The Energy Crisis

I don't usually go for energy drinks, but I recently discovered one that is amazing: NOS Fruit Punch. It doesn't have that syrup/wet garbage taste that Red Bull and other drinks have, and it actually gets you wired without the debilitating crash at the end. I suggest you all go out, buy one, and shotgun it right there in the store. I'm having one right now, in fact.

It's not quite the best energy jolting substance I've ever had, though. Near the end of the deployment an Army medic gave me some energy gum, and I have not had anything like it before or since. There were no ingredients on the blank, gray packaging, so for all I know it could've been chewable meth. He said to wait to chew it until I really needed it. I didn't use it until we were on this mission we did occasionally where we'd help the Iraqi Army escort about 200 fuel tankers from western Ramadi to northern Iraq and back. It always happened overnight, and no matter how hard you tried to adjust your sleep schedule, something always came up to prevent you from getting enough sleep beforehand.

Early on we did the mission in legs, stopping on a base north of Baghdad and another base in the north to sleep during daylight, but as the security situation in Anbar province improved, the Iraqis decided to skip the Baghdad rest stop. We'd get going through Anbar in the daytime but still go through the bad places at night. The Americans definitely got the shaft on that one, because everyone in our trucks had to stay awake to do a job. In our humvee, we'd do rotations: one person would drive, another person would man the machine gun in the turret, another would monitor the convoy net on the radio, and another (usually our captain) would control the aircraft. Meanwhile, the only person awake in the Iraqi vehicles was the driver -- and even then we'd sometimes see their trucks easing off the road and into the desert as the driver fell asleep. The other soldiers would be sprawled out inside the truck, no helmets, boots off, snoozing. And their officers would wonder why when the Iraqi trucks hit IEDs, everyone inside died.

Iraqi Police in Ramadi. As you can see, safety is a top priority.

Anyway, I waited until one of those missions to use the gum. I was at the point where I could barely even keep my eyes open, and as soon as I bit into the gum, it was like a switch flipped. A jolt of magic rushed through my veins. I don't know if it was partly psychological, but I was wide awake and jittery until the end of the mission. I doubt I could find it even if I looked for it, but I would love to have some more of that stuff.