldiers how to load an M-249 machine gun…here in our Life Support Area.  The lieutenant apparently thought he had the weapon on half-cock, but it turned out it was on full-cock and, in the process of teaching the soldier what to do, the gun fired.  The round went into a nearby trailer and landed on the floor without hurting anybody.  Well, guess who that trailer belonged to?  That’s right, Sergeants: yours truly.  I am now taking that near-death round and am making a necklace out of it.  I will wear it every day for the rest of my days here in theater as way of reminding us of our higher calling as NCOs to rise above sloppy indiscipline.  That lieutenant’s just lucky he’s a lieutenant, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
     I’m one of the lucky ones.  Since January, we’ve had 14 fatalities due to negligent discharges.  I’ll bet those 14 individuals are now wishing their fellow soldiers had thought to check whether or not that selector switch was on SAFE.

4. Alcohol Abuse.  I cannot believe I’m even having to type those words while deployed to a combat zone, but the sad fact is that we have a problem with illegal consumption here in Sham Div.  The evidence speaks for itself.
     Not too long ago, word reached my ears that a certain battalion commander ordered an inspection of his companies’ milvans, connexes and quadcons because he suspected they were harboring alcohol.  This was prompted by the fact that one of his soldiers—a staff sergeant for God’s sake!—had showed up for guard duty inebriated to the gills.  They traced the trail of booze back to his humvee where they found empty vodka bottles rattling around in the back.  The NCO (a disgrace to our chevrons, in my opinion) later confessed he’d been getting the liquor from one of the civilian contractors (trust me, that individual has since been fired and is on his way back to the United States where just punishment will be meted out).  Upon further investigation, the battalion commander discovered that the NCO (I can hardly bear to call him that) had been storing the alcohol in his connex.  He’d even gone so far as to build a false wall in the connex and hide the booze behind it.
     This is a sad state of affairs, indeed.  We are here in Iraq to fight the evil of terrorism, not the demon of alcohol.  I understand that some of our soldiers may have been struggling with addictions even before we left Fort Stewart and that by being over here in the desert, the word “dry” takes on a whole other meaning for them.  But you know as well as I do, the Army has programs in place to deal with these sorts of things and that’s where your soldiers should be if they’re having problems—in counseling, not wasting all their energies building false walls in their connexes.
     I am not so naive to believe this sort of thing isn’t regularly happening on my watch.  I suspect this sort of Prohibition-style bootlegging could very well be rampant in the Shamrock Division and that there are a fair number of private speakeasies set up in connexes all around the FOB.  If you personally know of such a thing or—GOD FORBID—are the owner/operator of such a speakeasy, then I suggest you come forward with all the facts before it is too late.  Once we find out your dirty little secret, you will not—I promise you—WILL NOT like the consequences.

As always:

Cheers and Blessings,
CSM Tupplewhite

Inside the Writer's Notebook

Ernest Hemingway did it.  Marcel Proust did it.  And now I've done it.

The three of us, along with countless others, spent a goodly chunk of our days sitting in a sidewalk cafe handwriting lines and lines of text, both tight and sloppy, drinking cups of bitter coffee, blocking out the babble of those around us as the sun soaked into our shoulders and we sharpened our focus, our imaginations, and our pencils.  Hemingway had his Closerie des Lilas, Proust had his Brasserie Lipp, I had my Starbucks in Helena, Montana.

The state's capitol city is a far cry from Paris and Prospect Avenue is no Left Bank, but if I concentrated really hard, I could conjure up my own miniature "moveable feast" as I brainstormed some notes for Fobbit.  I was on a business trip to Helena and was making good use of my free time between attending sessions of the legislative interim committees.  I hunched over the metal table, the lattice-work pattern digging into my elbows, and held my pen with a death-choke grip.  My earbuds were drilled into my head and the "Classics and Soundtracks" playlist was dialed up on the iPod: Mozart and Ennio Morricone filled my mind in equal measure, blocking out the inane romantic cooings of a young tattooed couple at the next table and the static-hiss of traffic passing five feet away.

You should know that this is not normal behavior for me.  I write in solitude and always on a laptop computer.  My justifications:
• I hate the sight of my handwriting
• I get distracted by my aching fingers
• I need the safety net of all the words in my novel
On this day, however, I had no choice because my beloved HP Pavilion had caught a Trojan Horse virus and was in the shop for three days.  I spent the first two of those days bemoaning the fact that I couldn't get any work done on the novel.  I'd planned to make good headway during the five days I was in Helena, but those ambitions collapsed like a deck of cards in the wind when my computer went on the fritz.  Oh me, oh my, whatever will I do now? I moaned, wringing my hands.

