CAMP VICTORY: Inside a US military base in Baghdad, soldiers wash their Subway sandwiches down with root beer and can watch television talk shows from home. Outside is the real Iraq.
Beyond the base perimeter live the people of a war-wracked nation, many of whom have been hit by tragedy as revealed in the latest WikiLeaks revelations of confidential US military documents.
Behind the blast walls life is certainly no holiday for the 50,000 troops who still remain after the official end of the US combat mission in Iraq in September and ahead of a full pullout by the end of next year.
But their living conditions cannot compare to the world outside.
At Camp Victory and bases like it around Iraq, generators running round the clock power ubiquitous air conditioners and wireless Internet connections, as they heat water for showers and chill water bottles.
Outside, state-supplied power often comes on for just an hour a day, leaving citizens sitting on one of the world’s largest oil reserves scrambling to plug the gap.
Despite many homes paying one or more private suppliers of electricity, they still go without power for hours at a time. And tap water that was once potable has become a polluted health hazard consumed only by the very poor.
Some US soldiers are unaware of basic facts about the world outside the confines of their base.
An officer at Camp Victory last week who has been in Baghdad for two months did not know there was a midnight to 5:00 am curfew in the city.
At the time, the officer was listening to American Forces Network radio teaching the Arabic phrase of the day, which was unlikely to be useful for those in the base: "There is no water."
A Baghdad curfew has been in place since the aftermath of the US-led invasion of 2003. It used to start at 9:00 pm but was later shortened with improved security, the main concern of most Iraqis.
Everyone in the country has first-hand tales of deaths or injuries among relatives or friends. These days, many stories are about kidnappings for ransom by criminal gangs.
At least one horror story is documented in the classified logs revealed by WikiLeaks.
American soldiers honked their horns at a car that got too close to their patrol, but when it failed to turn around, one gunner fired a warning shot.
"Gunner fires one warning shot from his M4. The bullet ricochets and hits one local national (nine-year-old-girl). Patrol stops traffic at the intersection," Al-Jazeera television quoted one document as saying.
The nearly 400,000 US military documents from early 2004 to January this year detail chilling accounts of torture and killings of civilians since the invasion, painting a grim picture of a nation torn apart by sectarian violence.
The main findings include revelations of "hundreds" of civilian deaths at manned American checkpoints, and show that in all at least 109,000 people were killed, 63 percent of them civilians, between 2003 and the end of 2009.
At another large US base outside the main southern city of Basra, Staff Sergeant Chanelcherie DeMello said she grabs every chance to get off base, including an organized trip several weeks ago to a village.
"We went to a home, and there was a little girl who took off her ring and put it on my finger. Iraqis are such warm people," DeMello said.
Another officer who admitted to being in Iraq for only a few months was surprised to see highways in the oil-rich country had checkpoints, a grim reality of daily life for Iraqis who have to stop and show their identity papers every few kilometers (miles).
American forces whose work routinely takes them off base are better informed.
But many troops began pulling back into their bases from mid-2009 and practically vanished from the streets after control of checkpoints was passed to Iraqi police.
US forces paid the price of visibility — more than 4,000 have died in the war and nearly 32,000 have been wounded, according to independent website icasualties.org.
Asked what legacy the United States was leaving behind, Brigadier General Randal Dragon told AFP that this was up to the Iraqi people to judge.
"Albeit we don’t have complete tranquility, security has increased dramatically over the past several years," said Dragon, a deputy commander at the Basra base.
"Are we there yet? We have to ask the Iraqi people… I don’t presuppose to know everything that is happening here in Iraq."
At Camp Victory, a warning sign at the exit warns that weapons must be in "red" position — loaded — and that all military personnel must be in armored vehicles.
Last weekend in Baghdad, families enjoying a relative lull crowded the dimly lit restaurants along the Tigris River to feast on "masgouf," Iraq’s barbecued carp specialty, as children rode on swings or played ball nearby.
Inside Camp Victory, the Halloween decorations had already gone up.
Soldiers shopped for leather jackets or electronics at a mini-mall, snacked on Pop-Tarts and cookies from home, or rode through streets with American names to dine at Pizza Hut, Taco Bell or Burger King Outlets found only on the bases.
