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sort the soldiers into clichés—redneck gun nuts, high school dropouts, tired Southern guys, the barracks intellectual, the kid from Brooklyn—every one of them a type for the next Saving Private Ryan . They dressed and walked alike and shaved their heads, allowing you to stop thinking at the first stereotype if you wanted to. The Army was a big place, and once you identified a type chances were there were more of him or her around. But after you were living on the FOB for a while you got to hear their stories. Ran away from an evil girlfriend, needed money for college, father said get a job or get out, that sort of thing. Each of them was proud to serve but each of them had at least another reason that they carried around for joining the military, their own little secret weight. Few Rambos at this level.
    The soldier tribe distinguished itself with names and mascots that spoke to the odd feedback loop between Iraq war reality and American pop culture. Many units had names like Mighty Warriors or Spartans, with logos all clearly based on the movie 300 . Others liked death-inspired names such as Death Dealers, Gravediggers, Ghostriders, and the like, with logos ripped from the Eddie character on Iron Maiden album covers. A few old-timers clung to Indian names like Crazy Horse Platoon or Gunslingers, usually with flaming-skull logos that used to feature on biker jackets. The names were not creative and, when applied to nonmartial subunits like the finance office or the medical team, seemed out of place.
    KBR White
    KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root) conducted the backstage portion of this war. They hired people in the United States to come to Iraq and run the generators, fix the plumbing, and do all the maintenance and logistics stuff because there were nowhere near enough soldiers around to do those things. After the soldier tribe, these people were the largest group on the FOB. Not all contractors worked for KBR, as many were subcontractors and sub-subcontractors (over three hundred US companies had people in Iraq), but everyone referred to tribe members who were contractors simply as KBR. At the peak there were an estimated 150,000 contractors of various types in Iraq. They were almost uniformly white, male, and from the southern United States (or maybe they all just talked that way). Some who had been in the military, however briefly and inconsequentially, spoke of their former service constantly. This impressed the soldiers in exactly the same way a dropout who continued to hang around the school parking lot impressed high school juniors. These guys often referred to other men as “brother” and liked to dress in “tactical” clothing, made by the 5.11 company. You could tell 5.11 clothing by the vast number of unnecessary pockets all over the shirts and pants. I had a pair of such pants myself, with over a dozen pockets, each with Velcro and snaps and D rings and all sorts of accessories. If you filled all the pockets, you wouldn’t be able to climb stairs. The KBR men imagined themselves as Chuck-Norris-the-young-martial-arts-killer but instead mimicked Chuck-Norris-the-aging-caricature. The six-figure salaries KBR paid them were augmented with free trips home and all sorts of benefits. These costs were of course passed on to the taxpayer and may have been part of the reason soldiers were paid only mediocre wages—even in the military there was only so much money to go around.
    KBR Brown
    What the KBR White personnel did not do was anything dirty, dark, or dangerous, such as cleaning latrines, digging holes, unloading things, guarding places, or serving food. Exclusively young male workers imported from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and other Third World garden spots did those jobs. KBR paid them low wages by American standards but pretty good wages by Sri Lankan standards, which undoubtedly made those jobs more palatable. There were rumors of virtual slavery, always unconfirmed, of workers