Then I used one of those hands to reach up and slap myself.  Come back to reality, you lazy son of bitch.  You've got a pen, you've got a notebook, you've got a couple of dollars left on that Starbucks gift card.  Do the math.

And so I spent a morning on the left bank of Prospect Avenue, drinking coffee and writing until my fingers cramped into a grotesque claw.  I started slowly--at the top of the page, a character description: “Vaughn Strong, 46 years old, West Point grad...”--but then started to pick up speed and steam. Before I knew it, an hour had passed and I had four full pages of notes about Lt. Col. Vaughn Strong. When the computer tech called to say my computer was ready to be picked up, I was almost melancholy to leave behind the black notebook.  I've since returned to the notebook to work out another character's backstory and the results were pretty satisfying, so maybe there's something to this handwriting thing after all.

Here are scans of the pages from my Starbucks session last month.  This is pure brainflow--unedited, pockmarked with things I need to fact-check, and, thanks to my terrible penmanship, hard to read in places.  I have no idea what (if any) of this will make it into the final manuscript.  If nothing else, they're interesting artifacts from the day I got my Hemingway on.

Don't Know Much About Guns (an excerpt)

This is a short interlude in the novel (Fobbit), presumably from Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding's perspective (though it could be any Fobbit who didn't know the first thing about weapons).  This is just one of the sections I worked on today as I continue to burrow my way deeper into the revision process.

You’ve always been afraid of firearms.

One time in particular comes to mind:

When you were a kid—12, maybe 13—your Dad brought you along on a hunt for elk high in the mountains of Wyoming, the two of you walking for hours into what, at the start, had looked like distant purple folds of landscape.

Earlier that day, the two of you heard an elk bugle.  It sounded like a cross between a whale song and a creaking door and it got your Dad all excited, like the animal was calling, “Here I am! Come get me!”

This was only the second time he’d taken you out with a gun; the first was the previous hunting season when the pair of you had gone after sage grouse near Riverton.  That day, you’d carried the shotgun in two hands, holding it out and away from your body, unsure how it should fit with your posture.  It was heavy and you wondered if you’d be able to lift it to your shoulder.  But when your Dad stopped short and whisper-shouted, “There!” you brought it up, like a barbell, and slammed it against your collarbone.

You shot wild and high when the grouse exploded from the prairie.  Then you fell backward, sagebrush snagging at your clothes, and writhed on the ground, your shoulder burning from the kick of the gun.  At the time, you were certain a bone was broken.

Your father had looked at the vanishing bird, then spit off to one side and left without another word, his pants whispering through the sage as he walked back to the car.

So, you were surprised when he shook you awake that mid-winter day and told you to get dressed, and not to dilly-dally because the elk were waiting.  Apparently, your Dad was all about second chances.

The gun you carried this time was heavier and smelled of fresh oil.  Your mittens were black where they held the barrel.

You and your Dad climbed the hill toward the meadow his co-workers had told him about, assuring him there were easy elk to be found at that elevation.  The two of you post-holed through the knee-deep snow, churning even faster after you heard the elk bugle.  Your Dad didn’t even stop to give you time to eat one of the candy bars you knew he was carrying in his coat pocket.  You panted and high-stepped and you were all for finding the nearest log and telling him to go on while you waited, maybe helping yourself to a candy-bar snack as you did so.

Then the two of you stepped out of the trees, the promised meadow opening before you, and there it was, three hundred yards away: a young bull, neck as long as a swan’s, coat the color of toast.  The elk lifted its head and the small rack stood up like a candelabra.

Your Dad grabbed your shoulder and pulled you forward. “Hurry, before he bolts.”

You stripped off your mitten, tossed it to the snow, and lifted the gun.  The barrel wavered and dipped, that’s how heavy it was.

“Safety!” he hissed, then he reached over and pushed it off himself.  “Okay, now, breathe….aim….pull!”

You looked down the length of the gun.  The elk looked back along that same aperture of barrel.  Unchewed grass poked from both sides of its mouth.  It stared, chewed once, then snorted a puff of foggy breath through its nostrils.

