Iraq is, on paper, a dry country, in the alcohol-free sense of the word. The US Army policy in Iraq was to respect that tradition. Many of the other forces there felt differently and so the conditions were ripe for some black market trading. In fairness to our leadership, not giving soldiers alcohol in a war zone was probably sound thinking, regardless of how much respect we felt for our host nation’s traditions. Soldiers and alcohol have a tendency to mix like matches and dynamite. On our home base, we were incentivized to check our drinking with the promise of a long weekend if we could go 82 days without an alcohol-induced traffic fatality. This prize was rarely awarded. Before I go on to paint a picture of us as irresponsible alcoholics, I should mention that the following stories are the only booze-fueled ones worth telling from that time, any other possible anecdotes being both brief and dull. But enough trying to save face; on with the shenanigans.

Although we weren’t permitted alcohol, we we couldn’t be entirely prevented from obtaining it. Most of our supply came bundled into care packages. One of our number had a relative, whose years spent bringing drug smugglers to justice had made him a skilled smuggler himself. Like a magician, who refuses to reveal the secrets to his tricks, I won’t go into the details of how this relative hid alcohol in the packages he sent us. Suffice to say that his tricks were always clever and often inspired. Not only did they pass the censors, we often didn’t find all the goodies in our more thorough investigations. The scale of booze that we received was far from industrial, but it did the trick. Most of the time, we put it to use during our games of Risk. This formed a sort of happy hour, with the game board standing in for the bar.

As with any happy hour, the volume goes up as the drinks go down. One night, our barracks door opened to reveal the executive officer, LT Hawkins, who had come to tell us that we were being too noisy. We moved like ninjas to clear the booze as he walked into the room. He reprimanded us, left and we did our best to continue our game in a more subdued manner. Some time after that event, we wound up telling him that we had been drinking that night. He became angry with us again. For not having shared with him. The lack of alcohol was a hardship felt across all ranks.

     Among the alcohol enthusiasts we had in Ambulance Platoon, we also had quite a few tattoo enthusiasts. “Let’s give ourselves tattoos while we’re out here,” we said to each other more than once. “Definitely! They would be like prison tattoos!” “Awesome!” We had a plan, of sorts. At any rate, we had the required materials. We reasoned that we could MacGyver ourselves some tattoos, using our syringe needles and pens, each of which we had in ample supply. A care package from our Mysterious Benefactor/Guardian Angel arrived and after tucking into its contents one night, we decided that we had talked enough. Action was called for and were we not men of action?

     We decided that Andrew would be the tattooist. I don’t remember why. It was Dustan, though, who really drew the short stick, being granted the honor of receiving the first al-Taqqadum prison tattoo. As any good medic should, we set up a clean area on Brian’s cot and laid out our tools. Andrew put on latex gloves, removed a needle from its packaging, dipped it in ink, sized up the area and judiciously selected a starting point. He touched the needle to his chosen point of skin and leaned in to see it clearer. And continued leaning in. We cringed in sympathetic pain as the needle sank heavily through Dustan’s flesh. I imagined it piercing every layer of flesh in Dustan’s arm, stopping only when it struck bone.

     Dustan swore, cringed, pulled back. “Oops,” said Andrew, retreating the needle back through all the layers of Dustan’s arm. Dustan rolled away from the offending needle (and from the offending tattooist), coming to rest curled up on the cot with his shoulder squarely on Brian’s pillow. He sat up, revealing a misshapen bloodstain on the pillow. We burst out laughing. Brian swore at us. The event was over. Of all the tattoos that many of us went on to acquire, none of them came from that dark barracks room in al-Taqqadum.

     There is a competition in the Army, in which every soldier constantly struggles, a goal towards which we each strive a dozen times a day. This is the game of Coming-in-Second. Second place is valuable because the Army labors under assumption that not only is hard work its own reward, but that more work makes a great reward. A soldier who is seen as more reliable than their peers will find themselves pulling duties on the weekends. Display the greatest competency in your job skills? Why not train others to that level? At night. On Saturday. And so, whenever volunteers are called for, we rush to show our enthusiasm to work, while keeping an eye on our companions, seeking to cross the finish line ‘only just!’ behind at least one of them. Ah, so close! Oh well, next time…

     Playing that game one night, Dustan and I looked for our soon-to-first-place companions and realized that we had lost the race by a wide margin and come in first ourselves.

    Earlier that night, a battalion-wide formation (Army parlance for a gathering) had been called on account of someone accidentally firing their rifle on-post. We gathered in the darkness to stand at parade rest while a revolving door of field officers and NCOs upbraided us on responsible conduct in a combat zone. By the time the third speaker had gotten up to recite the speech made just before them, I had mentally checked out. I was recalled from my reverie by the cry of “medics!” from people at the front of the formation. One of the other soldiers had locked her knees, a stance which prevents blood from returning to the lungs from the lower extremities and can result in a sudden loss of consciousness, an act known in the Army as “falling out”.

