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the world. The twenty-first century did not bring me a personal portable jetpack or a hoverboard, but I did get to travel a lot by helicopter while in Iraq.
    Once past the gate and another series of S-turns designed to slow down suicide bombers and piss off tired soldiers, the road in brought you to the center part of the FOB, where almost all of us lived amid a series of abbreviations and acronyms. Despite wildly varying rank, duties, and salary, everyone shared the same life. Soldiers, contractors, and I all lived in the same trailers, ate the same food, used the same showers. The military term for this zone was LSA (life support area), which translated to air-conditioned trailers (called CHUs, for containerized housing units) and a chow hall called a DFAC (dining facility), a gym (GYM), an MWR (morale, welfare, and recreation) Internet room with VoIP phones (Voice over Internet Protocol) and satellite AFN TV (Armed Forces Network), a tiny PX (post exchange), and maybe a fast-food trailer. A proper LSA was an outpost of the homeland. It affirmed morale. Even the postboxes were blue and imported from the States. It was supposed to look like home and it sort of did, if home was a trailer park and Taco Bell was a night out.
    The CHUs where we all lived were steel containers modified to become little rooms. Most people insisted on calling them hooches, invoking the ’Nam slang term, but it was hard for me to think of my steel box as anything as exotic as what the term hooch called up. The box was as long as a single bed plus three feet and just wider than my extended arms. Inside you had one or two beds, one or two IKEA-like freestanding closets, and as much junk as you and your roommate could cram in. During the times when I was lucky enough to live alone I kept the place fairly empty, but some soldiers acquired a frightening amount of what was technically known as crap, piling Xboxes (the value of video games to the war should not be undersold; troops would finish work patrolling the streets of 2010 Iraq to play Call of Duty , patrolling the streets of 1945 Berlin), cheap TVs, hundreds of DVDs, boom boxes, exercise gear, and stolen snack foods, pyramided from floor to ceiling. Everybody had to cram in their weapons and ammunition. The soldiers also had to deploy with all their issued gear, needed or not, so their hooches would also be piled high with cold-weather gear, bulky rubber chemical-protection suits, and arctic sleeping bags. There’d be regular inspections for forbidden drugs, booze, and any temporary cohabiting, and those rude checkups when everything was tossed around kept most hooches in a state of near collapse.
    Like most everything else on the FOB, our offices were temporary things. The Army had built a large building, about the size of a high school gym, and created within it a warren of rooms and cubicles and dead ends without cheese, all made out of plywood sheets. It was meant to be temporary (we’re not occupiers, you know!) but like a Big Mac left on a shelf it never rotted away. Nothing was painted, because paint was an enhancement, not a requirement, and so we had no paint inside. Outside rocks were painted white to make moving around at night easier, so there paint was a necessity and permitted. My office was decorated only by giant maps of Iraq and by dust.
    I had two old laptops, one for classified and one for unclassified. Unfortunately, I had only one power adapter, and so throughout the day I had to switch the power between machines as one battery or the other faded out. There was no legitimate method to procure a second power adapter, so I had to either buy one myself and wait eight weeks for it to arrive by military mail from Dell or steal one when someone transferred off the FOB. Furniture was a similar problem. Sometime before I arrived in Iraq, the ePRT had been relocated from FOB Loyalty to FOB Hammer. All of our office furniture had been lost in the move. State insisted that