A year in the desert: Tom Berry’s Iraq experience

This column is intended as a means to sketch life for deployed soldiers in Iraq to UAF students through the lens of someone of similar age and experience.

The ride into Camp Beuhring, Kuwait reminds me of the final stretch of the Dalton Highway running into Deadhorse. Where the Dalton bows under the Brooks Range’s jagged sublimity, the road to Beuhring silences passersby with its cohort of burnt out Iraqi armored vehicles standing sentry since the last Gulf War.

Both destinations emerge as clustered geometric aberrations across vast and otherwise featureless horizons, one of tundra, the other of sand. Entry into either enclave of prefab and temporary buildings leaves no doubt that these are places where aesthetics go to die in the name of utility. The most interested visitor is advised to stay at either place only five hours at most.

But I am not here on a visit. I am en route for a year in Iraq with the rest of the Stryker Brigade. Most soldiers at Beuhring are either in transit north for a year in “the suck” or south to catch a plane bound for home.

Stressful preparations of equipment needed to both enter and leave a warzone are accomplished here, but unfortunately the balance of hours is not fully consumed with work, allowing that special brand of boredom heightened by anticipation to set in.

The U.S. Army and its contracting arm make great strides to luxuriate this purgatory between home and combat. Starbucks presides over the center of Camp Beuhring as if it has been air dropped wholesale from its spawning grounds in a distant strip mall—down to the creme colored epiface and the polished chessboard cafe tables (and just like in America, no chess pieces are available behind the counter).

The illusion would be complete if not for the palisade of earthen Hescoe barriers designed to ward off SVBIED attacks (that’s suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device). Assault rifles slung on the backs of patrons as they bathe under soft inset lighting and re-mastered jazz lullabies constitute the other obvious departure from a stateside Starbucks.

It is the same with Taco Bell, Burger King, Subway, the movie theater and the PX (Post Exchange) among others—I am in familiar environs, but a faraway place. In case I ever forget my whereabouts, the dust-filtered sun retells my exile each morning, rolling pale and bloated across the Kuwaiti marscape, unlike any dawn in America. So too do the camels grazing scrub brush on our rifle ranges as their Bedouin keepers watch over from inside their alternate desert steed, the Chevy Suburban.

Watching them behind Oakley sunglasses (how did soldiers of previous desert wars survive without them?) I sit curious but uncomprehending, sucking on bottled water as sweat droplets tick the seconds until my return to air conditioned salvation—I am a stranger in a strange land, encased in a familiar bubble to cope.

The breathing space inside my bubble increases with little qualitative change once I touch down in Iraq at Logistic Supply Area Anaconda, a sprawling supply center, air base, headquarters and operating base anchoring the U.S. military presence in central Iraq.

Overt signs of war increase: I carry bullets along with my rifle; every building is sheathed in sandbags and six-meter-tall concrete barriers, endowing a grimly Orwellian alphanumeric “Pod” designation code to each identical street block. Sleep is interrupted by F-16 fighter jet afterburners throttling up for post-takeoff evasive maneuvers.

The size of everything else increases as well. There are more middle-aged white people in plus-size jeans and logo-emblazoned collared shirts (contractors). There are evermore varying nationalities wearing security, janitorial, mess service and other uniforms (hardworking and polite employees of contractors). The PX, chow hall, Burger King and, yes, Starbucks have all been augmented appropriately.

Me and my “cherry” peers setting foot in Iraq for the first time cannot help trading comic grins around every corner when another ripe example of mainstream American commercialism emerges, as fabled in newspapers and friends’ accounts for many years now but still an absurd deflation of our war movie pretensions on entering a warzone.

I sober up whenever a chopper rises across base from its self-made sandstorm and heads north. I will be on one of those choppers in the coming days—my ticket out of Anaconda’s insulating bubble and into a small outpost where I will patrol among the Iraqi people for much of the coming year.

I am impatient in this bubble. I have no job in this other than an inconsolable directive: wait. But leaving this bubble, something I have trained to do for a long time and comprising the central function of my, and every other soldiers’ deployment to Iraq, still gives pause to ponder the unknowns, the unknowables of my mission.

I imagine that my enemy, the insurgent languishing in his own brand of inactivity before his time to act, thinks the same thing as he watches my chopper land.

Tom Berry is a former non-degree seeking student at UAF who is currently serving with the Stryker Brigade in Iraq.

The views expressed in this column do not represent the opinion or official policies of the U.S. Army.