FORWARD OPERATING BASE GRIZZLY, Iraq – Sgt. Gary Bowman stared through the scope of an M-4 rifle. He lined up his enemy’s head in the crosshairs. He pulled the trigger. The target fell.
“Dude,” said Bowman’s roommate, Sgt. Bruce Scherrer, “did you just kill the colonel?”
“Yep,” replied the soldier from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. “Smoked him.”
A minute later, a grenade killed Bowman. Then the Tacoma native gunned down his friend with an M-4 rifle. And then he ran into an ambush and fell amid a hail of bullets.
Bowman, a fire support specialist with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, finally dropped his Xbox 360 controller, stepped out of his living trailer to light up a cigarette. The Stryker soldier took a few drags, bragged about his kills and snuffed it out.
Another game of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 beckoned.
“We play Modern Warfare 2 pretty much every night here,” Bowman said. “It helps us vent our frustrations a little bit, to be honest.”
Service members across Iraq spend countless hours playing first-person shooter video games, but perhaps none take it to the level of the soldiers of 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment.
Their small base in Diyala province holds about 1,000 people, and entertainment options can be scarcer than at bigger bases.
Video games, therefore, are king.
The games give players a reason to talk trash and recall their moments of glory throughout the day, even during downtime on missions.
The battalion held a Modern Warfare 2 tournament on Christmas Eve that drew about 80 service members and contractors forming into two-man teams and facing off on TVs linked together at the Morale, Welfare and Recreation center. Soldiers from 1-23 Infantry’s reconnaissance platoon won the tournament by one kill in the final three seconds.
Every night, dozens of soldiers kill each other in a portable world after linking their Xbox 360s through a central node for each living area. The next step is to link all the networks, giving everyone who lives at Grizzly and owns an Xbox 360 a chance to face off nightly.
Even the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Chuck Hodges, is a regular each night, playing under the handle Tomahawk 6. Soldiers especially relish killing their higher-ranking comrades in the game.
And no officer at Grizzly ranks higher than Hodges. He once complained about too many people targeting him with knife attacks in the game.
On this night, it was open season on the lieutenant colonel. The best clips from the night were spliced together, set to music and saved on Scherrer’s computer.
After Hodges racked up more than 30 kills against a reporter from The News Tribune, the officer felt the need brag in an e-mail a few days later about his Call of Duty prowess.
“Hopefully you can get in some COD practice,” Hodges wrote. “You need it.”
scott.fontaine@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/military
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