Sgt. Victor Flores’ day usually begins with an early morning jog or a trip to the gym to lift free weights. He rarely sits down for breakfast, usually just grabbing an energy bar on his way to the hangar where he maintains the Blackhawk helicopters of his unit in the 2-224th Aviation Battalion of the Army National Guard. By catching problems and sending the aircraft to the right place, Flores can get a damaged Blackhawk back up in the air within hours. He spends 12 hours a day working this mission.
Flores is stationed at the huge Al Asad Marine base in the sandy desert of northern Iraq. When asked about recent temperatures, the number 116 popped into his head .
“Every once in a while we get lucky and get to go home early,” Flores said in a phone interview. “We can just pretty much hit the coffee shop up and call it a day. We have the famous Green Bean coffee shop. That’s the key to our happiness.” He described the Green Bean’s mango smoothie as “something I can’t personally savor in the chow hall. A touch of home.”
Flores’ world is strictly bounded. His mission gives him little time to stray from the path between his bed, the gym, the chow hall and the production control shop where he works. But even if he had time to travel, he is sealed from the country where he lives almost as surely as most Iraqis are sealed off his base. “None whatsoever,” is how Flores describes his contact with Iraqis. “ We have a few members of the unit that do go out of the wire, but personally I’ve been lucky to stay, for the most part, within the wire.” For soldiers who rarely leave the world inside the wire, geographical proximity can become an abstraction. “The fact that I’m not dealing with the Iraqi people on a day to day basis, that fact just makes it feel like I am on a regular army base just anywhere in the desert somewhere,” he added. But the war dances across the wire. “It’s real. It’s real. It’s real,” Flores said later in the conversation. “And there’s no better place to find that out than when you’re actually boots on ground. You hear the movement in the air.”
FLORES’ LIFE is circumscribed by the term of his deployment as well as the razor wire that rings the base. “It’s no northern Virginia,” he said. “It’s no Alexandria. Believe it or not I miss traffic. I wish I was stuck in traffic because I know eventually it will end and I’ll be able to meet up with my girlfriend and go out with my parents and have a good time. You miss the things you complain about back home.”
“Losing freedom is the worst part of being deployed out here,” he added later. “I don’t have my keys, I don’t have my wallet. I do have my guitar out here and that makes it a lot easier. The guitar helps keep me sane to a certain extent.”
Flores has been attending Good Shepherd Catholic Church since 1991. He was an altar boy, then began playing guitar and piano during services and finally began coordinating and directing the church’s Hispanic community choirs. When he plays guitar in Al Asad, the steel lines at his fingertips plug Flores and the soldiers who gather around him directly into the world outside the wire. The connection is always analog and crystal clear. “I have a hard time pleasing people here with a lot of choir hymns and Latin songs,” he said. “[It’s] a little different audience than I have back home. They just kind of appreciate the tunes. They don’t understand what I’m singing.”
The other cables that connect Flores and his comrades to life outside the wire stream encoded information. When they arrived in Iraq in January, Flores and his unit were housed in communal tents. Now he shares a room with only four other soldiers and has been able to screen off the area around his bed. But the most profound luxury of the quarters are not the privacy they afford. The room has Internet access. “I think that’s the touch. The one touch we were missing to make it just like home,” Flores said. “It’s not home. But Internet connects me to the world, so I have no complaints. It is slow as heck though.”
One place Flores’ connects is a part of the world a few hundred miles away. There’s another Sgt. Flores in Iraq,” he explained. His sister Blanca is serving in the Army Reserve. “She joined after I did, but she beat me to the sand.” Sgt. Blanca Flores is stationed in Balad, another large base north of Baghdad . The siblings communicate with one another every day, by phone or email. A few weeks ago, Victor Flores visited Balad for an eye exam. His sister, who helps people on and off the base, happened to be the person to welcome him at the gate. With the opportunity to spend a day together, Blanca Flores took her big brother to the pool and the movie theatre. “We of course had some smoothies together,” Victor Flores said, “and to top it off she got me a pedicure. It was a nice day. That’s a nice sister.” He acknowledged his visit occurred only through happenstance and a bit of luck, “connecting with loved ones is probably not on the top ten of what we can do out here.”
Flores is the ninth of 12 Flores children. His family emigrated to Maryland from El Salvador in 1983, and he grew up in Fort Washington before moving to Route 1. His brother, Nelson Flores (number 10) said the whole family is grateful for their ability to email numbers nine and 11, and appreciative of the fact that other wartime families never had the opportunity. “It’s a blessing to be able to have that close contact. To be able to say, ‘Hey how are you doing?’ on a daily basis. What can I say, it’s hard knowing that they’re there, that they don’t have the comfort of things at their fingertips.”
“It kind of makes you value things more,” Nelson Flores added.
VICTOR FLORES knew before he left that the Internet had the potential to change the lives of American soldiers. He and another member of his unit decided to help this change happen. “We didn’t ask the chain of command. We said let’s do it.” The result has been www.tanboots.com, a website designed to give families at home access to their loved ones within the wire. Flores and his collaborators use a digital camcorder to give soldiers on the base a chance to send greetings home to their families. “People jump at the opportunity,” he said. In his limited spare time, Flores edits the videos into digestible 20 second-or-so gulps and uploads them onto the site. The soldiers email their families and tell them to visit. Flores estimates that so far “about 200 families have been touched by this site.”
Flores interrupted his general studies program at Northern Virginia Community College to go to Iraq. “Quite frankly,” he said. “I have no idea where I’m headed.” He joined the National Guard before September 11. “I wouldn’t call it a patriotic move even though I did want to help. I wanted to make a move. I wanted exposure. I wanted to serve. I wanted to serve the country that embraced me. And I enjoy it.”
Flores’ service to his comrades and the people that love them, what he described as “being able to serve the neighborhood,” has given him some insight into his next step. “Being out here, it enlightens you. Shows you where you want to head,” he said. For Americans back home looking for their own direction, and wondering what their place is in an America at war, Flores offered this advice. “Find a place where you can serve your country, be it the firehouse, be it to the hospital where you can volunteer, be it the police force. Find a way to serve.”
As for himself, Flores said, “Helping people is the route I want to take. There’s no high compared to that.” Putting Blackbirds in the air 12 hours a day, Flores often cannot update his site for weeks at time. He said that when he gets home, he hopes to spend one day a week uploading new faces onto the site, and expanding the service to a two-way communication between families and soldiers. “ When I get home I hope to blow this thing up,” he said. “Right now it’s just a work in progress. I can only do so much from the desert.”