5. Barracks Life, Part 1: Books, Games & Mortar Rounds

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.