The Secret Life of Fobbits
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
For the past two and-a-half days I’ve been at Bagram Air Force Base, reporting stories and waiting for a flight to Forward Operating Base Salerno.
I feel like I’m in a small city in the mid-west U.S. There are 16,000 plus people here, both military and civilian contractors. There’s Burger King, Popeye’s Chicken, Subway, DQ, and Pizza Hut (who deliver, base-wide.) There’s all night gyms, churches, a spa and local Afghani’s selling rugs and knickknacks. The PX has about as much stuff as a small Wal-Mart, from deodorant to external hard drives. There are also thousands of unexploded mines lying in fields just outside the 11-mile perimeter.
The airfield here is huge. F-15 and A-10 fighter planes, Apaches, Chinooks and Black Hawk helicopters take off constantly. Watching an F-15 light up its afterburners at night, streaking down the runway and off to engage in the business of killing is a strangely exhilarating sight.
And then there are the Fobbits. Fobit is a derogatory term for military personnel that never venture “outside the wire,” meaning they never leave the base. They are primarily support personnel, logistics, intelligence or even kitchen workers. The U.S. army is a vast bureaucracy and it takes many, many kinds of people and jobs to make this bureaucracy go. Many of these folks are basically working office jobs, they’re just doing so in a war zone.
But the secret is this: their lives here are pretty boring. They work very long shifts and when off-duty, they’re still stuck around their bosses and co-workers. There are endless rules, from where you can wear a hat (not in the mess hall,) to how fast you can drive (five miles-an-hour or you end up in the brig.) And of course there is no drinking.
More than one Fobbit has told me, “You have no idea what I would do for a Saturday night away from this place.”