     An ambulance was called for and each two-man crew scattered for their respective vehicles, each trying to outrun all but one other crew. Dustan and I, whose reflexes were suffering from the effects of the contents of a care package, ended up being the only crew to make it to their truck. We decided that Dustan would drive and I would treat. We were quick about loading the fallen soldier onto our truck and making a clean getaway.

     In the back of the truck, I chatted with our patient. Despite a blow to her ego, she had not suffered any obvious physical trauma and was in good spirits. She joked and I joked back. We bantered all the way to the battalion aid station, to which in my tipsy state, I felt that we arrived much too fast. The nurse practitioner on duty that night threw open the ambulance loading door and demanded to know the patient’s vitals.

     “The ride was too bumpy,” I said, “I couldn’t get them.”

     He looked at me as though I had just asked his mother on a date.

     “She’s responsive, alert and oriented times three (a medical shorthand for a completely alert state of mind) and breathing normal,” I said. “Just locked her knees and got dizzy.”

     The aid station team helped her off the ambulance and into the clinic. Dustan and I parked the truck across the street at the CP, the shack where we pulled shifts being on-call for ambulance duty.

     “Wanna park it here for a while?”

     “Yup. No need to head back just yet.”

     “Nope. None at all.”

     We hung out with the crews on duty for a while, playing Nintendo or just joking about the night’s adventure. Once our heads were clear, we drove back to the motor pool, put our vehicle to rest and returned to the barracks.

     “Took you guys a while,” someone said.

     “Yeah….where are we at in this Risk game?”

During one brief period of the deployment, my company was tasked to provide medical support to an infantry unit that manned a small post in a village closer to Fallujah, from which they would send units out on patrols. On occasion, they coordinated with Special Forces units to go on a raid in which they would take various targets prisoner. These prisoners would be interrogated at a short-term holding camp about an hour’s drive away before being either released or sent on. I now assume that they were ‘sent on’ to Abu Ghraib, but this was before the horrors that took place there came to light and if I ever even heard the name, it meant little more to me than the name of any other place in that country.

     The medics of my unit were needed mainly to man the clinic on their base while their soldiers went out on raids or patrols. We did the same things that we did on our base, pulling sick call duty, guard duty, etc. Once, however, two of us were sent to spend two or three days at the detention camp. If nothing else, I thought that this would provide a break from both the daily routine and my First Sergeant’s unwelcome attention. The detention camp was roughly an hour’s drive from the base, down potholed dirt roads bordered by a mosaic of rice paddies, vegetable plots, grazing areas and the red desert.

We worked primarily during the nights and in my memories, I can now hardly remember the place in the daylight. Interrogations took place during the days. The interrogations were highly controlled environments, in which no one ever suffered an injury that called for our attention. The few injuries we treated were usually small things incurred during raids, often the result of scrambling over broken terrain in the dark, an effort rendered futile by our night vision technology. My partner on this mission, Armstrong, had a slightly different job specialty from mine. Whereas I had trained as a field medic, to spend most of my time working from my ambulance or to be otherwise ‘in the field’, he had trained to work predominantly in a hospital environment. Minor differences aside, we had the same skill set.

     On our last night there, we were summoned to render aid to a man brought in from a raid. The soldier who brought us to him told us that the man had a deep gash on the palm of his left hand from having tried to climb through a broken window to escape the raiders. “It’s pretty deep,” he said. “It’s bleeding a lot. I think he might need stitches.”

     We brought our ambulance over to where the man was being held. We found him kneeling on the sandy ground, clutching his hand with a burlap sack over his head, duct taped onto him at the level of his eyes. An MP stood guard behind him. We knelt and spoke to him, saying, in a broken pastiche of english and arabic that we were medics and needed to look at his hand. He obliged and treated us to a view of his torn palm. He had thick, meaty hands, the kind made large and hardened by a lifetime of manual labor. True to the first soldier’s description, the cut was “pretty deep”. It was also jagged, looking more like a bullet’s exit wound than anything that might result from a knife edge. We cleaned it up to get a better look at it. This further confirmed that it was a very deep cut, extending through the many layers of fascia and into the muscles of the hand.

     “Yeah,” I said, “looks like he’ll need stitches.”

     “Yup,” said Armstrong in agreement, “definitely.”

     We walked over to the back of our ambulance, where one of the items we kept was a sealed, sterile suture kit.

     “Go for it,” I said, or something along those lines.

     Armstrong snorted and shook his head slightly, “I don’t know how to do stitches. You’re the medic, you go for it.”

     “I’ve never thrown stitches,” I replied in a hushed voice, “I’ve only just seen it done once in AIT.” AIT stands for Advanced Individual Training. It is the set of specialist training that soldiers undergo following basic training.

     At this point, I was glad to be out of earshot of the guard.

