Fobbit

Written by David Abrams

Narrated by David Drummond

Fobbit 'fa-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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Sep 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452679556

Reviews for Fobbit

[kwskultety · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

It tried to be Catch-22, but wasn't good enough. Halfway thru I lost interest; and 100% of the way thru I was annoyed by the names of the characters. It was distracting from the story and not fun at all.
Nice try, but better luck next time.

[hagelstein_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

David Abrams creates an unflattering portrait of the army staff at Forward Operating Base Triumph, housed in a former palace in Bagdad in 2005. The Fobbits, as they’re known, are the “supply clerks, motor pool mechanics, cooks, mail sorters, lawyers, trombone players, logisticians” that are “all about making it out of Iraq in one piece.” Abrams draws a harsh distinction between the Fobbits and “door-kickers,” the soldiers and officers that actually leave the FOB and conduct the war. He invokes the shame of those that stay behind day after day in the comfort of air conditioning and “three hots and a cot.”Abrams tells the story through the eyes of several officers and enlisted men.Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding, Jr. is the “Fobbitiest” of them all with his neat uniform and “lavender-vanilla body wash.” Gooding writes press releases making the war palatable to the public. He is charged with telling the war story the army wants to tell on a daily basis – and nothing more. Gooding and the rest of the “P.A.O.” staff have their own war, a war on words and common sense – specifically a war on the truth.Capt. Abe Shrinkle starts as a gung-ho officer with little sense. He ends up embittered – and worse. Lt. Col. Harkleroad is a delusional mama's boy in charge of the P.A.O. office. Others are portrayed in various degrees of competence – or not. Abrams tells the tale of FOB Triumph and its part in the war with a caustic humor that serves the story well.

[salsabrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hilarious and snarky, a military "Dilbert" featuring hapless soldiers fighting the Iraq war from the public affairs office, although Abrams doesn't shy away either from the physical horrors of war (describing the "vaporizing" of soldiers in IED explosions). Administration is definitely a side of the war you don't read about in the news. Your tax dollars at work, fellow Americans!

[blackshoe-924994 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"Fobbit" is a tale about the life and service of SSG Chance Gooding, a soldier in the Public Affairs Office of a division in Iraq c 2006. As books go, it definitely wants to be Catch-22, I'll say that. Overall, I thought it was underwhelming. While claiming to be a satire, overall, I felt it to be so heavy-handed in its dealings of characters that it came across more as a farce.-Goods: Abrams can write. It's a quick read, and the writing doesn't bog down. There are some funny bits in it (my favorite was the description of Fledger). He does some nice work describing both life on a large base in a warzone and some of the bizarreness involved in a modern military staff. -Bads: Gets some details (especially concerning commissioning sources) badly wrong. Of the five main characters, only one has any real kind of arc, two of them are thinly-drawn caricatures, and one just seem to exist to support/drive actions for another one. There's a bunch of other people who seem like really interesting characters, but get no more than a page worth of description. There should have been way more detail on the sausage-making that is creating briefings and SIGACTs and sending them up the chain of command The tone of the book is all over the place; is it supposed to be funny? Revealing? Maybe it would have been in 2006, but by the time it got released, I don't think it was (or at least, it shouldn't have been). The plot doesn't exist very much, and none of the characters give you much reason to care about their plight, safety, or existence. Overall, it felt like the book became what Abrams **thought** people wanted to see about the Iraqi War vice what he experienced or found particularly revealing/insightful. Caveat: I have been a Fobbit myself in Afghanistan, vice Iraq, so on some level, my frustration may be what I think would be the really awful things that deserve to be lampooned and satired vice what Abrams wrote about.

[narshkite · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I did not like this book. I went in so excited. Two of my favorite books in the history of books were name checked on the cover, Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22. I just re-read Slaughterhouse Five a couple weeks before starting this one, so the timing seemed perfect. I figured I could not go wrong. And yet...I will start with Slaughterhouse Five. This book has absolutely not one thing in common with S5. I cannot imagine how any comparison was even made. They are both (sort of) antiwar books. In S5 there is a line about how writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book. Its useless because war and glaciers are not going anywhere. Maybe given the melt of our polar caps that analogy doesn't work, but I think it still makes the point. If you are writing a book just to send an anti-war message you are wasting your time. There needs to be more. S5 has more, so much more. That book is about everything that matters in the world. Fobbit? Nope. No more. Nada.Catch 22 at least makes sense as a reference. This book is a clear homage to C22, from the silly names to the reference to the reading of C22 by an officer. That said, I know C22, C22 is my friend, and you Fobbit are no Catch 22.One of the best things about C22 is that as flawed as every character in that book is, Joseph Heller loves each of them as if they were his children. As a result you, the reader, come to love them too. Yossarian, the perfect anti-hero whose moral leadership takes the form of abdication, Anabaptist Chaplain Tappman who just wants to believe and protect his family, even Milo (the evil little troll), DeCoverly (the ambitious despot) and the entirely cruel and morally bankrupt Dr. Daneeka. We understand these men, we feel for them, we pray for them. Abrams on the other hand expresses nothing but contempt for every character here. He really seems to hate these guys (and the occasional women who, though treated more respectfully than Nately's Whore, still seem unnecessary and there only to satisfy HR.) These men are the definition of cannon fodder. I can't imagine any reader really cares whether any specific character lives or dies. Maybe if I had actually wanted someone to die I would have liked the book more because at least I would have cared. (Okay, I kind of hoped Harkleroad would suffer serious harm, so I felt a little something.) C22 makes me laugh and cry and moan with despair on every reading. The only thing I felt with Fobbit was the persistent unabating hope that it would speed up and be over soon. 2 stars instead of 1 because the author knows how to craft prose. That is an admirable skill. Maybe he will write a good book some day.

