Contemporary Authors

• Fobbit Black Cat (New York, NY), 2012
• Brave Deeds Black Cat (New York, NY), 2017

1. Brave deeds LCCN 2016057461 Type of material Book Personal name Abrams, David, 1963- author. Main title Brave deeds / David Abrams. Edition First Grove Atlantic paperback edition. Published/Produced New York : Black Cat, 2017. Description 256 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9780802126863 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3601.B7346 B73 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Fobbit : [a novel] LCCN 2013409631 Type of material Book Personal name Abrams, David, 1963- Main title Fobbit : [a novel] / David Abrams. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Black Cat, c2012. Description 372 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780802120328 0802120326 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1313/2013409631-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1313/2013409631-d.html Shelf Location FLS2013 004917 CALL NUMBER PS3601.B7346 F63 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1)

• David Abrams Website - http://www.davidabramsbooks.com/

  David Abrams’ debut novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and a Best Book of 2012 by Paste Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Barnes and Noble. It was also featured as part of B&N's Discover Great New Writers program. One of his short stories, "Roll Call," was included in the anthology Fire and Forget (Da Capo Press, 2013). His short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Electric Literature, Consequence, Salamander, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, Five Chapters, The Missouri Review, and many other places. His work has also appeared in the New York Times and Salon. He regularly blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen

  Abrams retired in 2008 after a 20-year career in the active-duty Army as a journalist. He was named the Department of Defense's Military Journalist of the Year in 1994 and received several other military commendations throughout his career. His tours of duty took him to Thailand, Japan, Africa, Alaska, Texas, Georgia and The Pentagon. In 2005, he joined the 3rd Infantry Division and deployed to Baghdad in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The journal he kept during that year formed the blueprint for the novel which would later become known as Fobbit.

  David Abrams was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Jackson, Wyoming. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife.

  If you'd like David Abrams to speak to your book club or other organization via Skype or conference call, contact him here.

  For bookstore appearances, festivals or other speaking engagements regarding Fobbit, please contact Deb Seager at Grove/Atlantic.

• UAF Corner Stone - http://uafcornerstone.net/iraq-back-fobbits-tale/

  Iraq and back again: A Fobbit’s tale

  By Frank Soos

  In 1992, UAF’s graduate writing program was full of ambitious and gifted writers. Among them was a guy who rushed into class every week still in his work clothes — fatigues. That would be Sergeant Abrams, a journalist attached to the 6th Infantry Division (Light) at Fort Wainwright.

  Sgt. Abrams — David — was not a soldier who suddenly took a notion to become a writer. Instead he was a writer who’d chosen the Army as his day job while he pursued a career in literary fiction. He’d already finished an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Oregon, and had written a large chunk of a first novel, a novel he says will remain forever locked in a desk drawer. A person digging around on the Internet can find a picture of a young, newly married David, no GI haircut, a full mop of hair, presenting a check, a payment for an early publication, to the camera. That photograph captures a beginning moment in a life of accomplishments and setbacks.

  David began college life in Wyoming, thinking he would be a theater major, an actor. He found parts in locally produced, broadly comic shows where he was often cast in the role of an oafish character. But while he and a friend were making plans to strike out for Denver or even New York to pursue their ambitions on a larger stage, he met a young woman named Jean. He invited her to a play he was in, but she was not especially impressed, so David instead showed her some short stories he’d been working on. “I think you’re a better writer than an actor,” she told him. He made an abrupt change in direction.

  By 1987, David had earned his BA, was married to Jean and was the father of two young boys. And he was working as a cook. The young couple took a chance, pulled up stakes in Oregon and moved to Montana, with no prospects waiting for them there. David got on as a beat reporter for a small paper, The Madisonian. He was paid 50 cents per column inch for his words — typical journalists’ pay for the time — so David learned how to write a lot of words. From there he moved to The Livingston Enterprise, where he climbed up the ladder a few rungs and had the chance to do some feature stories. Sent to cover a photo exhibit, he lucked into an interview with actor Jeff Bridges.

  David was writing, but his work didn’t pay the bills. Soda pop was a luxury he and Jean couldn’t afford.

  So he enlisted. Oct. 11, 1988, was his first day of a 20-year career writing press releases and articles for the Army. His third child, a daughter, was born in December of that year. He and his family set out on the typical Army life, moving around the country, including to Fairbanks.

  During that time, David caught moments when he could write, at nights or on weekends. That time might have been family time. “I don’t really regret writing,” David says, “but I regret not having a better balance.

  “You’re always going to have to take something away from something. We all make choices. It’s tough.”

  David spoke at a writer’s craft talk and gave a public reading at UAF in November 2013.
  David spoke at a writer’s craft talk and gave a public reading at UAF in November 2013.
  “You’re always going to have to take
  something away from something.
  We all make choices. It’s tough.”

  On the day the twin towers fell, David, like most of his fellow soldiers, saw a deployment of some sort as inevitable. So 17 years after his enlistment, three years after 9/11, David found himself on a military transport bound for Germany, the first stop on the way to a deployment in Iraq. As a writer going into a war zone, he set in to reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, but as far as his own work was concerned, he planned to use what free time he had to work on a revision of Dubble, his graduate thesis novel, and get it in shape for publication.

  When he made the last leg of his trip wearing full body armor and clutching his M16, when he at last touched down in Iraq and the rear cargo ramp opened onto a hot desert landscape, David Abrams adjusted his thinking: This strange new world would be the subject that held his attention and would be the focus of his writing and his work for the next six years.

  The Forward Operating Base (the FOB) was not what David had expected. If he imagined eating MREs, sleeping in a tent, suffering sand and heat, what he found was a large metal building filled with a cubical jungle. The Fobbits worked in air-conditioned comfort while they created PowerPoint demonstrations, ground fresh coffee beans at their desks, joked around like any group of office workers.

  This environment occasioned David’s attitude of “surprised irony.” He was not in the war he had expected, and as a result the novel he wrote is not the war novel people might expect.

  Fobbit was published to general acclaim in 2012. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Christian Bauman found Fobbit to be “a very funny book, as funny, disturbing, heartbreaking and ridiculous as war itself.”

  Yes, funny. A number of books, fiction and nonfiction, have come out of the Iraq war, most all of them brutal and harrowing. Few have as much as a moment of accidental humor. With the war and its attendant atrocities and political failures still fresh in people’s minds, nothing could be riskier than treating the war humorously — or more specifically, satirically. Satire, David says, is “poking holes in what we expect something to be … letting the air out of the tires.”

  The satire begins with the title. A Fobbit is a member of the Army, but one stationed safely within the perimeter of a Forward Operating Base. In his year of duty in Iraq, David ventured outside the wire only once, for a ceremony. Fobbits, like all soldiers, carry guns, but their M16s are rather like the umbrellas civilians might carry when there is a slight chance of rain. They are not fully immune from danger — the occasional mortar round does fall inside the FOB. (One such round proves to be a pivotal event in the course of the novel.) Fobbits live in a world of shillyshallying political maneuvering. Fobbits have a health club, hot showers, fast food and movies. Like hobbits, perhaps their distant kin, the Fobbits are “reluctant to go beyond their shire.” [See excerpt.]

  Fobbit will be among those books that, as decades
  go by, people will turn to in order to place the wars
  in Iraq and Afghanistan in a historical context.

  Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad is the very model of Fobbitry. His bulging excess weight tests the fabric of his uniform. He’s given to nosebleeds at times of stress, and he writes long, self-aggrandizing emails home to his mother. Once the character of Harkleroad came into David’s head, the novel began to take shape. David says Harkleroad’s many emails almost wrote themselves. The novel was off and running.

  Sgt. Chance Gooding Jr. is among the subordinates who must try to do their jobs under Harkleroad’s feckless command. Gooding, though, is a different sort of Fobbit. While others play video games, stream ballgames from the States on their computers or watch pornography, Gooding reads Cervantes and Dickens. He is not so different from his creator. David has admitted, with a bow to Flaubert, “Chance Gooding, c’est moi.” Gooding keeps a journal, and David has acknowledged that many of Chance Gooding’s musings are close variations on his own.

  As public affairs officer at Task Force Baghdad headquarters, Abrams was responsible for, among other things, writing press releases, managing a photo library, answering media questions, editing a biweekly internal newspaper and “fixing paper jams in the office printer.” Photo courtesy of David Abram
  As public affairs officer at Task Force Baghdad headquarters, Abrams was responsible for, among other things, writing press releases, managing a photo library, answering media questions, editing a biweekly internal newspaper and “fixing paper jams in the office printer.” Photo courtesy of David Abrams.
  Gooding maintains a cool, ironic distance on all around him. That distance probably began for David himself when he enlisted. “I joined the Army as this guy who was writing short stories. I joined as this guy who was separate from what he was becoming a part of, and that just intensified when I got over to the war zone.”

  It is through Gooding’s eyes that readers see some of the most absurd elements of the press releases he must write for the public affairs office, press releases bland and evasive that still must be vetted by the chain of command before they can be offered to the public.

  While Gooding reflects that dead soldiers “are objects to be loaded onto the back of C-130s somewhere and delivered like pizzas to the United States,” he cranks out the same boilerplate release: “A soldier paid the ultimate sacrifice while carrying out his duties in Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

  When he arrived in Iraq with a stack of empty notebooks to fill, David planned to simply capture the details of what he expected to be a life-changing experience. It was that, to be sure. But at some point, David began to see how the material in his journals could be made into a novel.

  His next posting — as it turned out, his last — was at the Pentagon, where he was a “geographic bachelor,” his wife and kids staying in Georgia. Living alone, when he should have had plenty of time to work developing his novel, he found he had let the project lapse. David determined to get up early one morning, 5 o’clock, and spend an hour on the manuscript before doing his physical training and heading for work. He tried it, and he had a productive morning with his manuscript. Energized and reconnected to his project, he got up early the next morning and the next. Fobbit was beginning to take shape.

  Once he was out of the Army but still working a full-time job, David found he needed to get up earlier still to find working time for the novel. Three-thirty became — and still is — his wake-up time for writing. As he worked along, he began to feel a sense of urgency to get the novel out in the world. His timing was excellent. Fobbit entered the literary world alongside other well-regarded Iraq war novels: Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, followed by Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days and Roxana Robinson’s Sparta.

  As he worked along, he began to feel a
  sense of urgency to get the novel out into
  the world. His timing was excellent.

  When seen in the context of these books offering varying takes on our recent wars, David is one writer in a community of writers. His most immediate community might be that of his fellow writers of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another significant audience is the many people in the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force who served there. David’s satire bites harder on commissioned officers than on enlisted people, but both groups seem to have found Fobbit to their liking. Allowing for the hyperbole necessary in satire, even some public affairs staffers told David that he pretty much got it right. His favorite critique, though, came from a soldier in Afghanistan who wrote in an email that he and his buddies were passing Fobbit around — while on guard duty — and enjoying it thoroughly.

  Fobbit will be among those books that, as decades go by, people will turn to in order to place the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a historical context. After a reading from the novel in Fairbanks last November, David was asked how he wanted it to be read. He replied that his initial intent was to write a book that would be as apolitical as possible. But he had to face facts. “Who am I kidding? I didn’t write an apolitical novel.” His judgment, at least in the short run, is that the war was a mess of politics, bureaucracy and red tape, with those who served doing the best they could.