     “How have you never learned to throw stitches?” I asked Armstrong. “Isn’t that something you have to know as a nurse?”

     “We only ever talked about it. It was something our unit was supposed to train us in. Then when I got out of AIT & jump school, I was tasked to your unit & no one trained me. I thought you had to learn that stuff to be a field medic.”

     “Shit! My instructor in AIT just showed us how to do it on an orange, then said that if it was something that we needed to know for our individual unit, that unit would train us.”

     “Shit.”

     …

     “Think we should call for higher level care?”

     In many settings, this would be a very straightforward question. As it was, this seemingly simple question required some discussion. As this episode took place sometime during the transition from the dead of night to the wee hours of the morning, calling for higher level care meant waking up a doctor back at the base. Once awake, transport and a security detail would be arranged. Transport could take the form of a humvee, which would take about an hour to drive to us, or a helicopter, which would involve an even bigger operation and would make a decidedly more dramatic entrance. All for a guy with a cut on his hand. It would be like passing out during a job interview and waking to find that two ambulances, a police squad, a fire truck and a SWAT team had been called to the scene. Except in this case, the responders would all be angry.

     The motto of the medical profession is “first do no harm”. It serves a guideline for treatment, especially in cases where uncertainty might exist concerning a given treatment. Our interpretation of this guideline on this occasion was that, given the logistical challenges and certain embarrassment of calling for help, we could comply with our ethical obligations as medics by ensuring, thanks to our supply of lidocaine, that even if we did a hack job of the stitches, we could painlessly stop our patient’s bleeding and manage the wound until it could be improved by higher-level medical attention. The doctor at the aid station back on the base was scheduled to come to the detention camp in a day’s time, anyway. At that time, we would be sure to bring the patient to his attention and take whatever reprimands the doctor might have for us in a much quieter environment. This might not have represented the highest level of care possible for an individual, but we felt that under the circumstances, the greatest number of people involved all stood to benefit.

     With these best of intentions in mind, we broke out the suture kit and began preparing to do medicine. For reasons lost to my memory, it fell to me to actually perform the procedure, while Armstrong stood by to assist, offer moral support, or perhaps distract the guard, as needed. The first thing was to anesthetize our patient’s hand with lidocaine. Lidocaine is what is called a “local” anesthetic, which means that it works to numb only a small and focused region, as opposed to the whole-body numbness brought on by general anesthesia. Our first mistake of the following comedy of horrors that was supposed to masquerade as medicine, however, was to overestimate just how local “local” was, when it came to lidocaine. Lidocaine, it turns out, should be applied directly to the wounded area. Not even near it, directly to it. Not having prior experience with lidocaine, we decided to use it in an attempt to numb the man’s entire arm, from his elbow to fingertips. This, we thought, would probably be the most comfortable option for him. I proceeded to inject an amount of lidocaine that I suspected was more than enough in an attempt to avoid giving too little, in various places all over the man’s lower arm. Reasoning that anesthesia worked by blocking nerves, I hoped to spread enough around his arm that most, if not all nerves in it should be blocked. Alas, lidocaine does not travel throughout the body’s tissues as I had hoped, a fact made evident when I began suturing.

     The first stitch, in keeping with the general theme of the rest of the night, did not go entirely as planned. The cut was already rather jagged and as much as possible, I didn’t want to make it worse. With this in mind, I placed the first stitch as close as I could to the border of the cut. I wove the thread through the flesh on the other side of the gash, again keeping it nice and close to the border. When I then pulled the stitch tight to tie it off, I witnessed the thread simply pull straight through the ragged flesh on both sides, leaving me kneeling on the sand, holding a bloody thread with a pair of forceps while a man with a burlap sack over his head shook in the darkness, repeating the phrase, “no mister, no, please”. It was hardly a calming moment.

     Adding to everyone’s anxiety, the guard thumped the prisoner-cum-patient in the back with his rifle stock and instructed him to be quiet. Under the gaze of Armstrong and the guard and in the face (so to speak) of the prisoner, I returned to making the first stitch with as cool  a demeanor as I could muster. This time, I placed the thread far enough back from the edge of the ragged cut, that it didn’t pull through. I was hardly out of the woods with this stitch, however, as I now had to tie it in a knot that would hold. I vaguely remembered being shown a special knot that would hold fast and could be tied using the sterile forceps I held in each hand. I stared at those two ends of the thread and willed more memories of that class to come forth, but the best I could manage was that there was something about two loops. After fumbling repeatedly with trying to make loops and chase thread ends through them using those stupid forceps, I finally managed to tie a square knot. It felt as much a victory as it did a defeat. I proceeded to the next stitch. This was a bad idea, but there was nothing to do now but keep going.

