In Iraq, Football Battles Are Diversion From War

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
Washington Post
November 23, 2006
Pg. E3

By Josh White, Washington Post Staff Writer
TALL AFAR, Iraq -- This weekend, in a small dusty conference room in this far corner of Iraq, a group of young Army officers will shed their body armor, huddle around a television and watch football.
As in countless living rooms across America, these men will yell at the screen and at each other. They will slap hands and they will pound tables. They will laugh and they will curse. And for just a few moments, as fleeting as they are, it will feel as if they are home.
People such as Capt. Ethan Olberding will be rooting for the Chicago Bears, while Capt. Luke Hale will be pulling for his Indianapolis Colts to continue their impressive start. Maj. Mitchell Watkins, known to jump up and make karate moves after big plays, will be looking for the Tennessee Volunteers to grab another win against Kentucky. Others will argue that Southern Cal is the best one-loss team in the nation or that the SEC is by far the best conference.
Football in Iraq is everywhere the soldiers are, and in some ways it is the most vivid link to their lives back in the United States. ESPN's "College GameDay" is on in all the dining facilities, where soldiers crowd the same side of the table to get a view. The Armed Forces Network broadcasts up to three games at a time in even the farthest reaches of the country, where some of the most rabid fans reside.
Living quarters are decorated with banners and souvenir footballs and posters. Offices are adorned with photographs taken with players. Some can recite the next weekend's schedule from memory.
Because Iraq is eight hours ahead of the East Coast, football mostly is a late-night event here, with college games starting after dinner and some pro games beginning at 4 a.m. on Monday mornings. Soldiers gather sodas and Gatorade -- there's no drinking alcohol while deployed to Iraq -- and burn popcorn in ancient microwaves. Some snack on cookies sent from home while others load their cheeks with chewing tobacco or spit sunflower seeds into empty water bottles.
It's at an early hour when I found Hale, an intelligence officer, braving the cold last month as we settled in to watch the matchup between his Colts and my New England Patriots. Never mind that it was 4:15 a.m. -- it felt like Sunday night football. Conversation drifted from interrogation policy to Peyton Manning's inability to win big playoff games to the state of the insurgency in northern Iraq, and then back to Tom Brady's frequent interceptions that morning.
In a place where everything is so real and filled with grime and frustration and challenges and, all too often, death, football nearly is the ultimate escape. From Iraq, battles on the gridiron injure only pride.
Such was the case with Watkins, who lost a bet with a fellow officer when his Volunteers fell in a squeaker to Louisiana State. The verbal, and sometimes physical, jousting almost was more fun than the game. In the end, Watkins's penalty was to wear only his cavalry unit's Stetson, his body armor and a pair of brown underwear to a staff meeting.
In Mosul, I watched my alma mater, Michigan, beat Northwestern on the Internet, because the game wasn't televised in Iraq. In the brigade's tactical operations center, below a video from an unmanned airplane depicting a small village where insurgent activity was suspected, was a feed of another Big Ten matchup. Officers there, as a weekly diversion, play each other in fantasy football, tracking their players and sending taunting e-mails in their rare spare moments.
On my arrival in Baghdad in mid-October, I made it known to the officers with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, that among my priorities during my embed with them was to be sitting in front of a television for the Michigan-Iowa football game on Oct. 21. I was directed to the "Stables" at Camp Stryker, a holding area for travelers that boasted two televisions. I thought I'd be lucky to see a single down.
What I found astonished me: There were no fewer than 20 soldiers crowded into the corner of the room, some screaming at the top of their lungs as time ran down in the Texas-Nebraska game. Two sergeants were jumping out of their shoes, yelling "Fumble! Fumble!" while a young private yelled "Hook 'Em Horns!" Others had their faces in their hands, one accusing the other of jinxing Nebraska by saying the game was over, when it obviously hadn't been.
When an SEC game next popped onto the television, I wandered over to the base's recreation center, where I found two Hawkeye fans flipping channels looking for the game that I, too, wanted. We found it on a snowy, crackling channel. But there was the Michigan band, playing the sweet notes of "The Victors." (Of course, later in my trip, I would take considerable heat from Ohio State fans, who promised to beat Michigan in Columbus, Ohio. Your slimmest of victories is duly noted. Congrats.)
A captain sat next to me, the base's dentist, and we struck up a conversation. I graduated from Michigan in 1998, he in 2002. He got his graduate degree there, and his wife is getting hers in Ann Arbor. Small world. Over the tinny and sometimes purely awful sounds of a karaoke version of Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" -- two soldiers were trying, badly, to sing over loudspeakers at an event outside -- we watched football and talked football.
We dreamed about a crowd of more than 110,000, about crisp fall days and barbeques and beer. We celebrated touchdowns and squinted to see the ball between the static.
The game felt so close.
The war felt a thousand miles away.
Josh White is a military affairs correspondent who was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq this fall.
 
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