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DJs in the desert



One of Mikhail Woltering's strangest experiences in Iraq came when he helped a US unit fix a problem with their satellite TV hookup. One of the soldiers in the unit had hauled an amazing array of electronic gear into the desert with him: expensive computer, turntables, speakers. He had converted one corner of his 10-man tent into a complete DJ studio and worked late into the night, remixing samples and patching together his own beats. And then, one night, he made a mistake—he accidentally unplugged his headphones.

The homemade beats blasted out of his speakers instead. Woltering remembers that the noise "woke everyone up in the tent. They all hit the deck, donning their body armor, thinking they were under attack. That guy got a talking to about that particular incident."

Woltering, who's a member of the Ars OpenForum, is no longer surprised to see this sort of tech on the battlefield after five years spent as a Satellite, Wideband, and Telemetry Systems Journeyman in the Air Force. While soldiers once deployed with little more than a backpack and a rifle, today's crop of infantry troops pack along MP3 players, digital cameras, DVD players, video games, movie collections, and computers of their own. The personal electronics have made modern American warfare the most comfortable it has ever been, but they've also brought a new set of problems onto the battlefield.



America: the portable version

Camp Liberty has turned a small strip of Iraq into a little piece of America. The base has air conditioning, Internet cafés, gym facilities, and an ice cream parlor. The New York Times reported that one soldier there managed to round up a "refrigerator, television, cellphone, microwave oven, boombox and DVD player" in addition to a king-sized bed and a down comforter.

Woltering paints a similar picture of some bases in Iraq. "The recreation area had several video game systems from all the major makers, as well as 16 computers for true 8vs8 Counterstrike," he says. "Three to four big-screen TVs hooked up both to satellite television and a DVD player, with the rec center having a large library of DVDs available to watch."

While life on the bases may not be routine, it is increasingly possible for soldiers in the larger ones, even in places like Iraq, to experience the comforts of home. This is made easier by the US Postal Service, which charges only domestic shipping rates to soldiers in Iraq. This means that GIs can load up on electronics from Amazon, get free shipping, and let Uncle Sam foot the bill to fly it halfway around the world.

The humble PX (Post Exchange) also makes it simple to acquire gear; the one at Camp Liberty stocks 11 types of televisions, including one plasma which retails for $3,000.

And then there are the local vendors, Iraqis who hawk cheap items like $3 DVDs. The low cost means that some soldiers can amass libraries of hundreds of films—a fact attested to by another Ars forum member who goes by the nickname DiePilot (but prefers his real name not be used).

"There's a fairly robust grey market run by the locals wherein a person can pick up movies which are still in theaters for a paltry $3.00," he says. "They aren't the best quality, usually, but things like series which have already been released (Sopranos, Buffy, FireFly) are also available at the $3.00/disk pricepoint and are ripped from the actual DVD sets. The quality of those items is right up there with the legitimate stuff, and all the stupid warnings and previews are usually done away with."

The entertainment industry has yet to sue soldiers in Iraq for copyright infringement, but perhaps it should if it's serious about stopping piracy. An MP in Afghanistan, who goes by the forum handle SirEverlast, tells Ars, "Every country I've been to has disregarded the MPAA and sold bootleg DVDs that soldiers buy for next to nothing."

In addition to the widespread DVDs, camps in Iraq have been known to stock base radio stations with MP3s pulled from soldiers' personal collections. An anonymous Ars forum member says that this was the situation at her base when she spent time in Iraq.

"The base radio station, for about the first year that it was broadcasting, was pulling songs from a shared folder on a hard drive that people dumped their MP3s into," she said. "For some of us, myself included, this usually was all or part of an external hard drive we brought down. For others, it was simply a matter of pulling their MP3s off of their player, and transfering it over. [It] made the radio station have more music available to it than most in the States."

A chicken DVD player in every pot



The soldiers that we talked to all agreed that iPods, DVD players, and digital cameras were omnipresent. Earbuds are a common sight in the gym, where they provide both privacy and the familiar tunes from back home. Many soldiers have webcams, which they use to keep in touch with spouses and children. Those without their own gear can use that provided by the base or by groups like Freedom Calls, which installs phones and computers on bases so that soldiers can call home for free.

All such gear is common, but the soldiers we spoke with had all seen stranger things as well. One describes a Marine Staff Sergeant that he knew when deployed in Afghanistan. The Sergeant went to extraordinary lengths (and showed the true entrepreneur's spirit) to ensure that his men were happy. "He got tired of Marines in his unit getting in trouble for surfing porn over the .mil sat link, so he purchased about $7k worth of infrastructure and wired all the tents in his camp, then charged the Marines in camp to use it. Their pipe was larger than the one we had for the entire rest of the base!"

