Fobbit
Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding works in the Public Affairs Office at Forward Operating Base Triumph in Baghdad, where his job is to turn IED attacks and friendly-fire incidents into press releases the Pentagon can stomach. The novel rotates through a cast of fobbits, the soldiers who never leave the wire, and the few who do, including the cowardly Captain Abe Shrinkle and the doomed Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret. Abrams writes the Iraq War from the bureaucratic underbelly, where the most dangerous weapon is the email chain.
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A public-affairs sergeant in Baghdad turns IED reports into Pentagon-ready press releases in this Iraq War dark comedy from a former Army PAO.
Fobbit was written by David Abrams and published in 2012. Abrams served in Iraq with the Army's public affairs unit, and the novel is dark satire about military bureaucracy in the war zone, in the tradition of Catch-22.
Fobbit is fictional but draws on David Abrams's year in Iraq with the U.S. Army. The bureaucratic absurdity, base culture, and types of personnel are documentary in spirit; the specific characters and events are invented.
Fobbit is 384 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Fobbit takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Fobbit is a standalone novel by David Abrams, not part of a series.
Fobbit is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
