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Wednesday, June 1, 2005
Staying connected is a chore
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Curtis Compton/AJC
Sgt. Monte Franks, 35, of Rock Mart holds a picture of his son, Tristan, 8, and daughter, Rose, 5, as he talks with them and his wife, Cari, from the Internet Cafe. Franks said his daughter said, “Daddy, you can hold a picture of me when you talk to me on the phone.”
Forward Operating Base St. Michael, Iraq - As a result of numerous e-mails from families and friends of 48th Brigade Combat Team soldiers asking why they haven’t heard from their loved ones yet, I thought it appropriate to provide a short description of some of the things they must do here to reach out to people at home.
The “Internet Cafe” at this base is about the size of a double-wide trailer. It sits in a dusty corner of this dusty place, surrounded by concrete walls that protect it from daily mortar and rocket attacks.
Soldiers are required to wear helmets and body armor whenever they venture outside, but they can shed them once inside. A wooden rack between the walls provides a place to stow the heavy, protective gear while the soldiers are online.
Inside the trailer are 10 phones and 20 personal computers, only about two-thirds of which are functioning at any particular time. That average is remarkable since most of the computer equipment is at least 10 years old. If there’s a heaven for office equipment, this stuff will surely go there because its life on this earth has been hellish.
Laptops with smashed and broken keys are linked to separate keyboards so that they can still function. And even those keyboards are cheap throw-aways whose springs are worn out and keys stick from years of hard use.
The one I’m working on now, for example, requires forceful pinky fingers to make capitals because the “shift” keys must be held down firmly.
To get to the phones and computers, soldiers have to wait for 30 minutes or more at peak times. The most desired online times are first thing in the morning, while it’s still late evening at home, or, late at night, when it’s early afternoon at home. (Iraq is eight hours ahead of Georgia time.)
Soldiers, particularly the younger ones, prefer Instant Messaging and video conferencing to straight e-mail, so they fill the Internet Cafe during hours their friends are likely to be online. In “researching” this story, I glanced at the computer screens of a few instant messagers around me to find out what they were talking about.
I was always pretty good at sneaking peaks at smarter kids’ test sheets at school, so I figured my chances of getting caught in this breach of Internet etiquette were pretty slim.
But my blushing face might have easily given me away. These Army boys and girls aren’t shy about describing exactly what they intend to do to each other when they get home, the manner in which they will do it or the duration of the activities.
The computers operate at a glacial pace, especially when the Internet Cafe is full of phone users. The phones work on “voice over Internet protocol,” so they demand lots of bandwidth.
When the phone lines are full, which is virtually all the time, the Internet slows to a trickle. Simply checking e-mail or sending a few text messages is a time-consuming process — and each soldier is limited to 30 minutes.
Some soldiers say they prefer e-mail or even hand-written letters to telephone calls. There’s an awkward pause as the signal makes its way around the world, and it’s easy to feel tongue-tied and clumsy. The soldiers want to put on a brave face, but hearing loneliness and hurt in a spouse or child’s voice is almost too much to bear when they know there’s nothing they can do to fix it from 8,400 miles away.
Also, it’s hard for those of us who have never been in the military to realize how hard soldiers in a war zone work. It’s not an 8-to-5 job.
On the short walk here, I passed a group of soldiers in about half a dozen armored Humvees who had recently finished a combat patrol. Evidently, they were still on call because their vehicles were idling and they were dressed in full “battle rattle” despite the stifling mid-afternoon heat.
I nodded at one of the drivers but he ignored me. Then I noticed the soldier in the back of his Hummer was flopped face-down in the baggage area, sound asleep atop a mountain of gear. As I continued walking, I encountered a group of about five more soldiers who had found a rare bit of shade. They were sprawled on the filthy ground, rifles beside them, exhausted.
It was only then that I realized the driver who had ignored me wasn’t being rude. Strapped into the driver’s seat, rifle on his lap, he wasn’t even awake.