     The needle sunk through thick skin to the soundtrack of “No, mister, please, no more,” and “Shut up! Be quiet!” At some point, I pulled another thread through and had to try again. No mister, please, mister! Another square knot. One more stitch. Mister please! Shut up! Thump goes the rifle’s stock. I’ve placed two of the sutures too far apart. As I tie one off, I can see one side of the gash folding to conform to my unnatural sewing line. Cut that stitch, try again. Please, mister! Just one more, I say. No more, mister, please! Hey, has he done this before, the guard asks. Armstrong, arms crossed, his face an expression of bored confidence, says oh yeah, hundreds of times. He’s the best, it’s just a difficult cut. One more stitch, ok? No more, mister! Ok, just one more. No, mister, please! Ok, really just one more this time. Mister, no!

Finally, the last stitch. Ok, done; no more. Oh, thank you mister, thank you! By now, he was swaying on his knees, regardless of any action taken by the guard. A cold sweat had soaked through every layer of my uniform, making the chill of the desert night all the more biting. Armstrong and I cleaned up our used medical supplies and made our way back to our ambulance. Under the guard’s supervision, the prisoner stumbled away towards his next trial, whatever it might have been. I felt that I had done some of the interrogator’s work, softening up the prisoner for questioning. I suppose that we had gotten the job done, although I couldn’t bring myself to take any comfort in such a thought.

I suppose that the episode made too good a story not to tell and so it made its way back to my base and into the ears of our surgeon. If this story is to have any silver lining, it is that our surgeon, shocked by the tale of our misadventure, paid exceptional attention to training me in proper suturing techniques. I became her go-to guy for doing stitches. Regardless of the hour, or whose shift it might be, if sutures were needed I would be summoned, perhaps awoken, to perform them. By the end of our deployment, I was an expert.

—Edit—

I spent three days at the detention camp.

Most of my nine months in Iraq were spent on our base, a former Iraqi air force base called al-Taqqadum, or TQ for short. TQ was an abandoned Iraqi Air Force base originally built by the RAF after WWII. It already looked appropriately apocalyptic when we arrived. The base was spread out over a large area and consisted of a number of low, rectangular buildings and a few fortified Nissen huts, built to house aircraft. Entering TQ felt like setting foot in a ghost town. Few of the rectangular buildings still had doors and many of them had walls in various states of disrepair. By the time we arrived, the sand was already reclaiming what was once its own and half buried underneath it lay all manner of military detritus. Sun-baked boots, a helmet, scraps of uniform clothing and paperwork. So much paperwork full of the meaningless details out of which emerge the stories of a soldier’s time in service. These stories fluttered in the desert breezes, languished under the weight of sand, slept in battered metal cabinets and were finally swept away by us, erased and written over by our own stories. Our first tasks there consisted of cleaning and repairing the base.

     After completing most repairs and building whatever new structures we needed, our lives settled into a routine. This routine consisted of a cycle of two consecutive 24hr shifts of being on call for ambulance duty, with one shift spent being first on-call and the second being backup for the other team. This was followed by a “day” off, then running a convoy and having another “day” off. Repeat. The days off were theoretically a full 24 hours, but this never turned out to be the case. We considered a stretch of 16 hours, counting sleep, as a solid day off. It was a zombifying schedule. I don’t know how exactly many convoys I participated in, but at roughly 2 convoys per week for approximately 32 weeks (no regular convoys during our first month)  and rounding down, since sometimes we would take part in a longer convoy, which meant that we only rode in one for that week, I estimate that it was close to 60. Most of those convoys blend together in my mind, becoming a grab-bag of snapshots from dusty nighttime roads with little sense of chronological order. Only a few stand out.

I read a lot during my time there. I easily read more in the nine months I served overseas than I did throughout all four years of high school. Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov, The Seven Pillars of

Wisdom, East of Eden and more. We played a lot of Risk, which seems strangely appropriate for a bunch of soldiers at war. Most of the guys played card games, but I’ve never really cared for those. I just read more instead. I tried keeping a journal, but that was a short-lived effort. Our favorite game was probably that of trying to push our buddys’ buttons, to test the limits of their good humor.

     TQ overlooked the village of Habbaniya and its eponymous lake. We were told that Lake Habbaniya was pristine, on account of having been the personal fishing spot of Saddam Hussein and his family. During the first two weeks or so that we were there, we ended our days swimming in the lake, with hummvee-mounted Patriot missiles looking over us. This particular form of relaxation was short-lived and those first couple of weeks ended with orders not to enter the lake, based on the premise of possible bacterial infection. Was there really a deadly bacteria lurking in the Hussein family’s private fishing hole or was the Army just wary of any fun that hadn’t been issued by them? I’ll never know.

Some days, I pulled a shift on perimeter security and whiled away the hours playing backgammon, another of our favorite pastimes, with my companion while gazing at the fishermen, alone in their rowboats, upon the water. Guard duty is boring and I constantly envied the fishermen. The sunsets over the lake were like nothing I had ever seen, nor have ever seen elsewhere. Red and gold, but deeper and richer shades than I had ever seen before. The fading light would cast black shadows that stood out in sharp contrast to the golden-brown and red hues of the enveloping sand. At night, we continued to play backgammon with the help of our night vision goggles.

