Friday Freebie: Fobbit by David Abrams

Congratulations to Jane Rainey, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie contest: The Incredible Journey of Plants by Stefano Mancuso.

As I mentioned earlier, this month marks the 10th Anniversary of The Quivering Pen. So, in honor of that decade of blogging, I’m offering up a signed copy of the book that was there at the very beginning: Fobbit, by yours truly. The blog proved to be a sort of child’s growth chart for the novel: I wrote about the process and content for several months before Fobbit was fully polished and eventually accepted for publication by Grove/Atlantic in 2012. Thanks to all of you who have reviewed the book over the years and who have come out through all kinds of weather to the bookstore readings. Your support has been one of the two-by-fours holding this blog upright throughout the years. Anyway, by now you Friday Freebie regulars know the drill: Keep scrolling for more information on the book and how to enter the contest...

In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The Forward Operating base, or FOB, is like the back-office of the battlefield – where people eat and sleep, and where a lot of soldiers have what looks suspiciously like a desk job. Male and female soldiers are trying to find an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, grunts are playing Xbox and watching NASCAR between missions, and a lot of the senior staff are more concerned about getting to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special than worrying about little things like military strategy. Darkly humorous and based on the author’s own experiences in Iraq, Fobbit is a fantastic debut that shows us a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war.

If you’d like a chance at winning Fobbit, simply e-mail your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail.

The Fine Print
One entry per person, please (or, two if you share the post—see below). Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on May 28 at which time I’ll draw the winning names. I’ll announce the lucky reader on May 29.

The Finer Print
If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your e-mail address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

The Finest Print
Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

A Decade of Quivering

Ten years ago this month, I found myself closing in on the end of the first draft of my first published novel. [cue montage of furrowed brow, fingers tapping keys, pencil gripped between teeth]

At the same time, I was feeling full of book chatter, bursting at the seams like I’d just overeaten at Heavy-Meats Burger Shack, but had no one with whom to converse. I was lonely for a book community. [cue montage of staring out the window, heavy sighs, the silvery track of a single tear caught in mid-afternoon light]

So, I birthed this blog.

It arrived on May 2, 2010, 8 pounds, 6 ounces and full of self-doubt, wallowing in “dreams of Mailer, Updike, and Dickens.” In that first blog post, titled “And So It Begins...,” I began by saying: “I am standing on the threshold of the first draft of my second novel (the first, an oddly funny story about a midget stuntman, remains unpublished—and perhaps unpublishable). I am days away from typing the final period of Fobbit: A Novel.”

Fourteen days, to be precise.

And, in another two years, the messy manuscript became a reality between covers.

Random, idle, self-serving chatter about Fobbit soon faded to the background and more outward-focused book chatter commenced. And has been commencing and re-commencing, in fits and starts, over the decade.

When I started The Quivering Pen in 2010, I didn’t know how long I could sustain it. Would it last a year? Would it flash in the pan and then join the other fads of my life: stamp collecting, flip-phone games, that time I reigned as mayor of Foursquare, etc.?

Well, I’m here, and you’re here, so something must have gone right....

Damn the self-doubt and full steam ahead! Until...

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine blurted out in mid-conversation to me: “Blogs—does anybody really read them anymore?”

I hid my wince with a laugh and an “I know, right?!”

All I can say is, blogs may be as useless as the appendix, but at least we carry those around for a while before they’re taken out.

I like this blog because it carves me a space, a tiny little scrape of the penknife against the Internet, where I can talk about the books I love and all the ones I think I will love in my future. It is a place where I can share bits and pieces of my own writing, hesitantly and nervously. It is a big overstuffed chair where I can settle in at the end of the day and open up my mail and show you the new books that came. And this blog has also been a microphone to which I’ve invited other writers to step up and share the stories of their “first time” or perhaps to take us on a guided tour of their home library. This blog has been all this—plus recipes and music—for ten years.

And yet, sometimes I fret that this blog is obsolete, that I’m trying to drive a dinosaur-drawn carriage with a whip. Does anyone read this blog anymore? (cups ear, waits for echo)

Well, even if I’m back to being alone, even if everyone else has moved on to other platforms (high, towering platforms from which to dive into new ways of communicating that are cleaner and simpler), even if I’m typing into the void, I think I’ll keep on doing it—maybe not for another ten years, but at least for another ten months. Somehow, it feels like a good time to be talking about books. We need them now more than ever.

[cue montage of dinosaur-rider wheeling his mount around, clicking between his teeth, “Giddyup, T-Rex,” and riding toward the sunset.]

New Year, New City, New Apartment, New Writing Space

“Oh, wow,” I said as we took our seats at the large table in the back room of the title company.

“What?” Jean said.

“This is the same table and the same chairs we sat in eleven years ago.”

My wife took stock of the room. “You’re right. That is weird.”

“Full circle,” I said as I reached for a pen to start signing the papers.

It was the end of a decade-long chapter in our lives, a long chapter full of ups and too many downs for the both of us. It was the longest either of us had lived in one place in our entire lives, but now it was time to leave Butte, Montana and put it in our rear-view mirror as we drove an hour north along the interstate to Helena. I held the pen lightly in my fingers and swirled my signature across a couple dozen papers, closing the sale of the house we’d bought in February 2009. In California, a gentleman we’d never met would be doing the same thing at roughly the same time. And then, our separate inks drying, the deed was done. The house was out of our hands.

Oh, Argyle Street House, I have loved you so over the years and my throat is soggy with tears at the thought of leaving you, but I think you and I both knew it was time to go. We made a lot of memories together, you and I.

This 4,000-square-foot Craftsman home, built in 1920 has housed many families over the years: the Martins, the Duttons, the Archibalds, the Casebeers. The hardwood floors and the narrow winding staircases creak with the voices of ghosts; the huge, immovable safe in the basement holds its own secrets; the hardwood bar has been polished by generations of drinkers’ elbows. Over the years of our ownership, the whole house shone with beauty, particularly after Jean finished adding her own beautiful design touches to each room—a vintage-white look that was prominently featured in the nationally-circulated magazine Cottages and Bungalows (you can see the sexy-gorgeous photo shoot here).

This was the house where I finished the final draft of my first novel, Fobbit, and wrote the entirety of my second novel, Brave Deeds. There, in the upstairs bedroom I converted into my writing space, is where this very blog was born. Many writer friends have stayed overnight in the spare bedrooms, and polished the basement bar with their elbows (along with a few tipsy slops of gin and tonics). This is the house where I have read more than a thousand books and which, until recently, I kept ten times that number on the tall white bookcases lining the basement. This was the house of Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries and epic video-game tournaments. It has been home to five cats and the occasional visiting dog (whose departure was always greeted with wary feline stretches and sniffings). It has ridden unharmed through several earthquakes, been battered by wind and snow, and has seen its walls drenched more than once by burst pipes. But it was always kind to us and never said a word during our multiple interior renovations (“Mrs. Abrams,” I said, trying to sound Reagan-esque as we re-did the kitchen several years ago, “tear down these walls!”). And during two Christmases, and two Christmases only, Argyle Street House endured in silent suffering the ignominy of my talentless attempts to string lights around the front porch.