  Homecoming, with Jean and their daughter, Kylie: “One of the ... happiest days of my life.” Photo courtesy by David Abrams
  Homecoming, with Jean, David’s wife, and their daughter, Kylie: “One of the … happiest days of my life.” Photo courtesy of David Abrams.
  Beyond the community of fellow soldiers (and perhaps the narrower community of fellow Fobbits), David is an active and activist member of a much larger, continent-size community of writers maintained through his weekly blog, The Quivering Pen. Living in Butte, Mont., away from New York — still thought to be the center of the literary universe — David’s solution has been to bring the community to him.

  The Quivering Pen gives David a chance to explore and celebrate his various reading interests, and has proven to be a vehicle for David to build a network of literary friendships. David is the son of a preacher, and when his father moved the family from the East Coast to Wyoming and a new congregation, he found that the friendships among his classmates were already formed. Besides, he was the preacher’s kid, stuck under a halo whether he wanted it or not. So he accepted his isolation and took to reading. Looking back on those days, David recognizes that he was also learning something important from his father: Each Sunday sermon was a carefully crafted 20-minute essay.

  Through all the hurrah surrounding the publication of Fobbit and the accompanying disruptions in his work schedule, David has continued to produce new work. Lately that work has been in the form of short stories. His stories can be found in the Iraq and Afghanistan war anthologies Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand and Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, as well as a more broadly conceived volume, Visiting Hours. These stories will lead to his own collection — with luck — soon.

  Meanwhile, Dubble, that novel project put on hold when David was deployed to Iraq, is back on his desk for another round of revisions. Dubble is the story about a star-struck dwarf who sets out to make his mark in Hollywood. He finds work as a stunt double for an obnoxious child actor. Informed by work of the classic Hollywood director Preston Sturgis — a fine satirist himself — Dubble is, like Fobbit, a serious story wrapped in wildly humorous episodes.

  In his graduate student days, David wrote a wonderfully imagined short story, “Providence,” about a freakishly deep fissure in the earth on a Georgia farm, converted to a state park. That story was accepted by Esquire, among the most prestigious venues for serious short fiction. That acceptance was a significant mark of distinction for any writer, especially for a guy who had not yet completed his degree.

  When he got the call from his agent relaying the happy news, he was at work in his public affairs office. David, not wanting to do personal business on Uncle Sam’s time, hung up and quickly stepped into the hall to call her back on the pay phone. Fifteen years before the publication of Fobbit, he thought the appearance in Esquire meant his literary star had risen; he’d leave the Army when the current term of his enlistment expired and live the life of a writer. It didn’t quite happen then. (Neither did his graduate career: a combination of Army moves and procrastination meant he didn’t get his master’s degree from UAF until 2004.)

  “It’s been a 30-year
  train chugging down
  the tracks, and it finally
  pulled into the station.”

  That first agent did not see the marketing potential in Dubble, and at the time, short story collections were not strong sellers. In David’s words, a story collection looked like “moldy bread to agents; they didn’t want to touch it.”

  Now, despite the success of Fobbit, David is still working a full-time, 40-hours-a-week job in public affairs for the Bureau of Land Management. It’s a better situation than his Army job, less red tape and without the burden of a chain of command second-guessing his every sentence. He is his own one-man shop. His BLM boss has been flexible and generous in granting David time off to promote his book, and colleagues who know about his literary pursuits have been supportive.

  Through steady hard work, David has made himself a fully enfranchised member of the literary world, in love with the wonder of well-told stories, whether his own or others’. He realizes his short story collection and the novel Dubble may or may not get into print or find the same level of acclaim. Undaunted, philosophical about the good luck and bad luck that has informed his writing career so far, David says, “It’s been a 30-year train chugging down the tracks, and it finally pulled into the station.”

  Still, being a writer means being something of a professional fatalist. What you did in your last novel or story or poem is no use in writing the next thing. You’re always starting from scratch, always accepting that rejection is part of the deal. Like every writer, David would like to see the day when his day job would be doing his own work — writing more stories and novels. But he worries the abundance of freedom would not necessarily translate into the discipline needed to spend seven hours at his desk. Given all he has accomplished in the bits of time he managed to grab for himself over the years, that seems an unlikely outcome.

  So until his dream job becomes his day job, David Abrams still wakes up at 3:30 every morning in the cold dark, sitting at his desk, crafting another story to tell. a-bug-SA

  They were Fobbits because, at the core, they were nothing but marshmallow. Crack open their chests and in the space where their hearts should be beating with a warrior’s courage and selfless regard, you’d find a pale, gooey center. They cowered like rabbits in their cubicles, busied themselves with PowerPoint briefings to avoid the hazard of Baghdad’s bombs, and steadfastly clung white-knuckled to their desks at Forward Operating Base Triumph. If the FOB was a mother’s skirt, then these soldiers were pressed hard against the pleats, too scared to venture beyond her grasp.

  Like the shy, hairy-footed hobbits of Tolkien’s world, they were reluctant to go beyond their shire, bristling with rolls of concertina wire at the borders of the FOB. After all, there were goblins in turbans out there! Or so they convinced themselves.

  Supply clerks, motor pool mechanics, cooks, mail sorters, lawyers, trombone players, logisticians: Fobbits, one and all. They didn’t give a shit about appearances. They were all about making it out of Iraq in one piece.

  Of all the Fobbits in the U.S. military task force headquarters at the western edge of Baghdad, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr. was the Fobbitiest. With his neat-pressed uniform, his lavender-vanilla body wash, and the dust collected around the barrel of his M16 rifle, he was the poster child for the stay-back-stay-safe soldier. The smell of something sweet radiated off his skin–as if he bathed in gingerbread.

  Gooding worked in the public affairs office of the Seventh Armored Division, headquartered in one of Saddam Hussein’s marbled palaces. His PAO days were filled with sifting through reports of Significant Activities and then writing press releases about what he had found. His job was to turn the bomb attacks, the sniper kills, the sucking chest wounds, and the dismemberments into something palatable–ideally, something patriotic–that the American public could stomach as they browsed the morning newspaper with their toast and eggs. No one wanted to read: “A soldier was vaporized when his patrol hit an Improvised Explosive Device, his flesh thrown into a nearby tree where it draped like Spanish moss.” But the generals and colonels of the Seventh Armored Division all agreed that the folks back home would appreciate hearing: “A soldier paid the ultimate sacrifice while carrying out his duties in Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Gooding’s weapons were words, his sentences were missiles.

  As a Fobbit, Chance Gooding Jr. saw the war through a telescope, the bloody snarl of combat remained at a safe, sanitized distance from his air-conditioned cubicle. And yet, here he was on a FOB at the edge of Baghdad, geographically central to gunfire. To paraphrase the New Testament, he was in the war but he was not of the war.

  FOBBIT © 2012 by David Abrams; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• Independent Record - http://helenair.com/news/local/butte-author-s-debut-novel-fobbit-makes-nyt-notable-book/article_988b2540-740f-11e2-8c21-001a4bcf887a.html

  Butte author’s debut novel — 'Fobbit' — makes 2012 NYT Notable Book List
  By EDDIE GREGG Independent Record Feb 11, 2013 0

  When we envision a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq, an Army public affairs officer toiling over a press release probably isn’t the figure that first comes to mind.

  But that’s the perspective author David Abrams, a Butte resident and 20-year Army veteran, offers up in his satiric, debut novel “Fobbit,” which made the 2012 New York Times Notable Book List.

  The novel, which has been compared to the television series “M*A*S*H” in theme, deals with a public affairs soldier, Chance Gooding Jr., and his compatriots as they toil through daily life at Triumph, a fictitious Forward Operating Base in Baghdad.

  On a recent afternoon, Abrams, who works for the Montana Bureau of Land Management, made a visit to Capital High, where he spoke with students about his book, his experiences in Iraq and what it took to become a published novelist.

  “I would call this book almost verging on a cartoon. It’s pretty exaggerated in a lot of places,” he said to about 20 students gathered in the Capital High Auditorium. “But I will say, without naming names, that I have worked for my share of buffoons.”

  Abrams, who joined the Army in 1988 but did not serve in a combat zone until 2005, says he himself was a “Fobbit.”

  The name, which purposefully rhymes with “Hobbit,” was given to soldiers of Abrams’ ilk — those who worked within the relatively safe confines of Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs — by the “door kicker” soldiers who worked and fought in the field.

  The opening paragraph of “Fobbit,” which Abrams read to the students, sums up the kind of work he did while in Iraq and the reputation he and his cohorts had:

  “They were Fobbits because, at the core, they were nothing but marshmallow. Crack open their chests and in the space where their hearts should be beating with a warrior’s courage and selfless regard, you’d find a pale, gooey center. They cowered like rabbits in their cubicles, busied themselves with PowerPoint briefings to avoid the hazard of Baghdad’s bombs, and steadfastly clung white-knuckled to their desks at Forward Operating Base Triumph. If the FOB was a mother’s skirt, then these soldiers were pressed hard against the pleats, too scared to venture beyond her grasp.”

  “If you go onto discussion boards or chat rooms or whatever, you’ll find a lot of scorn for ‘Fobbits,’” Abrams said. “(It’s) not necessarily a good thing to be called these days.”

  While in Iraq, Abrams kept an extensive journal, even though he worked 10-12 hour days. Every night he would grab some “chow” and go to his “hooch” — or trailer — and chronicle the events of the day.

  Within a couple of months of arriving in Iraq, Abrams published some of his journal entries on a writers’ blog where a literary agent spotted his work and partnered with the author.

  By that time, a slew of Iraq war memoirs had been written or were in the works, so the two determined that a novel with Abrams’ unique perspective was what the world needed, Abrams said.

  He left Iraq in 2006 with roughly 100 pages of single-spaced notes and started working on his novel.

  He had a draft nearly 800 pages long ready for his agent at the end of 2010. They worked on the draft until the summer of 2011, at which time his agent started sending the book out to editors.

  A first-time editor with new York-based Grove/Atlantic took on the book in September 2011 and “Fobbit” was published a year later.

  Through the editing process, “Fobbit” slimed down to fewer than 400 pages.

  Although the book was published late last year, it quickly climbed through the rank and file of new fiction, garnering praise from the Washington Post and New York Times Book Review.

  “I applaud David Abrams for sticking to his vision and writing the satire he wanted to write instead of adding to the crowded shelf of war memoirs,” wrote Christian Bauman in his review of the novel for The New York Times Book Review. “In ‘Fobbit,’ he has written a very funny book, as funny, disturbing, heartbreaking and ridiculous as war itself.”

  The book was published in paperback in North America. In April, “Fobbit” will be published in the U.K. in hardback.

  But Abrams isn’t slowing down — he’s already working toward the publication of another novel.

  “It’s 180 degrees different in plot, but it’s still a comedy,” Abrams said of his forthcoming book. “It’s about a little person … who gets a job as a stunt man for a child actor in Hollywood in the 1940s.”

  Taking time to write every day is critical for success as an author — you can’t wait for the moment of inspiration, he says.

  “For me that’s 3:30; every morning I get up and do my writing,” Abrams said.

  Aside from that commitment, he says there are two secrets to writing:

  “That’s applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair and then applying the fingertip to the keyboard.”

• CAROLINELEAVITTVILLE - http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/2012/12/david-abrams-talks-about-fobbit.html

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2012
  David Abrams talks about Fobbit, screwball comedy, being paid to read the Bible, and so much more

  David Abrams debut, Fobbit, a harrowingly funny novel about the Iraq War, was not only a New York Times notable book of 2012, but it zoomed onto the Best Books Lists from Barnes & Noble, Paste, Amazon, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Publishers Weekly--and my own personal list, too. He's also the genius behind the blog, The Quivering Pen, and truthfully, one of the warmest, most hilarious human beings on the planet. I'll thrilled to finally have him on the blog! Thank you, David!

