Reading List: Fobbit - David Abrams

Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to go with a book I have wanted to read for ages: David Abrams’s 2012 Iraq War classic Fobbit.

A tale about the boredom and folly of war, Fobbit follows a rag tag group of Iraq War Army fighters at various stages in their careers. Staff Sergeant Chase Gooding seems to be the main character, the titular “fobbit” who stays at Forward Operating Base Trinity and works in the Public Affairs Office under Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad. Death tolls come in every day and it’s up to Gooding and others in his office to write the press releases that will sanitize the fallen and show the war to be going great. But we don’t just hang out in the FOB all novel, we also meet several other characters including Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret and Sargeant Brock Lumley who are actually out in the streets of Iraq fighting the “enemy,” and we meet Captain Abe Shrinkle who manages to make a mess of every “situation” he finds himself in, first shrinking away from killing a terrorist who had rammed an Abrams tank and then killing a mentally ill Iraqi and then another “Local National” when he tries to torch a Coalition truck without realizing there is a man underneath. Shrinkle then gets relieved of his command by Duret and is forced to work in the fitness center gathering towels. He eventually goes rogue and winds up hanging out in the Australian pool where a very tragic event happens that I won’t give away for those who want to read this fabulous book. Of course Gooding’s PAO department is called in to massage the horror and make it palatable for the media, which in this case is damn near impossible.

This book was a great read for many reasons, not least of which is that Abrams absolutely nails the stupidity and yet incredible morale of warfare. Each of these characters is fully realized and that makes their observations of the war that much more realistic. As is probably known, Abrams himself fought in this conflict and so his recollections are spot on and deserve commendation. He also started a blog called The Quivering Pen which unfortunately shut down in 2020 but in which I was fortunate enough to write a blog post about my first time writing a novel. Abrams knows about the banality of warfare and how it grates on those who made the decision to go into the armed forces and it totally shows in this work. Even the title is a play on words, calling upon older writers such as Tolkein as Abrams mentions in the beginning of the book.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone looking for a rollicking tale about the disastrous invasion of Iraq from 2003-2011 (and beyond, as we still have troops there) and looking for characters that illustrate that conflict in the most imaginative and entertaining way possible. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure.​