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under some obscure memorandum of understanding the Army was responsible for furnishing our office. After doing so, the Army felt that even if it then stole the furniture for its own use, it was under no obligation to give us new furniture. While this was worked out at high levels, we used sheets of plywood for desks and sat on crates. The same problem came up with printer cartridges; State said they were a DOD responsibility and DOD said State should pay. For a while we couldn’t print anything in our office and had to beg permission to print from neighbors until an unnamed person stole some printer cartridges from the Embassy for us.
    The few Iraqis allowed on the FOB ran shops, created as part of a long-forgotten program to nurture small business in Iraq. The soldiers to a man and woman called these “hajji shops,” misappropriating the formal Islamic term for a devout Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Hajji used in this fashion was this war’s kraut, Jap, and gook. The shops sold mostly office supplies (but not printer cartridges) and illegal DVDs. The office supplies were popular because the Army supply chain could be slow and seemed always to be out of what you needed. It was easier to buy yellow stickies for a few dollars than to order them through the Army. We believed many of the office supplies in the hajji shops were stolen from the Army, which was one reason the Army was usually out of what you needed.
    Illegal DVDs constituted about 90 percent of the hajji shops’ inventory and close to 100 percent of their profits. The DVDs were an encyclopedic collection of action, adventure, and car-chase movies from the birth of cinema to the most recent Fast and Furious . The DVDs all came from China. One can only imagine the reverse Silk Road journey these movies made from a back-alley copying operation in Guangzhou to a hajji shop at the FOB. All that and you could get a movie for three bucks. After oil, it seemed like illegal DVD sales made up the other half of the Iraqi economy. Some soldiers had collections of hundreds.
    Near the semiofficial hajji shops were the official franchises, sponsored by the Army and Air Forces Exchange Service (AAFES). These shops existed on almost every FOB of decent size. They included a barbershop, an out-of-place embroidery shop (almost all name tapes and rank badges were now stuck on uniforms with Velcro), and a fake fast-food stand (sign says Pizza Hut, food says generic frozen). Then there was the PX, a cross between a general store and a gas station convenience shop. It didn’t have much but it had the necessities. Soldiers could buy toiletries, three-month-old magazines, batteries, a few music CDs (the rack would have three rap artists, three country artists, and three heavy metal groups, all about a year out of style, to displease everyone equally), and lonely full-price versions of some of the same DVDs the hajji shops sold.
    The bad side of town was the semianonymous area where the Ugandan contract guards and Third World servants who cleaned the latrines and served the food stayed. They lived in tents while we lived in trailers, and their tents were one of the places on the FOB where you did not go. I envisioned the area as a dust bowl hobo camp. They were so removed from us that if someone told me the FOB had secret utilidoor tunnels underneath like Disney World, I would have believed it too. At the Embassy, I knew they lived crammed into unsafe shipping containers, with all sorts of fire hazards. 6 We often wondered what their lives were like, if they ever did things for fun, and how many hours they worked. There were rumors, too, about the Ugandan camp, that drugs were available and that two rapes had occurred there. No one knew what was true, but we all kept away.
    Our area of responsibility was the Maadain, a loosely defined rural area that used to be Iraq’s breadbasket but was now a Sunni-Shia battleground centered on the town of Salman