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Camp Hurricane Point, Ramadi, Iraq, Dec. 5, 2005

Whatever you do — and I know it’s hard to avoid the urge — stop sending care packages full of toiletries to the front. They’ve got plenty.

After several rounds of deployments to Iraq with many different units rotating through the same bases, the stockpile of beautification products keeps mounting. Everything from soap to shampoo, toothpaste to Q-tips, cold medicine to deodorant, eye drops to shaving cream, lie stacked on makeshift shelves by every bathroom in the hooches here at Camp Hurricane Point.

I thought it would be pretty bleak. I packed a whole bottle of shampoo to back up my supply of mini-bottles in my duffle anticipating sparse supplies. I needn’t have worried.

These guys get mail here like it’s going out of style. Twice already this week, the pile of boxes in the back of the hooch — Rob and I are staying with the staff noncommissioned officers of Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines — is getting embarrassingly large. It threatens to push some of the guys out of their bunks; they have to weave their way to bed through goodie packs in the middle of the night to hit the rack.

What these guys seem to like the most are are DVDs and food. They brew up “artistic” (I call them downright sickening) concoctions of canned chili, Doritos and nacho cheese dip, for example. Maybe that’s a good way to bolster your immune system to withstand the germs that are flying around here, but I say it’ll be more likely to get you a one-way ticket to the battalion aid station. Let me just say, the air around here isn’t very “fresh” when the guys wolf down a hot-pot full of this stuff.

And since it’s Christmas time, there’s a lot of candy floating around. Folks, remember: a lot of these Marines are young … like “wig-out sugar high” young. But the older guys are not immune. There’s plenty of late-night Star Wars marathons after polishing off a bag of Milky Way Darks.