Goodbye, good house. We will always hold you in our hearts with love and appreciation.

Not so much with Butte itself. I have feelings about the city and they’re....complicated. Soon after we moved there, Jean and I were full of hope and optimism for Butte, a once-great mining town whose glory days are crumbling in the past but whose renewal seems to always be on the menu of conversation at the local coffee shops. “It’s on the cusp of revitalization,” we told ourselves. “Any day now, it’s gonna turn the corner and really be something.” The city’s motto is “The Richest Hill on Earth,” and we hoped we could help the place cash in on that promise. But our payday never came and we eventually realized we were fools for waiting on the town to turn a corner.

Butte has been punched to the ground time and time again by the economy (and the occasional corrupt city leadership), but it’s always managed to stagger woozily to its feet and continue the fight. Over the years, we’ve heard it all. Butte is quirky, Butte is a hard nut to crack, Butte is beautiful, Butte is fugly, Butte is Butte and don’t, by God, try to change it. About two years ago, Jean and I realized that the town was starting to drag us down emotionally and physically. And so, eighteen months ago, we started to plot our escape.

At first, we thought we would literally escape in an RV, roaming the country like nomads in our 26-foot Thor Vegas; but one evening of sober math and writing a list of pros and cons made us realize that wouldn’t be financially feasible. And so we started planning for other options. Around this time, I got a new boss at work and I screwed my courage to the sticking point by going in to ask her if she thought telecommuting would be a viable possibility. To my surprise and overwhelming gratitude, she said yes. And so, starting this week, I am officially telecommuting from Helena, driving the hour south to Butte to my office just one or two days a week. The rest of the time, I’ll be working from our apartment in the state’s capital city.

The Blackstone in the 1930s

Ah yes, the apartment. Let me tell you about this place we found: we have fallen in love with it as surely as any high school geek fell in love with Molly Ringwald by the final reel of an 80s movie. The Blackstone is an old-school apartment building, built in 1915 (yes, we like to date older men—what of it?) and still going strong today with twenty-eight units for rent among its four floors. It has the atmosphere, as someone said on my Facebook page, of an apartment building from an 80s sitcom. I tend to liken it to apartments from noir films from the 1940s and 50s. I mean, it even has an old timey-time manual cage elevator.

Our apartment is also less than one-quarter the size of the living space than what we had at Argyle Street House.

We are not complaining, we are adjusting.

The Blackstone is located just off of Last Chance Gulch, Helena’s historic district, and we’re within easy striding distance of a dozen good (and gluten-free-friendly!) restaurants, two movie theaters, several banks, the post office, two yoga studios, art galleries, antique stores, the civic center, and not one but two independent bookstores. There is even a community theater kitty-corner from the Blackstone for goodness sake! The public library is less than half a mile away. It’s a tread-worn cliche, but I’ll say it anyway: Life is good.

We’re in a two-bedroom, one-bath on the fourth floor—the entire east side of the building—and, to our joy, we still have hardwood floors (with a whole new playlist of creaks). Here are a few photos of the decorating magic Jean has already performed in our new small space (with many more tweaks and changes to come, she assures me), complete with the typical feline photobombs....

The Entryway

The Living Room

The Dining Room

The Bedroom

The spare bedroom is taken up with a bed (go figure), so I have settled on a different location for my writing space: a sun porch near the back of the apartment which looks out onto the backside of the Blackstone and the opposite sun porches and neighbors’ windows. There is a strong Rear Window vibe going on here. I expect to gather new stories every time I glance out the window. A plastic owl perches on the top railing of my fire escape and I still do a startled double-take when I walk into the office. It’s not a huge writing space, but why should that matter much when all I need is a laptop and a place to set my coffee mug? I managed to get a metal shelf loaded with about two hundred of the books that are on my immediate to-be-read list (it’s only the tip of the TBR iceberg—the real list goes on for fifty single-spaced pages on my computer).

But even in this cold and drafty room, I find pleasure and comfort. I have my reading chair, I have a large folding table that works well as a desk, I have some companionable books smiling at me, I have my three cats that take turns curling like soft fuzzy heaters on my lap, I have the sound of my wife listening to YouTube videos in the next room, and, by walking a few short steps out to the dining room, I have a beautiful view of dawn breaking behind the spires of the Cathedral of Saint Helena a few blocks away. I’ll say it again: Life is damn good and I’m glad I’m here in this moment in this new town in this new life at the dawn of a new decade. Turn the page, begin a new chapter.

War-mocker: New Interview in Mount Hope magazine

There’s a new interview with yours truly in the latest issue of Mount Hope magazine, published by Roger Williams University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. My thanks to writer Hannah Little and editor Edward J. Delaney (author of The Big Impossible) for giving me the space to talk about my war novels Fobbit and Brave Deeds. Other topics of discussion: the transition from military to civilian life, James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, my second (and current) career with the Bureau of Land Management, the 4:30 a.m. alarm, and my two current works in progress (Happily and Dubble). Here’s how the conversation begins:

Mount Hope:  You’ve described yourself as a “people pleaser” in the past. Did you worry about what your fellow servicemen or colleagues would think of the satirical honesty in your first novel, Fobbit?

David Abrams:  I share the same pre-publication anxieties as most writers: Will readers appreciate what I have to say? Will they love my characters or loathe them? Will the book become a Frisbee that’s tossed across the room in disgust? This is all the needless worry and fretting creators are riddled with when it comes time to publicly unveil the creation.
       In my case, concern, and trepidation about what military members, veterans, and their families—particularly those who’ve lost loved ones in combat—would think about Fobbit was paramount in my mind in the months before it was released. This was a novel that, on the surface, appears to mock all that patriotic Americans hold dear to their hearts. Would they think I was ridiculing or diminishing what they or their families had sacrificed for this country? It kept me awake at night.
       As it turns out, I could have slept peacefully: Fobbit was embraced with open arms by my fellow servicemembers. I was surprised, humbled, and brought to tears on a couple of occasions when people came up to me after readings or emailed me to say how much they appreciated Fobbit and what it had to say. I learned a valuable lesson with that first book: trust your readers to “get it.” They knew I was mocking the bureaucracy of war, not those who were only carrying out their orders in a complex tangle of a war.

MH:  Would you say that writing acts as an outlet of sorts for expressing your frustrations through snark and sarcasm? Such as the parts of Fobbit that show the ridiculous bureaucracy behind each press release, or your short story “Thank You” (if I am remembering the title correctly), which is both funny and heartbreaking.

