Desperately seeking booze in Iraq

One of the many evils war brings in its train, an evil we had thought long banished from our shores, is the scourge of prohibition. At least among our armed forces. This article by a civilian military employee is from the delightfully irreverent Modern Drunkard Magazine and discusses life on a dry (at least officially) military base in Iraq:

At work here are reasonable precautions – no one wants drunk teenagers manning .50-calibre machine guns – as well as unreasonable ones, such as the wickedly pious dry laws in Muslim host countries. But in practice the prohibition means exquisite torture for the fighting men and women who crave and deserve a stiff drink at day’s end. Making matters worse is the knowledge (repeated with envy as whispered lore among US troops) that in southern Iraq, British soldiers still get a modest ration of ale with their dinners, and the Italians near Nasiriyya can buy cases of beer from their PX. As for the Ukrainians and Poles manning bases south of Baghdad, suffice it to say that their cultures have blessed them with the ability to distill spirits out of the most meager of materials. Place those fine men in the desert with nothing but a palm tree, a folding shovel, and a thimble of sugar, and somehow they will be producing gallons per day of mid-grade vodka before the weekend is through.

What’s left for an American drunkard in Iraq to do? The answer, in short, is to arrange for smuggled liquor, then to pay extortionate prices once it arrives. For a 750ml bottle of Jack Daniel’s couriered in on a convoy, $50 is reasonable. The truckers who bring in the goods are frequently Turkish, and therefore teetotalling Muslims. But they see our desperation, and their pity transcends religion.

Occasionally we can make contact with Iraqi Christians living off the bases. The Christians, who make up a small fraction of Iraq’s population and tend to support the Coalition, swill whiskey as eagerly as any American, and they are proud to sell us hooch. The catch is that fundamentalist Muslim zealots have been firebombing their liquor stores in the cities. (For that reason I would like to imagine that with every defiant sip of Iraqi liquor I am striking a blow for freedom in this benighted country. But even I am not self-congratulatory enough to feel so ennobled by my own drinking.)