Mokesa Firebase, Diyala Province, Iraq
April 2006
We were told to pack for a four- to ten- day mission. Other than the uniform on his back, his body armor, and his personal weapon, Kinney brought nothing more than a stick of deodorant and a spare t-shirt. No sleeping bag, no spare socks, no toothbrush . . . at the time we didn’t know what he was thinking, but now I know: Kinney was the first one of us to catch the sickness . . .
In springtime of 2006, the tankers of Delta Company and the infantry platoon attached to them we’re sent to the town of Mokesa to establish a coalition presence and to stop an impending civil war from breaking out. We were essentially there to keep neighboring Shias and Sunnis from massacring each other. Our operating base would be a small, walled former-farmhouse dubbed “Mokesa Firebase,” which would, at varying times, be home to between 60 and 100-plus rough and tumble tankers and infantryman. We fortified the walls of the compound and built guard positions with sandbags and plywood. We strung concertina wire and emplaced Claymore mines to cover the dead spaces.
When we weren’t conducting short vehicle patrols out into the surrounding towns, our sole escape from the compound, we were confined to the Firebase. It was our home, but also, as it became increasingly apparent, our prison. We were quarantined, and before we knew it, we would all have the “Mokesa Madness.”
Each squad or section slept on cots in whatever rough structure or shelter we could find. It was only April in Iraq, but already the daytime temperatures routinely approached and even exceeded 110 degrees. The roofs of the Firebase were collapsing, the walls were infested with large spiders, day and night rats (or something else) scurried audibly overhead. There was no air-conditioning and few fans. During the day, when we weren’t on guard or on patrol, we took sweat-soaked heat naps and downed entire liter-bottles of hot water thirstily and immediately upon waking. I routinely slept with a t-shirt wrapped around my head to keep the hordes of buzzing flies, mosquitos, and gnats away. We lived rough.
But although life was genuinely miserable and our only escape was to get out and patrol a town and interact with a people that hated us, these conditions became the new “normal” and we rose (or sunk?) to the occasion. We improved our fighting positions, conducted patrols, pulled endless guard shifts, and we got on with the “quarantine,” even when the “four- to ten-day mission” dragged on into 15, 20, and then 30-plus days.
“When are we getting out of this place, Sergeant?”
“Maybe never, Goldsmith. Maybe never . . . ”
We don’t have Netflix, we don’t have iPhones, few of us brought magazines, even fewer of us brought books to read. There are no showers, we can’t call our families and friends back home, and the food is bad and in short supply. We don’t have much of anything, really, except hot bottles of water, MREs, and each other. Fortunately, that was more than enough.
We alleviate the quarantine boredom by building a shrine to Chuck Norris, throw bullets and cans of bug spray into the burn pit, scrub each other’s heat-rash covered backs in baby wipes, and volunteer to burn the firebases’ shit.
Yeah, you heard me right, we were so bored we actually volunteered to burn shit.
We suffered, but also thrived under the Mokesa Madness. Second squad made flaming jousting sticks and did battle with each other. The locals didn’t like them for some reason and blew them up like clockwork each time they left town. (Don’t worry, our armor was good, and no one got seriously hurt.) Zschoche shared his locally-sourced candy with me at night while letting me listen to Metallica and Scorpions songs on his MP3 player. Bob, on his own initiative, drained the water running through the Firebase and overnight solved our mosquito problem. Brand and I ate the delicious egg sandwiches that were guaranteed to give you food poisoning/minor dysentery every third portion. Worth the risk.
Eventually we got one hot meal a day and wooden porto-potty toilets (instead of having to use an open trench), it made life seem downright luxurious. Then, twenty-five or thirty days into the quarantine, Command allowed us to lighten our presence and to start rotating sections and platoons out of Mokesa Firebase. By day Forty, the quarantine was lifted. We received orders to dismantle the Firebase and roll back into the Forward Operating Base that had previously been our home. The Sickness had abated, the quarantine was over, and although we were all relieved, fond and lasting memories remained, bonds of friendship and brotherhood forever cemented.
We were broke, dirty, exhausted and consigned to hard labor in the harsh Iraqi sun. We defecated in holes in the ground and pissed into a tube. In short fits of madness we debated setting off the Claymore switches, “just for the f^%k of it,” just to relieve the boredom, to feel something. But we also laughed heartily with our brothers, supported each other through hardships, shared our limited supplies of food, and woke up to relieve our comrades on guard shifts, no matter how painful it felt in the moment. We made it through some trying times, without a single casualty and with our minds (largely) intact.
We suffered through the Madness . . . together, and we lived to fight another day.