DA:  Oh, absolutely. Humor is a way for me to vent about issues that frustrate and anger me. Fobbit was a guided missile launched into the sky, aimed toward all the things that tied me in knots during my year in Iraq: the tangle of bureaucratic red tape, the clowns in the White House who never seemed to understand what was happening in the desert, and the blind American patriotism that vigorously waved the flag while glossing over the real questions like why were we there in the first place? I vented and vomited my anger all over the pages of Fobbit while, at the same time, I perfumed it with jokes.
       Don’t get me wrong—the United States did accomplish some good things in that country over the long slog of the war. And while I would never discount the value of the humanitarian projects the military undertook during my time in Iraq (which included building schools, upgrading and providing security for power plants, and repairing infrastructure—which U.S. forces had damaged and destroyed during the invasion-slash-liberation), I would characterize most of our efforts there as one-step-forward-half-a-step-back. It was that disconnect between the way the Fox News anchors seemed to sing The Star-Spangled Banner while reporting the news and what I saw actually taking place on the ground which was the ultimate driving force in writing this novel. One of my favorite quotes from Flannery O’Connor is about how sometimes you have to use “violent” literary ways to get your vision across to a hostile, ignorant, or reluctant audience: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” In my case, I loaded those guided missiles with whoopee cushions. It was totally cathartic for me and gave me a sense of comfort knowing that I’d vented my feelings. It just so happened that spew of anger manifested itself as humor.

Read the rest of the interview here

The First Time I Found a Title For My Novel

What you’re seeing here is the very first photo of Fobbit when it lived on a thumb drive and was called Fobber.

I recently stumbled across this image on my computer and it was as unrecognizable to me as a grainy ultrasound photo is to parents after their child is finally born, weaned, and raised to be a walking, giggling toddler. For starters, that name, that work-in-progress title! How wrong-headed could I have been?

I imagine I wrote the term “Fobber” on a slip of a Post-It note and bound it in tape to the thumb drive even before I’d left Iraq in December 2005, back when the manuscript was still a messy jumble of words and when—then, as now—I struggled with the correct grammatical usage of “that” and “which.” In its infant years, Fobbit suffered from an identity crisis, starting with its title.

Some of you are perhaps wondering about the definition of either of those words. That’s okay; before I joined the Army in 1988, I couldn’t have told you the difference between a military colonel and Colonel Sanders. For the un-militarized, a Fobbit is someone in a war zone who rarely goes “outside the wire” into the “real war.” It’s a portmanteau that (or “which”?) marries Forward Operating Base (FOB) with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbits who, as those who’ve read The Lord of the Rings know, were reluctant to leave the safety of their shire. In another time and another war, Fobbits were known as pogues or REMFs (whose full meaning rhymes with “rear echelon brother truckers”). I know all about the derogatory slang term because, between January and December of 2005, I was a Fobbit with the 3rd Infantry Division serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. As I wrote of my main character (a thinly-veiled version of yours truly) in the novel published by Grove/Atlantic in 2012,

As a Fobbit, Chance Gooding Jr. saw the war through a telescope, the bloody snarl of combat remained at a safe, sanitized distance from his air-conditioned cubicle. And yet, here he was on a FOB at the edge of Baghdad, geographically central to gunfire. To paraphrase the New Testament, he was in the war but he was not of the war.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to that baby photo of the novel. The sight of it on my computer the other day prompted me to look up my errant use of the word “Fobber” in my journal and that sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole of memory. Here is the first time I ever typed the word in my diary:

February 6, 2005:  I read a newspaper story today featuring some Louisiana Guardsmen who were out on street patrols in Baghdad when their Bradley Fighting Vehicle was hit and two of their comrades died. In it, these hardcore infantrymen said they had nothing but scorn for the soldiers who never ventured outside the wire. They called them “Fobbers,” as in ones who never leave the FOB (Forward Operating Base). As far as I’m concerned, they can sneer in my direction and label me a Fobber all they want—if I have the opportunity to stay hunkered down inside the camp up there, I plan on staying there. I don’t need to see all the tourist sites of downtown Baghdad. I’d rather be a living Fobber than a dead hard-charger. Cowardly? No, just smart (and determined to return to my family in one piece). Hey...possible title for this book (if it ever makes it that far): Fobber: the Diary of a Soft Soldier.

Reading that now, I wither with mortification in much the same way I did when my mother trotted out the family photo album to show my fiancée nude photos of me taking a bath at four years old. I don’t know how I could have lived with myself if my first book had been called “The Diary of a Soft Soldier.”

I went back to my journal, flipped forward a half-dozen months and found the moment near the end of my deployment when I started to realize maybe I wasn’t using the correct term after all....

September 12, 2005:  I hear about some hardcore battalion commander with too much time and money on his hands who had a bunch of uniform patches made at his own expense. They looked just like Ranger tabs, but said “Fobbit.” He also had some that had “REMF” and “POAG” (another derogatory for us Fobbers).

But still, I persisted in using the incorrect term, even after I returned stateside and started taking my first toddler steps toward writing what would eventually become the correctly-termed Fobbit. Truth be told, if I had not been an actual Fobbit, if I had been an infantry soldier patrolling the streets, I would have probably been calling myself by the right name from the get-go. After all, it was an infantryman who first let the word “Fobbit” (and not “Fobber”) fall from his lips (I am guessing the reporter who wrote that story of the Louisiana National Guard soldiers misheard the word, tangled on the tongue in a Southern accent). I should have gone straight to the source of the river of slang.

March 7, 2006: Mark this day! I think I might have—maybe, possibly, perhaps—gotten a start on my novel today. Tentatively calling it Fobber and tentatively starting it out with this sentence: “They were Fobbers because, at the core, they were nothing but marshmallow.” More to follow…

Somehow, miraculously, that first sentence (with the exception of the wrong F-word) survived all the way to publication.

But still I called my characters “Fobbers,” even as the fire of writing the novel waxed and waned. I was now living in Maryland during my final year in the Army when I was assigned to the U.S. Army Public Affairs office in the Pentagon (the ultimate Fobbit job).

As I leafed through my journal the other day, my curiosity about the use of the word “Fobber” had become something deeper: now I was on a journey to rediscover the writer I had been, with all his aches and joys, when he was deep in the process of wrestling with words.

July 9, 2008:  Whatever belly-fire I had for Fobber has vanished. I had been doing so well up until about three weeks ago: rising every day at 4:30 a.m., going for a morning run, then coming in and sitting down to work on the novel, getting in a solid hour’s writing on the book before I have to take the train in to the Pentagon. Now, I still rise at 4:30, but I accomplish nothing. I meander across my desk like a nomad. I read e-mail, download music, putter with household chores. All the while, the words—still at that same stopping place—stare back at me from the laptop’s screen. The cursor blinks. I do not advance, I do not pile more words into the vast blank space—or, if I do, the sentences are limp, vague, and ultimately go nowhere. Even this, writing in the journal, is a means of distraction to keep me from my work.

I flipped ahead in my diary (of a soft soldier) to the year after I retired from the Army and was living in Montana and started a new career with the Bureau of Land Management (where I still work to this day). I clicked the search bar for the next instance of “Fobber.”

August 9, 2009:  My enthusiasm for Fobber started to go into a tailspin today. Engines screaming, smoke streaming past the cockpit, ground rushing up at me, I was only able to pull up out of it when I decided to look to the past for inspiration. For years, I’ve been making flirty eyes at Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead on my bookshelf, the white words on the black spine of the hardback calling to me, but have never had the time to start reading it. Today, I decided the day had come. I’m fifty pages into it and I know this is the right book for me to read right now. Mailer’s narrative moves like a camera across his big cast of characters—something which I’d been fretting about with Fobber. Mailer reassures me in his growly voice: You can do this. I tinkered a little more with what I’ve already written. I'm still not totally happy with it, but at least I’m sitting down at the keyboard and trying my best.