You jerked the trigger.

At once, the world was filled with thunder and you were toppling backwards, the blue sky rushing down across your sight like a curtain, the gun flying out of your hands and soaring through that same blue sky.  Your head hit the snow with a loud WOOMPH!, digging a skull-shaped tunnel.  The powder-soft flakes crumbled down over your face.  You couldn’t feel your right arm and thought it had been severed at the shoulder.  You heard your Dad’s muffled voice and the crunch of snow as he came near to yank you up from the little grave you'd dug yourself.

For the second time in as many years, you had been shamed by a gun which threw you to the ground.

The two of you walked unspeaking and empty-handed down off the mountain, not even stopping to have a post-hunt candy bar along the way.

The Care Package King (an excerpt)

The following excerpt from an early draft Fobbit is in no way, shape, or form meant to be an insult to any of the dozens of kind-hearted strangers who sent me care packages during my time in Baghdad.  Believe me when I say that the letters and packages from home always cheered me up and gave me something to look forward to at the end of each day.  This is not to say that bits and pieces of what you're about to read aren't true--of course I scavenged real life and transmogrified it into fiction--but no one who sent me baby wipes or beef jerky should take any of it personally.  Except maybe the dingleberry who sent me the Whoopee Cushion.

Another note: Abe Hornsacker was later rechristened Abe Shrinkle in the final draft of the novel.

Captain Abe Hornsacker had earned a reputation around the Forward Operating Base as the Care Package King.

It started with a trickle of boxes from his mother, her friends at work, and a few of his on-line friends (those who posted regularly to the Civil War Re-enactors group at northVsouth.net).  Then, Hornsacker had learned there was a multitude of organizations back in the U.S.—mothers of deployed soldiers, mothers of dead soldiers, prayer circles at churches, Girl Scout troops, Harley-Davidson Vietnam Vet clubs, the Vermont Republican Purple Ladies, you name it—who had made a non-profit cottage industry of collecting items which would “bring the comfort of home” to “our men and women who have placed themselves in harm’s way.”

Abe shook his head and hmmph-ed aloud.  Harm’s way.  Most Americans had no concept of what it meant to live in a world of car bombs and mortar threats and severed arms cocked in the grass beside the road.  But, Abe was certain, most of them wanted to know.  They wanted to empathize with him and his soldiers and they felt slack and helpless sitting back there in the land of cheeseburgers and Paris Hilton perfume.  They wanted to say or do something, so they reached out a hand in the airport or they mailed a package of chocolate chip cookies to a person they would never meet, and still they knew it wasn’t enough, but at least it was something.

And so, across America—but especially in the central belt of the Heartland—men and women, boys and girls, young and old, armed with plastic baggies and black markers, formed assembly lines and packed boxes full of donations which had flooded into the collection center.  They spent their nights and weekends carefully nesting baked goods and toiletries into boxes bound for soldiers they didn’t know from Adam (or Eve).  They pulled the names off the websites they’d built, which allowed soldiers to sign up to be on the receiving end.  It gave these mothers and fathers, these teachers and students, these pastors and their flocks, hot butterflies of happiness inside their chests and though they didn’t truly understand what was going on over in Iraq and really had no idea what it was like to wear eighty pounds of body armor in the 120-degree heat, it helped salve their collective guilt over the way America had treated the boys returning from Vietnam.  Along with the yellow-ribbon stickers on the backs of their cars, it was a way for them to show the rest of the world—Democrats especially—that they really knew how to Support the Troops.  It was incredible how the mere screech of pulling tape across the flaps of just one box could bring spiritual harmony to a person, make her feel like she was doing Something that Mattered.

Once Captain Hornsacker stumbled across this network of do-gooders, there was no stopping him.  In truth, he was supposed to share what he got with the rest of his company, but he’d always been a hoarder and this just fed his hunger--like grabbing an addict by the hair, tipping back his head, and pouring baggies of cocaine into his nostrils.   Each day, Abe received anywhere from two to ten boxes of items carefully packaged by mothers in Omaha and upstate New York.  Many days, he made multiple trips between the company mailroom and his trailer, slogging through the ankle-deep gravel beneath his load of boxes.

Here he is now, moving earnestly across the rocks for another armful.  His bootsteps, rough and determined, sound like someone punching a box of Corn Flakes.  Other soldiers give way, parting on either side of him; they know he is a man on a mission.  He has that look in his eye.

