War Games

Lord knows they could use some. According to The Stars and Stripes, a third of U.S. troops in Iraq say their morale is low. Since the war began in March, 10 soldiers have committed suicide and another 15 deaths are being investigated as possible suicides.

Hopelessness comes with this kind of conflict: You can't quite figure out why it started and can't quite figure out how it can end, but guys are getting sent home in body bags in between. More American soldiers have been killed since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1 than died in the war itself. Most of the 101st were supposed to leave Iraq by September. Now it's looking like January at the earliest.

That's why if you built it, they would come and hang around. Guys like specialist Ronald Hancock of Alpha Company, who doesn't play baseball but spends his downtime at the field keeping score. "It gives me something to do," he says. "It keeps my mind off the fact that we're never going home."

"It's so fun to fly back to our airfield in the evening and see the ball field lit up with guys running the bases," says Capt. Hunter Marshall. "Surreal."

And they don't spend game days at their cribs, kickin' it with their peeps, then bouncin' to the park in their Escalades. Most of them spend their day gassing Chinooks and Apaches and Black Hawks, keeping the trucks rolling and burning out latrines.

They can play only four nights a week, so they always do—sometimes until 1 a.m. But instead of New York City cops providing security, they have infantry posted on all sides, which is what you need in a war with no front lines against an enemy who doesn't care about saving his own flesh, only splattering yours.

"So far," says Johnson, "we've been lucky enough not to have to call a game because of an enemy attack."

But don't all those lights make these guys a well-lit bull's-eye? "It does make us a little nervous," says Capt. Adam Kamann, "but we're all too engrossed in the game to worry about all the what-if."

And that's how much these guys need this field, this game, this break: getting blown to St. