Dodge City North

Quick quiz: What is "Dodge City North"?

A) The name of a town from the Wild West where a famous shootout occurred.

B) The title of a second-rate action movie starring Arnold Schwartzenegger.

C) A Chrysler plant that makes the new Dodge Ram 1500 pickup.

D) The aptly named living area in Iraq where James currently lives.

E) This is an April Fool's joke; why would anyone name something Dodge City North?

If you guessed "E", then you are probably thinking the same thing the people who lived in this place thought when it was officially called something else, but affectionately called Dodge City. So the story goes, this used to be the living area that got hit the hardest and most often by mortars and over-the-wall attacks. It's not particularly close to the wall anymore (the wall has been moved out over the years), and there have been almost no attacks since I arrived. At some point, though, it was bad enough that the residents nicknamed it, and the military let the name stick.

Despite the relative calm, the living areas are pretty heavily fortified with concrete barriers, and it is a lot like cabin camping in a post-apocalyptic wasteland:

Bottled water is available everywhere - you just help yourself to however many bottles you want. Of course, you are encouraged to conserve, but not at the expense of hydration. Even in the winter and spring, I usually go through two or three of the 1-liter bottles a day. All the water is purified out of the Tigris River, which is diverted to Victory Base Complex via canal, and the bottles are produced, filled, and distributed from the Oasis Bottling Plant about a 20 minute walk from my room.

This is one of the massive generators that provide power to the living areas. All of the power here is generated using fuel that is trucked in. All of the water and raw materials used on base are trucked in, and the wastewater and trash are trucked out. It's almost like we are living on the moon.

The tall concrete walls are known as "T-walls", since they roughly form the shape of an upside-down T. They are everywhere. In the beginning, there were sandbags, but as our presence grew more permanent, they were replaced by the Jersey barriers (like on the freeway), then 5-foot tall barriers, then a year or two ago, these 12-foot T-walls. As going-away gifts, units will often get miniature replicas of the T-walls and engrave something in them or mount a coin in them. The signature mark of the company that makes the T-walls is the number "77" at the top - it is even on the miniature ones they make!

Dodge City just goes on and on ... and it's one of several living areas on Camp Victory (one of 6 camps that make up Victory Base Complex)!

The structure to the right of this picture is a bunker. These are not as frequently occurring as I would think for a place called Dodge City, but they are close enough to you if you are between T-walls that you can dive into one in a pinch.