He walked up quietly and asked what I was doing.
"Taking pictures," I said pointing to my camera setup and the memorial wall. He turned, as if to walk away, but instead started pointing at names. After touching nearly a dozen names he turned and walked back to me.
"I remember them in here," he points to his head.
"I hate that thing," he said pointing back at the wall, "It's obnoxious."
We were quiet for a minute, maybe five.
"It's 1:30 in the morning," he said.
"I wasn't keeping track."
"What's your name?"
We introduced ourselves.
"So, what do you think about all of this?" He asked, stretching his arm out like a prince showing his kingdom.
"What? You mean Warhorse or in general?"
"In general, I guess."
I started to speak, but stumbled over my words, realizing that I wasn't sure about any of it; the base, the war, Iraq or this trip.
I started over.
"Well, I certainly wasn't expecting clean showers, laundry service and air conditioning."
"Yeah. They didn't have all that stuff when I was first stationed here."
Bruce is now on his third deployment to Iraq and his second time at Warhorse. He's 24. He's my age.
"I was mad when I saw Pizza Hut and all that new stuff they put in," he pointed past the memorial.
Behind the memorial is a line of t-walls. Behind those walls is a Pizza Hut, a Green Beans coffee shop, a tailor, a barber and an AT&T calling center. Some nights they show movies on a large projector screen.
"Doesn't seem like war, does it?" I said.
"During my first deployment my squad and I spent two months in an apartment in Baghdad. The toilet didn't flush; you had to pour water down it. And when we first tried to take showers we thought the water was just rusty. After a few days we found out that our shit water was coming right back through the shower plumbing. We'd been showering in our own shit."
Bruce and I were now sitting at the base of the memorial. I could see silky threads running between the lens and the body of my camera. I turned my flashlight on and started tracing cracks in the concrete.
"Ewww, ants," I said, pointing to a small colony. I turned the flashlight off and then on again. "Sun down, sun up. I will give them more days than God ever intended. Eternal life!"
He laughed.
"You're like a kid," he said jokingly.
I looked at him, rather seriously, "Aren't we both?"
"Heh, I guess so."
Sitting below hundreds of dead soldier's names and controlling the sun in an insect's world, I thought about how this conversation would never take place back home.