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about life around camp. “Sir,” he said, “when I got here I was excited about the additional combat pay. Now that I’ve been here eight and half months, been in numerous IED [improvised explosive device] attacks, and haven’t had sex in a long time, I can’t wait to get the fuck out of this place.”
    The evening after we landed we got our first small taste of the difference between camping at Yellowstone and camping at Camp Victory—mortar attacks. The attacks were nowhere near our tents, but I could still hear the rumble and feel the small earthquakes beneath me as the shockwaves moved across the ground. What I learned about mortar attacks is that you can’t worry about them because you can’t do anything to stop them.
    I did some simple calculations to figure out how improbable it was to get whacked by a mortar on Camp Victory. My back-of-the-envelope calculations were based on the camp being six square miles, the mortar attacks being randomly distributed around the camp, and there being concrete barriers and sandbags everywhere. First, a six-by-six-mile area is roughly one billion square feet. Next, let us assume one of the average mortars the insurgents fling into the camp has a kill radius of about a thousand square feet, after we take into account all blast protection measuresin place around camp. When you use this simple model you end up with literally a one-in-a-million chance (1000/1,000,000,000 ≈ 1/1,000,000) of having a mortar land close enough to kill you at Camp Victory.
    Is a one-in-a-million chance a big deal? I remember reading a statistic somewhere that every year a nontrivial percentage of Americans are injured while trying bizarre sexual positions. I liked my chances with the mortars. If I died from a mortar attack at Camp Victory, I reasoned, at least my wife would get four hundred thousand dollars from the military’s life insurance fund, I would be buried in Arlington Cemetery, and I would be awarded a Purple Heart. This all sounded better than the alternative: “Kama Sutra gone extremely wrong.”
    If the mortars reminded me that I was in Iraq, touring Saddam Hussein’s Al Faw Palace reminded me of the injustice during Saddam’s rein. The palace is stunning and truly ostentatious. Imagine one of the Arab palaces in the Disney movie Aladdin . Now put a lake around the palace and fill it with exotic fish species, tended to at all times by a small army of immigrant labor. Next add fifty acres of personal hunting grounds, stocked with nonnative exotic wildlife shipped in from all corners of the globe. Finally add on a few satellite palaces for all of your sons and some additional “recreational” palaces to house your indoor swimming pools. This is the basic setup for Al Faw Palace.
    The inside of the sixty-two bedroom, twenty-nine bathroom palace is even more stunning. As you approach the palace there is an elaborate thirty-foot front door made of the most precious metals and woods on earth. Once you enter the palace door, a crystal chandelier the size of a Honda Civic hovers above your head. If you move another twenty feet inside the palace, on your right you will see a gold-plated emperor’s throne Yasser Arafat gave Saddam as a gift (see photo 1 ). In addition the entire interior of the palace, save the thrones and chandeliers, which are made of gold, crystal, and other precious materials, is made of hand-carved marble stones. There is even a bathroom made of pure gold inside the palace. I must admit oil-rich dictators who have a knack for stealing from the United Nations’ Oil for Food program really know how to live.
    The next day we took a sixty-mile flight from Camp Victory to Camp Taji, which is twenty miles north of Baghdad. We didn’t exactly travel in style. We managed to stuff around twenty bags of equipment and six passengers into the Black Hawk helicopter, maxing out the payload in the process.
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