     Although the war was often boring, it was not always peaceful. In the beginning, while we were still repairing our base and building its defenses, we endured almost nightly mortar fire. The Iraqi artillerymen would wait until the darkest hours of the night to pop off a few shots before retreating into the desert’s folds. They would fire from a different direction each night, but always at such a time that those of us not on guard were in deep slumber and likely exhausted from the work of constructing our buildings and defenses. Even that grew dull. At first we would start from out cots, throw on our armor, grab our weapons and take defensive positions. After a while, though, we just grew used to it. Every shot went wide and our mud-brick roofs offered no meaningful protection anyway and so we learned to sleep through them, only rousing ourselves enough to drape our body armor over our chests and our helmets over our faces. We worked hard during the days and were tired. It might be hard to imagine, but there we were. There was always at least one person, perhaps better-adapted for survival and usually named Mark, who, after the first mortar round struck, would frantically throw open our doors to announce that we were taking mortar fire and needed to take defensive positions. We usually showed our appreciation for the attention he gave to our safety by throwing a boot at Mark’s head and swearing at him. He always appeared shocked by this response, which I suppose, does make sense. Brian once joked that our commanders probably ordered artillery fire at night to keep us on our toes. Plausible. I now work in a building with a faulty fire alarm. It has been “fixed” many times. My colleagues and I have learned to react to it by turning up the volume of our headphones and continuing to work. I suspect that I will one day die in a fire.

     Intense focus is an activity best performed in short bursts. Over a longer span of time, the mind wanders, the eyes grow weary, the body fidgets. For me, this was guard duty in a nutshell. I seemed to always pull guard duty shifts that began in the evening. In some ways, this was nice, as it gave me a private seat with a view to the sunset, which, in the desert, competes for its place among the natural wonders of the world. Natural beauty didn’t end with the sunset. Given our strict rules regarding noise and light pollution and the rarity of overcast skies in the desert, I was kept frequent company by an unobstructed view of the Milky Way, its cold beauty amplified by the silence of our sleeping base.

     Given the night vision goggles, or NVGs, that I possessed, I also theoretically had an unobstructed view across the desert, from where any potential attack might come. The hours could grow quite long on guard duty, however and although I would periodically check our surroundings for signs of movement or anything out of the ordinary, I cannot claim to have maintained perfect vigilance. We were forbidden from using lights in our guard posts, which made the NVGs particularly useful for playing the games that we used to keep ourselves entertained while on duty. Backgammon was a popular one.

          We built our own guard shacks (officially observation posts, or OPs), simple wooden boxes, reinforced with sandbags. Before we had those up, though, our OPs consisted of a camouflage net on the hillsides of our base. A dark green camouflage net on a light brown hillside. On my first guard shift, Micah, my partner for that shift, and I were ordered to

remain under the camouflage at all times. We didn’t question that order out loud. We sat out that shift under our pathetic camouflage, reading magazines, playing backgammon and talking about the climbing that we had done and hoped to do in the future. Both being avid climbers, we were able to make good on at least some of the plans we made out there.

     Guard duty wasn’t all stargazing and games, however. Every once in a while, something would happen. One night, perhaps between games, or while looking in just the right spot while stargazing, my partner (I wish I could remember his name) and I saw something that we deemed ‘suspicious activity’. A car drove along the road separating the shore of Lake Habaniya from the small cliffs, upon which our guard post was situated. The car stopped at a broken lamppost, whereupon four men got out and walked away, towards the lake, apparently abandoning the car on the roadside. Granted, ‘suspicious’ doesn’t always mean ‘dangerous’ and there could certainly be multiple stories to explain what we saw. Erring on the side of caution, however, we decided that it was prudent to report the event, so that other guard units might be just that much more watchful. When all was said and done, it was still an active zone. We radioed the artillery unit that was responsible for handling communications for perimeter guard detail. No one responded.

We began calling for other guard posts, to report our situation and ask them to try to contact the command unit as well, but none of them responded to us, either. The mounting evidence suggested that a radio problem existed and that it existed within our radio set. Each guard post was required to perform a radio check every hour and the last one that we had done had gone smoothly. Somehow, between then and now, our radio had found a way to malfunction. We did the things that we had been trained to do in the event of a radio malfunction, but as neither of us were trained radio technicians, this amounted to turning it off and turning it back on again and finally disassembling certain parts and putting them back on again. Nothing worked. We tried twiddling dials at random and hitting the radio. Still nothing.

