Feature: Sim Racing - In Iraq!

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I’d recently returned from what I thought was my last overseas deployment prior to military retirement: A long, 8½ month deployment on an aircraft carrier. It was a rewarding experience, but one that was hard on my family. In late October 2006 I was back on “shore duty” at NAS Fallon, Nevada where my squadron had traveled to pit our FA-18F Super Hornets against TopGun’s adversary F-16As and FA-18Cs. In between flights, an e-mail from the Navy’s Personnel Bureau popped into my in-box. Imagine my surprise when I read that I had been tapped by the Navy for an Individual Augmentee (IA) assignment... in Iraq! I felt like I’d just received my Draft Notification — because that’s essentially what had just happened.

What’s an IA, you ask? That’s when Navy sailors are sent individually into land combat jobs, with the intent of providing relief to the over-taxed deployment tempos of our Army and Marine brethren in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007, the Navy sent nearly 10,000 personnel into Army and Marine maneuver units, in a variety of roles. I was to be one of those 10,000. Despite my 21 years of naval service, I was most certainly not trained for this line of work. And the orders said I should expect to be deployed in the combat zone for a total of 280 days, which is a long time to be away time from friends, family and flying when you weren’t expecting it. The job produced a great deal of anxiety for me in many ways, not the least of which was that you don’t learn what your actual combat assignment will be until you arrive in theater. And although my usual line of work contains a set of robust risks that I must deal with every day, I was now looking at a totally unfamiliar and very scary set of risks in this new assignment. They say you should never turn down a combat assignment (not that I had the option), but to say I was initially rather dismayed by this set of orders is a bit of an understatement!

I kissed my family good-bye in January, off to begin my 4-week crash course in Army soldiering. By the middle of February, I was standing on the ground at Baghdad International Airport, watching B-1 bombers roar overhead, popping flares as night closed in on the city. Welcome to Iraq, Sailor. If anyone was wondering why I suddenly seemed to drop off the map at SimHQ, you now know the reason why.

"Early this year "Chunx" confided in me and other staff that he was heading overseas. A lot of the racers really missed him, but when they’d ask I’d just reply 'he’s a little busy right now...'"

After one last week of specialized mission training in Baghdad, I finally received my combat assignment, settling into a job with an Army Combat Engineering unit in Iraq’s farm country, managing a program key to the unit’s high-profile mission of countering the road-side bomb or IED threat. As it turned out, some of my aviation background allowed me to pick up the mission fairly quickly, and over time I got pretty good at what turned out to be a highly satisfying and rewarding job negating the insurgents’ preferred weapon, and saving Soldiers’ lives in the process.

Prosecuting a wartime mission while remaining healthy and fit for combat is pretty exciting and demanding work. Work days were 10 to 14 hours long or more, 7 days a week. Between work and working out, I didn’t have much in the way of free time or inclination for frivolous things like playing computer games. Once I settled into the job and learned the routine, I found that I had no more than 3 hours a week available for things like computer gaming — usually less. But all work and no play can actually dull your performance in combat, so I decided to structure my life to maximize the benefit of those few hours. Anticipating the chance for distraction via electronic entertainment, a few weeks before deploying I’d purchased a Dell M1710 Red gaming laptop to serve as my “entertainment center” in Iraq. At first all I had on it were tactical sims, due to their small peripheral requirements (a mouse). In the first two months, I was able to work my way through Rainbow Six: Vegas, which was a worthy and enjoyable distraction from my new job.

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