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Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
-Dante Aligheri
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Camp Taji, Iraq is a huge, dusty, fortified slum. Currently, we live out of a warehouse shit-full of cots, bunk-beds, and soldiers--about two companies worth. We have huge AC ducts that blow gloriously cold air all over my cot, so when I sleep at night, I have to wrap up in my sleeping bag. The warehouse is surrounded by 12-foot-tall concrete blast barriers to protect us from the mortars that the bad guys love to fire but never learned how to aim. A direct hit on the warehouse in the middle of the night would punch through the tin roof and probably wipe out 100 soldiers, easily.::::::
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We have an early-warning siren that lets us know when a mortar will land in our sector. The third morning in Taji, someone woke me up and told me to get kitted up in my armor real fast, quick, and in a hurry because the siren was wailing. I didn't hear shit, so I scratched myself and went to the port-a-potty outside.
What I do hear, through the day and night, is outgoing artillery. At first, we thought it was incoming, but our MI (military intelligence) guys assured us that in the first 3 days, there's been only 1 mortar to land remotely close to Taji, and it landed outside the wire on Route Tampa. The outgoing artillery makes the walls shudder and my cot rattle even though the nearest artillery range is something like 5 klicks away. Whole grid-squares of Iraq must be getting pulverized every day.
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Every building on post is fortified with sandbags in the window-frames and surrounded by yard-thick HESCO barriers or concrete blast-barriers. Everything is a dead, sandy color. Random sections of walls show mortar damage: Taji looks like a bombed-out version of Tuscon with sandbags. Some of the Army vehicles rolling around look straight out of Mad Max.::::::
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On the second morning in Taji, my section went on a 3-mile run on the hard-ball road next to the warehouse. About a half mile out, we encountered the Boneyard--both sides of the road lined with the skeletons of dead tanks for a half-mile stretch. If not for the random graphitti tagged up all over the tanks, it'd be creepy.
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Taji has a large PX that houses an ADIDAS and an Oakley store inside. The PX has a large stock of pink iPod arm holsters and three-month old issues of Maxim and Stuff Magazine. The food court next to the PX has Subway, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Burger King. The main chow hall can seat an entire battalion at once and offers midnight chow for the night shift. The food selection is so deep, they serve kimchi, freshly-cut fruit, and lobster tail.We have shuttle buses that run every 5-10 minutes. We have a pool and a coffee shop next door to it. We have one-day-turnaround laundry service. We have an MWR (morale, welfare and recreation) center that provides us with AT&T phones and free 28.8K internet for half-an-hour at a time. The wait is only an hour long, and only once a week do we have a communications blackout because someone from the camp dies.
We have everything we need to live in a war zone but still pretend that we're just slumming it in the States.
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