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G.I.'s in Iraq Tote Their Own Pop Culture
By THOM SHANKER
 AGHDAD,
Iraq — American troops arrive for duty in Iraq with a rifle in one hand, a
wrench in the other and a lot of American pop culture in their rucksacks.
Personal CD players, MP3's, portable DVD movie systems,
satellite dishes and laptop computers with Internet access allow soldiers to
stay current with American music, movies and television, even inside the
concertina wire at bases deep in a foreign society isolated by years of
dictatorship, embargo and war.
When a day's combat patrol or reconstruction mission is
over, the troops join the global consumer culture, retreating into the the
privacy of headphones to recapture a bit of territory in the war zone, free from
the collective of military life.
The new technologies have had a potent impact on the
military, ending its monopoly over the supply of news and entertainment for
American troops serving in a foreign land whose borders include a language
barrier.
Senior officers have responded with daily newsletters for
unit commanders and the troops via e-mail. The American Forces Network continues
to splice official messages into its satellite TV programming and mingle them
with the songs on its radio station here.
But when the troops peel off their flak jackets, they
largely tune into their own play lists. While musical tastes among the troops
are as varied as they are in civilian life, in the land of the Tigris and
Euphrates let it be recorded: Soldiers assigned to civilization's cradle will
rock.
At the Kirkush Military Training Base in the eastern Iraqi
desert less than 15 miles from the frontier with Iran, an hour's wait for a
helicopter was spent listening to Marilyn Manson, Eminem and Shania Twain before
the Black Hawk fired up its turbines and somebody back in the barracks, as if on
cue and with a dark sense of irony, cranked up Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to
Heaven."
The songs came from a European satellite music channel and
a communal computer where 12.8 gigabites of tunes had been downloaded for
sharing on MP3's. The rule was simple: Take some music, add some music.
"Any time anybody on the team gets a new CD, they
load it in, so we stay pretty current," said Sgt. Thomas R. Mena.
As the new CD from Tool blasted in the barracks, Sergeant
Mena scrolled through the computerized music library, which ranged from Abba and
AC/DC, through Limp Biskit and Metallica and on to Van Halen and ZZ Top.
Émigrés from West Africa who joined the Army for
citizenship and career training arrived with the latest Nigerian pop CD's.
Chinese-Americans hauled along hot Hong Kong video imports.
"We've got the whole world under one tent," said
Pfc. Nicholas Allen of the First Infantry Division's Third Brigade Combat Team.
Troops running a checkpoint near the Kuwait border end
their day by listening to Bush, not their commander in chief but the grunge
riffs of a band with the same name.
Inside the Baghdad Green Zone, the walled-off sector of
central Baghdad whose palaces are home to the American-led occupation authority,
Ludacris and R. Kelly were heard within earshot of the broad promenade where
Saddam Hussein celebrated victories under crossed swords that reach five stories
into the sky.
A Green Beret sergeant in his 40's, a veteran of the war
in Afghanistan and now in Iraq to train new domestic security forces, said he
packed Grateful Dead CD's next to his laser rangefinder.
The country and western of Dwight Yoakam blared from a
mechanics' bay at Taji airfield, north of the Iraqi capital, even as a bass drum
of captured ordnance rumbled in a controlled detonation.
So in the spate of anniversary stories, one year after the
start of the war, 12 months since the capture of Baghdad, as nearly a quarter
million American troops trade places in Iraq with 130,000 veterans clearing out
their tents to make way for 110,000 fresh soldiers, it is time to take stock.
This is not Vietnam and Jimi Hendrix. In the American war
in Iraq there is no obvious soundtrack save the thump-thump-thump of helicopter
rotors, which set the rapid tempo for missions all across the combat zone.
Sgt. Daniel Kartchien of the 419th Transportation Company
has been in the Army since 1973. He said that when troops go off duty,
"it's all individual stuff now."
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