On this day, Abe whistles a peppy Glenn Miller tune (something he’s picked up from a Big Band CD which came in a recent care package).  At this particular moment, he loves this war and all its bennies, he loves the time of day with its slow-boiling sunset, and he loves the way the rocks sound beneath his boots.

He even loves the corrugated-steel shack that serves as a battalion post office.  Truth be told, he has a bit of a crush on the mail clerk, despite her thick glasses and oily patches of acne high on her forehead.  If time and circumstances were any different, Abe wouldn’t give her a second glance on the street.  Here, however, he wants to sweep her off her feet, and waltz around the gravel path with her in his arms as he hums “Dese Dem Dose” (or maybe “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”).

Here she comes now, glasses askew, staggering out of the back room beneath the weight of five boxes.  One of them is almost certainly full of books—a set of encyclopedias from the feel of it.  She hoists the boxes onto the counter, then steps back and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, further enraging the pimples to an angry red.  She is breathing heavy and, of course, this stirs Abe's lust.

“Sir, I gotta ask: has there been a day when you didn’t get any mail?”

Abe puts a finger to his chin and ponders.  “Yes, I believe there was that Monday about two months ago when I went package-less.”

She laughs.  “We figure you’ve gotten more than 300 boxes so far.  You’re the King of Care Packages!”

There it is.  His title endorsed by a U.S. Government postal clerk.

To her, he is just an oddity—charming, but deserving of muttered curses because of all the backaches from lifting and toting those boxes every single blankety-blank day.  To Abe, however, Little Miss Mail Clerk is an angel, delivering fresh supplies of hand-packed home goodies every afternoon, starting at 1600 hours.

See how he skips back to his hootch, pondering the mystery of the boxes in his arms.  See that candy-store gleam in his eyes. 

Abe keeps to himself, spending most of his time in the trailer, arranging the various contents of his care packages and whiling away the remainder of his time reading the Louis L’Amour paperbacks which arrive with predictable regularity.

On this day, most of the boxes contain the usual assortment of granola bars, mixed nuts, hand sanitizer and magazines (Muscle & Fitness, Vermont Life, GQ, etc.). The encyclopedia-weight package turns out to be a year’s supply of shampoo and conditioner, along with three oily-looking fruitcakes in ziplock baggies.

One thick envelope in today's mail, however, is from a woman in Laramie, Wyoming—an oilman’s wife who fancies herself as something of a poet. She has written to Abe several times and he has answered promptly and enthusiastically, their correspondence revolving around Wyoming geology and literature and the joys and frustrations of being an unpublished poet trapped in a loveless marriage. In this day’s envelope, Mrs. Norma Shingledecker has included a two packages of jerky “made from genuine Cheyenne beef” along with another epistle (handwritten in lavender ink) about her “bluebird-soundtracked life on the High Plains.”  Abe sits there and snacks on the Wyoming cows as he reads the two-page letter she’s enclosed:

Wyoming got a big snow last week—in the north.  But down here (in Laramie), it’s all burning blue skies and the golden tumble of leaves from the aspen and cottonwoods when the wind shakes the boughs.  I saw a tiny warbler in the juniper bush outside my window two days ago; she’s on her way south…The fishing, too, is magnificent…mostly because of what you can see and smell and hear when you’re standing in the middle of the warmish, slow-moving Platte River.  Mint.  Dew-frosted sage.  The trilly scoldings of kingfishers and ravens.  The careful sip of a rainbow trout…The farewell serenade of Canada geese which breaks one’s heart with the reminder of seasons…I feel blessed every day to live in a place where nature still has the upper hand.  Ah, if only I felt the same glorious surge of love for my husband, Ray.  He’s a stinking, no-good bastard who always finds it necessary to stop at the Rockin’ R before he sloppy-stumbles his way home to an ice-cold dinner every night….But don’t get me started.  No doubt you already have too much to fret away at your nerves and occupy your mind over there for me to be going on about Ray.

Abe carefully re-folds Norma Shingledecker’s letter, tucks it back into its lavender-scented envelope and turns to the next box, ripping away the tape which resists with an angry squeal.  More socks.  Abe doesn't have enough feet for all the socks he's received since January.

