For Soldiers Like Me, Cigarettes and War Are Inseparable

Joe Raedle / Getty Images From blackmarket $40-a-pack Marlboros to free smokes bummed at car-bomb checkpoints, nicotine is a soldier’s best friend—and addictive in a way a civilian can never understand.

The last time I quit smoking was years ago, back when I was government property.

For whatever reason, I’d enlisted in the military, and when I arrived at Fort Benning, I was immediately informed that tobacco products of any kind were absolutely prohibited during basic training. While standing in formation, our drill sergeant told us the reason we couldn’t smoke was because our “asses” all now belonged to the government, and so smoking would be tantamount to “destroying government property.”

I thought I’d smoked a lot before I joined the Army, but I hadn’t smoked at all. Unlike what you see in the recruiting commercials, most of wartime is spent doing nothing except waiting to be told by someone what to do. And sometimes that could take hours, and during those hours you’d sit and smoke and joke with your fellow soldiers, and if you didn’t have any smokes you’d bum 'em off someone who did.

You’d ask the Iraqi for a cigarette, and these nice Iraqi people would give you their entire pack.

One soldier in my platoon who’d already been in the military for a couple of years brought two cartons of cigarettes to JRTC, and the guy didn’t even smoke. Claimed he’d never smoked a cigarette in his life. But he knew that after a few days out in the field, once soldiers started running out of smokes, they’d pay anything for them, and when that happened, he’d open up shop (his rucksack) and sell them to his nic-fitting colleagues for $40 a pack.

Once we got to Iraq, one of our first missions was in the infamous Sunni Triangle. It was only supposed to last two or three days, but of course it went on for nearly two weeks. After day three or four, everybody in my platoon started running out of cigarettes, and all the smokers began turning into crack addicts, like they’d almost gotten to the point of offering oral sex for a cigarette. A guy in my squad told us all not to worry because his sister was sending him a care package with a full carton of smokes, and as soon as it got there, he’d share the wealth and we’d all have nicotine. We waited anxiously.

But in the meantime, we were out in the field, where it was highly unlikely that we would have a mail call. Thus, we were all in a world of shit, so we improvised: We began acquiring our smokes when we did Traffic Control Points.

TCP’s are kind of like those damn sobriety checkpoints we have here in America, but instead of looking for drunks or stoners with nickel bags stashed in the glove box, we were looking for terrorists and praying that the car ain’t a goddamn car bomb.