     We were not entirely without options. We could wait out the better part of an hour for the next radio check. After failing to make contact, the quick response force, or ORF, a squad of soldiers on hand to respond to security issues, would be dispatched to check on us and the radio would be sent for repair or replacement. One of the two of us could be dispatched to run to the next guard post to report our situation and ask for help. As reasonable as that sounded, it did actually contradict our orders, which were to never leave post unattended or undermanned. Our third option was to use a flare. We had flares of different colors, one to signal an attack, another simply to get a better view of something. We would see the latter type in use from time to time. Whenever we used a flare, we were supposed to radio in an report on our situation, giving all other guard posts a heads-up on what to expect.

     We sat for a while, staring at the silent, abandoned vehicle, our NVGs finally put to their prescribed use and considered our options. It was far from obvious how the abandoned car might be used against our base. It was not exactly close and was not left on a road that we commonly used, making it a rather poor location for an IED. Nonetheless, we sincerely felt that the actions we witnessed merited the term ‘suspicious’ and did not want to be the assholes who blew the chance to stop an improbable attack. We decided to use a flare.

     The flare was a long cylinder that closely resembled a common highway flare. The instructions for use of the flare were written clearly on the side of the device. They directed us to point the flare upwards while facing the target. They were very clear about pointing it upwards, stating unambiguously “Do not aim flare at target.” Our target, however, was quite the distance from us and we unscientifically decided that it wouldn’t hurt to at least angle the flare in its direction.

     The resulting arc formed by the flare’s trajectory never achieved the desired parabola, but decayed almost instantly into a clean shot straight into the backyard of the small house below our guard post and alongside the road. The flare struck the ground and exploded into multiple small fragments, each blazing with enough light to make out the terror in the expressions of the faces brought suddenly to the windows. The fragments dispersed across the backyard, one of them even igniting a heap of something (sticks, clothes, refuse?) into a small fire.

     Our  radio erupted into chatter. We tried responding a couple times, but our radio’s status went unchanged, leaving us with little to do but sit and wait for the QRF to arrive. They arrived, bristling with arms and ready for action. Risking understatement, they were disappointed by the type of action that they found. For our part, my partner and I reported as humorlessly as possible, masking how sheepish we felt on the inside with a solid mask of military professionalism. Our radio was exchanged for a new one and we played out the rest of the night as usual, using our night vision goggles to play backgammon, making the occasional joke, straining our eyes into the darkness and sometimes staring upwards to take in the undiluted field of stars above us.

     Mefloquine is a medication used to treat and prevent malaria. It is one of several and was selected for us in the army probably on account of being the cheapest. One drawback to using mefloquine, rather than the other antimalarials is that rare but serious psychological side effects have been documented with its use. These include anxiety, hallucinations, depression, unusual behavior, and suicidal ideations, among others. In my experience, they involved the most intense and emotionally charged nightmares that I have ever had. Nothing else before or since has even come close.

Mefloquine Dream #1

     I’m tied to the outside of our thin wooden ambulance depot. All of my skin has been flayed from my body. I am a captive mass of exposed muscle and blood. My platoon stands around me, holding knives. The lieutenant stands behind me to my right, holding an enormous knife. She has carved out several chunks of meat from my right leg and is contemplating her next move. I am tied tightly to the side of the building, straining against my bonds, screaming at them to give me my skin back. I am abruptly woken up for lunch.

We crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq in one long column of vehicles. My ambulance rode somewhere in the middle. No children lobbed grenades our way. Our most present enemies proved to be broken vehicles and incompetence. Every breakdown meant that while the mechanics repaired the trucks my teammate Cory and I would hunker down on one knee alongside our ambulance and watch the desert. I no longer recall my precise daydreams while gazing across that featureless golden expanse. I’m sure they involved ambushes and firefights, captures and escapes, probably a romance with a beautiful Iraqi woman. An idol of my early childhood was Conan the Barbarian and I still picture myself as a sword-wielding barbarian sometimes. The blank slate of that desert is a good place for daydreams. The holy trifecta of active daydreaming, drinking Red Bull and chewing tobacco kept me awake and nominally alert through hundreds of miles of convoys. Terrible habits, the last two, but effective.

     When it came our turn to play the part of the broken vehicle, it happened on account of a blown tire. Naturally, we had trained for just this sort of occasion. The protocol was to call in our situation on the radio, stop the convoy and take up defensive positions while the vehicle was either repaired, or if it could not be repaired in a reasonable time, destroyed. At the sound of the flat tire slapping against the pavement, we slowed our ambulance, radioed ahead and began to pull over to avoid further damage to the wheel.

     “Hold tight, medics,” was our only reply. We watched the other vehicles in the convoy pass by and disappear into the shimmering heat of the cement. Minutes grew longer, and the only vehicles of any sort that saw were the occasional civilian car or pickup truck, the latter consisting mostly of white Datsuns. We watched each one approach, nervous of what it might bring us. But each one passed us by, drivers and passengers shooting us looks of wary confusion, while we just stood on the side of the road like perfect assholes. At some point, our convoy commander radioed us to say that the convoy was turning around, but after thirty minutes of waiting, we decided to believe him only when we had more evidence.