[jimnicol-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Terrific read...fictional account of the absurd, darkly comedic and tragic life experiences of a public affairs officer working in a forward operating base (FOB) in Iraq. Everybody should read FOBBIT.

[nwreader14 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Set in Baghdad's Forward Operating Base Triumph, Fobbit skewers a military and civilian culture obsessed with winning and spin. There are no heroic characters here, all are revealed to be petty, self-dillusional or ill-equipped to handle the pressures of war. While succeeding as a satire, there is little for the reader to connect with in the characters, and the story, while entertaining, is not compelling enough to keep the reader turning pages.

[johnluiz-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Making war and death the subject of satire and humor is a monumentally difficult task, and only a few, like Joseph Heller, can pull it off. David Abrams achieves that difficult task here, and Fobbitt fully warrants its accolades as the Catch 22 of the Iraq war. It's an eye-opening view of the lives of soldiers operating in Forward Operating Base in the middle of Baghdad. Public Affairs Office Chance Gooding serves as the moral center of the book, and he is fully aware of the futility of what he does - filing press releases that distort the harsh realities of the war to keep a positive spin on the effort for the folks at home, while the press ignores the military's propaganda because they're way ahead of them in uncovering the real facts of every incident. Gooding is surrounded by incompetents - his boss, who rewrites him mercifully, can't stop his nose from bleeding in every moment of crisis, and who blotches his clothes with continent-shaped food stains from his constant over eating. But perhaps the poor soldier you feel most sympathy for the hapless Captain Abe Shrinkle, who does everything wrong - from peeing himself when a local national, and suspected suicide bomber, gets his car stuck under a tank; to tossing a hand grenade into an American military fuel truck he doesn't want to have be captured by insurgents, and in so doing fries a another local who had crawled under the truck. His general consigns the inept captain to work the towel service at the F.O.B.'s ridiculously ill-equipped gym. I won't give any more away about Shrinkle's fate because it's a key part of the books culmination. The characters, the plotting, and the humor in this book are pitch perfect. I enjoyed every page and was sorry to see it end. It's one of a number of great books about Iraqi soldiers that came out this year, along with the terrific Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Kevin Powers' Yellow Birds. Abrams' book reads like an instant classic. Abrams is a veteran and every page is fully of anecdotes and insights that only someone's who lived through this would know. (Care packages are a source of rich satire in the novel, as Shrinkle is a hoarder of them, but the book still inspired me to send one!)

[henrimoreaux · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A humorous look at 'life behind the wire' in the 2003 Gulf War.The story is based at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Triumph and follows a handful of misfits through a period of their deployment.It's a well written satire which resembles closely real life in some circumstances whilst also adding a little bit more exaggeration to highlight the idiocy of some characters.Probably one of the best real-life satires I've read.

