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gonna enter Iraq soon.” I was scared, and I was suddenly very, very awake. My neck started to sweat even though the bus was cold. I wanted to be anywhere else. I was willing to go back to the La-Z-Boys in Kuwait. I stayed hyperalert the entire one-hour ride, aware of every bump and turn. My vision blurred and my mouth was cotton-dry. I had no control, I felt stupid being frightened, I wanted to go home.
    It was unclear to me in my state when exactly we left Iraq and entered the Green Zone and, soon after that, the Embassy compound. Someone handed me a key and pointed me toward a dorm door, told me to be outside at 8:00 a.m., and left. I found my room, my clothing soaked clean through in frigid sweat. I had to get up in a few hours to be helicoptered to my new home in the desert. Unable to sleep, I turned on the TV. The first channel to pop up showed a Seinfeld rerun in English and I watched that until three. I hate that bass-riff thing Seinfeld uses to bridge between scenes, but no one was around to listen or care.

A Home in the Desert
    From high up in the air my new home looked like a ship, a speck floating in the sea of Iraq, affected by it but not part of it. For the next six months, I would live at this place, FOB Hammer, embedded first with the 82nd Airborne Division, followed by the 10th Mountain Division, two of the Army’s proudest can-do units. FOB Hammer was purpose-built in 2007 for the Surge, and it sat out in the literal middle of nowhere. I say literal, literally, because there was no town or feature, man-made or natural, to mark it or lend it a name. It was its own kingdom, built entirely by the US Army to house the US Army. They simply picked a flat piece of ground and moved in, with the squatter’s rights a successful invasion granted. FOB Hammer was physically huge, twelve miles around its perimeter, and surrounded by rings of ubiquitous T-walls, cast concrete twelve feet high with a wide base so they could stand on their own. T-walls were as iconic to our war as Betty Grable was to that other, better war. The walls kept us in our ship and they kept Iraq out. As a hint there was something more out there, I smelled wood fires burning as we landed. Someone explained Iraqis used scraps of palm wood for fuel. It was a very old thing to do. There was not much fuel in the desert, and people throughout the Middle East had burned palm wood for millennia. Jesus smelled palm wood burning.
    The FOB was subdivided into parts of town where one spent a lot of time and parts where one did not venture, all populated by about four hundred troops. A few places, like where the helicopters touched down or the single land gate in and out, were necessary stops but otherwise to be avoided. The landing zone (LZ) was way out on the edge of the FOB, presumably for safety (if a helo crashed it was better somewhere unpopulated). People went to the LZ to get on and off birds; there were a lot of cigarette butts on the ground but otherwise it was distant, noisy, dangerous, and without amenities.
    The gate was a bad place to hang out because you could be shot. The gate was not a front door like at Fort Apache but rather a series of stages that transitioned you from outside to inside. The journey in started with the dirt road that led to Hammer. The road acquired barbed wire as it approached the FOB, followed by concrete barriers that forced vehicles to slow down and execute a series of S-turns, followed by the first line of Hesco barriers. (Made by the Hesco company, whose stock you should have bought in 2002, these gigantic wire baskets, taller than a person, were lined with waterproof cardboard and filled with dirt to make thick walls.) A flat area, the “kill zone,” filled with razor wire and watched over by contracted guards in medieval-looking concrete towers, was the final defense. Unless you were going out on patrol, people tended to fly in and out of the FOB for safety and because it was so damn far away from