The Care Package King lived alone with his accumulated goodwill in his trailer, a single room which was—he’d paced it out—11 x 13, wood paneled, tile-floored, with one window, an air conditioning unit, a metal wall locker, a two-drawer night stand, a small lamp and a bed which comes with a pillow, a comforter and one sheet.  He got lucky with the sheets—his were beige with an ivy pattern running along the borders; the KBR contractors had issued some of his fellow officers sheets with cartoon characters like Strawberry Shortcake and Care Bears.

Thanks to Abe’s care-package hoarding, wall space was getting squeezed to a minimum.  After the first few weeks, he’d custom-built a large shelving unit along one side of the trailer and shoved his bed into the corner as tightly as he could just to accommodate his care package treasures.

Over the months, he’d received dried fruit, microwave popcorn, paperback books, packets of ketchup and mustard swiped from fast-food restaurants, comic books, DVDs, a bar of blackberry soap, four boxes of envelopes, three cans of apple juice, two kitchen scrubber sponges, gel insoles for combat boots, nail clippers, chocolate chip cookies, lemon bars, eye drops, bookmarks, pencils advertising local insurance companies, powdered drink mixes, tampons (at a site where he’d registered as “A. Hornsacker”), months-old copies of Car & Driver, Cosmopolitan, Newsweek, and Organic Gardening, combs, toothbrushes, butterscotch candies, rosary beads, photos from the 18th Annual Fireman’s Pig Roast in Eau Claire, breath mints, cheese crackers, raisins, band-aids, a tuft of pubic hair tenderly sealed in a Ziploc baggie by a Ms. Wanda Showalter (recently divorced) in Boise, cocoa mix with mini marshmallows, boxes upon boxes of Kleenex, a calendar with Norman Rockwell paintings, foot powder, jock itch cream, the complete Louis L’Amour collection (minus Buckskin Run and The Rustlers of West Fork), twenty-one bottles of Tylenol, crossword puzzles, bookmarks, fifteen copies of The Da Vinci Code, miniature American flags (made in China), a studio “boudoir” portrait of Ms. Wanda Showalter (still divorced), antibiotic ointment, a CD of Irish jig music, original cast soundtracks of South Pacific and Cats, cans of tuna fish, thirty-six decks of playing cards, Christmas decorations which arrived in February, Hershey’s Kisses that came in one glob of melted chocolate and tinfoil, kazoos, a pair of slippers, stationery, Post-It Notes "From the Desk of Jack Cramer," powdered laundry soap, saltwater taffy, sunscreen, and baby wipes. Oh Lord, the baby wipes!

Somewhere along the line, some soldier at the beginning of the war must have mentioned to his mother that he and his buddies had no way to wash their hands after eating T-rats out in the middle of the desert where running water was hard to come by (at least in the early days of the invasion, this was very true), so if she could manage to send a box or two of baby wipes to him and the rest of the guys, that would be totally awesome.  Word must have spread.  Since then, baby wipes had been appearing on the “Much Needed” lists at the care package websites, and now Abe Hornsacker’s west wall was completely bricked with plastic tubs of baby wipes.  They numbered in the hundreds, floor to ceiling, and provided a noise buffer against the Blackhawks chopping low overhead.

They also served a more immediate, economic purpose for Abe Hornsacker.  He hadn’t known what to do with them until 2nd Lieutenant Pepperhill came to Bravo Company in March.  Pepperhill’s wife had given birth one month before he shipped out.  It was their first child and Pepperhill wasn’t taking it well.  So, every three days like clockwork, he paid Hornsacker $4 a tub just to take it back to the privacy of his hooch and be able to pull out a baby wipe and smell the antiseptic powdery perfume and remember what his baby’s butt smelled like back in Lafayette, Louisiana.  There were nights when his soldiers came back from patrol and found their lieutenant sitting there on his cot rubbing a baby wipe all over his face and crying deep, heavy homesick sobs.

Sometimes, Hornsacker received large envelopes full of letters written by entire classrooms of students at the behest of their teachers.