     It sounds shocking, but in light of some of our pre-deployment training, our current situation might be slightly less than surprising. The high point of our pre-deployment training had been going on a virtual convoy. This event took place in shipping containers that had been outfitted with real hummvees and whose walls were covered with  screens on which we could see our CGI surroundings. We would sit in the vehicles and the images on the screens would reflect our reactions while driving, rotating appropriately with our turns and changes in speed. Each container housed one vehicle and we could see the video game representations of the groups in the other containers. The graphics weren’t stunning, but overall, it was probably the most sophisticated thing that I had ever seen used in the army.

     We ran through a couple quick simulations to get ourselves used to interacting with the virtual environment. There were a couple of communication glitches between containers and we spent most of that downtime cracking jokes to stave off boredom. During one such interval, my crew decided to change positions for a little unplanned cross-training. When the next simulation began, I found myself as a medic manning the 0.50 caliber machine gun mounted on the top of the truck in contradiction to at least one of the Geneva Conventions.

     We drove briefly through the virtual desert and then lurched through a series of two-dimensional urban settings before the action started. Our attackers came at us on the fringes of a crowded

market and continued to pop out whack-a-mole style from alleyways and rooftops as we zig-zagged through the city towards our goal, a UN-run hospital. I was enjoying myself in the gun turret, swiveling from side to side, squeezing the trigger of the world’s biggest joystick. It was great. We were all laughing, joking, the guys in the truck were leaning out of the windows like a bunch of camouflaged Indiana Joneses. The driver spun the wheel hard to the left, the images on the screens swiveled forcefully to match and a large building came into view straight ahead of us.

     “Oh shit, they got guns!” someone shouted.

     “I got ‘em!” I shouted back and unleashed virtual hellfire into the group of digital armed men. The screens stopped moving, which we interpreted as either another technical glitch or a mission complete, both of which signaled a break. Amidst laughter and high-fives, someone asked; “did they have blue helmets?”

     You see, UN soldiers distinguish themselves by blue helmets. I then remembered that our simulated destination had been a UN-run hospital.

     It was then that the door to our container burst open to reveal the stocky silhouette of the sergeant in charge of the training operation.

     “What the fuck?!” was all he shouted, in wide-eyed disbelief. “Just what the fuck!?”

     Our day of training ended shortly thereafter and several months later, Corey and I found ourselves standing alone alongside a broken humvee in the Iraqi desert. Some of the trucks from our convoy did eventually return for us. It might have been an hour or so that we waited, although the distortion of my memory stretches it into several. The command vehicle, which is to say the vehicle carrying the convoy commander, led a wrecker with a tow bar and a gun truck. Their plan was to tow our vehicle to where the convoy would stop for the night. Lost to my memory is the reason why we didn’t simply change the tire. I’ll assume that for whatever reason, we simply didn’t have a spare available and none was brought by the rescue party.

The plan was to tow our ambulance along with the rest of the convoy and to do this, the wrecker first had to turn around on the highway. As wreckers are rather long vehicles and the highway consisted of only two lanes, this involved executing a multi-point turn in a garish homage to Austin Powers making a 67 point turn on a luggage car in a narrow hallway. This simple plan backfired when the wrecker ran over the guardrails that ran along the side of the road. With a steel support post now angled forward underneath the engine, the driver began to back up to make the next point in the turn, oblivious to our cries for him to stop. In an instant, the truck’s radiator became impaled on the steel post, gushing fluid onto the sand and cement and doubling the number of trucks that needed to be rescued. The sergeant in charge of the command vehicle turned out to be none other than the same sergeant who had witnessed us gun down the virtual UN soldiers. He now rushed to control this situation, calling for more support and giving orders for our ambulance to be lashed to his vehicle.

     It is important to note here that we had blown a rear tire, making it important to attach the rear of our vehicle to any truck that would tow us, thereby allowing our truck to roll on its front tires. This was not a point that we could impress upon the sergeant in command. After being told to shut the fuck up and not get in the way, we calmly watched the nose of our ambulance get hooked up to the back of the command vehicle. Another wrecker soon arrived to tow the first one. It executed a 180degree turn without injury, hooked itself to the first wrecker and away we went. Corey and I were ordered to ride in the open back end of the truck towing ours. We shrugged and obeyed, clambering on top of some rucksacks and securing ourselves to the tow vehicle by a measly canvas strap. With the ambulance hooked up and ourselves minimally secured, our rescue truck sped forward at a solid 50mph to catch up with the rest of the convoy. For Corey and I, clinging to the truck to avoid slipping our canvas strap immediately became a full-body workout. Fortunately our exercise was brief, cut short by the predictable shower of sparks erupting like the tail of a comet from the ambulance’s wheel, which was quickly stripped of its rubber and reduced to a hot mess of burned and bent metal.