  So, every writer's least favorite question, sometimes, but the one readers always want to know: Tell us what sparked the writing of Fobbit?

  What sparks any novel? A word? An image? An off-hand comment from a co-worker, a spouse, or a stranger? In the case of Fobbit, it was a little of all of that. Maybe it was the fact that I read Catch-22, Don Quixote, and Jarhead on my first deployment into a war zone (Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2005). Maybe it was the time when I was sitting at my desk in the U.S. Army’s Task Force Baghdad Headquarters and someone in the next cubicle was complaining about a paper cut they’d just gotten after a printer jam while, at the same time, we were hearing a report through the overhead speakers of another casualty in the war—a soldier blown apart into five different pieces from a roadside bomb. Or maybe it was my agent emailing me—after unsuccessfully shopping around my “Iraq War memoir” manuscript to New York publishers—to advise that maybe what this war really needed was a novel—a work of fiction that would hit home to a reading public who’d grown numb to a nation at war. It was all of those things—a culmination of factors that led me to turn away from truthfully recounting my year-long deployment to Iraq as a much-despised “fobbit” and focus on the medium of lies instead. Near the end of my tour of duty, I realized fiction would be the most effective megaphone I could use to tell people about my war experience. And so, I set to work writing a comedy about my days in Baghdad with the 3rd Infantry Division.

  Fobbit's been compared to Catch-22 in its wild, black humor and its raw look at the War. You even include a funny homage to Heller's book in your novel, by having a character reading Catch-22. Does this fantastic comparison make you more nervous about writing your next book or does it save you, or a little of both?

  The debt I owe Joseph Heller for artistic inspiration is incalculable—as is the debt I owe Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Dickens, Richard Ford, Flannery O’Connor, Victor Hugo, and any number of other literary lampposts which have lit my path. In the case of Catch-22, it obviously had a direct impact in the way Fobbit turned out and since I knew the comparisons would be inevitable, I decided to give the book its own little cameo in my novel. I read Heller’s novel for the first time when I was on my way to war—literally on my way: I started on page 1 after I’d boarded the plane at Fort Stewart, Georgia and had reached the midway point by the time we touched down in Kuwait, the 3rd ID’s staging ground before we moved north to Iraq. Catch-22 was unlike anything I’d ever read. There’s slapstick on one page and horror on the next. It’s not an easy book to read; it’s illogical and irrational in structure; there are as many characters as an Osmond Family Thanksgiving guest list; and you have to work your way toward its pleasures….but when you get there, those rewards are immeasurable. I should add that Catch-22 is not the only influence behind Fobbit. I was raised on a diet of TV shows that poked fun at the military: Hogan’s Heroes, Gomer Pyle, and M*A*S*H. Those shows were subversive and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, they set the stage for the way I always root for the underdog. The little guys (the privates) always got their way while the higher echelons (the officers) came off looking like fools. Discipline was turned upside down, creating chaos. And out of that chaos came comedy. So Fobbit is as much Gomer Pyle as it is Yossarian.

  I loved that you focused on the noncombat units of the Iraq War. As a former army public affairs specialist, you have an insider's unique perspective, so how much is exaggerated and how much is dead-on true?

  If comedy is truth stretched out on a wad of Silly-Putty, then there’s probably a lot of truth at the heart of Fobbit. I don’t think I want to get into naming the specific elements of the novel which really happened or are daily practices of the Army at war because nearly everything in the novel is a hybrid—a fictual faction—but I can tell you there are two sections of the book which stick pretty close to the truth: the tragic scene at the on Al-Aaimmah bridge where nearly a thousand Iraqis were killed in a stampede; and Captain Abe Shrinkle’s flashback to a disastrous date in high school. The bridge stampede happened while I was in Iraq, and that date was pretty close to my own romantic fumble in junior high. For the rest of the book, I tried to filter the essence of truth through comedy. While I was writing Fobbit, I kept circling back to one of my favorite quotes from Flannery O’Connor: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” In order to get readers’ attention, I did a lot of shouting and billboard-painting in this book.

  What's your writing life like?

  I balance my writing routine with the demands of a full-time day job, and the pleasures of a very rich, happy married life (my wife and I are empty-nesters now, but we like to spend most of our time together). These things squeeze the rest of my day into small compartments. So, in my quest for better time management, I’ve started getting up at 3:30 every morning to work on my creative writing. The house is dark and quiet. It’s just me, the keyboard, a mug of coffee, and my classical music iTunes playlist. It’s an ungodly hour, but I find these are my most fertile hours. Sadly, I don’t spend all of those hours writing fiction. Lack of self-discipline is the biggest monster on my back. That’s why you’ll usually find me checking email, Tweeting, blogging, and any number of other distractions when I should be writing fiction. When I do write, it’s usually in these big bursts—lung-burning sprints to a finish line—where I write an entire short story in one sitting, or spend three days in isolation trying to get through 50 pages of my novel.

  What's obsessing you now and why?

  Apart from my blog, The Quivering Pen, which is always an obsession, I’ve been consumed with revising my next novel. It’s a screwball comedy set in the Golden Age of Hollywood—something pretty far removed from the bloody grit of the Iraq War. In a nutshell, it’s about a popular child actor and his adult stunt double and the trouble they get into when the kid kills a rival studio’s mascot—a scrappy little dog who always opened the studio’s films with a “Yip-yip-a-rooo!” similar to the MGM lion’s roar. On a larger level, it’s about identity, loyalty, and the conflict of protecting someone you’ve grown to dislike.

  What question didn't I ask that I should have?

  You didn’t ask me about the time my father, a Baptist minister, paid me to read the Bible (I made it as far as Leviticus that year and earned $35); the name of my first dog (Shane, a chocolate Labrador Retriever); three things I love about my wife (her sense of fairness, the depth of her voice, and the way she collapses with laughter when I’m on a really good roll with snappy one-liners); my favorite non-writing, non-reading passion (cooking); the two TV shows which didn’t deserve to die early deaths (Southland and Better Off Ted); which type of chocolate I prefer (milk); and the moment I really, truly grew up (September 22, 1984 when my first child was born: For nine months, he’d been this mystery--identity unknown, a shifting shape behind the barrier of my wife's skin--but now here he was, pink and wet and complete, coming out of my wife's body with his arms springing open wide, as if he was at the end of a dream about falling from heaven). But then again, how could you have known those were the questions you should have asked?

  The Quivering Pen, a blog about books
  Follow David on Facebook
  Follow David on Twitter: @ImDavidAbrams

• DianeProkop - https://dianeprokop.com/2012/10/12/david-abrams-and-karl-marlantes-at-powells/

  David Abrams and Karl Marlantes at Powell’s
  October 12, 2012
  I haven’t been shy about my admiration for Karl Marlantes on the pages of this blog. He’s the author of Matterhorn (2009) and What It Is Like to Go to War (2011). I’ve been to a few Marlantes’ readings and they’re always emotionally charged. (Read about one here.) They make me realize how important it is to get outside my bubble to listen to someone who has lived the life of a soldier. So, imagine my delight when I saw that Fobbit author David Abrams would be teaming up with Marlantes to talk about their books at Powell’s.

  Abrams, who had a 20-year military career, based his debut novel Fobbit on his experiences while stationed in Iraq as a military journalist. It’s biting satire at its best. Think Catch-22 or M*A*S*H and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect. I loved it! (Read my review here.)

  Before reading from his book, Abrams talked about the genesis of Fobbit saying that while he was deployed in Iraq, he kept a journal. “Out of that journal, stories started to form, and eventually they coalesced into what I’m holding in front of you now. I started writing Fobbit while I was in the war zone and really worked on it in earnest when I came back in 2006.”

  Marlantes asked Abrams whether he had known he was going to write Fobbit when he was deployed. Abrams said, “When I went over to combat, I went over as a novelist. I had already written books. I’d been writing short stories published in places like Esquire and small literary reviews and magazines. I went over with the idea that this experience would probably change me in some way, and I would eventually get something out of it. I didn’t know it was going to take this shape or form or that it would be a comedy. I just figured I should pay attention to what was going to happen to me over there in the war zone. As I was over there keeping my journal and recording things that went on in the task force headquarters where I was at, some of the absurdities started to come through. The story kind of wrote itself, really.”

  They both talked about the trials and tribulations of getting published. Marlantes said, “I actually tried to publish Matterhorn in 1977 and no one would read it. I would get the query letters back and it would be like, ‘Vietnam? We can’t sell a book about Vietnam. Are you kidding me?’ In ’78 I had the first of my five kids so, you know, you have to get the money to straighten the teeth, and so I put it aside. I would work on it on weekends. In the mid-80s I tried it again, but this time when the query letters came back, it was, ‘Well, it’s too bad you missed the market. Hollywood’s already saturated with Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. So the same thing went on–more teeth growing. In the mid-90s I tried again and I honestly got letters back from publishers saying, ‘Gosh, you could just make this relevant. Why don’t you just take this platoon you’re talking about and put it into the Gulf War. I was so happy that Microsoft had come out with Search and Replace so I could put desert in for jungle in the novel. Then in the OOs it was the same. ‘Matterhorn’s a mountain, right? Why don’t you just move it to Afghanistan?’ So, it was a long, long haul. I think it was 30-some years before finally somebody read it.”

  Abrams said, “About half way through writing the first draft of what became Fobbit, this book came across my desk called Matterhorn. I was a book reviewer and I would get advance copies. Along with the copy of Matterhorn came a nice letter from the publisher giving the back story of Karl. So I looked at that and said ‘Golly!’ if this guy could spend 30 years on his book, I’ve got another 25 to go and I’m in pretty good shape. In all seriousness, I admire the hell out of Karl for sticking with it for all those years and not to be all gooey but he did inspire me at that point to stay true. But my path to publication was a little bit easier. If there were any stumbling blocks in the writing of this book, they were me. My procrastination…because on a daily basis I do anything to avoid writing. That’s the mantra of most writers, I think. It took me about five years to get to a point where I was happy with the draft of this novel.”

  Later Abrams mentioned that “as any writer knows, it’s a relief to get something down on paper, finished and bound and printed, which is a friggin miracle. I still look at this book everyday and say, ‘Is that mine?’ So, just the joy, from a very personal standpoint, of having a book finished and published and accepted, and I guess talked about in some circles–my family mostly–but so for that it was a great experience for me just to get it done.”

  Marlantes said that when he hit the NYT bestseller list he got a call from a cousin who said, “Karl, your novel’s on the NYT bestseller list! I didn’t know we had that many relatives.”

  Fobbit, Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, 2012

  What It Is Like to Go to War, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011

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• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2012/09/the-rumpus-interview-with-david-abrams/

  THE RUMPUS INTERVIEW WITH DAVID ABRAMS
  BY KYLE MINOR

  September 10th, 2012

  David Abrams served for twenty years in the U.S. Army. He came to public notice during the second war in Iraq, by writing dispatches from Baghdad for the Emerging Writers’ Network email newsletter, and his fiction was subsequently published in Esquire and Narrative. His debut novel, Fobbit, is a tragicomic rendering of things he observed in Baghdad.

  In popular military jargon, a “fobbit” is a pejorative describing a U.S. Army employee stationed at a Forward Operating Base, who avoids danger by staying put on the base. The novel has been compared favorably to other comic novels about war, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

  ***

  The Rumpus: What kind of experience of war were you expecting when you deployed to Kuwait, and then Iraq, with the Public Affairs Office of the 3rd Infantry Division in early 2005?