But bases are still dangerous; even large ones experience mortar attacks and other security threats. And those who spend time outside the walls of their compounds have little use for big screen TVs or videogames—they are worried about staying alive. One soldier said that "your initial package guys, like Rangers, Marines, Recon types, LRS guys, Special Forces and so on, will not take much of anything downrange that doesn't go boom. It simply isn't conducive to keeping your mind on the task at hand, which is staying alive."

While having a "large porn pipe" may please some Marines, non-military tech has also created new problems for the armed forces. Personal video cameras and digicams have allowed the world to see both music videos and prisoner abuse. That might lead outside observers to suspect that the military would like nothing better than to limit the use of these sorts of devices. DiePilot notes that in his experience, however, that simply isn't true.

"Most commanders tend to take the attitude that they'd like their soldiers to refrain from doing things which they would be afraid or ashamed to have filmed in the first place. Said one colonel at a preconvoy brief, 'Do nothing that you would be ashamed to have your mother learn up.' That's a little simplistic, I suppose, but it's also not a bad metric."

In fact, the military has proved generally open to cameras so long as they don't violate requirements regarding operational security. They even allowed three soldiers to shoot the footage that became the feature-length documentary The War Tapes, a new film that chronicles life in the military through the eyes of the soldiers on the ground.

Computer gear can also become a security risk when soldiers use it to store classified information. That has happened at the Bagram Air Force base outside Kabul, where USB drives from US soldiers have turned up in local markets, complete with sensitive data. SirEverlast says that the loss of the drives (also known as "geek whistles") "caused a recent s***storm here at Bagram. Service members were putting classified information on them and then the drive was either lost by the soldier or stolen by locals working on the base and sold at a local bazaar outside the base."

The "stuff" effect



The Icarus myth is really a story about technology; when father Daedalus creates the artificial wings for himself and his son, he makes it possible for them to experience something new, but the technology also makes it easy for Icarus to destroy himself. Critics of "American stuff" see the same thing happening right now in the desert.

David Sears wrote a provocative essay last year in which he argued that the simple presence of so much "stuff" made the military look bad to outsiders. "If we are waging a struggle for ideas and ideals," he says, "(if democracy is indeed 'on the march') then we may well lose—if the developing world sees our ideas and ideals reduced to digital, wireless and high definition. While many Iraqis can find no oases of safety, and no reliable electricity, water or fuel, the 'American Stuff' in their midst hums on."

Sears doesn't blame the troops, though, and asks, "Who among us would refuse these digital distractions if they were in reach and served to take our minds and bodies waive the perils just outside the gate?" But he does think that the focus on gadgets and convenience says much about "our country and its global priorities," and what it says isn't flattering.

A few weeks ago in Time, Ana Marie Cox argued that soldiers' expectations of war are now so shaped by movies and video games that they are unable to experience a conflict in any other way. They want to see battle as pure action, devoid of context, full of simple goals and explosions, and so when they put together music videos of their time in Iraq (and most home videos do feature music), they tend to unconsciously echo the movies and games they've seen and played.

"Raised on Nintendo and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies," Cox writes, "the troops fighting this war want to experience the kind of battle promised to them by Splinter Cell and Total Recall. The videos they make are an attempt to salvage a war whose coherence crumbled soon after Saddam's statue fell. However, while they offer the credibility of an unvarnished image, they lack any meaningful context of what came before and after the clip, or what's happening outside the frame. One veteran described them to the Wall Street Journal as 'kind of like the ESPN highlight reels—the music is pumping and everyone was running around.'"
Camraderie, card games, and computer games

DiePilot, for one, isn't convinced by the argument. "Speaking for myself, movies and games haven't really shaped my reactions to traumatic events like bombs going off or rounds getting traded. I don't act in real life like I do in a virtual world, because 1up mushrooms are scarce resources out here."

He does admit, though, that all the electronics can interfere with a soldier's primary mission. "If you can't be comfortable being miserable, as it were, then you just won't make a good soldier. Technotoys are wonderful distractions, to be sure, but there's also a lot to be said for communal entertainment as well, cards with the guys, dominoes, and so on. Those types of activities build camraderie far more than being hunched over a GameBoy for hours on end."

And sometimes the technology designed to make life easier causes its own set of new stresses—which can only be relieved by more technology. "I can remember getting angry many times that I just couldn't quite get a good signal on somebody's satellite receiver," Woltering says; "usually the dish they had bought was too small for the area. Getting in some good gaming really helped blow some of that steam off."

Technology is changing the way that soldiers fight, but it's also changing the way that they relax. Soldiers who pop in earbuds every chance they get may find it harder to make friends and feel fully at ease with other members of their unit, but instant messaging and VoIP calling can also keep families together and in touch. Like so many tech stories, the equipment here is morally neutral—it's the way its used that makes the difference.