Redeployment(34)

The message began, “I am continually amazed by the lack of foresight I have found…,” and got uglier from there. Within five minutes, I had a new e-mail in my in-box, this from Lieutenant Colonel Roux, the brigade XO. It was addressed not to me, but to Major Zima. Roux hadn’t been cc’d on the initial e-mail, but scanning down through the document, I saw the colonel had forwarded it with the terse message “Jim. Deal with this.”

Lieutenant Colonel Roux was not quite as laconic. His message read, “Can someone explain to me why the Colonel is getting cc’d on angry letters to members of Congress? I want this unf*cked. Now.” Below that was his signature block: “Very Respectfully, LTC James E. Roux.”

I started sweating over a response e-mail to the XO. It seemed important to convey the sheer idiocy of G. G. Goodwin, and I wasn’t sure I had the skill to get it across. But before I’d even put down the first paragraph, Major Zima beat me to the punch with what was clearly the right reply. “Sir,” it read, “I’ll handle it immediately.”

Five minutes later came another e-mail, this also from Major Zima. Lieutenant Colonel Roux and I were cc’d, as was the congressman and the random brigadier general, but not the colonel.

“Sir,” it began. “There’s been a little miscommunication on our part. I actually just finished talking with a schoolteacher who would be glad to take the uniforms and teach the children baseball.”

That seemed highly unlikely, but Major Zima went on to give a rather dizzying account of all the logistical hoops he was jumping through to get the project fast-tracked.

The e-mail continued: “We talked about having the children write you thank-you notes, but unfortunately most children in our area of operations are illiterate.” Then Zima urged patience, using Gene Goodwin’s very own reference to Japan as an example. He explained how baseball was actually introduced in 1872 and took about fifteen years to become firmly entrenched in Japanese culture. This bit was surprisingly long and technical, which made sense, since it turned out Zima had simply copied and pasted the Wikipedia entry for “Baseball in Japan” right into the text to make it seem like he was as engaged with the sport as Gene himself.

A little later, another e-mail popped up, this one strictly from Zima to me, no one else cc’d.

“Hey, Nathan,” it read. “Maybe you should let me handle this guy. No need to kick the hornets’ nest.”





? ? ?


About two weeks later, I ran into Major Zima doing push-ups in his cammies. Between grunts, he told me that if I wanted to start funding repairs for the water plant, the ministry wouldn’t go out of their way to roadblock us or steal more than the usual amount of reconstruction dollars.

“How many dollars are we talking?” I said. “Didn’t we already sink 1.5 million dollars into it?”

He stopped, put a cheerful grin on his face, and said, “Yep.”

“Where’d that money go?”

“I don’t know,” he said, dropping down for another push-up, “I wasn’t here then.”

I watched him for a bit. His torso was round enough that even with his arms fully extended, his belly was still hovering less than an inch above the ground. He dropped down and used his stomach to trampoline back up. I said, “How’d you get them to agree?”

“Seventy-nine,” he said. “Ahhhhh… . Eighty!”

He collapsed to the ground. There was no way he’d done eighty push-ups. My guess was closer to twenty-five. He looked up.

“I told them what you told me,” he said between big breaths, lying belly down on the ground with one cheek in the dirt.

“What did I tell you?”

“That if we turned on the water, it’d make all the Sunnis’ toilets explode.” Zima slowly rolled onto his back. “Ahhhh,” he said.

“And that was enough?”

“No,” he said. “But they double-checked and it turns out you’re right. Those pipes are designed off the Nasiriyah Drainage Pump pipes, so they’ll push out twenty cubic meters a second. That’s way too much. There’s something that you need to reduce the pressure. I forget what it’s called.”

“A pressure reducer?” I said.

“Yeah, a pressure reducer,” he said. “We’re not building that.”

“You told them the United States would purposely destroy all the plumbing in a Sunni community in order to get the water plant on line.”