  David Abrams: Well, that’s the thing—when I got on that plane in Savannah, Georgia on January 2, 2005, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d been in the active-duty Army for seventeen years by that point, but had never deployed into combat. So, there was a little fear of the unknown churning around inside me, I suppose. My expectations, as it turned out, were different than the reality. I imagined I’d be living in some pretty hard, spartan conditions—working out of a tent, sand everywhere, not showering for days on end, etc. It turned out to be an office job not unlike all the others I’d had here in the United States. Except for the occasional mortar passing overhead, of course.

  Rumpus: How did that feel? Was it disappointing in some way, or a relief?

  Abrams: In a way, it was a relief, but it also took some getting used to. Of course, it only took about a day-and-a-half for me to get mentally acclimated and in the groove of the routine. Once you’re inside the wire, there’s a tendency for the war to slip away into the background. You can still hear it out there—the machine gun fire and the mortars—but it sounds so distant, at a far remove from your day-to-day reality of the office job.

  Rumpus: Can you describe the place where you were working in Baghdad?

  Abrams: I was at Camp Liberty (later called Camp Victory), and I was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, which was part of Task Force Baghdad. We worked out of this large headquarters building full of cubicles and air conditioning. The area surrounding our building once used to be Saddam’s hunting preserve, stocked with wild game which he and his guests would “hunt” on the weekends.

  Rumpus: Did you have much interaction with the soldiers who weren’t primarily located in the air-conditioned headquarters building?

  Abrams: As a rule, no. There’s a certain kind of insularity that envelops Fobbits like me when they’re working at the higher echelons. Many of the other NCOs and officers I worked with went “outside the wire” on a regular basis, and there were times when I interacted with combat arms soldiers from other units (mainly to interview them for stories I was writing or to prepare them for media interviews), but for the most part I was just a Fobbit surrounded by other Fobbits. If I have one regret about my experience over there, it’s probably that I didn’t go outside the wire into Baghdad and actually see the country I was supposed to be helping defend and rebuild.

  Rumpus: It seems like such a strange way to be in a war. Reading the book, and listening to your answer, now, I’m thinking about Karl Marlantes’s and Tim O’Brien’s books about Vietnam, where the war was such an ever-present thing, and where home seemed so far away. That daily immersion seems interwoven with the moral reckoning both of those writers have had with the war. How did you begin to process the war, being in the middle of it, and yet not being in the middle of it?

  Abrams: That’s a good question. Wars always evolve over time, don’t they? Iraq/Afghanistan is different than Vietnam, and Vietnam was different than Korea, and Korea was different than World War One, and so on. Some things remain the same, of course—one side fighting another over ideology or a patch of ground—but there are some aspects of combat life which differ radically than their predecessors. Nowhere was this difference more striking than the way technology has changed the way the military does business on the battlefield—a battlefield which no longer has any clearly defined front lines. There is no more “front” and “rear” where Fobbit-types would go to hide out in safer locations. In Iraq and Afghanistan, you engaged in a theater of operations that’s 360 degrees at all times. The modern wars are also omnipresent in our electronic media—to be cynical about it, we now have 24 hours of non-stop bloodshed available to us. The internet and real-time media reporting were integrated into daily life in Iraq. You’d have bloggers like Matt Gallagher (Kaboom) coming off patrol and sitting down at the keyboard to describe what just happened…you’d have soldiers being able to Skype-chat with their wives..and, if you were like me, you’d have Fox News on the TV—literally right next to my computer monitor—describing what was happening down in Firdos Square just as the Task Force’s Significant Activity reports were rolling into headquarters. It made for a very surreal, often disconnected, experience for me. It was hard to “process” the war while I was in the middle of it. I think that’s true for most soldiers. We only fully process what happened after we return home and see the war from the other end of the telescope.

  Rumpus: Were there any differences between the war you were watching on Fox News and the war as you perceived it from Baghdad?

  Abrams: For the most part, I think the media got the facts right. They were often on the scene first and there were many times you’d find a knot of officers huddled around a TV screen in Headquarters where I worked, watching live footage from downtown Baghdad, along with the Army’s feed from the “blimp cams” overhead. Where the differences came in was the patina of ideology which the news media laid over everything. There’s certainly a bias, to some degree, in the way the media portrays the military. I’m not saying that’s entirely wrong—the Fourth Estate is there to hold generals and colonels accountable for their actions and decisions—but having reporters on the scene, reporting in real time certainly complicates things for the military mission.

  Rumpus: Were there ways in which you saw the writing of Fobbit as a corrective to some of the distortions—ideological or otherwise—that might have arisen either from media reporting, or from the public relations work in which the military invested?

  Abrams: No, I wasn’t trying to write a corrective novel—that would just end up tasting like medicine, and I tried to stay away from polemics as best I could. I think that, if anything, Fobbit is my way of showing readers there’s another side to war—the backstage of combat, if you will. If you play a word association game with Americans and say “war,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Soldiers running across a battlefield through a hail of bullets, right? Rambo, smoke, explosions. In Fobbit, I hope readers will see something a little different.

  Rumpus: I was thinking, though, of things like Fobbit‘s list of “Forbidden Words”—certainly, and usually in a funny way, you were showing the distance between the public story and the real experience. It wouldn’t be fit, the logic went, for Americans to hear words like “Iraqidocious” or “pretzel logic” or “metric assload.” The novel seems to refuse to sanitize the war, especially at the level of language, but also when it comes to questions of sex and video games and comfort and so forth.

  Abrams: Sure, in that respect, I guess it’s an unsanitary account of the “business of war.” The careful choice of words, the scrubbing of language, the calculated images we presented to the external audiences—those were all major parts of my daily life over there. So, some of that is going to seep over into what I showed in the novel and—more importantly—how I showed it.

  Rumpus: At what point did you realize the material you were gathering might be something worth turning into a novel?

  Abrams: About midway through my tour in Iraq, when my agent sent me an email which said, in part, “I’ve come to believe that only in fiction will this insane war finally reach an American reading public.” From that point on, I think I started seeing my daily life through a different lens. I mean, I had a skeptical, cynical viewpoint from the start, but I think those words from my agent really gave me a little more freedom to do anything with this war, on the page, that I wanted. I could make it as loud and distorted as I wanted. I could paint it in images as large as a billboard. Sometimes you have to do this to get your point across.

  Rumpus: There is an argument in the book about Catch-22, whose protagonist is called “that ass-clown Yossarian” by a West Point professor. It seemed to me that this book is really more in the tradition of Catch-22 than in the tradition of more recently fashionable novels and stories and nonfiction narratives about war (the Vietnam generation especially—Tim O’Brien, Karl Marlantes, Michael Herr, etc.). Was this a matter of your sensibility asserting itself, or is there something about our later wars that is better suited to the comic mode than to the tragic?

  Abrams: I think it’s possible—perhaps even necessary—to find comedy in any war. I mean, look at the brilliant work which was done by Joseph Heller and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H) and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Svejk—which I haven’t read, but have heard was funny). Seeing any war through the distortion of comedy is healthy. There is just too much absurdity and irony at play in a combat zone not to pay attention to it. At least that’s how it struck me; others may have had an entirely different war experience. As for how I approached Fobbit and made the style choices I did, all I can say is that one of my greatest literary role models has always been Flannery O’Connor. So not only did I deploy to combat in a Catch-22 frame of mind, I was also going to Iraq with some of O’Connor’s wit and sensibility coursing through my veins. O’Connor showed us how you can take something as sober and earnest as religion and punch holes in it until all the funny stuff leaks out. In the same way, I came at war sideways and wearing a jester’s hat. Just as O’Connor had her critics, I expect I’ll have mine for the light in which I cast the military.

  Rumpus: The book ends in a terribly interesting place. I want to quote a little from the ending:

  He ran without cease. His legs were hot iron bands and his lungs were breath-harshed sacs near collapse, but still he ran.

  It was only when he was within sight of the Main Gate, the dark mystery of Baghdad lurking just beyond the bristle of concertina wire, that Chance Gooding realized he had no helmet, no flak vest, no weapon. He hesitated for a second but then tucked his bare head to his chest and continued to sprint toward the guards at the checkpoint who were even now bringing up their rifles and shouting for him to “Stop!”

  Somewhere to the north, a mortar shrieked across the sky, coming closer, ever closer.

  Even this is comic in its way. Comedy usually springs from the darkest places, and there’s a terrible irony to this ending. But there is also a moral weight to it. The reader immediately begins to think about the shelter of headquarters, and the disproportions that separate the warring forces, and the idea of a war that can be fought in part by men, but also in part by robotic machines handled by video game joysticks, and by bureaucratic functionaries who spend so much of their time creating PowerPoint presentations. In some ways, the action of the life-and-death things can seem like another form of entertainment. Certainly this war seemed—certainly not to Iraqis, but to many Americans at home—more like reality television than anything that came before. It was nothing like Vietnam, where everyone at home was horrified.

  Were these the kinds of questions you hoped readers might be left to consider in the white space that follows the last sentence? Did you feel the weight of any sort of moral responsibility as a novelist of the war, or as a member of the military, or as an American?

  Abrams: It’s disingenous for me to say that I wasn’t trying to write a moral novel. By its very nature as a novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit steps into the political conversation. There’s no way to avoid that. I can appreciate that readers are probably going to line up on one side of the novel or the other. I hope they go to those polar extremes, actually. If Fobbit leaves a reader feeling stranded in some bland in-between territory, then I haven’t done my job. But having said all that, I didn’t consciously write the book with a particular moral intent. I took what I experienced and processed it through the sausage factory of fiction. It’s up to readers to interpret what’s on the page—as is the case with any novel. Some will read it as anti-military, others will take away some empathy for soldiers. I don’t know if that answered your question about how this war was perceived as something close to reality TV. I think you’re right, though. This war was delivered to the public in a way that previous wars weren’t. Sadly, it did come across as “just another TV show” to many Americans. That’s a dangerous thing—having that disconnect from the horrible realities of war.

  Rumpus: How do you think and feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and your participation in them, now? Did the writing of the book bring any new clarity to any of those thoughts or feelings?

  Abrams: No, I think I’m still just as conflicted about the war as I always was. On the one hand, I was a soldier carrying out his duty, following his allegiance to his country and to the mission at hand. But yet, there was always this unease plaguing me. “What are we doing here?” “Are we really fixing this country or are we doing more harm than good?” And the most pressing question: “How do we pull ourselves out of this quicksand?” I think I’m still there in that white space you mentioned, trying to get clarity for myself on what this war did to us as a nation.

• The Nervous Breakdown - http://thenervousbreakdown.com/tnbfiction/2012/09/david-abrams-the-tnb-self-interview/

  David Abrams: The TNB
  Self-Interview
  By TNB Fiction
  September 06, 2012

  Fiction Self-Interviews

  Okay, here we are. You ready?
  As I’ll ever be.

  First of all, I’d like to thank you for accommodating me. My schedule’s been pretty crazy lately, so I appreciate you shuffling your calendar to meet with me today. These days, I don’t know if I’m coming or going.
  That’s no problem. —Hey, are you taping this?

  Yeah. Is that a problem?
  I guess not.