Dear Hero,
Thank you for your hard work on keeping me and my family safe.  I know that you have been their for a long time.  It’s been hard for everyone.
Sinserily your friend,
Fernando M.
P.S.  Stay safe.  Oh by the way, even if you die you will still be my hero.

and,

To Abe: Yore in my famly’s prayers evry nite at dinner.  Be verey verey verey verey verey verey verey verey verey verey verey verey carful. My name is Kirsten age 7.  Yore friend, Kirsten.

and,

Dear Soljer,
Mrs. Parker is makeing me write this.  I don’t like Mrs. Parker.  Did you like your teechers?  Teechers are the worst.  They’re worser than splinters.  Well, I hope you are well over there.  Stay cool!
Darius K. Abernathy

Like the rest of the care packages, these letters written by boys and girls gripping pencils in their fists and leaning over their desks with poked-out tongues filled Abe Hornsacker with gallons of pride.  If even the least of these--the schoolchildren and the lonely housewives--were standing behind him, then surely he and his men were doing the right thing over here.  If these care packages were any indication, this war was indeed winnable.

Standing on the corner of Fact Avenue and Fiction Boulevard (an excerpt)

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of one of the saddest moments I saw during my time in Iraq.  There were plenty of bombings, sniper attacks, and just plain ugly sectarian violence which splashed gallons and gallons of blood across the country in 2005; but of all the attacks, this one stood out.  The event has worked its way into the novel, of course.  Here's how I recorded it in my journal--bear in mind, I wasn't an eye-witness, only a third-hand ear-witness (full disclosure: this isn't exactly as it appeared in my handwritten journal; in the past five years, I've cleaned it up and smoothed it out to a small degree):

Shortly after 10 a.m., a company of soldiers enters a neighborhood in east Baghdad—the section they’re now calling New Baghdad.  As if the name, like a fresh coat of paint, could make a difference.

The American soldiers are there to establish a secure perimeter—a cordon, in military terms—while another unit from a different American division searches for a suspected IED somewhere inside the perimeter.

The day is hot, the air thick with dust carried on the morning winds which have dropped a pale brown curtain over the city.  Along the cordon, gunners behind their .50-calibers scan their sectors of fire, watching for anything out of place.  A wink of metal from a second-story window.  The way shoppers give a wide berth around a dog carcass.  A man dressed in unseasonably heavy clothes speaking into a cell phone.  Anything, anything at all.  The gunners have tunnel vision, their minds buzzing like hives.  Their eyes go all telephoto on them.

The morning is hot, dusty and unravels slowly.  The soldiers mutter quietly to themselves and in the lulls of conversation think they can even hear the tick of their wristwatches.

Some soldiers, not as alert as the gunners, get out of the humvees—not only to stretch and smoke, but to greet the children who have rushed the military patrol, as they always do when the Americans roll through.

“Mister! Hey, Mister!” the children shout, their palms out, their fingers splayed.  They know what these soldiers are good for—automatic candy dispensers.  The Americans always carry plastic bags of taffy and chewing gum wherever they go.  The kids are drawn like ants to sugar.  If they’re really lucky, they’ll get a Beanie Baby or a soccer ball.

Today, the soldiers give fistfuls of candy to the first wave of children, but then they must turn back to the business of keeping the perimeter secure.  The children keep coming with their insistent, spread-open fingers.

“No more, no more today,” the soldiers tell the children.

But still the children persist and crowd around the GIs.  The Americans hate to do it, but they put on their tough-guy masks, scanning the streets and trying not to look at the children, hoping they’ll eventually get the message and go away.  The soldiers, at least most of them, love it when the children come around—reminds them of home, the carefree things in life, Saturdays in the park and all that shit.  But they have a job to do, and it doesn’t mean standing there like candy vending machines for these underprivileged rugrats.

After half an hour, maybe the children have forgotten about the candy, maybe they’re just curiously touching the camelback water backpacks, the heavy flak vests, the flashlights and earplug cases dangling like jewelry.  Maybe they practice some high fives with their American heroes.

The soldiers reluctantly play along as best they can, keeping one eye on the road and the shadowy houses while slapping palms with the kids in a gruff-tender acknowledgement.

But still the children persist.  Now they’re giggling and pretending to play grab-ass with the soldiers.  It’s all happy fun.  Some of the soldiers even crack a smile.

From their perches on the humvee roofs, the gunners hear the frivolity and it distracts them.  It breaks their concentration, but that’s okay because their brains have been on high alert for an hour and by now they’re pretty exhausted after looking at the same doorways and storefronts, over and over.  They glance down at the other soldiers, the darting and dodging kids.  The gunners grin, but then snap back to reality and remember the mission.  They turn their backs on their buddies talking and laughing with the kids, and scan another sector of fire.

