Wartime Sojourner: Calling Home

This is a gathering place. It's the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation center, the MWR, and every FOB, Patrol Base, Camp or any other military facility I’ve had the privilege to visit in Iraq or here in Afghanistan has one. Sometimes they are dank little tents with plywood floors and poor lighting made even darker by confined access points to blot wayward light-shards from escaping to the attention of watchful insurgent eyes. Sometimes, they are well furnished and well lit facilities furnished with pool and ping-pong tables, electronic games nooks, theatre rooms, phone and computer banks, and lounge areas with access to wifi. Always, the story is the same: war-weary American fighters and their support elements finding a place to cool down, relax – and contact home.

The lines for the phones and computers can be long and slow – when busy, a 30 minute time-limit is enforced. During those times, people working on their own computers via wifi can be seen to grimace often as they are repeatedly knocked off from a connection, often that they just barely secured.

Each area has its own unique characteristic added to by the antics of soldiers and marines themselves. My first night in the one here, I watched marines shoot pool. Their pistols were strapped to their hips, and they had to hitch them out of the way to aim the cue. At the ping-pong tables, the soldiers had taken their weapons off so that they had full mobility – but a buddy always kept watchful guard. One night, a soldier in battle-trousers and tan t-shirt did a rendition of the robot-dance after trouncing his buddy in ping-pong.

Not much happens in the room where others wait for their turn on a phone or a computer. They signed onto a waiting list when they entered the building, and they wait patiently for the 1 – 1 ½ hour wait for their turn. They read books and converse and patiently wait for the very few minutes available to connect with home. In another area, soldiers and marines sit clustered together in front of large screens – these are the gaming gurus, and they hunt, and fish, race cars, fly airplanes, and practice combat skills, all in the virtual world.

The most interesting place is the lounge area. Along the walls, long extension cords provide additional outlets for the myriad collection of our fighters to communicate with the outside world via wifi. To get to this point, they must have brought their own computers, registered it with the command, received access via a password – and then arrived at an opportune time when the band-width is not already so consumed as to prevent their entry onto the net. However, watching those already connected is a study of human emotion. They stare into their screens with microphones and earphones often strapped on. Then, connection made, their expressions break, and they coochy-coo to babies on the other side of the world. They flirt with girlfriends and boyfriends from hometowns and places stopped along the way to this edge of the planet. They smile, they laugh, they frown, they catch with emotion, each staring into his/her private, left-behind life, through the window of Skype and Google and Yahoo, and each lost to the surrounding cloud of similar emotion, and rank is immaterial. They sing songs to children or other buddies; they read bedtime stories; they discuss family problems; and plan vacations. They attempt to carry on normalcy in a land that defies the definition.

They are not alone. Fighting men and women from Britain and Scandinavia come here, as do interpreters from Pakistan and India, and US civilians supporting the war effort far from their families. They come hoping to “connect” in a way that adds new dimension to the meaning of the word.

Camp Leatherneck is known for being Spartan. A few nights ago, I started to sit down on a couch to open my own computer. A young marine offered to slide to the other end so that I could be closer to the outlet – he was not plugged in. I accepted and sat down, and we entered into conversation. He was smiling broadly, because he was on his way home in a few days, and he was more than ready to talk. He had spent most of his year here in and around the town of Marjeh, a few miles south of here. Marjeh was the town where the battle raged two years ago as Marines mounted the surge that drove the Taliban out. Less than three weeks ago, peaceful elections were held in that town, a council formed, and now citizens take action to keep the Taliban away. This marine had participated in stabilizing this area, and he was proud of his service. Interestingly, he was enthusiastic about being at Leatherneck. “People complain about this place,” he said, “but that’s because they haven’t been where I’ve been. They don’t know how bad it can get.”

These are our kids. They live for home, family, and friends, and they are here because we asked them to come. They experience unimaginable highs and lows, and victories and sorrows – often expressed right here at the MWR.