I drew inspiration from Norman Mailer as I pounded away at what I was now thinking was an Impossible Novel. Here is what I wrote in my journal one day while I was fretting over the tone and scope of Fobber/Fobbit. I remember worrying about whether I had the authority to write about war in all its gory glory when I’d spent my entire year bathed in air-conditioning and sipping lattes at my desk. Mailer reassured me I was on the right path:

When you talk about the difference between real experience and the experience you put into a book, you touch on perhaps the single most basic difficulty. For some young writers it’s very disturbing not to tell the story exactly the way it happened. For others it’s equally disturbing to tell it the way it happened. They want to exaggerate it. They want to make it larger. That could be good or bad. If you are truly an ambitious writer it’s not necessarily so bad to exaggerate, because that enables you to dare to take on themes larger than yourself.....I had a lot of experience in the war, but it was not as intense as the experience of the people who were the characters in my book [The Naked and the Dead]. Nonetheless, it was close enough so I could extrapolate a bit. I could exaggerate to a degree, because I had a sense of what the outer possibilities were, as you do when you get a little bit of combat. You get a very good idea of what a lot of combat might be like. Not necessarily a true idea, but a bigger idea. I came late to my outfit in the Philippines, and most of those guys went over for a couple of years already. They had been in other campaigns, so I picked up all the stories of battles that they had been in before I ever joined them. So you could say The Naked and the Dead was on the one hand realistic, and on the other hand it was an exaggeration of experiences I had.

I wrote in my journal: “Someday, when I’m being criticized for not ‘telling it like it was’ in Fobber, I’ll pull out this quote to remind myself that what I’ve done is okay.”

This was no longer an investigation into why I’d mistitled my novel; it was an autopsy of my insecurities and all the fears and doubts I’d had while working on the book. Norman Mailer gave me permission to tell a war story in my own way, through my own lens of a “stay-back, stay-safe soldier.” I will forever be grateful to him for writing The Naked and the Dead which served as a brightly-lit lamppost on my path as I worked on the book from my home in Montana. I needed his words of encouragement because my writing days were a rollercoaster of peaks and valleys. Mostly, as my journal now reminded me, I seemed to live in the valleys.

August 31, 2009:  Fobber continues apace. I rise at 4:30 every morning, work out on the elliptical for 45 minutes, then sit down and write for anywhere between one and two hours. Some days, it’s writing; other days, it’s just typing. Today, I was distracted and the words had a hard time coming. Tomorrow will be better. Today’s total word count: 60,324.

October 14, 2009:  A piss-poor Fobber day. Got up at 4:20, as usual. Showered right away without working out, since I have to be to work early this morning. Got coffee, came downstairs and was immediately distracted by the Internet. Mindless surfing for far too long drained the batteries and so I only typed (wouldn’t even qualify it as “wrote”) 51 words today. Overall, the word count stands at 93,923.

October 25, 2009:  While I’m typing a particular funny scene in Fobber, I get a “Breaking News” e-mail from the Washington Post reporting on two suicide car bomb attacks in Baghdad: “At least 132 people were killed and 520 wounded…The blasts, which the Interior Ministry said were carried out by suicide bombers, detonated under a pale gray sky, shattering windows more than a mile away. Broken water mains sent water coursing through the street, strewn with debris. Pools of water mixed with blood gathered along the curbs, ashened detritus floating on the surface. Cars caught in traffic jams were turned into tombs, the bodies of passengers incinerated inside. The smell of diesel mixed with the stench of burning flesh. ‘Bodies were hurled into the air,’ said Mohammed Fadhil, a 19-year-old bystander. ‘I saw women and children cut in half.’ He looked down at a curb smeared with blood. ‘What’s the sin that those people committed? They are so innocent.’” There’s nothing particular funny about this kind of déjà vu. I squirm while writing similar scenes in Fobber. How can I make readers laugh about the U.S. in Baghdad while blasts are still cutting children in half? I can only hope my intent is in the right place.

January 23, 2010:  After nearly a month’s hiatus from Fobber, I was back at it again yesterday. I’m on the home stretch now and getting impatient, but still overwhelmed by all that needs to be done in the months and months of rewrites. After today’s three-hour session, the word count stands at 143,774. Pages: 479.

January 29, 2010:  Fobber word count: 153,230. Page count: 510. Yes, I’ve been writing like a motherfucker lately.

February 19, 2010:  I’ve hit a dry spell. Work on Fobber has stalled during the past two weeks. I’ve been distracting myself—mostly with the Internet—and have not been writing, which in turn has sent me into a spiraling depression. I know what I should be doing, but I don’t do it. I hem, I haw, I mope. Last night in bed, I said to Jean, “Tomorrow will be the day. I have to do it. To paraphrase that song in Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town: Put one word in front of the other and soon you’ll be walking across the page.” Today, I am determined.

And then, finally—after five years of typing the wrong word—I got it right. The novel received a new title and wore it like a tailored jacket. Here is the day when I typed “Fobber” in my journal for the last time:

March 27, 2010:  Today, a revelation—which must surely lead to a revolution. I have a daily Google News alert which sends me links to mentions of the word “Fobber” in news articles, webpages, and blogs. Today, one of the links led me to a blog where an infantry soldier, scorning the REMFs of today’s war, defined a “Fobber” as someone who moves from FOB to FOB—completely distinct from a “Fobbit” (a soldier who stays in the protection of the FOB, either willingly or unwillingly). Doing my own Google search, I discover that “Fobbit” is the common term for the people who populate my novel. Damn! I’m glad I caught that before it was too late. But now, I must rename everything and get my head trained in the right direction. Fobbit it is from now on. Of course, some agent or publisher will probably come up with a better title when the day arrives.

As some of you know by now, my bleeding-agony struggle eventually had a happy ending. Neither my agent nor my editor had any qualms about calling the book Fobbit (unlike the tug-of-war we went through over what to call my second novel, Brave Deeds. But that’s another story for another day...).

Now, the only thing that remains of “Fobber” is an old baby photo of a book that was still wondering what it wanted to be when it grew up. I look on it now and smile at that thumb drive with a mixture of pity and amusement.


My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. For information on how to contribute, contact David Abrams.

This Memorial Day, Will Everyone Please Be Quiet, Please?

In a perfect world, Memorial Day would be as quiet as the grave. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a country that, for the most part, observes the “holiday” with noisy, raucous patriotism. We “celebrate” the day with doorbuster sales at the local mall, the staticky sizzle of meat on the grill, and the exuberant yelp of our winterpale bodies hitting the beach for the start of Summer Living. That’s all well and good―nothing wrong with shouting hosannas to the sun―but to be true to the spirit and intent of Memorial Day, we should all shut up on Monday. At least for something longer than the obligatory moment of silence where we bow our heads while standing in a flag-fluttering cemetery.