     The phrase “I told you so” is never a welcome one and so Corey and I stood dumbly to one side while the sergeant made the necessary changes to the towing set-up.  The drive to what was to become our base was a three-day affair and the vehicle breakdowns proved not to be our only incidents.

     When the ambush that we had all been told to expect finally occurred it was not what any of us had expected. While driving through al Iskanadariya the following day, Corey and I started hearing a clicking noise coming from the rear of the ambulance on the driver’s side. It was an arrhythmic clicking noise and we began to debate what part of the truck might be breaking down now. I could hear voices on our radio, but couldn’t make the words out clearly. Clarity came very suddenly with the phrase “Hey medics, maybe you want to return fire?”

     I looked at Corey. “Hey man, is someone shooting at us?”

     He looked at me, then into his side view mirror.

     “Holy shit!”

     Behind our vehicle and alongside the convoy, were a car and a white pick-up truck, the passengers of which were firing at us. Before we could react, the vehicles peeled off the highway and onto a small side street. Although I almost immediately lost sight of them, our convoy commander, who I assume hadn’t, ordered us to change course. Several turns later, we stopped in front of a large villa, dismounted our vehicles and took up defensive positions, with some of us watching the house (for what, exactly, was never made clear) and the others keeping an eye on our surroundings, which largely consisted of the desert and a lot of angry drivers stopped in traffic.

     It’s worth mentioning that we had established standard operating procedures how to react to an ambush

during a convoy and that absolutely none of those procedures involved stopping the convoy. In fact, if the entire set of convoy ambush instructions had to be summed up by one key sentence, that sentence would probably be “Don’t stop the convoy.” Since in this particular ambush, none of our vehicles had been disabled, no one had been wounded and the assailants were no longer even present, one might think that not stopping the convoy should be a very natural course of action. Of course, thinking, as we say in the army, can get you in trouble, so there were crouched in broad daylight outside somebody’s home. Presumably the home of the ambushers, but really, who knows? If we’re being honest, I have to admit that I did find the idea of storming a house pretty exciting. It was not to be, however, and eventually, I had to trade in my daydreams of close-quarters combat for the harsh reality of sweat, boredom and knees stiffened from crouching alongside my vehicle.

     Life in the army is and probably always has been about hurry-up-and-wait. I suppose I should have known better than to expect war to be any different. After sweating on the side of the road for enough time to have allowed our attackers, if they were even inside, to have showered, cooked dinner and watched a movie, our commander ordered us back into our vehicles and away we drove.

     In keeping with our theme of self-made problems, we did have one final misadventure before arriving at our base in al-Habaniya. The night following our slow and pointless stakeout, we camped out in our vehicles at a truck stop that had been converted into a fuel depot for American vehicles. The nights were fairly warm and most of us laid out on the tops of our vehicles. An unobstructed view of the starry night sky was considerably better than the view offered by staying within our vehicles, bulletproof though they may be. The camp was therefore littered with legs dangling from pillow-strewn hummvee roofs. One of those legs belonged to a certain Sgt. Silva, who had the misfortune of being backed into by the truck in front of his, resulting in broken tibia. Corey and I treated him and brought him to a nearby field hospital.

     The next day, we finally arrived al-Habaniya, at al-Taqqadum, the former Iraqi air force base that was to become our home for the better part of the next nine months. We showed off the bullet

marks on our ambulance and traded stories with the soldiers who had arrived ahead of us. While sorting out our ambulance parking and barracks situation, I tallied up my accomplishments in Iraq to date: I had been abandoned on the side of the road by my own unit, shot at without having been aware of it, experienced boredom and discomfort staking out a house and treated one non-combat-related injury. War is hell.

            The day before crossing the border from Kuwait into Iraq, we assembled for a battalion-wide briefing. The invasion had begun only slightly before we arrived and our job was to establish supply lines in the wake of the initial forces. Although all of our top commanders addressed us during that briefing, the only speech that sticks in my memory is that given by our Command Sergeant Major (CSM), the battalion’s senior non-commissioned officer. He began with an anecdote about a group of soldiers from our battalion who had crossed the border several days earlier, had been attacked and had fought back  bravely and successfully.  He began to tell us what we could expect upon crossing the border and as often happened during his speeches, his words (mind, perhaps?) veered from the safe shores of sanity and into more hallucinatory realms.

“Don’t let any children approach your vehicles!” He told us this with a grave sincerity that should have been an easy target for parody had he not been addressing a thousand young untested soldiers, all armed and in their hidden fear, willing to believe in the depths of our enemy’s depravity.

“If a child steps in front of your vehicle while you’re driving, don’t stop!” the madman cried.

The briefing ended quickly thereafter and we all shuffled out of the tent. The Sergeant Major must have been caught so off-guard by our honest response that he forgot to find out who we were, therefore never making good on his vague threat. Maybe he was busy. Maybe he had a train to catch.