Fobbit ’fä-bit, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011). Pejorative.
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 an office 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.
About David Abrams
FOB is an acronym, meaning Forward Operating Base. It’s 2005 in war-torn Iraq, and a Fobbit is a soldier working within that secured area, never venturing beyond the wire and guard towers to cope with AK-47–toting terrorists and improvised explosive devices. Staff Sgt. Gooding mans a computer in FOB Triumph’s Public Affairs Office. Though he uses no active unit’s designation, the author knows the Army, good and bad. Abrams is a 20-year veteran who served in Iraq as part of a public affairs team. While the narrative generally feeds off Gooding, it is peopled with far more outlandish and intriguing characters. One is Gooding’s immediate superior, Lt. Col. Eustace Harkleroad, timid, overweight, incompetent and subject to stress nosebleeds. Bunkered in a cubicle in one of Saddam’s old palaces, Gooding shoots off cliché-riddled press releases meant to obscure casualty numbers. The doublespeak must earn three chain-of-command initials before they’re ready to be ignored by the media. The tipping point comes when news outlets begin to salivate over killed-in-action numbers reaching 2,000. With notations from Gooding’s diary and woeful, lie-laden emails-to-mother from Harkleroad, the author’s narrative reflects the Fobbit war, the heat and the sand, civilian contractors and guest workers at the FOB’s burger and chicken franchises. Abrams saves his best work for two supporting characters, Lt. Col. Vic Duret, a hard-driving, stressed-out, uber-responsible battalion commander haunted by his brother-in-law’s death in the World Trade Center attack, and the inept and fear-filled Capt. Abe Shrinkle, a West Pointer who bungles his way into shooting an innocent Iraqi civilian on one mission and incinerating another on the next. More a Fobbit’s Jarhead than a Yossarian Catch-22, although one character meets a Kid Sampson-like fate. – Kirkus Reviews
Review: David Abrams’ ‘Fobbit’ is an impressive Iraq war satire
The Chicago Tribune Book Review – September 17, 2012 (Excerpt)
In “Going After Cacciato,” Tim O’Brien’s brilliantly inventive 1978 novel, the title character seeks to escape the madness of 20th-century warfare by simply walking away from the rice paddies of Vietnam and heading for Paris, some 6,800 miles away. Whether real or imagined, the point of the surreal exercise is to get out of the line of fire — the farther away, the better.
The soldiers deployed to Iraq in “Fobbit,” a first novel by David Abrams, a former Army public affairs specialist who served there in 2005, are far less adventurous in their approach to staying alive, especially if they work in the type of administrative, support, logistics or supply job that does not require them to be in close contact with an enemy all too eager to obliterate them.
A “fobbit” is a fairly new coinage: It’s a word distinctive to the war in Iraq — an amalgam of “FOB” for forward operating base, with the final syllable a bow to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”: “Like the shy, hairy-footed hobbits of Tolkien’s world,” Abrams explains of the “marshmallow” warriors he has chosen to satirize, “they were reluctant to go beyond their shire, bristling with rolls of concertina wire at the borders of the FOB.” [Read the full article...]
Odd Men Out
The New York Times Book Review – September 28, 2012 (Excerpt)
In the American wars of the 20th century, soldiers of the rear echelon were derided as “in the rear with the gear,” or worse. However, the whole concept of a “rear,” predicated on a definable “front,” started slipping in Vietnam and met its official death in Somalia. By the time of the Iraq occupation, the place where clerks did their clerking and infantrymen got a plate of hot chow was no longer in a relatively safe rear area but in the forward operating base, or FOB, smack in the middle of everything, and the soldiers stationed there became known as Fobbits.
As a former real-life Fobbit, assigned to a public affairs team in Iraq, David Abrams puts his knowledge of this world to good use in his first novel, also called “Fobbit.” Although the modern FOB is inherently more dangerous than a rear encampment miles from enemy lines, the comforts provided to the troops there are light-years beyond anything available to soldiers in a war zone even 10 years before the Iraq invasion. Burger King and Dairy Queen have been in some FOBs; even more significant, I think, is access to media, e-mail and the telephone. (As a long-serving member of the Navy SEALs told me recently, “I’m not sure it’s healthy for either my wife or me to be on the phone with each other about a plumbing contractor less than 45 minutes after I’ve put a bullet between another man’s eyes.”) [Read the full article...]
Book review: ‘Fobbit’ by David Abrams
The Washington Post Book Review – October 1, 2012 (Excerpt)
David Abrams knew a book was forming in his journal as he sat in an office near Baghdad recording the feel of dust, the contents of care packages and the dialog of an inept occupation force at work around him. His first novel, “Fobbit,” blends fiction and journalism, an apt reflection of literary influences combined with his experience in an Army public affairs team. His duty was to draft and redraft cautious press releases, and words are much on the mind of everyone in this book.
Casualty reports become the stuff of tedium on Forward Operating Base Triumph, and Abrams writes what he knows from an insulated workstation in Iraq where the war is edited for America. The bureaucracy of storytelling and the almost factory labor of producing official language for export reduce death to little more than rumor. We gain a rare gestalt perspective on the journey that news takes as we follow five main characters from the patrols outside the defensive perimeter to life inside with the “Fobbits.” [Read the full article...]
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