Let it be known that I am just as guilty as many of the rest of you. Over my many Memorial Days, I have yelled, I have frolicked, I have grilled. But after serving twenty years in the Army, I’ve come to a deeper appreciation for what the day really asks of us: a somber, sober reflection of the true cost of war. Instead of woo-hooing over my three-day weekend, maybe I should be boo-hooing over a grave. At the very least, I should close my eyes and watch the war dead parade past on the screen of my eyelids, specifically the people who were killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2005, my year in-country. When you personally know some of those dead-and-buried warriors, Memorial Day takes on a whole new meaning.

Earlier this year, while I was reading Ben Fountain’s excellent book Beautiful Country Burn Again, I came across a passage which I immediately bookmarked and saved with the intent to share it on this particular weekend. Though the book primarily concerns itself with the 2016 presidential campaign which ended with us (not me!) electing our own President Noisemaker, the chapter “Doing the Chickenhawk with Trump” conclude with the following paragraphs (including an unexpected mention of my own Fobbit):

Since when did it become not just acceptable but expected that politicians orate on Memorial Day? Who gave them permission to speak for the violently dead? Come Monday we’ll be up to our ears in some of the emptiest, most self-serving dreck ever to ripple the atmosphere, the standard war-fantasy talk of American politics, complete with sentimentalist purlings about heroes, freedoms, the supreme sacrifice. Trump will tell us how much he loves the veterans, and how much they love him back. Down-ticket pols will re-terrorize and titillate voters with tough talk about ISIS. Hemingway, for one, despised this kind of cant, his disgust borne out in a famous passage from A Farewell to Arms, in which the wounded veteran Frederic Henry reflects:

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of the places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Here’s a proposition: We stand a better chance of understanding something about ourselves and our wars if we tune out the politicians, for one day at least, and turn our attention to a certain kind of writer: namely, the man or woman who experiences war firsthand, then devotes heart and soul to finding the correct words, the true words, for describing the reality of the thing. Crazy, right? Maybe you think I’ve been smoking that good Texas dope? The very idea, ignoring Hillary and Trump and instead reading a poem by Brian Turner or Kevin Powers, or a passage from Youngblood or Fobbit or Green on Blue. But a country going on its fifteenth year of war would seem obliged to use every tool at hand for making sense of its situation. And if looking at poems and novels seems like a radical act, that in itself might be a clue to the problem.

Or how about silence. In an era where language has been so mangled and abused, maybe the sanest thing we can do is reserve some space for silence. The National Moment of Remembrance Act puts this notion into law, encouraging a minute of silence at three p.m. local time on Memorial Day. At least then we would be spared someone trying to sell us something–cars, appliances, political agendas, war–for as long as the silence lasted, and that alone seems like a mercy. It’s hard to hijack silence, and maybe that’s the point.

*     *     *     *

You can read the full essay, which originally appeared in The Guardian in May 2016, here. Read the essay, sure, but I also urge you to buy the book. What Ben has to say in these pages is important. For more about Beautiful Country Burn Again, you can also check out this Bill Moyers interview with Ben Fountain.

Girls in Lakes, Soldiers in Boots: A Conversation Between Bill Roorbach and David Abrams

David Abrams and Bill Roorbach first met at PNBA, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association conference, which took place in Tacoma, Washington back in 2012, when David’s book Fobbit was new and Bill’s book Life Among Giants had just been released. These friendships on the road with new books bloom quickly, and are reinforced by chance meetings across years to come. On the occasion of the publication of their newest books, Bill and David thought they’d better have a virtual conversation, as the road wasn’t going to bring them close this time around.

Two dapper gents: Bill Roorbach and David Abrams at PNBA in 2012

Bill:  David, David—if only we could do this in person over a stack of books and a cup of coffee. I’m a fan since Fobbit, and love that you’re continuing to mine your own Iraq War experience for the new novel. I hope it won’t give too much away to say that Brave Deeds follows a squad of six men going AWOL and crossing an explosive Baghdad to attend the funeral of their late, lamented leader—sounds like they’re going to be up against it from both sides. Is there an incident in your own experience that got you inventing this terrifying journey?

David:  Bill, first of all, it’s great to have a dialogue with you again. We need to make plans to reunite more than once every five years; that PNBA encounter was too long ago, my friend. Fortunately, I have your newest book, the short story collection The Girl of the Lake, to keep your wonderful voice close at hand. I gotta tell you, I am enjoying the hell out of these stories!
       You know, I actually tried stalking you last autumn. My wife and I spent two weeks in Maine, driving all over the eastern half of the state. I never did see you, though. You’re elusive. Do you retreat to a rustic cabin in the Allagash and write your novels by kerosene light?
       But circling back to your question to me....
       Brave Deeds was initially inspired by a 2007 Washington Post article by David Finkel (whose The Good Soldiers and Thank You For Your Service are war literature classics). In that account, an entire company of soldiers--27 of them--performed a similar “memorial march” across Baghdad to attend a funeral for their sergeant killed in a bomb blast a week earlier. While nearly every mission in Iraq at that time carried a considerable weight of danger, these particular soldiers were backed up by a full contingent of Humvees, gunners, maps, and compasses. In Brave Deeds, as a cruel creator, I stripped away all of that security. Despite their best-laid plans, my six soldiers are left with no Humvee, no maps, no compass, no food, and only limited ammunition for their rifles. They are AWOL and they have gotten in way over their heads. I thought that might make for more interesting reading. And so, I stripped away the reliable “comforts” of military life, heightening the “strangers in a strange land” aspect of wartime deployment and giving them a ticking-clock timeline to get the job done. So that’s how it began: I read a story in the newspaper while drinking my morning coffee and started plotting the fates of these foolhardy, loyal, and brave soldiers. Never having walked in the figurative footsteps of my characters--my deployment to Baghdad in 2005 was nearly all served within the confines of the Forward Operating Base--I was definitely writing as an outsider, a non-infantry soldier. But none of that mattered much once I got underway with this book because my intent was not to write a bombs-and-bullets military thriller but a character-driven story about six co-workers who go off the grid and must survive not only the enemy but themselves.
       How do you approach writing something that’s well outside of your experience? I’ve just finished reading the first story in your collection, the wonderfully-named “Harbinger Hall.” Surprises peel like an onion in these thirty pages, so I won’t say too much except that we, the reader, eventually end up in Russia around the time of the 1917 Revolution. How did this story come about? What paths brought you to these two characters--a sixth-grade boy skipping school and an elderly recluse whose first words to the boy are “You want to play war?”—and this dazzling story?

Bill:  I love that you stripped away the security apparatus. Your mission sounds like it cost a lot less! At least in dollars and cents. Yes, I felt your presence in Maine. Actually, I saw you were here through your posts on Twitter. We live a little isolated from the coast world up in Farmington, which is western Maine, foothills of the White Mountains. It’s been a great place to live relatively inexpensively and at the edge of civilization. We have a place now in Scarborough, too, that puts us closer to the sea and to Portland, a city I love, and full of writers, too.

