82nd Airborne Division
We shared the warehouse with the 82nd Airborne. Those guys were built different—shaved heads, boots laced so tight you could see the veins in their feet. They were always moving: lifting, running, prepping for something. We were MPs attached to an MI battalion—half misfits, half thinkers—so we didn’t fit their mold. Different worlds under the same roof.
The second floor of that warehouse we shared with the 82nd Airborne always felt like neutral territory—some strange, suspended space where nobody had rank and nobody had to pretend they were invincible. TV that was always too loud or not loud enough and a microwave that somehow survived a war better than some people. That’s where I made popcorn, the cheap kind that somehow tasted like a five-star meal because everything in Iraq tasted like dust except whatever came out of that microwave.
That was our entertainment: TV, a microwave, the 82nd Airborne, and whatever we could invent to make a day feel less like a day in Iraq.
On rest days, we played basketball outside in the dust or threw a football around. For some reason, that made us feel almost normal, like we were back home on a Sunday afternoon instead of sitting in a warzone waiting for the next convoy brief.
And then there was the German kid. He was my personal alien species. Smart, odd, hilarious without meaning to be. He talked like an encyclopedia with legs—as if every sentence required citations. He spent an entire year trying to teach me poker. An entire year. For the love of God, he tried everything—explanations, examples, metaphors, diagrams, probably quantum physics at one point—but poker never clicked for me. Not once. I’d listen, nod, pretend I understood, then immediately forget everything. I think talking to him slowed down my brain waves. You ever speak to someone so smart you feel like you’re lagging behind in real life? That was him. I swear he wasn’t a person—just a sentient textbook.
But he tried. They all tried. And we lived like that, in that weird, suspended warehouse, inventing ways to pass the time between missions: pool, guitars, popcorn, encyclopedia-boy poker lessons, and all the silent ways soldiers keep each other company without ever saying the word friend.