  You seem to be a pretty agreeable person.
  I’ve been told that. My wife goes around telling her friends I’m “the nicest guy in the world.” Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing. But, on the other hand, I haven’t stopped her from saying it, have I? I guess I’ve always been what you’d call a “people pleaser.” You know that song from Oklahoma, “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say ‘No’?” As a kid, I used to go around singing that. Quietly and to myself, of course. But it’s true, I have a hard time turning people down. This leads to over-commitment and problems with time management—which makes life harder sometimes. I was in therapy for a year before I got out of the Army and I remember at the end of one session, the doctor “prescribed” a book for me, a self-help manual called Anxious to Please. Normally, I’m allergic to self-help books—the very thought of reading one fills my head with grey static and I’m bored before I even turn to the first page. But, here’s the thing: because my doctor had asked me to read this book, I couldn’t not read it. That was either one very clever or very twisted doctor. She knew I had a problem and yet she used that very problem against me in order to “cure” me. As you can see, it didn’t do much good. I never did finish that book. I still feel guilty about that failure. [Pause] Wow, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to go off on such a deep, personal tangent on the very first question.

  Oh-kaay. Let’s get back on track here. Most authors doing these TNB Self-Interviews tend to avoid talking about their new books—a tired rehash of all the questions they’ve already answered elsewhere—and who can blame them? We’ll get to some non-traditional questions in a minute, but first, in the interest of giving readers an idea of who you are and what your book’s about, give us the elevator pitch for Fobbit.
  I suppose it depends on how long the elevator ride is and how many floors we’ll be going up—

  You just wasted two floors with that non-answer. Why don’t you start by telling us what, exactly, is a “Fobbit.”
  That’s the slang term given to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who hang around the Forward Operating Base, or FOB. Fobbits are usually stereotyped as combat cowards, the “clerks and jerks” of the Army who make excuses not to go outside the concertina wire into the action on the streets of Baghdad or Ramadi or Kabul or wherever.

  You were a career soldier—20 years in the Army—and served a combat tour in Iraq in 2005. Would you consider yourself a Fobbit?
  Sure. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I was a Fobbit, through and through. When I went to Iraq in 2005, it was the first time I’d been deployed to a combat zone after 17 years of active-duty service. Once I was there on Camp Liberty, I fell into a routine of an ordinary, cubicle-type job straight out of The Office. It was day-in, day-out of computers, air conditioning, and comfort.

  So you didn’t face any real combat?
  Well, I’d say all those mortars that landed on Camp Liberty were “real.” Fobbits inside the wire died all the time….But I get what you’re saying. Did I ever go out into the thick of things, walk through the unpredictable streets of Baghdad with my nuts shriveling to the size of peas and sweat soaking my uniform not just from the heat but from outright fear and dread? No, I did not go outside the wire on missions like that. I have nothing but admiration and respect for those guys who did, though.

  So Fobbit is your way of making up for the guilt you feel about having a relatively safe life in a combat zone?
  No, I didn’t write Fobbit to justify my combat experience. I wrote it so that people would understand there are two sides to every war story. There’s the story everyone reads about in the headlines—the gun battles, the bombs, the air strikes—but there’s also the story of what goes on back at headquarters—the operations planning, the PowerPoint briefings, the banter between cubicle mates, the paper cuts, Lobster Night at the dining facility, and so on. I wanted to talk about that untalked-about battlefield. Now, by writing this book, I realize I’m opening myself up to more mockery and scorn for not having faced any “real” combat action in my eleven months of Operation Iraqi Freedom. But I’m okay with that. Haters gonna hate. I’m secure in the knowledge of what I did and didn’t do over there. I may not have shot anyone or been shot at, or worked a full day in 115-degree heat patrolling the streets of Baghdad, but I did work my ass off in my own way.

  Which was what?
  I was a public affairs non-commissioned officer with the 3rd Infantry Division and, among other things, I was responsible for writing press releases about Task Force Baghdad missions and accomplishments.

  Which brings us to your novel.
  Right. Fobbit follows several different characters in a task force (similar to the one of which I was a part): public affairs Fobbits and a company of combat-arms soldiers who patrol the streets. Their worlds intersect when the company commander, Captain Abe Shrinkle, commits a series of fatal blunders and Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding, a public affairs Fobbit, has to clean up the mess before the media gets hold of it. There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the essence of the book.

  And it’s a comedy, right?
  Correct-a-mundo. I’ll go ahead and answer the question you were about to ask. Yes, Catch-22 was an influence, as well as M*A*S*H. But also Preston Sturges.

  The movie director?
  Yes. I’m a huge fan of Sturges’ films Unfaithfully Yours, Sullivan’s Travels and especially Hail the Conquering Hero—which is probably my favorite of his movies. At his peak, in the 1940s, there was nobody making faster or funnier films. If he were still alive, I’d love to see what he could do with Fobbit.

  Let’s shift gears for a minute.
  Okay. These are the non-Fobbit questions, right?

  Yes. Favorite color?
  Purple. Also forest green. But especially purple. For one thing, it was the color my wife and I used at our wedding 28 years ago. So I guess it’s partly sentimental, but I also like the way purple feels. It’s royal and also comforting. I’ve been ridiculed for my purple-philia, though. I’ll never forget the time, back when I was a young sergeant working in an infantry unit in Alaska, I bought my first laptop computer case. It was the color of grape Kool-Aid. Whenever I walked through the headquarters building with that computer case, I know for a fact that some of the infantry grunts were mocking me behind my back—making limp-wristed swishy gestures, that sort of thing. I didn’t let it bother me. I held firm to my purple conviction.

  Favorite food?
  A New York Strip with a honey-balsamic glaze topped with Gorgonzola crumbles.

  Favorite food when your wife’s not around to give you a look of disgust?
  Hostess Sno-Balls.

  Favorite punch line to a joke?
  “Saskatchewan.”

  Pet peeves?
  Oh God, where do I start? There are so many—the number increasing with every year I get older. Before too long, I’ll probably be an old man coming out his front door with a shotgun, growling, “Get off my lawn!”

  But if you had to pick the one pet peeve that tops your list?
  Right now, it would probably be cashiers who hand me my bag and say, “Have a good one.” The vague non-specificity of that catchphrase drives me absolute batshit. “Have a good what? A good elephant? A good proctology exam? A good sneeze? There have been a couple of times my wife has had to hold me back from going off on the teenager down at Safeway, finger in the face, the whole nine yards.

  Okay, I think that about wraps it up. Thanks for—
  Wait, wait. We can’t end this on that negative, crotchety-Clint Eastwood note. Let me leave them with something a little more positive. I’m a people-pleaser, remember?

  Alright. Uh, name one non-writing moment in the past ten years that has brought you unbridled joy.
  Apart from all those moments I spend with my wife, you mean?

  Sure.
  It would have to be the time when I was working at the Pentagon and after work I’d take the metro to the National Gallery of Art. I’d go to the west wing and sit and stare at my favorite painting in the entire gallery: Gilbert Stuart’s “The Skater.” It’s this huge, eight-foot-by-five-foot portrait of a man skating on a pond, arms crossed and leaning forward like he’s going to come right through the canvas. I don’t know why that painting moved me so much, it just did. I remember thinking, “Man, the only thing that could make this moment any better would be if I was eating a Hostess Sno-Ball.”

  ________________

  David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War (Grove/Atlantic) which Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” It was also an Indie Next pick and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review and other literary quarterlies. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career which took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com

• Books, Personally - http://www.bookspersonally.com/2012/09/author-q-david-abrams.html

  Wednesday, September 5, 2012
  Author Q&A - David Abrams

  I'm so delighted to welcome David Abrams, author of the newly released novel Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic 2012) to the blog today. Like the main character in Fobbit, Abrams served in a Forward Operating Base outside of Baghdad during the Iraqi War, his experiences serving as inspiration for his book. Abrams' short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Esquire, Narrative, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review and others. He is also author of the excellent literary blog The Quivering Pen. Fobbit is his first novel.

  Fobbit is set in a Forward Operating Base on the edge of Baghdad, much like the one you served in (Camp Liberty, later named Camp Victory). Please tell us a little bit about your role and your experiences serving in Iraq, and the seeds of inspiration for Fobbit.

  Though Fobbit is most definitely fiction, some the events I describe were inspired by my experiences during Operation Iraqi Freedom. When I was at Camp Liberty/Victory in 2005, I was part of the 3rd Infantry Division’s public affairs team, serving as a non-commissioned officer in charge of media relations. I had several different duties, but primarily I was in charge of writing official press releases on behalf of the Army task force whenever any significant activity happened within our sector. In other words, if there was an IED attack, I wrote a news release giving the basic who/what/where/when (but never “why”) of the incident. If our soldiers found a terrorist’s weapons cache, I tallied up the loot and put that information in the news release and sent it out to the civilian news media. As you can imagine, in a combat zone the cycle of press releases is never ending. I kept a spreadsheet of all the releases I put out in the 10 months I was in Baghdad. By the time I left, I think I was up to nearly 1,500 releases. Sadly, too many of them began with “A Task Force Baghdad Soldier was killed today when…”

  I’ll freely admit I was part of the military’s effort to shape public perception of the war. Words were chosen carefully and sanitized and scrubbed and polished by the time they left our task force headquarters and were emailed to places like CNN, ABC and Reuters. These press releases were bland artifacts of the information war, and I’m pretty certain editors at news desks back in the United States deleted them because by the time they finally reached their inboxes— after going through layers and layers of approval up and down the military chain of command in Iraq—the “news” I sent them was pretty stale. I tried to illustrate this to comic effect in Fobbit in a scene near the beginning of the novel where the public affairs officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad, is bouncing around the headquarters building like a nervous ping-pong ball as he tries to get a press release approved by the commanding general’s staff. After he’s gone through all these gyrations and agonizing rewrites and issued it to reporters, the release is too late to be of use to anyone in the media. It’s played for laughs, but it’s really not that far from what I saw happening just about every day over there.

  You describe one of your main characters, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding as “fobbitiest” among the fobbits – what is the nature of being fobbity? What makes one soldier more fobbity than another?

  “Fobbit” is a hybrid word combining FOB (or, Forward Operating Base) with Hobbit. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s world, hobbits are creatures who prefer to remain in the comfort of the shire, reluctant to venture forth into the larger, scarier “outside world.” In Iraq and Afghanistan, the term “Fobbit” very quickly became a derogatory slang term to describe a soldier (usually, but not always, a support soldier) who rarely went off the base. Infantry soldiers in particular have a lot of scorn for Fobbits—sometimes rightly so. Fobbits are seen as having the cushier life, spending their days in an air-conditioned office, buying up all the potato chips at the PX before the grunts can come off patrol and doing their shopping—that sort of thing.

  In Staff Sergeant Gooding’s case, he’s a Fobbit through and through—cut him, he bleeds marshmallow. He’ll be the first to admit that. He’s okay with just staying inside the confines of the concertina wire, doing his job writing press releases in his cubicle at task force headquarters. But of course, this leads to a very skewed vision of what the war is all about. All he knows about the conflict is what he reads in the significant activity reports and watches on the video feeds from the blimp-cams over Baghdad. This creates a real disconnect with the reality of the war which plagues him throughout the novel. When infantry soldiers come in to Gooding’s dining facility reeking of blood and sweat, they’re like aliens from another planet. As I say near the beginning of the book, “To paraphrase the New Testament, he was in the war but he was not of the war.”

  In a recent blog post considering the end of the war, you described feeling nostalgic for Camp Liberty, and shared an excerpt from your novel describing the fictional Forward Operating Base. What do you miss most about Camp Liberty(Camp Victory)? What do you not miss at all?