       I wrote “Harbinger Hall” a while back, published it in The Atlantic, and then revised it for this collection. It starts with a ten-year-old deciding to bail out of school forever, using a method I dreamed up in sixth grade but never dared try. Great thing about fiction is you get to see what might have happened. We kids used to play war extensively, and one of our battlefields was on an estate you could approach through the forest from my neighborhood. We’d spy on the old guy who lived there, pretend we were going to rescue him or kill him or kidnap him depending on the various storylines. This story has a kid braver than I who goes ahead and skips out of school, begins to hang around the estate on the far side of the woods. But he gets caught, and gets a dose of history. I’ve always been fascinated by the Russian Revolution and all the mayhem that preceded it. Here was a chance to be in two worlds at once. I did a lot of research, but in the end, as you say, the story has to be about characters in motion. And really, a boy’s imagination, which is still alive in me.
       Did you have any personal experience to go on for Brave Deeds? I know you were part of some dark times in Iraq. Have you been back at all since? Is it hard to sit still and write when the memories, or the imagination they've unleashed, start coming back to life on the page?

David:  While portions of Fobbit were lifted almost whole-cloth from my war diary, the plot, characters and much of the setting in Brave Deeds were far beyond the scope of my experience in Iraq in 2005. I was, sadly, a headquarters-bound Fobbit during my entire time in-country. So, Brave Deeds gave me a chance to think about soldiers whose lives were vastly different than my own (infantry vs. support soldier) and to virtually and vicariously step out into the more dangerous world of Baghdad beyond the Forward Operating Base. If I had “dark times” during my time in Iraq, they came when I read about (or, worse, saw photos of) the grisly and unpredictable violence which more courageous soldiers saw nearly every day. Looking at a photo on your computer screen in an air-conditioned office is nothing compared to actually standing on a street, staring down into a crater made by an exploding mortar, smelling the blood, and seeing--well, sights too horrible to describe. I’ve seen the pictures—many of them—from these types of attacks and they were enough for me.
       To answer your other question: no, I have not been back to Iraq. Nor do I plan to vacation there in the future. Baghdad is a chapter in my life I hope to never re-read.     
       Speaking of stretching exercises we authors perform at the keyboard, what about your story “Broadax, Inc.”? The narrator is a self-proclaimed corporate shark who finds himself deep in a love triangle (and, boy, do I dig these lines: “Sharks do fall in love. It isn’t all just gnashing and splashing and arms coming off clean.”). You don’t strike me as the Wall Street executive type. (But maybe you have a hidden double life? If so, I have a few questions about how I can sweeten my investment portfolio.) Ted Broadax is the kind of guy who bites his sentences into chunks, prides himself on his immense wealth, and is a total mess when it comes to personal relationships. This doesn’t sound like the Bill Roorbach I know. How did Ted arrive in your head? And have you ever watched the Showtime series Billions? Your Ted reminds me an awful lot of Bobby Axelrod (whose name, if you stutter-slur resembles “Broadax”).

Bill:  Well, I’m loving seeing your imagination at work--it’s clearly well informed. I haven’t seen Billions, not yet, but I’m really enjoying these long-form cable series, which are like novels on TV. I can even read them the way I read novels, going back to check on plot elements I might have missed, flipping back a few pages when I realize I’ve been spacing out. I worked with HBO a while developing a show based on my novel Life Among Giants. It was fascinating to pull that thing apart into seasons and episodes, and to write scripts as opposed to novels, where nothing’s getting done by actors or cinematographers—that’s all in our hands. These are great narrative minds, is what I’m saying, and I learned a lot from them. Before they killed my show, that is. You wouldn’t want to see the pictures of that carnage. Though in fact my main emotion was relief--I could get back to being a novelist, which is where I live.
       As for Broadax—I just wanted a name that included a weapon, because that’s the way he’d come to see himself as the story opens. I’ve got a number of high school friends who went into finance, as they used to call it, and these guys, math whizzes, all of them, seemed pretty mild-mannered sitting in Algebra II. But the aggression when they went out in the world, and the pure focus on money! Astounding what was hiding behind those khaki slacks and Bass Weejuns. I just wanted to see what was left of a particular guy if every bit of his business success and money dependence was taken away from him. I’m also interested in how easy it might be to manipulate the electronic everything of our lives to destroy someone. Or a country, come to think of it. “Broadax” the story comes from that. In the end, what he’s got is love, and that turns out to be enough.
       You’ve been busy--this I know based on our exchange, which has taken quite a few weeks between questions and answers. A new book is a whirlwind, even months before it ever hits the shelves. The Girl of the Lake is my tenth book, amazingly, and the experience of every single book has been different, with emotions from despair to ecstasy along the way, and back again. And again. Second books are notoriously tough—how is this one different from your first? The reception has been fantastic. Did you feel more prepared?

David:  Putting out a second book is like the Grand Central Station of Neuroses for self-doubters like me. On the exterior, I may look much the same like I did when Fobbit came out in 2012; but inside, I’m a storm of worry. The early reviews for Brave Deeds and the reception I’ve gotten from readers on this book tour have certainly been reassuring. And yet, there’s always that second-guessing that goes on: a reverse of Sally Fields’ famous line from her Oscar acceptance speech, “Do you really like me?” But that’s just ego talking and has nothing to do with the finished, published book we now hold in our hands. No matter what my conflicted, complicated feelings are about the so-called “sophomore slump,” Brave Deeds the novel stands on its own. It’s written, it’s published, I’ve tossed it like a homing pigeon from my worrisome grip. It has to fly to readers with its own wings. But, yes, anxious voices inside my head still clamor. I’m not sure how to tamp them down, muffle the overthinking. As a seasoned veteran in this business (ten books!!), do you have any Rilke Letters to a Young Poet type of advice for me?

Bill:  We really like you! I have no advice for you—I think your art and life are well in hand. The only observation I really have after a lot of ups and downs is that nearly all of the pleasure of writing comes in the making. That’s what lasts, and that’s where we’re most in our element. Please keep it coming!

David:  You are entirely right! I will carry that forward with me to Books 3 and 4 and beyond. Thanks again, my friend.

Bill:  But wait—I want to ask you about the Cave of Rewrite you mention on your Twitter page. It sounds fucking scary!

David:  The Cave of Rewrite can be a dreadful place, can’t it? Sometimes I look at the process with the same amount of joy I once felt for trips to the dentist (Dr. Rusty Pliers, DDS). All those words—All. Those. Fucking. Words. –demanding reevaluation and judgment. It’s deflating, isn’t it? Or maybe that’s just me. One of my faults is trying to take an all-encompassing, long-range view instead of just relaxing and taking small bites from the elephant. Too often, I deflate my tires before I start driving. Then again, revision is the time of discovery: plunging my hand into my characters’ chests and pulling out surprises (“Wow, Rusty--I had no idea you were a dentist by day and stamp collector by night!”). So, yes, the Cave of Rewrite is dark and frightening, but if we self-doubting artists can swallow our fear and keep walking forward to that pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, the rewards can be infinite.

Bill:  Revision is where it all happens, for me. It’s what makes our stories smarter than we could ever be. Okay, brother! See you in the wings!

David:  Maybe Texas Book Festival?

Bill:  Nope, not me, but I’ll be at National Book Festival over Labor Day weekend. We’ll cross paths again yet, my friend.

