JPG

After a few months in Iraq, we were rewarded with a partial day off each week. On one such fateful day, my friend Joanne and I discovered a couple of lounge chairs at the back of the PX. They were horribly overpriced as most things there were, but we couldn’t let such a rare find pass us by.

We were anything but stereotypical females in this environment. She was a mechanic and I was a gunner. We both abhorred being categorized by anything even remotely related to our gender, but every subsequent Sunday thereafter, we vowed to celebrate every girly cliché that we could possibly think of.

We laid out on the roof in our newfound chairs, read fashion magazines, and worked on our tans. We did our nails and sipped juice cocktails concocted from anything we could find in the chow hall. We imagined ourselves by the ocean and talked about life as if the war had never started.

Our imagined mini-vacations were interrupted only by the occasional sand storm or the MEDEVAC flights that we prayed would never come.

For those few hours each week, we were anywhere but the desolate dustbowl we both called home. We were human again. We were real.

Two years later I finally left Iraq and with it my treasured lounge chair, hopeful that another Soldier might stumble upon it and find their very own desert oasis, just as I had.

This image documents my last visit to the rooftop refuge that had become my only escape from what was happening around me. Hours later I would step onto a plane, finally headed home.