Author: James Golub
James Golub is a U.S. Army veteran and general contractor. He served as an electronics technician with the 101st Airborne during the Iraq War. An avid gamer since childhood, he has used gaming to connect with fellow service members and decompress during deployments. He now streams, writes, and creates content exploring the intersection of gaming, military life, and real-world experiences.
March 1st, 2003, I was in the 8th Battalion, Alpha Company, 101st, 6th chalk into Iraq and stationed at Camp Udari. I told my squad to bring whatever they needed to get through the suck. We were depot-level, highly trained electronics techs, so we brought the only thing we loved. No, not our ladies. Our gaming PCs.
When we got to Camp Udari, it was still being built. Burn pits were being covered, tarmac was being laid, injuries left and right, due to the rush. The kitchen tents burned down the moment we arrived. We were low on food. It was really a mess of a deployment early on, rushed and woefully underprepared. Bringing a second sidearm was less important than bringing extra food. Our PCs seemed like a bad choice at the moment. We were running every mission we could to bring the base online. QRF, gate security, supervising trash crews, organizing tents and equipment, moving from tent to tent as more troops arrived from 3rd ID and others.
The more that came, the more tense it got. Coalition soldiers who were not happy about being there drew guns on some of us. They cordoned off their area so that no US soldier would enter. Not to mention the attack on Camp Pennsylvania on March 23rd by Hasan Akbar and the attack by a Kuwaiti national who ran over 13 soldiers at the Udari PX line on March 31st. Two of my soldiers almost got run over in that line. I kept a tighter leash on them after that. It was THAT tense the first few weeks in March.
About the end of week one, is when we got settled into our own tent space. It was packed, our civilian counterparts were living with us, and everyone was in their own headspace about what was to come. My platoon Sergeant already had the 1000-yard stare, and we were already worried about him. He went through Desert Storm. What was this one going to be like?
Our equipment wouldn’t arrive for another week or two, so we did extra duties, and after work would do what every good soldier did. We played games we bought from the PX. The PX line at Udari was literally 8 hours long. Fifty thousand soldiers trying to enter a PX the size of two connex’s was a sight to behold. SSG McCay was our NCO, and I was the shop foreman. And I did what every responsible E-4 shop foreman would. I dutifully had two of my soldiers on PX duty, for our squad of eight, to buy the newest gaming console at the time, the PlayStation 2. We barely had food, but we had the newest gaming console out in the middle of nowhere. Go figure. A lot of weird stuff happens in war.
Almost all of us had bought at least one PS2. They were set up in the middle row of the tent between poles and had LAN cables connecting them so we could run eight-player tournaments on Time Splitters 2. One after the other, we got on and deleted the mess outside the tent from our view. That’s what gaming does: it can bring you into a different world. We finally had our comfort getaway after being in “high speed low drag” mode for months, preparing for the invasion. It was like being back in the barracks, doing LAN parties with cables running up and down the halls. The only thing missing was pizza and beer.
But it didn’t last. Sandstorms are the enemy of electronics. Our skills allowed us to take them apart and fix them, despite having no tools. We made them last for another two weeks, but the sea of airborne sand was too great. They succumbed to the dust. Sand and wind are a mighty combination.
March 19th, 2003. The day the invasion began. And yet we were retreating to Arifjan to pick up our equipment. While the 160th, Rakkasans, and 3rd ID raced to Baghdad, we were getting situated in the rear. We donned our MOP gear to MOP 4 so the media couldn’t identify us as we came back out of the theater. It wasn’t until nightfall that we began hearing the SCUD sirens. We returned to Udari with no issues; the gaming PCs had arrived.
Our electronics testing stations were about 40 years old at the time and needed recalibration due to the sensitive nature of the equipment. We didn’t have the equipment for that. That was the civilian side, so in the meantime, we ran convoys to the front lines in Najaf for supply runs, picked up a downed a blackhawk, and brought it back to the rear. Eagle Three was the name of Najaf Airbase. We got loaded up and broke out the deck of cards, because we were not going anywhere until they cleared a path to go. Fighting was going on all around us; the city was HOT. While they were playing cleanup, we played spades on the back of our trailers as choppers flew, infantry kicked ass, and the might of the 101st was laid bare. It was beyond surreal. We didn’t know if we were going back to Udari or staying to fight.
It was the most stressful time of the war to date. We ran the convoy back that lasted in 15-hour stints. One time, I woke up while driving an LMTV bobtail hauling a 50’ trailer, and saw my TC asleep too. It was incredibly dangerous. Especially at night, pitch black, with no lights across the open desert. I remember having a nice set of headphones, having them play music at full blast, and I would still fall asleep at the wheel. Also, there was no such thing as radios on the convoys. It was all gas, no brakes. Only front and rear command vehicles had radios in a 300-rig train.
Thank God we made it back from these convoys. Sniper fire took a life in Charlie Company; small arms fire was abundant, but all of that vanished behind the wheel of the controls of a gaming PC. Command & Conquer: Yuri’s Revenge was the new main game of the shop. New to PC and a fantastic series, this game had everything a 22-year-old strategy gamer could ask for. We had two gaming PCs stashed away in the supply trailer and set them up with a local network so we could play against each other.
Word got around that we had gaming PCs, and we played against other shops. Sgt Hager, my gaming buddy, and I went head-to-head against another shop and got walloped in the first round. Hager did not bring his A game. We got back in, double or nothing, and won back our title in a grueling battle that lasted a few hours. It was a great release from the stressful situation I had just encountered a few days before.
Another month had gone by. Our vans were calibrated and ready for the push north through Baghdad and into Mosul. Or at least we thought. The brakes on the test equipment trailer had seized and were set on fire no more than 300 meters north of Udari. My platoon sergeant stayed behind to supervise the repairs.
By this time, we had no access to new media and only had a couple of other PC games, which quickly became boring. We did have a backup, though. Dungeons and Dragons. I remember being up late at night with the B schedule squad in the test vans, throwing dice while we ran tests on equipment. I was a Minotaur warrior, bashing my head through everything to get to the next phase of that deployment, trying to keep the squad intact.
Looking back, gaming ended up being how I shut things off for a while. You couldn’t stay locked in all the time. Trying to do that just wore people down. We didn’t think of it as therapy or a coping mechanism. It was just something that worked and kept us together.
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