  Being in a combat zone is a very intense experience for anyone—Fobbit and grunt alike. It’s nothing like “real life” back here in the United States. You live in compound that’s like an instant, pop-up city in the desert (“just add water and watch it spring to life before your very eyes!”); your entire day is structured around the job, the mission; and so, your downtime is all that much more precious. You learn the value of sleep, the pleasures of a day’s-end shower, the laser-focused concentration on what you do in the few hours which are yours and yours alone. In my case, I spent the majority of my downtime reading books and watching classic movies on my computer. To anyone who knows me, this will come as no surprise. Some of the other soldiers played Xbox, or batted a volleyball back and forth, or “hung out” with members of the opposite sex. Me, I got deep into Don Quixote and Mrs. Miniver. What don’t I miss? That’s easy: being an ocean and two continents away from my wife and three children. Man, that was a rough, rough year. We all felt this ache, this gaping empty spot. Half-hour phone calls twice a week could do nothing to fill that hole. Separation made the reunion all that much sweeter, but I’d never want to go through that kind of experience again—spending months and months without having my wife, my best friend in the world, at my side.

  You describe your novel as “a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war, in all of its bloody, dark, and often hilarious glory.” War is, of course a terrible thing, but the novel does sound quite funny, and you credit Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 with giving you “permission to let the jokes drop onto the page as I wrote my novel.” How do you know when you’ve found the right balance between the darkness and the humor? What were some of the choices you had to make along the way to get it just right?

  On the surface, there’s nothing very funny about war, is there? I mean, what is war? It’s one man legally killing another man to gain an acre of soil or, in the case of the Iraq War, fighting to regain our national honor after the bully insulted us on the playground (mind you, I’m not saying that bully didn’t deserve to get his ass kicked in order to make the playground a better place). In 2005, 844 U.S. service members were killed in Iraq. There’s nothing funny about that, is there? No, there’s not. But, without diminishing the importance of those lives lost, I have to say there was also a lot of absurdity going down in Iraq—a lot of it to be found in the halls of the military headquarters.

  About halfway through my tour of duty over there, I decided that if I was going to write about this war, it would be in the form of fiction and it would be funny. Humor was the canvas of Fobbit from the start. I honed some of it to a finer point as I went along, but there was always the intent to write a book about war which would, hopefully, make people laugh at the silly way men behave on the battlefield. There are also some very grim, very serious patches of the book. I mean, it can’t be all Marx Brothers all the time, right? Bombs explode, people die, and mortars rain down from the sky. Sometimes, it happens in mid-laughter. Joseph Heller was a genius at getting this rhythm down to near- perfection. Death, joke, death, joke. I tried to find this same kind of light-dark balance when it came time to write my book. I don’t want to sound like I’m comparing myself to Joseph Heller—I’m not worthy to touch the hem of his garment—but, yes, I drank deep from the well of Catch-22 as I wrote Fobbit, along with Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (not for humor but for its narrative structure). Those were just three of the books which gave me permission to write about the war the way I did.

  "The Hours I Keep" is a lovely essay about writing habits– you are a wee hours of the night/early morning writer, noting “It’s only when the house is at a standstill that I'm able to listen to my imagination.” What are some other essential writing disciplines or mantras you live by?

  Avoid writing at all costs.

  Just kidding. Sort of. Procrastination and self-distraction are my biggest demons and in order to fight them I have to discipline myself to a daily regimen. The alarm goes off at 3:30 am, I get a cup of coffee and a glass of water, I come to my office in the basement of our house, I sit down, I type. A good day of writing is when I plan ahead and turn off my computer’s Wi-Fi switch the night before. I go to bed telling myself, “Okay, dummy, in the morning you’re going to get up and work on Story X or Novel Y before you read email or write your blog post for the day.” If I’m smart, I’ve pulled Story X up on the screen the night before so it’s there waiting for me with open arms in the morning. These are the things I do to trick myself into writing. Once I get going on the keyboard, I wonder why I ever avoided this joy, this feeling of creating something out of nothing. But yeah, when it comes to writing habits, I’m my own worst enemy.

  I’d also like to ask a little about your blog – one of my favorite features is “My First Time,” in which you ask writers to talk about their first experience being published (or rejected, getting a nasty review, etc.) There are wonderful insights to be gleaned from their experiences. How did that feature come about? If you were invited to write your own “first time” column, what would you write about and why?

  Thanks for mentioning “My First Time,” Jennifer. It’s been one of my favorite parts of doing The Quivering Pen blog. It came about when I realized I couldn’t keep up the pace of daily blogging by myself, that I’d need help from others. I started thinking about what I’d be interested in reading about and quickly realized that I’m most curious about writers’ beginnings. Where did they come from? What or who had an early impact on their writing? On his podcast Other People, Brad Listi does a really good job at engaging writers in casual conversation and getting them to open up about their “genesis years.” I wanted to do something like that on The Quivering Pen, so I sent an email to about two dozen writers I knew. I was overwhelmed by the response I got. Everyone likes to talk about their “first time,” it seems. The stories my contributors have come up with have been such a wide range of experiences, but all of them deeply personal.

  As for my own first time…I would probably write about my first book editor (who is, of course, my current book editor): Peter Blackstock at Grove/Atlantic. My agent, Nat Sobel, played matchmaker between Peter and me about a week before Grove formally accepted Fobbit for publication. Nat wanted to see if Peter and I would be a good fit for each other, so he had me give Peter a call to talk about the book. In the first five minutes of that phone conversation, I knew I’d found my champion for Fobbit. Peter has believed in the book from the beginning and helped me see Fobbit not as “my” book, but as “a” book. In other words, he made me take a step back from this thing I’d spent six years writing, this thing I’d poured everything into, this thing that had become part of my bloodstream. To put it in symbolic terms, Peter—in the gentlest and kindest of ways—made me take that book, turn it upside down and shake all the loose change out of its pockets. It was not the same book in the end that it was when we started. For one thing, I cut about 130,000 words from it. That should tell you how bloated it was—and how blind I was to its faults. Peter did what I’d thought was impossible: he made me excited about “killing my darlings.” There have been a lot of things I’ve learned throughout this whole “debut novel” experience, but that first lesson of Peter’s was probably the most valuable. Once you’ve taken the novel as far as you think it can go, even if you’re on the seventeenth draft, you have to come back to it again with sharpened knives ready to do some more cutting.

  Many, many thanks to David Abrams for taking the time to be a guest here on the blog. You can learn more about Fobbit on David's author website davidabramsbooks.com or at his literary blog, The Quivering Pen. You can also find David on Facebook and Twitter: @ImDavidAbrams.

  Happy reading!

• Montana Standard - http://mtstandard.com/news/local/butte-author-book-receiving-national-acclaim/article_5de63516-eff7-11e1-86be-0019bb2963f4.html

  Butte author: Book receiving national acclaim
  By John Grant Emeigh of The Montana Standard Aug 27, 2012 0

  Take nearly a decade of kicking in doorways, road-side bombs that reduce soldiers to hamburger, bad intelligence and mounting casualties — both combatant and civilian — and turn that into something the world can understand.

  Somebody’s got to make sense

  of the madness. That’s David Abrams’ job.

  He did it seven years ago as a public affairs flak for the U.S. Army during the Iraq War. He’s doing it again with his debut novel “Fobbit.”

  The novel is a work of fiction that is loosely based on his 2005 deployment to Baghdad with the Third Infantry Division. His job then involved writing press releases from the war zone. Abrams condensed IED explosions, casualty reports, riots, weapons caches

  discovered and suicide bombers in to 320-word articles.

  “It was all scrubbed and sanitized and received different levels of approval from the chain of

  command before being released to the media,” Abrams said about duties in Iraq.

  Abrams sat recently at the Quarry Brewery in Butte with a glow on his face that wasn’t from the pint of beer he moderately sipped. No, this form of intoxication only comes from being a first-time published novelist. “Fobbit” will be released Sept. 4 by Grove/Atlantic.

  His book takes the reader into the world of the Forward Operating Base, or FOB. The FOB is a highly protected fortress located in the center of Baghdad, surrounded by high walls, concertina wire and well guarded posts.

  The FOB is inhabited by dwellers whose frontlines are cubicles and main weapons are computer keyboards and PowerPoint briefings. Known as “fobbits,” these troopers prefer their air-conditioned offices over the sun-scorched and deadly world outside. (You know, they’re like hobbits that hide in a FOB – Fobbits. Get it now?)

  Abrams doesn’t classify his book as an anti-war novel.

  “It’s an anti-stupid novel,” he says.

  Strip the story of concertina wire, M-16s and military uniforms and you’ve got any office environment in America, he explains.

  MASTERFUL WIT

  With masterful wit and satire, Abrams describes this life of alphabet-soup acronyms, handwringing junior officers and the frustrating bureaucracy of orchestrating a war from a desk. The way novelist Richard Hooker introduced “M.A.S.H.” to the American culture four decades ago, Abrams is likely to make the fobbit part of the American consciousness.

  The seed of his novel was first planted by his agent, Nat Sobel, while Abrams was still serving in Iraq. Abrams was making daily entries in his diary about his real life in the FOB. But it was an email from Sobel that noted “only in fiction will this insane war finally reach an American reading public.”

  Abrams jumped on that concept and spent the next seven years working on what would become “Fobbit.” As a member of the U.S. Army’s public affairs staff it was Abrams’ job to “tell the Army’s story.” Like Abrams’ protagonist in “Fobbit,” Chance Gooding Jr., Abrams was a dedicated soldier who followed orders — even when the orders seemed ridiculous at times.

  “It was my job, but I was torn,” Abrams admitted. “I wanted to be an Army yes man — salute smartly and move on; but I’m not dumb.”

  Staff Sgt. Gooding seems to share this same feeling in the novel. He follows the often inane orders of his superiors with dog-like obedience without losing his soul. Gooding keeps himself grounded from the madness by reading literary classics and by counting the days until he can go home.

  In fact, most of the characters in the book share a profound homesickness that makes them sympathetic to the reader. No matter how frightfully incompetent or exasperatingly clueless some of the characters are in the novel, there’s still a humanity about them that makes you hope for the best.

  This isn’t a surprise. Abrams was a soldier for 20 years and knows all the fears, trepidations and obstacles a soldier packs in his rucksack.

  It’s this authority that Abrams writes with that makes “Fobbit” work. There’s nothing pretentious about it. The writing is raw and powerful, with wonderfully lewd humor that one would expect from troops stranded on an island whose shores are continually battered by waves of war.

  NATIONAL ATTENTION

  Abrams has already gotten the attention of renowned literary critics and writers with his debut novel. The comparison to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” is the general concession.

  “It makes me a little uneasy, because I’m not worthy to touch the hem of Joseph Heller’s garment,” Abrams says.

  Regardless of his sincere modesty, Abrams has touched on something with “Fobbit.” If Vonnegut and Heller were the undisputed chroniclers of the madness of World War II, Abrams should be considered the resounding new voice of the Iraq War.

  — Reporter John Grant Emeigh may be reached via email at john.emeigh@lee.net or phone at 496-5511. Follow him at Twitter.com/@johnemeigh.

• Pencils - https://pencils.com/interview-david-abrams-on-comedy-the-iraq-war-and-finding-your-golden-sentence/

  Interview: David Abrams on Comedy, the Iraq War, and Finding Your Golden Sentence
  06/29/2012/5 Comments/in TV, FILM & BOOKS /by Victor Inzunza
  David AbramsI recently sat down with David Abrams to talk about his forthcoming novel, Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq war. David offers a glimpse into how he became a novelist, his service in the Iraq War, and how, as he puts it, “Comedy was just one way—the easiest way—of dealing with all that stupidity and bravery and sadness.”

  In this interview, he shares his philosophy on living the creative life, and well, pencils of course.

  My Interview with David Abrams
  When did you begin writing creatively, and what is it that keeps you inspired to continue to write now?