That’s when the car, which had been prowling through an alley adjacent to the road, decides to make its move.  For the past ten minutes, it has been making unseen passes through the alleys near the military cordon, watching for a weakness in the line of humvees, waiting for the right moment.  It is like a lion, moving on whisper paws through the shadows of the grass, stalking with professional finesse, before it coils then roars forward, the engine growling as the driver accelerates into the open for the kill.

Maybe one of the soldiers standing on the street looks up and knows exactly what is about to happen, maybe he tries to scream but the “No!” catches like a bone in his throat.  Maybe he raises his hands to fruitlessly push away the car, or maybe those hands grab the two nearest children and pull them close in a protective embrace.

Maybe, on the other hand, no one even notices until the grille of the car is upon them.

Maybe the gunners have been fatally distracted by the burble of laughter and the cries of “Hey, Mister, Mister!”

The explosion sucks all sound into an awful vacuum, turning this one small patch of Baghdad into a silent film full of smoke and gore.  In the silence, the car incinerates with such force that later, much later, when the fire hoses have doused and cooled the scene, the only thing that will remain for investigators to log into evidence is the engine block.

Children fly into the air, cartwheeling, their bodies aflame.  One boy will die with barely a mark on him, but all of his clothes will be blown from his body and that very day, before the sun goes down, his sobbing father will place him in a coffin like that, naked and fetally-curled.  Seven or eight children—who can bear to look long enough to make an accurate count?—are flung against a stone wall in front a house.  Their bodies strike the wall and collapse in a heap on the ground.  If you didn’t look too closely, you might think it was that pile of dirty clothes which you keep reminding yourself you need to wash before the pile grows and gets too far out of hand.  If you did look closely, however, you’d see a little girl abruptly sheared of both legs, her blackened face still cooking.  Another boy, not four feet away, has his hand raised toward his face, as if he is about to suck his thumb.  There is a fist-sized hole in his forehead, a neatly-scooped hole that is so horribly, horribly out of place but yet so undeniably real in its seething red presence.  It insists you look at it and later, much later, when you are on your computer staring at the photograph which has been sent to you by a Brigade Public Affairs Officer recommending that you release the photos because “the world needs to know what these bastards are doing,” when that photo is lividly dominating your computer screen, it insists that your eyes be drawn to that angry, fist-sized hole.  And the only words your own brain, still safely enclosed behind bone and skin, can form are “So young, so goddamned young.”

Back at the humvees, someone is screaming.  But no one can hear him because all sound has been momentarily sucked away and the only thing left is a sharp, high ringing. And, in that silent, ringing soundtrack this is the movie one has to look at: the smoke, the small flames licking the solitary engine block, the now-scattered children, the 27 dead (including one of the American soldiers), the 18 wounded, the charred and mangled bicycle, the empty sandals, the pools of blood, the four half-shattered buildings, and the three Iraqi men rushing up with blankets to cover the dead.

Reading back over it, this "non-fiction" passage betrays even more of its fiction roots. As I mentioned, I wasn't there--I was sitting in my air-conditioned cubicle miles and miles away--so the majority (perhaps all) of what you just read was filtered through my imagination.  Clever words filled the interstices of what I never saw.

When I chose to insert this same (slightly-embellished) passage in Fobbit, I added an additional section which places the novel's characters at the scene.  This is just one of many collisions between the truth of 2005 and the fabrication of my novel.  Here is what comes a dozen pages later in the book:

When it happened, Lumley been turning to say something to Lieutenant Fledger.  Thinking back on it now, he couldn’t remember what it was.  Maybe a complaint about next month’s twelve-on, one-off schedule; maybe a joke about going on ghost patrols.  Must not have been too important.

What happened next jolted everything from his head.

He heard, rather than saw—no, scratch that: felt, rather than heard, the car roaring across the open space.  Lumley was standing about 100 meters away from Boordy, but the vibration of the engine went up through his spine as if he himself had been standing in the path of the car.

He turned away from Lieutenant Fledger, with whatever he’d planned to say still dangling on his tongue.  For one nano-second, he was pissed at this pressure-noise interrupting his comment to the LT.

Then it all uncoiled like a whip.

Lumley caught the explosion in the corner of his eye, the white flash already blossoming in orange petals which quickly curled black.

He heard Lieutenant Fledger say “Fu—” before everything went silent, the detonation sucking away all sound.