David:  Wait, wait! There’s still so much more to talk about. Like how “The Girl of the Lake” is shaping up to be one of my favorite stories of all time--it goes on the shelf of honor next to the other long-time residents: Mr. Carver, Mr. (Richard) Ford, Miz O’Connor, et al. Other things I still want to talk about include “The Fall”--good googly-moogly, I LOVE that freakin’ story about a wilderness hike gone bad!--your style/voice (alluded to a little in that remark about Broadax’s choppy dialogue), and the relationships between men and women in these pages, not to mention your marvelous novel The Remedy for Love. All those things, and more. I think the most bro-romantic thing I could say to you is, “You have a way with words.” So, if you’re up for it, I’d like to sustain this conversation on down the road (the literal and figurative one).

Bill:  That is a promise! Loved it, David. And thanks for kind words. More talk soon!

How to get a signed copy of Brave Deeds

My second novel, Brave Deeds, will be released on Aug. 1. About two weeks later, I’ll set off on a book tour, stopping at cities throughout the Pacific Northwest (a complete schedule is coming soon). I’m looking forward to not only visiting some outstanding independent bookstores but also meeting readers along the way.

But how can those readers who can’t make it to one of the readings get a signed copy of the novel? I’m pleased to announce that I am once again partnering with one of my favorite local bookstores, Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana, to make signed copies available to readers. CB has had a very special place in my heart since I moved to Montana eight years ago. It’s a bright, inviting store well-stocked with everything I love to read: from literature of the American West to noir mysteries set in the gritty streets of New York City. In the past, I’ve said: “If Montana bookstores are comfort food for readers and writers, then the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman is the mashed potatoes and gravy on the plate.” I love eating there.

Here’s how to go about ordering a signed copy of Brave Deeds (or Fobbit) from Country Bookshelf:

1.  Click on this link to take you to the Brave Deeds page.
2.  Add the book to your cart.
3.  Order two or three other books on your wish list (not mandatory, but hey, why wouldn’t you want to have more books than just mine in that box when it arrives?)
4.  During Checkout, fill out the necessary billing information then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the screen to a box that says “Order Comments” which looks something like this:

5.  If you would like your book personally inscribed, this is the place to tell us. I’m happy to either just sign the book or inscribe it to a particular reader. If you want a personalized inscription, please tell the Country Bookshelf staff in that comments box to whom you’d like me to make it out and if there’s a special message you’d like me to include.
6.  Complete your transaction and sit back with a satisfied smile knowing that a book with my nearly-indecipherable scrawl is on its way to you. Bonus Satisfaction: You’re supporting an independent bookstore, a simple act which is bound to earn you a couple of feathers on your angel wings in heaven.

Thanks to everyone who pre-orders a copy. These early pre-publication sales can boost a book’s strength so that it hits the ground at a gallop on Publication Day.

Early praise for Brave Deeds

Most normal people (i.e. non-writers) don’t fully understand the complexities of the writing life. In particular, what happens between the book’s first sentence and publication day. Here’s a helpful timeline:

1.  The author writes the first sentence of a new book and realizes there are only another 104,573 words to go before the first draft is done.
2.  The author freaks out.
3.  The book is written. (See also: Steps 3a through 3w)
4.  The author freaks out.
5.  The book is accepted for publication.
6.  The author freaks out.
7.  The publisher sends out galleys and advance reading copies to book critics six months before the publication date.
8.  The author freaks out.
9.  The first early reviews trickle in.
10.  The author freaks out.
11.  The book is published.
12.  The author stops freaking out because by this point, the book has permanently left the creator’s hands, it stands on its own, and there is little the author can do to change the course of the book’s reception and reputation.

I’m currently somewhere between #9 and #10. People other than my wife and editor have been reading my new novel Brave Deeds and I am, every day, practicing hand-release exercises. The early critical chatter has been gratifyingly, surprisingly good. Every novelist has anxieties and freak-outs--none the less so when it’s a sophomore novel like Brave Deeds. (Okay, they say they liked the first book, but how will this one be received?) You have no idea how many sailor’s-hitch knots I’ve had to untangle from my guts these past few weeks. In many ways, Brave Deeds is a different novel than Fobbit and I hope readers will give it a fair shake. Before I go too much further, let me state that I love ALL readers--even those who dislike Brave Deeds or (worse) are left feeling indifferent by it. No book can ever please everyone. Though I wouldn’t want to meet them, I’m sure there are Charlotte’s Web haters out there. We writers do the best we can, then with a great deal of pride-swallowing, we force open our clenched hands and let the book fly out into the world.

Here, then, are some of the early reports which have come home to roost (some minor spoilers lie ahead):

In Fobbit (2012), Abrams caricatured military personnel who avoided combat overseas. His second novel confronts another underexplored aspect of war: the unlikely bonds formed by mutinous allegiance. Six soldiers steal a Hummer and sneak off base to attend their esteemed commander’s memorial service. Then their vehicle breaks down in the heart of Baghdad. In a city where everyone is a potential enemy, the men risk their careers, and their lives, to get to the service on foot. Battling hunger and paranoia, the squad episodically recalls their daring adventure and Rafe’s violent demise, portraying a complex man who secretly cared for stray dogs and avenged the deaths of innocent victims. Sharing their stories as a collective voice, each man bears his own burden: there’s the notorious overeater, Cheever; impulsively violent Fish; Park the stoic; desperately romantic O, who can’t get over his ex; Drew, who married the wrong woman; and their sententious makeshift leader, Arrow, who spurs them on. Just when the squad’s plights become darkly, hilariously absurd, Abrams surprises with pathos and tenderness. This is military fiction at its truest.
       (Booklist)

In Abrams’ second novel (after the well-received Fobbit), a group of six soldiers in the Iraq War attend the funeral service of their dead sergeant, which involves stealing a vehicle and essentially going AWOL. The Humvee breaks down in the middle of war-torn Baghdad, and the group ends up getting lost walking to their destination. Somewhere along the way they raid a house they have been told is a bomb factory. Gunshots are exchanged, several people wind up dead, and one of the officers is wounded. After the raid, the soldiers steal a car, and with their injured comrade and a very pregnant Iraqi woman who joins them on the way, they make progress toward the base. Yet getting past the entrance there proves to be one of the most dangerous events of the day. Describing the soldiers’ perilous journey while filling in details of their backgrounds and the military situation in Iraq, this excellent novel is believable, dramatic, and also quite funny.
       (Library Journal)

Abrams returns to the Iraq War in his second novel, which tells the story of six AWOL American soldiers defying orders by crossing Baghdad to attend the funeral of their squad leader, Sgt. Rafael Morgan. It’s a journey made more difficult by the fact that their stolen Humvee has broken down and they now have to cross hostile territory on foot, mapless and without a radio or medic. During these tension-filled hours, we get to know the squad members: new leader Arrow, who is beginning to have doubts about his sexual orientation; Cheever, the overweight screwup; Park, “our quiet one”; Fish, the twitchy FNG (“fucking new guy”); Drew, who dreams of being unfaithful to his wife back home; and O, short for Olijandro, who is everyone’s friend. Their personal mission is interrupted by the search for a bomb factory, a diversion that turns unexpectedly bloody. The journey is also punctuated with nightmarish flashbacks to earlier in the war and the heroic act that cost Sgt. Morgan his life, and glimpses of civilian life. It all builds to an emotionally wrenching and tension-filled climax as the squad attempts to crash the funeral in a hijacked civilian van. Filled with vivid characterizations and memorable moments, this novel—as with classic modern war literature from John Hersey’s Into the Valley to David Halberstam’s One Very Hot Day—turns a single military action into a microcosm of an entire war.
       (Publishers Weekly)