  At the risk of sounding too pretentious, I have a simple answer for that: “When I started to breathe.” It seems like the urge to create has always been in me. Even as a very young kid, I would spend a lot of time creating scenarios with my plastic cowboys and Indians or my set of Matchbox cars. I’d invent stories full of elaborate car chases across the living room rug, that sort of thing. It was the early germ of narrative, I suppose. Then, when I got older and started reading—somewhere around the age of 5—well, then I was just completely done in by the idea of putting words, one after the other, in proper and perfect order to create a “story.” That’s when I think it really started—there in the public library of Kittanning, Pennsylvania, when I opened my first book and read my first sentence on my own, or maybe even earlier than that—when my mother read stories to me at bedtime. In a sense, I was writing stories in my head long before I learned how to hold a pencil in my hand. But, to specifically answer your question, I remember writing my first story when I was 6 years old. It was called “The Lady and the Clock” and was about a rich lady who takes her clock in to a kind old man to be repaired. If I remember correctly, the drama all hinged on a broken spring. That was the start of my writing “career” and that need to tell stories and play around with language has been driving me forward ever since.

  What is your preferred method of composition? Do you prefer to write exclusively on a computer, jot down your drafts with pen or pencil in a notebook, or a combination of these methods? In short, what does your writing process look like?

  I’m ashamed to admit this on a site called Pencils.com, but I’m pretty much a computer guy. The idea of writing a story by hand is romantic and a little retro—though I know plenty of novelists these days who say they write their first drafts longhand—but I really don’t like the way my handwriting looks on the page. It’s not so much the words themselves, but all the scribbles and cross-outs that dirty up the page. I’m a guy who revises as he goes along and the computer backspace key just makes that so much easier. Now, having said that, I’m going to contradict myself and tell you that I recently started writing a novel in longhand as a sort of experiment, to see if this kind of intimacy with the physical process makes a difference in how the story comes out. I’m finding it’s a slower, more deliberate pace, forcing me to choose my words carefully as I go along. We’ll see how it goes and how far I get before I run back to the familiarity and ease of the computer keyboard.

  In an earlier Short Story, “Joyride,” which appeared in The Literarian, your character Jacob P. Zeildorf’s mind is marred by memories of the untimely deaths of his brothers in arms. The story also seems to remark on the confinement of the story’s characters to Forward Operating Base Triumph and the conflict it imposes on Zeildorf, filling him with a desire to escape not only the base, but his memories. How did you come up with the idea for this story?

  Thanks for mentioning that story—it’s one of my favorites. I like how you say it’s a story about escape—escape from the boredom of guard duty, escape from the rigid regulations of the Army, escape from the military base itself. “Joyride” was originally a chapter in my novel Fobbit, but it was eventually cut because the original draft of the novel was too long. As soon as I cut it, I realized I had a complete, self-contained story on my hands. I revised it a few more times, then sent it off to The Literarian and they were kind enough to publish it. Like a lot of the scenes in Fobbit, “Joyride” was based on an actual incident, which happened while I was in Iraq in 2005. I worked as a media relations non-commissioned officer in an Army task force headquarters in Baghdad and it was my job to monitor the serious incident reports involving U.S. troops. One day, I read of a soldier who got drunk while on guard duty, stole a Humvee out of the motor pool, then went joyriding out on Route Irish. My fiction radar went on full alert and I was already starting to write sentences in my head before I finished reading that report. What I eventually came up with probably had little to do with the reality of the situation, but that’s where it got its start—a dry, just-the-facts military report.

  In “Known Unknowns,” a story that appeared in War Literature and the Arts, your story dealt with serious and dangerous situations with a delicate balance of levity and wit. How do you approach such a serious subject as war, using humor, without diminishing the severity of the situation? What are some difficulties you had early on when developing your style?

  That’s really the key question I struggled with as I wrote Fobbit (“Known Unknowns” is an early version of Chapter 2 in the novel). How can I make war funny? How dare I make war funny? Joseph Heller did it with Catch-22, of course, but it’s a tricky, tricky thing. A real tightrope act. I worried then and I still worry now that readers will think I’m mocking the war or that I’m diminishing the deaths and injuries of our men and women in uniform. Far from it. Okay, maybe I’m mocking the war itself as a concept of failed diplomacy—especially in Iraq—and I guess I’m ridiculing the tragi-comedy of military leaders who walk around in a constant state of ass-pucker because they’re worried the commanding general might not like their PowerPoint briefing. But the men and women doing the hard, deadly job of the door-to-door, street-by-street mission? No comedy there—or, if there is, it’s grim, black humor. For the most part, the “boots-on-the-ground” aspect of war is dangerous, tedious business. I tried to provide some of that sobering balance in Fobbit.

  Your novel, “Fobbit,” due for release in September of this year by Grove/Atlantic Press, is a comedy about the Iraq War. For our readers, can you explain what a Fobbit is? Also, can you tell us how this title came about?

  A fobbit is a soldier who avoids combat—whether deliberately or subconsciously—by spending most of the time in the confines of the Forward Operating Base. The term is a marriage between “FOB” and a “hobbit” from J. R. R. Tolkien. In his books, he describes hobbits as creatures who are reluctant to leave the comfort of the shire. In the military, the word “Fobbit” started off as a joke to describe support soldiers who busied themselves with office work and PowerPoint briefings and who were out of touch with what was going on outside the main gates of the FOB. It didn’t take long for the word to become a really scornful putdown. These days, “fobbit” is a four-letter word to most members of the military. The book always had the title of “Fobbit.” I like its simplicity, its directness, the stark sound of the word. Of course, it will also be something of a riddle to non-military readers, so my publisher has smartly put a definition of the term on the front cover of the book. The novel centers around a public affairs team—dyed-in-the-wool fobbits—who work in an Army task force headquarters in Baghdad. It also follows a company of combat soldiers who go out on patrol and make life difficult for the public affairs fobbits by being the cause of some “bad news” situations, which must be cleaned up and “spun” for the news media.

  Readers who want to get the real story from the frontlines read novels about war with great anticipation. When writing Fobbit, who was your ideal reader? In addition, what thoughts did you have in your mind given the huge body of work written on the subject of war?

  My ideal reader? Hmmm. I guess it would be the 26-year-old woman reading the book while eating her lunch in the employee breakroom and thinking about her brother who’s serving his second tour of duty in Afghanistan. She’s read a lot of news stories about the war but is skeptical about everything official “Army spokesmen” have said. She would also be someone who likes to laugh out loud and wouldn’t hesitate to say to her co-workers there in the lunchroom, “Hey, listen to this.” Is that too specific? Okay then, how about “anyone with even a passing interest in what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Also, people who like screwball comedies, who cheat on their “diets” by eating dinner at Red Lobster, who read Charles Dickens and David Baldacci, who program their TiVos for all episodes of The Office (especially the British version), who passionately debate politics with co-workers, who don’t debate politics but sometimes wish they did, and who cried when Old Yeller died. I think that about covers it. But really, when it comes right down to it, I wrote the book for myself as a way of making sense of everything I saw and heard while I was in Iraq. Comedy was just one way—the easiest way—of dealing with all that stupidity and bravery and sadness.

  What is your favorite novel about war and why does it resonate with you in particular?

  I think the work of war fiction that resonates strongest with me is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which is a collection of short stories (though it’s sometimes labeled a “novel in stories”). He absolutely nails the mindset of war to the wall—the misery, the chaos, the humor. Other war novels that have been strong influences in my writing include Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak, A Midnight Clear by William Wharton, and of course the granddaddy of them all, Catch-22.

  What advice would you give to writers trying to make their debut today, given the opportunity to self-publish, the rise of eBooks, and the growth of small literary presses?

  There will be times when you think your writing is absolute crap, that it’s so bad you think you ought to just give up, that you should just take a ballpeen hammer to your keyboard. Don’t let yourself get like this. Go back over something you’ve written, find that one golden sentence that leaps off the page with life. Embrace it, kiss it, then go out there and make another one like it. The other thing I would say to writers who are hoping to make their “debut” in writing: it doesn’t have to be big; it doesn’t have to be a splashy book deal right out of the gate. I spent nearly 15 years publishing short stories and poems in microscopically small literary magazines—usually for no pay—before I got my “big break” with a short story in Esquire. Then it was another 14 years before Fobbit, my debut novel, was published. So, sometimes it takes time. If you have the passion and the belief in your writing, and if you every now and then write a golden sentence you love, then I say, “Don’t stop typing.” Or, more apropos to this website, “Never stop sharpening your pencils.”

  David Abrams’ short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review and other literary quarterlies. His novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit, will be published by Grove/Atlantic in September 2012. He regularly blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen. Read an extended bio at his website, David Abrams Books.

Brave Deeds
Jonathan Fullmer
Booklist. 113.21 (July 1, 2017): p15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Brave Deeds.

By David Abrams.

Aug. 2017.272p. Black Cat, paper, $16 (9780802126863).

In Fobbit (2012), Abrams caricatured military personnel who avoided combat overseas. His second novel confronts another under-explored aspect of war: the unlikely bonds formed by mutinous allegiance. Six soldiers steal a Hummer and sneak off base to attend their esteemed commander Rafe's memorial service. Then their vehicle breaks down in the heart of Baghdad. In a city where everyone is a potential enemy, the men risk their careers, and their lives, to get to the service on foot. Battling hunger and paranoia, the squad episodically recalls their daring adventure and Rafe's violent demise, portraying a complex man who secretly cared for stray dogs and avenged the deaths of innocent victims. Sharing their stories as a collective voice, each man bears his own burden: there's the notorious overeater, Cheever; impulsively violent Fish; Park the stoic; desperately romantic O, who can't get over his ex; Drew, who married the wrong woman; and their sententious makeshift leader, Arrow, who spurs them on. Just when the squad's plights become darkly, hilariously absurd, Abrams surprises with pathos and tenderness. This is military fiction at its truest.--Jonathan Fullmer

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fullmer, Jonathan. "Brave Deeds." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 15. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862673/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d9c65bb1. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862673

Abrams, David: BRAVE DEEDS
Kirkus Reviews. (July 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Abrams, David BRAVE DEEDS Black Cat/Grove (Adult Fiction) $16.00 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2686-3

Abrams (Fobbit, 2012) follows his award-winning debut with a more empathetic but no less bitter take on the Iraq War.In the Land of Not Good, Staff Sgt. Raphael Morgan, "dismembered but not disremembered," has been killed by an improvised explosive devise, "obscene pieces of him flying through the bomb-bloom air." A band of brothers, troops he led, has decided to attend his memorial service at FOB Saro across Baghdad from their Taji camp. However, officers have denied permission. That's irrelevant to troopers Arrow, Park, Drew, O, Cheever, and Fish. They steal a Humvee and go AWOL. The Humvee breaks its drive shaft, and the six, edging past death at every door, must hoof it across the "chaotic center of terrorism" amid "al-Qaeda, Mahdi, Ba'ath, and Badr clashing their ideologies and ambitions of evil." Abrams offers an unusual narrative, first person plural, with points of view discernible only by process of elimination, a subtle reframing of the Rashomon effect. Chapters are long and short, one a mere 38 words, another a prose poem that's an homage to legs, the infantryman's mode of transportation. With multiple narrators, each trooper is seen through a different squad member's eyes. There's Arrow, distant son of more distant parents, who falls naturally into a leadership role, or the Hajji-hating Fish, years of promotions and demotions turning him into the private soldier with a "shine of gray at his temples" and the ability to shoot prisoners without remorse. As the six march across Baghdad, the heat, dust, and broken buildings stand as warnings until the action explodes in short, spare declarative sentences, every bullet another shot at the cruel and illogical aspects of war. A powerful story on its surface, a soldier's story laced with vulgarities and gallows humor, but also a story holding deeper interpretations of our troubled Middle Eastern misadventures.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Abrams, David: BRAVE DEEDS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199574/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c72c2834. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199574

