Fobbit by David Abrams

Author:David Abrams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

17

GOODING

When Staff Sergeant Gooding returned from Qatar, his tan was the envy of all the cubicle rats whose skin was the color of paper. With his beige glow, Gooding strolled into the palace, feeling radiant and refreshed (the real R&R, he thought). He felt like an actor in a toothpaste commercial who shows up with new breath and all his female coworkers swoon when he passes them in the hall.

The palace was filled with an odd buzz when Chance came on shift his first day back—and it wasn’t just because he was bright with Persian Gulf sunshine. It turned out that most of the staff was distracted by a preseason NFL game.

By the time he walked through the marbled hallways and entered the work area, it was the fourth quarter. As he passed the cubicles, everyone—officer and enlisted alike—was clustered around the satellite TVs or the computers with streaming live video feeds, all eyes focused on the little men in helmets bashing each other. Sitting at his desk, he could hear voices like rising sirens: “go, go, gogogoGO—aaawwww!”

Even later, during General Bright’s morning brief, the officers had their chairs swiveled away from the SMOG station and turned toward the TV screen in the Information Ops section, only half-listening to the G-staff drone on with their reports: “Sir, we expect AIF activity to resume at April levels within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The majority of attacks are expected to be comprised of harassing small-arms fire and IEDs. Targets are likely to be—”

There was a blast from the referee’s whistle and a cry of “What the fuck was that? Did you just see what happened? What the fuck was that?” from one of the officers throwing up his hands in dismissal at the quarterback on the screen.

Even the CG seemed abnormally distracted while he sat in his third-floor office, SMOG earphones clapped to his head. Gooding figured he probably listened to the G-staff reports with one eye on his TV. At one point, he grunted his approval for G-4 to retrofit a fleet of uparmored Humvees with sheepskin seat covers because the soldiers in one unit had been complaining of hemorrhoids—and when was the last time you heard the CG give a tinker’s damn for the luxuries of life when soldiers should be focusing their attention on the immediate mission at hand (“cleaning up the streets by eradicating Sunni ruffians and foreign troublemakers”)? That the CG seemed to care about the inflamed rectums of infantry soldiers showed he definitely had something else on his mind at the time.

By midmorning, the football game was over and everyone had returned to their normal routine of plotting future operations and cataloging the results of current ops.

In his cubicle, Gooding sat holding his forehead in one hand. The glow of his Qatar tan was already starting to fade. He was depressed because he’d just hung up the phone after learning one of their moneymakers had been hit with an IED, which had sheared off the lower half of his left leg.

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