the understanding that it is, politically speaking, impermanent. Its eventual doom foretold in its name, FOB Triumph will one day wither away when the United States is victorious in Iraq.
That day is still far in the future, however.
For now, soldiers, Local Nationals, American contractors, and Third World Employees (known as “Twees”) move through the gravel streets engineers have quickly and roughly laid between the fifteen rows of trailers. Triumph’s residents move like ants, orderly and focused, as they go about the business of supporting a war that crackles across Baghdad, well outside the sandbag-fortified entry control points where guards check ID badges, hold mirrors on poles like giant dentist tools to look at the undercarriages of trucks, and German shepherds pull against leashes as they sniff for bombs. Vehicles are forced to navigate a quarter mile of concrete barricades, slowing them to a crawl as they wind their serpentine way onto the base. By the time a suicide bomber cleared the last barrier, he would have been killed five times over by the soldiers at the gate. He’d be riddled with bullets—turned to a bleeding wedge of Swiss cheese—before his lips could even form the words “Allahu Akbar!”
FOB Triumph is located in west Baghdad, caught between the pressure points of the airport and Abu Ghraib prison. Soon after the United States took control of the city in 2003—securing first the airport, then gradually expanding the ring of safe real estate outward—FOB Triumph grew in increments. Hastily dug foxholes next to tanks turned into tents, tents turned into shipping containers tricked out with cots and air-conditioning, shipping containers turned into trailers with windows, doors, and small wooden porches—the kind of tin-sided mobile home that have made more than one soldier from Hog Wallow, Tennessee, weep with homesickness.
There are dangers here, too. Lest you forget, you’re smack dab in the middle of a combat zone. While, horizontally speaking, the FOB is well fortified by concrete barriers and guard towers, this is not to say death cannot and will not fall from the sky at any given moment. There is no Kevlar dome over FOB Triumph, no invisible force field off of which mortars or 107-millimeter Chinese rockets will rebound. Why, just last week, one Second Lieutenant Zipperer had a 7.62 round crash down in his hooch. It punched through his tin roof in the night and this Zipperer must have been one hell of a heavy sleeper (or zonked out on Valium) because he didn’t flinch, not even so much as a fluttery pause in his REM. When he woke, there was the round sitting on the floor of his hooch. He sat up on the edge of his cot, groggy and cobwebbed, and stared at the metal shards for the longest time, not fully comprehending, until finally he uttered the phrase that he would repeat once every two minutes for the rest of the day (much to the irritation of his co-workers): “Holy Mother of Fuck !”
But what Lieutenant Zipperer was really Holy-Mother-of-Fucking about was the fact that just the day prior he had done some interior decorating in his hooch, moving his cot from the east wall to the north wall and that furniture shift had made the difference between a round punching through the roof and landing in the middle of the floor and the same round coming down and sizzle-slamming through his skull, his head bursting into a gory fountain. Thanks to feng shui, he might just make it home alive.
Walk the gravel paths and dirt streets of FOB Triumph and you will come across a post office, a medical clinic, a library, a movie theater, a bowling alley, two churches, five dining facilities, and four fitness centers.
There is a phone center: a single-wide trailer with a loud-banging door that snaps back on a spring getting looser by the day as thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilian contractors walk in and out of the one place on the FOB offering a tangible link to the comforts of home. The
That day is still far in the future, however.
For now, soldiers, Local Nationals, American contractors, and Third World Employees (known as “Twees”) move through the gravel streets engineers have quickly and roughly laid between the fifteen rows of trailers. Triumph’s residents move like ants, orderly and focused, as they go about the business of supporting a war that crackles across Baghdad, well outside the sandbag-fortified entry control points where guards check ID badges, hold mirrors on poles like giant dentist tools to look at the undercarriages of trucks, and German shepherds pull against leashes as they sniff for bombs. Vehicles are forced to navigate a quarter mile of concrete barricades, slowing them to a crawl as they wind their serpentine way onto the base. By the time a suicide bomber cleared the last barrier, he would have been killed five times over by the soldiers at the gate. He’d be riddled with bullets—turned to a bleeding wedge of Swiss cheese—before his lips could even form the words “Allahu Akbar!”
FOB Triumph is located in west Baghdad, caught between the pressure points of the airport and Abu Ghraib prison. Soon after the United States took control of the city in 2003—securing first the airport, then gradually expanding the ring of safe real estate outward—FOB Triumph grew in increments. Hastily dug foxholes next to tanks turned into tents, tents turned into shipping containers tricked out with cots and air-conditioning, shipping containers turned into trailers with windows, doors, and small wooden porches—the kind of tin-sided mobile home that have made more than one soldier from Hog Wallow, Tennessee, weep with homesickness.
There are dangers here, too. Lest you forget, you’re smack dab in the middle of a combat zone. While, horizontally speaking, the FOB is well fortified by concrete barriers and guard towers, this is not to say death cannot and will not fall from the sky at any given moment. There is no Kevlar dome over FOB Triumph, no invisible force field off of which mortars or 107-millimeter Chinese rockets will rebound. Why, just last week, one Second Lieutenant Zipperer had a 7.62 round crash down in his hooch. It punched through his tin roof in the night and this Zipperer must have been one hell of a heavy sleeper (or zonked out on Valium) because he didn’t flinch, not even so much as a fluttery pause in his REM. When he woke, there was the round sitting on the floor of his hooch. He sat up on the edge of his cot, groggy and cobwebbed, and stared at the metal shards for the longest time, not fully comprehending, until finally he uttered the phrase that he would repeat once every two minutes for the rest of the day (much to the irritation of his co-workers): “Holy Mother of Fuck !”
But what Lieutenant Zipperer was really Holy-Mother-of-Fucking about was the fact that just the day prior he had done some interior decorating in his hooch, moving his cot from the east wall to the north wall and that furniture shift had made the difference between a round punching through the roof and landing in the middle of the floor and the same round coming down and sizzle-slamming through his skull, his head bursting into a gory fountain. Thanks to feng shui, he might just make it home alive.
Walk the gravel paths and dirt streets of FOB Triumph and you will come across a post office, a medical clinic, a library, a movie theater, a bowling alley, two churches, five dining facilities, and four fitness centers.
There is a phone center: a single-wide trailer with a loud-banging door that snaps back on a spring getting looser by the day as thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilian contractors walk in and out of the one place on the FOB offering a tangible link to the comforts of home. The
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