Brave Deeds
Publishers Weekly. 264.23 (June 5, 2017): p26.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Brave Deeds

David Abrams. Black Cat, $16 trade paper

(272p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2686-3

Army veteran Abrams (Fobbit) returns to the Iraq War in his second novel, which tells the story of six AWOL American soldiers defying orders by crossing Baghdad to attend the funeral of their squad leader, Sgt. Rafael Morgan. It's a journey made more difficult by the fact that their stolen Humvee has broken down and they now have to cross hostile territory on foot, mapless and without a radio or medic. During these tension-filled hours, we get to know the squad members: new llader Arrow, who is beginning to have doubts about his sexual orientation; Cheever, the overweight screwup; Park, "our quiet one"; Fish, the twitchy FNG ("fucking new guy"); Drew, who dreams of being unfaithful to his wife back home; and O, short for Olijandro, who is everyone's friend. Their personal mission is interrupted by the search for a bomb factory, a diversion that turns unexpectedly bloody. The journey is also punctuated with nightmarish flashbacks to earlier in the war and the heroic act that cost Sgt. Morgan his life, and glimpses of civilian life. It all builds to an emotionally wrenching and tension-filled climax as the squad attempts to crash the funeral in a hijacked civilian van. Filled with vivid characterizations and memorable moments, this novel--as with classic modern war literature from John Hersey's Into the Valley to David Halberstam's One Very Hot Day--turns a single military action into a microcosm of an entire war. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Aug.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Brave Deeds." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 26. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538291/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=277316da. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495538291

Abrams, David: FOBBIT
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 15, 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Abrams, David FOBBIT Black Cat/Grove (Adult Fiction) $15.00 9, 4 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2032-8

IEDs, VBIEDs, EODs, G-3 and even CNN contrive a constant Catch-22 as Fobbit Chance Gooding Jr. fights the acronym war in Abrams' debut novel. 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 clich�-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. Sardonic and poignant. Funny and bitter. Ribald and profane. Confirmation for the anti-war crowd and bile for Bush supporters.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Abrams, David: FOBBIT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A299605425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aa1b8bb0. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A299605425

Fobbit
Publishers Weekly. 259.27 (July 2, 2012): p45.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Fobbit

David Abrams. Grove/Black Cat, $15 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2032-8

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Abrams's debut is a harrowing satire of the Iraq War and an instant classic. The Fobbits of the title are U.S. Army support personnel, stationed at Baghdad's enclave of desk jobs: Forward Operating Base Triumph. Some of the soldiers, like Lt. Col. Vic Duret, are good officers pushed to the brink. Others, like Capt. Abe Shrinkle, are indecisive blowhards. But the soul of the book is Staff Sgt. Chance Gooding Jr., a public relations NCO who spends his days crafting excruciating press releases and fending off a growing sense of moral bankruptcy. A series of bombings, street battles, and media debacles test all of these men and, although there are exciting combat scenes, the book's most riveting moments are about crafting spin, putting the "Iraqi Face" on the conflict. A sequence in which a press release is drafted and edited and scrutinized, held up for so long that its eventual release is old news, is a pointed vision of losing a public relations war. Abrams, a 20-year Army veteran who served with a public affairs team in Iraq, brings great authority and verisimilitude to his depictions of these attempts to shape the perceptions of the conflict. Abrams's prose is spot-on and often deadpan funny, as when referring to the "warm pennies" smell of a soldier's "undermusk of blood," or when describing one misshapen officer: "skull too big , for the stalk of his neck, arms foreshortened like a dinosaur ... one word came to mind: thalidomide." This novel nails the comedy and the pathos, the boredom and the dread, crafting the Iraq War's answer to Catch-22. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Sept.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fobbit." Publishers Weekly, 2 July 2012, p. 45. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297137140/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b364cac0. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A297137140

Fobbit
Diane Holcomb
Booklist. 108.21 (July 1, 2012): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Fobbit. By David Abrams. Sept. 2012. 384p. Black Cat, paper, $15 (9780802120328).

In west Baghdad, while the infantry fights the war on terrorism, a team of public-affairs soldiers play computer solitaire and clip toenails in the relative safety of the Forward Operating Base (FOB), waiting for the latest death reports. This is the story of the Fobbits, as they're pejoratively called, and, in particular, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding Jr., who types up the latest suicide bombing into something palatable for Americans digesting his words over breakfast. It's the story of Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret, knee-deep in the heat, stench, and gore of combat instead of working on nation rebuilding, who hates those Fobbits in their cushy cubicles avoiding combat. It's the story of incompetent Captain Abe Shrinkle, who has something to prove and becomes a burr in the boot of the U.S. Army. First-novelist Abrams punches up the grittiness of war with the dark, cynical humor that comes from living it (he served as a Fobbit in Iraq), crafting images that will haunt readers long after they pry their grip from the book. Think M.A.S.H. in Iraq.--Diane Holcomb

Holcomb, Diane

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Holcomb, Diane. "Fobbit." Booklist, 1 July 2012, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297915232/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5095dc29. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A297915232

Abrams, David. Fobbit
John Cecil
Library Journal. 137.12 (July 1, 2012): p71.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Abrams, David. Fobbit. Black Cat: Grove.

Sept. 2012. c.384p. ISBN 9780802120328.

pap. $15. F

Former army journalist Abrams offers a comic novel about press officers, clerks, and all noncombat military personnel at a Forward Operating Base (FOB) during the peak of violence in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Staff Sgt. Chance Gooding--while counting the days until his deployment ends--methodically translates combat reports and suicide bomber fatalities into bloodless press-release prose. After several fatal incidents of incompetance, Capt. Abe Shrinkle is transferred in disgrace from leading troops, and exiled to folding towels in the FOB gym. From there, his humiliating downward spiral is unstoppable and ends scandalously in the Australians' off-limits swimming pool. Abrams (with a nod to Catch-22) mocks the dich6s of military bureaucracy, yet he frequently employs military jargon and expressions to describe the characters' thoughts and schemes for self-preservation. While the author paints with broad satirical strokes, the book offers a unique behind-the-wire glimpse at life at the FOB and the process of "spinning" a war for public consumption. VERDICT A funny, hard-edged satire about recent history and modern war-making, suitable for adult general fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/19/12.l--John Cecil, Austin, TX

Cecil, John

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cecil, John. "Abrams, David. Fobbit." Library Journal, 1 July 2012, p. 71. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A323858131/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a8eff5c1. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A323858131

Book World: Six U.S. soldiers go AWOL in Baghdad to honor a fallen brother
Brian Castner
The Washington Post. (Aug. 11, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Brian Castner

Brave Deeds

By David Abrams

Black Cat. 256 pp. Paperback, $16

---

In the deluge of Iraq War-themed books that appeared in 2012, David Abrams' "Fobbit" was known as the funny one. Drawn from his experience as an Army public affairs officer, it tells the story of the "marshmallow" soldiers confined to base, writing news releases about a war they never see.

But funny was always the wrong word for that novel. "Fobbit" is clever and absurd, but too earnest for carefree guffaws, full of biting if-you-don't-laugh-you-cry satire. In interviews, Abrams often said that he was not primarily a humorist and that "Fobbit" was an outlier.

He has proved that in his new novel, which is only rarely funny, though still plenty earnest and affecting. Set at the height of the Iraq War, "Brave Deeds" is the story of six soldiers sneaking across the suburbs of Baghdad to attend the memorial service of their beloved platoon sergeant, Rafe Morgan, who was blown to pieces by a car bomb. Assigned to quick reaction force (QRF) duty during the ceremony, they go AWOL instead and steal a Humvee to drive across town to the base where the service will be held.

The war is just happening to these young men, who serve on the lowest rung in the Army hierarchy, and, as implausible as it might be, this quest is their chance to regain some agency. "The point is - if we were to get this far in our s--t-for-brains reasoning - the point is that we want to tell the command group to take their QRF roster and shove it up their air-conditioned fobbity asses. We'll show you!"

The whole novel is written in this collective first-personal plural. The six members of the unit are all screw-ups in their own way - a porn addict, an adulterer, a semi-suicidal Piggy from "Lord of the Flies" - but together, they add up to more than the sum of their parts. "Our breath slows until we are, without realizing it, inhaling and exhaling as one twelve-legged animal," the squad says. The "we" of the squad is the union of their better selves, capable of acts of physical courage and emotional truth that none of them could achieve individually. They imagine how it will be when they finally get to the memorial service: A dramatic entrance, "standing at the back of a church, all heads swiveling." They'll "march down the aisle, smelling of dust," they say, and "there will be gasps of surprise, of admiration, of anger." The squad is a pack of Tom Sawyers, going to their own funeral, which is right, because without Sergeant Morgan, part of the "we" will forever be dead.

"Brave Deeds" takes place on a single afternoon, a five-hour sprint across enemy territory, though with regular and often momentum-sapping flashbacks to flesh out each squad member's backstory. A rule of thumb in modern moviemaking says that the first step in creating dramatic tension is to take away every character's cellphone, so they get lost and can't call for help. Abrams uses a similar convention, stripping the squad of their vehicle, medic, radio and map in the first chapter. Over the course of their journey across Baghdad, there are shootouts and pee breaks, tragedies and victories, and a lunch stop for halal chicken that made my stomach rumble in anticipation.

The soldiers are foulmouthed, sex-obsessed and fiercely loyal for reasons they can't quite articulate - in other words, packed with young American male authenticity. Abrams' prose is relaxed and conversational, with a few scattered literary nuggets that add heft, like chunks of beef in a vegetable soup; dead bodies are taking a "terrible nap," explosions are a "bomb-bloom," a fatal bullet makes "a hole no bigger than a goldfish's mouth." The mash-up works, and Abrams' voice is clear and strong.

In the climactic final scene, though, Abrams attempts to braid thematic strands of death and rebirth and religious communion, never quite attaining the emotional heights to which he aspires. But the central irony - that this funeral is more important to them than any mission their squad has undertaken - remains front and center. In the Iraq War, we veterans eventually realized that they were killing us mostly because we were killing them, and the reverse as well. It's a cycle cruelly laid bare in "Brave Deeds," where Abrams reminds us that death always begets more death.

---

Castner, a former Air Force officer, is the author of three books, including "The Long Walk." His new book, "Disappointment River," will be published in the spring.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Castner, Brian. "Book World: Six U.S. soldiers go AWOL in Baghdad to honor a fallen brother." Washington Post, 11 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500286969/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d4b8c3e5. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A500286969

Fullmer, Jonathan. "Brave Deeds." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 15. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862673/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d9c65bb1. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. "Abrams, David: BRAVE DEEDS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199574/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c72c2834. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. "Brave Deeds." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 26. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538291/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=277316da. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. "Abrams, David: FOBBIT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A299605425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aa1b8bb0. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. "Fobbit." Publishers Weekly, 2 July 2012, p. 45. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297137140/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b364cac0. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. Holcomb, Diane. "Fobbit." Booklist, 1 July 2012, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A297915232/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5095dc29. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. Cecil, John. "Abrams, David. Fobbit." Library Journal, 1 July 2012, p. 71. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A323858131/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a8eff5c1. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. Castner, Brian. "Book World: Six U.S. soldiers go AWOL in Baghdad to honor a fallen brother." Washington Post, 11 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500286969/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d4b8c3e5. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

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