Abrams follows his award-winning debut with a more empathetic but no less bitter take on the Iraq War. In the Land of Not Good, Staff Sgt. Raphael Morgan, “dismembered but not disremembered,” has been killed by an improvised explosive device, “obscene pieces of him flying through the bomb-bloom air.” A band of brothers, troops he led, has decided to attend his memorial service at FOB Saro across Baghdad from their Taji camp. However, officers have denied permission. That’s irrelevant to troopers Arrow, Park, Drew, O, Cheever, and Fish. They steal a Humvee and go AWOL. The Humvee breaks its drive shaft, and the six, edging past death at every door, must hoof it across the “chaotic center of terrorism” amid “al-Qaeda, Mahdi, Ba’ath, and Badr clashing their ideologies and ambitions of evil.” Abrams offers an unusual narrative, first person plural, with points of view discernible only by process of elimination, a subtle reframing of the Rashomon effect. Chapters are long and short, one a mere 38 words, another a prose poem that’s an homage to legs, the infantryman’s mode of transportation. With multiple narrators, each trooper is seen through a different squad member’s eyes. There’s Arrow, distant son of more distant parents, who falls naturally into a leadership role, or the Hajji-hating Fish, years of promotions and demotions turning him into the private soldier with a “shine of gray at his temples” and the ability to shoot prisoners without remorse. As the six march across Baghdad, the heat, dust, and broken buildings stand as warnings until the M4 action explodes in short, spare declarative sentences, every bullet another shot at the cruel and illogical aspects of war. A powerful story on its surface, a soldier’s story laced with vulgarities and gallows humor, but also a story holding deeper interpretations of our troubled Middle Eastern misadventures.
       (Kirkus Reviews)

In his first novel, Fobbit, David Abrams had his satirical way with Iraq War soldiers who lived inside Houston Barricades, lounging at Burger Kings and Dairy Queens on the army’s FOBs (Forward Operating Bases). Abrams had been one of them, serving 20 years as a military journalist. But on the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah, the grunts got their chow in MREs salted with blowing sand. Their only protection from unseen hostile insurgents was a “hillybilly armored” Humvee, their “battle rattle” gear and a squad of alert buddies. Brave Deeds is the story of six such soldiers at Camp Taji, who steal a Humvee to drive across Baghdad to attend the officers-only funeral of their sergeant, killed by an IED. Told by an unnamed member of this motley crew, it is a story as old as The Odyssey--soldiers far from home on a less-than-rational and dangerous journey. When the Humvee’s drive shaft freezes an hour into their mission, they abandon the disabled vehicle, radio and maps to avoid a potential sitting-duck attack, and begin to hoof it to the funeral through unfamiliar streets amid Iraqi citizens. As the narrator puts it: “The situation had gone from bad to totally f**ked... there we were, a cluster of dumb in the middle of Baghdad.” In short chapters, Abrams fleshes out each of these unlikely comrades. As the favorite of the dead sergeant, Dmitri “Arrow” Arogapoulos steps up to take charge, but is as clueless as the others when it comes to navigating the city’s dicey alleys and open-air markets. Abrams’ sarcastic narrator doesn’t miss the metaphor: “We’re all blind men feeling our way across Baghdad; Arrow just happens to be the one in front with the cane.” Cheever is an overweight whiner. Fish has a history of crime and violence back home. O hasn’t gotten over losing his ex-wife. Park is a silent Korean American with overbearing parents. Drew is obsessed with the high school sweetheart who got away. Some are gung-ho for the war and “worship at the First Church of Bush.” Others joined up for the money. Whatever their reasons, they share the ordeal: “We walk. Through the dust, through the thirst, through the sunbake, and now, through the Iraqis filtering into the marketplace with their goats, their dishdashas, their wind-flipped magazines, their snapping teeth, their cooking smoke.” The men in Brave Deeds (and they’re all men) crack funny, gripe at their buddies, and, with reason, fear the unseen. A car full of armed Sunnis opens fire in a public square, killing children, beggars and mothers. A feral dog is run over. A wedding groom is blown apart in a mortar attack. The squad is lured into a wild firefight where a family held hostage by a bomb-making operation is slaughtered. With compact precision and the amusing patter of a sardonic narrator, Abrams captures the unusual histories of these ordinary men shuffling through Baghdad as they encounter the horrors of war. They may be AWOL on a personal mission outside command protocol, but they are heroes in their own ways and perform small brave deeds in the midst of half-baked chaos.
       (Shelf Awareness)

And finally, this dispatch from the Time Now blog in which reviewer Peter Molin makes me sound way better than I am:

Few things could possibly be more welcome than a second novel from David Abrams, the author of 2012’s highly entertaining and shrewdly perceptive black comedy Fobbit. No one would blame Abrams if he moved on from Iraq—surely he has it in him and will do so one day—but I for one am glad that he has kept his eye on the Tigris and Euphrates battlefield for at least one more novel, this summer’s Brave Deeds. If anything, Brave Deeds is more of a war novel than Fobbit, a work that has its boom-boom moments, but which is largely more interested in military culture than combat action. Where Fobbit explored a wide range of Army types and ranks as they frittered away their deployments doing busy work on the FOB, Brave Deeds relentlessly focuses on the actions of fighting men outside the wire, observing the unities of time and place to follow the journey of six junior enlisted infantry soldiers as they cross Baghdad, AWOL, to attend the memorial service of a beloved, at least by some, squad leader. Along the way, adventures ensue, distinctiveness of character emerges, and back-stories get told in the manner of picaresque war tales ranging from the Odyssey to Going After Cacciato, but Brave Deeds feels far from derivative. Rather, it is fired up, that is to say inspired, by an animus that Fobbit hinted at but softened with its comic punch-pulling: Abrams’ interest in, which is to say love for, young enlisted soldiers bereft of the quote-unquote leadership of NCOs and officers, two military demographics whose authority and credibility are discredited in the eyes of the Brave Deeds soldiers, probably Abrams’ as well, and, frankly, my own, looking back at the negligible achievements of long war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The David Abrams I know—a career NCO, for what it’s worth--is the most kind, gentle, and sweet soul imaginable, but Brave Deeds reflects an intense class-war sensibility that exposes military lifers as the vapid and ultimately incompetent self-servers that most junior enlisted rightly assess them to be within weeks of joining. Abrams’ achievement here, people, is immense: lots of contemporary war fiction attempts to portray the worldview of junior enlisted—“Joe” in Army-speak, or the “Terminal Lance” as they are known in Marines—and much of it falters for want of craft, over-reliance on clichés, and limitation of vision. Those are not Abrams’ problems in the least.

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