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Taji Saturday night — the joint is jumpin’

Camp Taji, Iraq — April 8, 2006

War is hell.

Unless you’re at this camp north of Baghdad on a Saturday night.

On bulletin boards everywhere, flyers shout out to the thousands of soldiers who live here announcing all types of events, including poetry and open mike night, poker, yoga, Bible study, ping pong, dominoes, country line dancing, salsa lessons and bench press competitions, to name a few.

We chose three we thought we could make before the night was over, but we only made it to two.

First we stopped in at one of the gyms where there was a Jiu Jitsu class going on. A group of about 16 soldiers, men and women, almost all of them from a unit of mechanics who work on Humvees and trucks, were pummeling each other on a set of mats in a corner of the gym.

Capt. Anthony Debelak, an intelligence officer and level three Army combatives instructor, and Sgt. Mario Gonzalez, a military police and wrestling coach back in the states, guided the timed fights and taught the group the kind of moves they signed up to learn.

The “wrenches,” as the mechanics were referred to affectionately by one of the soldiers, grappled aggressively on the mats and learned how to choke each other and break one another’s arms with their bare hands.

It looked like more of a workout than I would have expected and the soldiers were clearly having a great time doing it.

On the other side of the gym, treadmills rolled, elliptical machines glided and bicycles spun. A boxer listened to his music on earphones as he swatted a punching bag and a group of four soldiers crunched sit-ups, push-ups and leg lifts.

A couple of blocks away, at the Army’s MWR — morale, welfare and recreation — center, we approached what I thought would be a routine salsa lesson with a few couples stepping on each other’s feet.

I was wrong.

It turned out to be a throbbing party that rivaled any scene in Dirty Dancing, minus the revealing clothes. I don’t think I was prepared for the volume of raw fun being had by a huge group of soldiers — officers and enlisted — who packed a room half the size of a basketball court.

Nobody’s allowed to wear civilian clothes in the war zone, so there were no women in glittery spiked heels and skimpy dresses or men in tight pants with open shirts revealing gold chains. No perfume. No cologne. No hairspray.

Everybody had a weapon, but there was no alcohol. People were chugging water and near-beer, their rifles lined up along the walls or on the floor at the outside of the dance floor.

The lights were soft, the music loud and the room temperature equatorial.

Wearing their uniforms and boots or their workout clothes with reflective safety belts, dancers swirled, gyrated and shook provocatively while dozens more soldiers stood three-deep at the edges.

“Watch out, I know your first sergeant,” the DJ bellowed over the music at one point, teasing the dancers about some of their more lurid grinding moves. There must have been at least one first sergeant there anyway.

The crowd was stacked with Latinos, to be sure, but the dance fever was cross-cultural. Because this is a camp where a lot of logistics and support units are based, there were plenty of women, but definitely more men.

One Cuban-Mexican couple I saw dancing right in front of where I was standing were so smoking hot together I couldn’t take my eyes off them. There were a dozen more couples tearing it up toward the middle of the floor, soaked with sweat, smiling and completely lost in the moment.

The last two numbers the DJ played were Reggaeton “songs” which spun the dancing into another orbit of suggestiveness. I was told later by a soldier who occasionally goes to the salsa parties that they’ve cut down on the number of Reggaeton songs because the sight of the female soldiers’ moves was causing too much heat and people were pushing each other around.

Apparently letting off steam is encouraged, but not too much steam.

At 11 p.m. the music stopped, the lights came up and rifles were claimed before everyone walked out into the cool night. “See you next Saturday,” the DJ said.

The crowd overflowed into the street in front of the MWR center and the soldiers headed out on foot and in up-armored military vehicles to get the same thing any late-night group of dancers gets after a good workout — food.

Like I said, war is hell, unless you’re lucky enough to be at Camp Taji on a Saturday night.