A Grisly Problem, Grateful Iraqis and a Grim Outlook

Unit Planning Outpost Confronts an Obstacle Known as 'Bob'

BAGHDAD, April 24 -- The soldiers called him Bob, and for the past several weeks, until Tuesday morning, he was the biggest obstacle to the success of an important mission in a small but crucial corner of the Iraq war.

"We can't get anybody to get Bob out. No one wants to do it," Army Maj. Brent Cummings, executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, said with worry one recent morning as Bob's story began unfolding. Cummings was looking at an aerial photograph of an area in east Baghdad called Kamaliya, where there was an abandoned spaghetti factory with a hole in the courtyard, a hole in which some of his soldiers had discovered Bob.

Bob: It's shorthand for "bobbin' in the float," Cummings explained.

Float: It's shorthand for "two to three feet of raw sewage," he further explained.

Bobbin' in the float is shorthand, then, for yet another lesson in the comedy, absurdity and tragedy that is any moment in this war.

Bob was found as a result of the new strategy of trying to secure Baghdad by temporarily increasing the number of troops and moving them into neighborhood outposts. After the soldiers identified the spaghetti factory as the best place from which to secure poor, rough, dirty, insurgent-ridden Kamaliya, they began clearing the factory in order to move in.

One day, in one area, they found 16 rocket-propelled grenades, three antitank grenades, 11 hand grenades and 21 mortar shells. Another day, they found 14 more mortar shells. Another day, they found the makings of three roadside bombs. Another day, they found a square metal cover in the courtyard that they thought might be booby-trapped. Ever so carefully, they lifted it and found themselves peering down into the factory's septic tank at Bob.

The body, floating, was in a billowing, once-white shirt. The toes were gone. The fingers were gone. The head, separated and floating next to the body, had a gunshot hole in the face.

The body, it was quickly decided, would have to be removed before the 120 soldiers could move in. "It's a morale issue. Who wants to live over a dead body?" Cummings said. "And part of it is a moral issue, too. I mean he was somebody's son, and maybe husband, and for dignity's sake, well, it cheapens us to leave him there. I mean even calling him Bob is disrespectful. I don't know. It's the world we live in."

He paused.

"I'd like to put him in a final resting place," he said, "as opposed to a final floating place."

But how? That was the problem. No one wanted to touch Bob. Not the soldiers. Not the Iraqi police. No one.