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If you didn't know, I used to be in the army. This is me 13 years ago while I was deployed to Iraq 👇
Don't be offended by my left hand. The temperature was a blazing 120 degrees that day, and my photos from back then are limited.
When this picture was taken, I had just discovered a creepy locked door in the far back of my unit's operations building. The door happened to be right next to my desk, where I worked every day.
I spent a little over a week trying to find the door's key, with no luck. It didn't help that the building was a total labyrinth, either. I must have gotten lost every day for three weeks after arriving.
I initially gave up on my quest to figure out what was behind that door.
The creepy door is to the right of this photo 👉
But then, weird things started happening.
One day, a cakey-brown dirt blew out from under the mysterious door as I was working. It was odd because the dirt didn't match the reddish sand on the base. Also, I saw it blow out from under the door, meaning that a draft was coming from the other side. I verified this by running my hand around the door's seams. It was warm to the touch.
Soon after, I searched my labyrinth office building for the opposite side of the creepy door but found nothing. Only a hallway and refrigerator stocked with bottled water. No door.
I briefly wondered where I was.
A real mural of Stephen Colbert in Iraq. A rocket destroyed it about 8 months after I'd arrived.
In the middle of a war zone in Iraq, I had stumbled upon a mystery that felt like a complete fantasy.
So, naturally, I did what anyone would do in this situation: I announced to everyone that "the door to Narnia" was in my office. No one could prove me wrong or open the door.
The creepy, drafty, dirty door remained a mystery until my final month in Iraq.
After a week of power outages (during the middle of summer, I might add), the internet in the operations building bit the dust. It turns out that "computer-based warriors" like me can't work without internet. So, I left my office for an extended lunch while IT sorted it out.
When I returned, the mysterious locked door to Narnia in Iraq was wide open.
Inside, three soldiers stood around a server tower connected to a screen and keyboard.
(FYI, I have no picture of this. Mainly because taking photographs of military servers is heavily frowned upon…and illegal.)
I saw one soldier had tracked a dark brown mud through a door opposite my office. It matched the color of the dirt I'd seen months earlier. Later, I discovered the out-of-place dirt came from the garden courtyard around the officers' quarters. Also, my investigation of the entire building (or labyrinth) had been way off. The other side of my office was in a completely different spot than I'd estimated.
I was a little disappointed after learning the truth of the door, to be honest. The mystery was solved, but my fantasy of Narnia existing next to my desk was forever gone. I was happy about one thing, though.
Iraq was a tough place to live. But at least I'd had a fun mini-adventure while making my friends laugh whenever I mentioned "Narnia" in our conversations.
That's what imagination is for, so I use it whenever I can. I hope you do as well.
PS. Here's one last photo for the road—my bed in Iraq.
Yes, those are Super Mario Kart bed sheets 😉