Afghan embed: The virtual game of war

If there were an internet cafe at the gates of hell, it might sound a little like the MWR on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Bostick.

There is a quiet panic that seeps out in the silence, between the clatter of keyboards and the occasional snippet over IP telephones. A military base’s entire emotional complex sent down the wire, by satellite, back home.

The MWR – which seems to stand for Military Woe Receptacle – is free internet for soldiers, with rules. You can guess what’s banned. You can guess what’s encouraged. You can guess what they like.

In one larger MWR I fell into, young men insatiably played video games in which they shot a lot of people dead. It wasn’t clear why the people needed shooting dead, other than that was the role they seemed to be playing in the game: that of the enemy.

But each time the shotgun went off, a large amount of claret would adorn the floor around the bad guy’s body, who would agreeably choose to immediately check out. No death throes, no final words, no orchestral flourish – just silence, for you sunshine.

Death for the assailant is a milder affair. The screen goes red and you freeze. This is what I remember virtual death being like about 20 years ago, in video games of the past.

Either there’s been a failure of game makers’ imaginations in making the players’ death experience more real. Or perhaps they have discovered – through the power of computers – that’s what a violent death is really like. In which case it’s a piece of piss. Bring it on, you might think. You even get another go.

But these cafes are hell because of the emotions that surge therein.

I did not hear this conversation: our cameraman Stuart Webb did. But the situation of one soldier meant he was given, in quiet, calm and clearly pained tones, to say this: “Our marriage is over. That is adultery. No. I don’t want to make it work. I only have to give you $650 a month, because it’s adultery, that’s what my lawyer says. No. No more. You’ve done a great job with the kids. You are a great person, and I hope you are happy with this new guy or whoever you end up with. But our marriage is definitely over.”

A moment of power gleaned from being rational and focused, in the face of the irrational and animal.

Then it’s back to the war. The boredom so often of which is inversely proportionate to the worry of those at home, thinking about you “out there”.

There are simpler conversations overheard. In the MWR here: “Speak to you in eight and a half hours. Me too.”

And on the top of a observation point, overrun by the Taliban two months earlier, perched above a savage valley: “Both of them are maxed out? How did you do that?” The small agonies of domestic life, amplified by forced distance, and the unknowing of the other’s experience.

[I should just point out that in the past 20 minutes I have been writing, two – make that three, sorry seven – enormous artillery shells have been test fired. I was warned, but on each occasion the bang caused me to curl up, like a circus dwarf climbing into the cannon barrel. You never get used to – or want to get used to – that sort of tremor.]

It seems impolitely indifferent – when you’re waiting in line for the internet – to not look over soldiers’ shoulders.

MySpace sites are, it seems, given the attention paid to one girl’s by one soldier, laden with pornographic undertones. The words “Get With Me” seemed to attract special attention.

The power of the imagination when you’re stranded somewhere like here for a year must be such, I shudder to think what the sight of fresh strawberries does to the mind in the dining facility.

Instant messaging is also a “buzz”, if you are close enough to catatonia. I found myself having a Facebook chat with a friend who’s bedridden with a prolapsed spine in Seoul, unable to even get to the fridge as his girlfriend is on a business trip to Hong Kong.

The established format between men is simple: 1. Expletive. 2. Mild preamble casually mentioning where you both are. 3. Real thing that’s on your mind in 40 word ramble that fills allotted space. 4. Potted truism that returns you to point 1. Or you can just do stage 1 repeatedly.

Don’t get me wrong: we need not weep too much for these private hells. These men and women are the enforcers of the world’s only superpower.

There have been meeker people in history and there is a reason why this MWR feels like it’s at the gates of hell: it’s in Kunar province, Afghanistan, perhaps home to the insurgency’s most hostile characters, and to a lot of American firepower.

Not one of these people has been forced to be here and most admit they joined the army to fight, rather than to bring peace and harmony to people of a different faith.

But there is a spasm of pain that you cannot fail to empathise with in the frustrated hammering of the space bar, the repeated clicking of the mouse button on “refresh”.

No, she hasn’t felt compelled to write to you in the last 15 seconds.

Sorry, I must go and press refresh.