There's something particularly brutal about a war in which you never meet your enemy. At Balad military base in central Iraq -- the largest and most luxurious anywhere in the world -- the only contact with Iraqis is when "a group of Iraqi merchants arrives on base to sell pirated DVD's and knock-off Saddam Hussein memorabilia." Otherwise, they are simply unseen targets, according to an NPR report..
The vast majority of airmen will never leave the base.
When his family back home asks him what Iraq was like, Saunders says he's not really sure.
"The pictures we see are the same they see," [Major Jeremy] Saunders said. "So really, we don't know much more about it over here than they do over there."
At the base, the sounds of construction and the hum of generators seem to follow visitors everywhere. Seen from the sky at night, the base resembles Las Vegas: While the surrounding Iraqi villages get about 10 hours of electricity a day, the lights never go out at Balad Air Base.