[randall6hansen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting "behind-the-scenes" and (hopefully) over-the-top satire of what war has become -- and in this case, the war in Iraq in 2005. Based loosely on the diaries of a public affairs officer who served in Iraq, this novel tells the accounts of life mostly within the forward operating base (FOB) at a former Saddam palace in Baghdad -- from the viewpoint of several key characters (including one based on the author himself). Perhaps still a bit too soon to compare to something like M.A.S.H., this book is at times funny, sad, warped, tragic.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fifty years ago The New York Times hailed Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 as "vulgarly, bitterly, savagely funny." The same could easily be said of David Abrams' first novel, FOBBIT, which has already been compared to Heller's book. FOBBIT, with its odd cast of selfishly flawed characters - or, perhaps better, 'caricatures' - is indeed Heller-ian in nature, but is finally, I find, considerably smaller in scope than Heller's blackly comic achievement. While the well-meaning screw-up Captain Shrinkle, with his fondness for formal formations and, later (disgraced), tightly folded towels, is perhaps remniscent of Heller's Lieutenant Scheisskopf with his chocolate soldiers and mad schemes for orderly drill, I was hard-pressed to find any other direct comparisons. Which is good, because Abrams' characters are wholly original. There is the fat, fabricating Mama's boy, Lieutenant-Colonel Eustace Harkleroad, with his food-stained button-strained uniforms, and nosebleeds and knocking knees in the presence of his superiors. And Vic Duret, the manly commander who tries mightily to do the right thing by his men, but secretly yearns for the comforts of his wife's mammaries and the cold nose of his dog. And Sergeant Lumley, who, in a tense and drawn-out confrontation with the enemy, cuts through all the political correctness and cautiousness with one well-aimed shot which will probably haunt him and many of his men for years to come.But the central figure here is probably Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding, Jr. And I add the 'probably' because I think Gooding needed just a bit more center-stage time in this narrative of shifting perspectives. Although Gooding is certainly no Yossarian, there is that scene with its "I've had enough" declaration of independence and the sprint for the main gate check point of FOB Triumph. It is very like Yossarian's last run, heading for Sweden - "Yossarian jumped. Nately's whore was hiding just outside the door. The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."An incoming mortar "shrieked across the sky" as Gooding runs toward the gate, "no helmet, no flak vest, no weapon." He has divested himself of all the acoutrements of war and is running, unprotected and unarmed, unheeding into the danger-filled streets of downtown Baghdad. Is he running away from or toward something? Or is he simply running for the pure and simple animal joy of running, of escape from all of it - all the fobbity crap that is his life? I thought at once of the ending of another book that probably not many would think to compare here: John Updike's RABBIT, RUN. Perhaps Gooding is simply running, like Harry Angstrom did, "[in] a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs."One can look for and find many comparisons here to Heller's classic comic novel of WWII, but, in the end, FOBBIT is also something else the NY Times called CATCH-22: "wildly original" and "unforgettable." An early blurber of FOBBIT, novelist Thomas McGuane, noted that the book "made me furious." I concur with Mr. McGuane's back-handed compliment, and, upon thinking about it, I decided the 'furious' reaction is because the Iraq War is still much too fresh in our minds, barely over for us, and certainly still ongoing for the people of Iraq. Heller's book, with all its darkly comic characters and implications, came more than fifteen years after his war had ended. A 'decent interval' had elapsed. It felt okay to laugh. FOBBIT's publication may be a bit too early. The wounds are still fresh, giving our laughter a reluctant, bitter taste. But this will pass. FOBBIT will endure, I suspect, and may indeed earn that 'classic' status of this particularly nasty war.

[perednia_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While a hobbit lives in a hole in the ground -- a comfy, lovely hole -- a Fobbit lives within the confines of a Foward Operating Base in a war zone. It's neither comfy nor lovely, and it isn't always safe. But it's the life many characters have in Fobbit, the debut novel by David Abrams, based in part on his experiences on active military duty in Iraq.Chance Gooding Jr. is "the Fobbitiest" of them all. As a Public Affairs Officer, he punches out press releases from inside Saddam's former Baghdad palace the way major league sluggers knock baseballs out of the park. No matter how many times he has had to write a variation of the same old story -- one or more of our people were killed or wounded, so were so many of theirs. Then the press release goes up the chain of command and comes back down after every comma is fussed over and imbedded cable news reporters broadcast more complete information hours earlier -- often from the scene itself.Off-duty, Gooding reads. Catch-22 speaks clearly to him, no surprise, but he also tries to live in the worlds of Dickens' Hard Times, of Don Quixote and more. Stories are important to Gooding. He would agree with Joan Didion that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live". The truth is elusive in a military organization, as Gooding's superior officer, Lt. Col. Eustace (Staci) Harkleroad's letters to his mother prove. These are master classes in how to shade, evade and twist the facts just enough to show how delusional some people are. And, of course, not a delusional, pumped-up "word to Jim Powers at the Murfreesboro Free Press or the ladies at the First Church of Redemption". Of course not.A real military man is Lt. Col. Vic Duret, who keeps his sanity by focusing on his dog and a certain part of his wife's anatomy back home as he and his men patrol outside the Green Zone. As long as he doesn't remember that his brother-in-law was in the Twin Towers. That's an image he cannot face but cannot forget. Instances when Duret and his men are on patrol show but one of Abrams's writing strengths. He easily and economically puts the reader in the middle of the chaos that is a routine patrol, sharing not only what the service men and women do right and honorably, but also how stacked the odds against them are and how quickly and randomly events can turn tragic or comic, or both.Although many events in war, like the rest of life, are random, the catalyst to the plot here is Capt. Abe Shrinkle. He's the Frank Burns of our story, a would-be take-charge kinda guy who should never have left home. Shrinkle is the kind of guy other soldiers are tempted to shoot. When he makes one mistake too many, he's taken off patrol and put in charage of the exercise equipments and towels at the FOB rec center.When Shrinkle realizes a slight moment of truth, Abrams writes with straight-to-the-heart accuracy in a passage powerful enough on its own. But later, another character is thrust into a turning point, and then feels "part of himself break away" on a metaphor that recalls the earlier passage. The eloquence in Abrams's purpose in writing by connecting the two passages is wisely used and pays off handsomely.Like the other great war novels that show the absurdity of those who organize war and those who are placed in charge, Fobbit makes one wonder how any combat victories were ever achieved. Abrams also creates memorable characters who bring to life the years of strife, boredom and suffering endured by troops who were sent to fight and then forgotten by a public wrapped up reality TV and recession hardships. Like Willie Loman, the characters who live in Fobbit deserve to have attention paid to them.