Camp Victory
When we first landed in Iraq, there was fear, sure, but it came with adrenaline. Everyone was wired and wide-eyed. We were young, loud, and ready for anything. The air was hot, the sand stuck to everything, and none of us cared. We were finally here. The stories we’d heard for months were now real, and it felt like a strange kind of adventure.
We came into Camp Victory, they dropped us off at a massive warehouse—empty, echoing, and hot. Inside, cots—and eventually bunk beds—were arranged in long rows, separated by a wall: males on one side, females on the other. First, there was the water issue. There were bathrooms and showers, but no running water. The pipes were dry. The sinks and stalls stood there like props in a stage set, waiting for a scene that would never happen. They gave us gallon water bottles instead, the kind you buy at a grocery store, and told us to make them last—for drinking, brushing our teeth, washing our faces, and taking what passed for showers. You learned fast: pour, soap, rinse, done. It was a strange kind of initiation—entering a world half-built, half-forgotten, where the only constant was dust and the sound of plastic bottles crinkling in the dark.
The first people we saw were the soldiers, replacing the ones who’d been there since 2003. They looked half dead. Skin pale, eyes hollow, movements slow. They had that thousand-yard stare I’d only ever heard about. The kind that doesn’t come from fear but from seeing too much for too long. I remember thinking, What happened to them? It still felt like a camping trip to me then—a government-paid adventure with guns. No Subway, no commissary, no luxuries yet. Just tents, dust, and MREs. We had energy. We joked. We took pictures. We believed we’d come back exactly as we left.
But a year later, I saw my reflection in a mirror at Camp Slayer and barely recognized myself. Same stare. Same hollow look. Same exhaustion I’d once pitied in those 2003 guys. That’s when I realized it happens slowly. You don’t feel yourself changing until one day you notice the light’s gone from your own eyes.
The fear fades. The excitement burns out. What’s left is endurance—and the quiet understanding that you’ve crossed some invisible line, and you won’t ever fully cross back.