Until then, for the past three hours, the day had been hot, the mission boring.  They’d all been lulled half-asleep by the heat waves shimmering off the hoods of their humvees.  The wind pushed the dust through New Baghdad, same as always.  Once the kids’ initial demands for candy had dwindled, there had been nothing to hold the soldiers’ interest.  Sure, they kept scanning the terrain, but honestly, once you’ve looked at the same doorway with four dozens sweeps of the eye, it gets pretty fucking old.  Yeah, they were all feeling the lullaby of the distant, bleating goats and the squeak of the gunners rotating in their sling seats, back and forth, back and forth, scan, scan, scan.

The day pulled onward slowly, like it was dragging iron weights behind it.

Once, one of them declared he couldn’t hold it any longer and relieved himself against the side of his humvee.  That held their interest for a short while—the patter of piss hitting the rubber tire—but when it was over and the soldier said “Aaahhhh…the pause that refreshes,” they all went back to what they’d been doing.  They scanned their sectors of fire and the minutes trickled by.

Lumley went around, checking for heat stroke, squeezing camelbacks to check water levels, commiserating with the occasional “Yeah, this sucks balls, alright.”

One or two of them—including Boordy, apparently—hadn’t been able to resist playing grab-ass with the few kids who still hung around the perimeter.  It didn’t distract them from the mission—not that much, anyway—and they didn’t see the harm in trading high-fives or engaging in a little freeze-tag.  Cross-cultural international relations, that’s what it was.  Boordy, evidently, pretended he was a carnival sideshow strongman and showed off by lifting two thin Iraqi girls off the ground, one on each side of him.  The little girls, kind of cute even with their rat’s-nest hair and snot-crusted noses, giggled as they held on to Boordy’s biceps and rose two feet off the ground when he curled his arms upward.  They dangled like jewelry off this funny American.

But Boordy was always like that, flexing his strength for all to see.  He was a bull trapped in a china shop—usually didn’t know where to turn with the clumsy power of his own body.  He must have thought it was some pretty funny shit to be doing curls with those little girls.  He probably would have laughed at how that sounded: girl-curls.

Yeah, Boordy. He was cool, that Boordy.  Fucking-A, man.  He looked like an ox, but don’t let that fool you.  He came off pretty bad-ass, tough as a cement wall, but deep down he was a give-the-shirt-off-his-back kind of guy.  He was strong and he took that strength seriously, like it was his personal mission to protect the weaker ones around him.  Generous motherfucker, too.  You need someone to pull your graveyard because you stayed up too late playing Halo the night before?  Boordy was your go-to guy, no questions asked, no strings attached.

That’s why nobody was surprised when they later pieced it together, what they’d seen out of the corner of their eyes.  It was typical Boordy to react like he did, going into protector-mode by instinct.   When he realized the car was leaping right for him, Boordy would have pulled those little girls tight against his chest, wrapping himself around them as best he could.  He must have known it was a useless gesture, that he was flesh and not iron, but what else are you gonna do in that split-second of reflex?  You’re gonna obey the electric impulse of your nerves and the natural pull of your muscles, right?  You’re gonna grab those little girls and hold on tight.  You’re gonna duck your head, let the top of your Kevlar helmet take the brunt of whatever’s coming your way.  You’re gonna tuck yourself over those two little rat’s-nest heads, the three of you breathing together in that tight space for the smallest of moments, and you might even manage to gasp, “Hold on,” to these little girls who have no idea what the words are but who certainly know what they mean.

Hold on, here we go.  Like the three of them had reached the crest of a rollercoaster and were hovering on the plunge.

From where he stood 100 meters away, Sergeant Brock Lumley didn’t actually see the incinerating evaporation of Corporal Nathan Boordy, but he felt it.  Oh fuck yeah, he felt it all the way to the marrow.  As he fell to the ground, pushed there by the concussion and cradled in the vacuum of silence, he thought maybe it was just him, maybe he was having a stroke or a blackout or something, maybe they would all be rushing to his aid in a few moments.  For that little sliver of time, he was embarrassed and thought how his men would make sure to give him a rash of shit for passing out like a pussy.

Then, over his head, he saw the cloud of boiling blooming smoke, and he realized he was probably wrong, that it wasn’t just him.  Maybe it was all of them.  Maybe they were all dead.

But when the body parts and bits of ragged flesh started raining on him, he knew for certain it wasn’t him.  It took him a moment to slide back to the fact that he was still alive, and then another moment to realize this was Boordy falling from the sky.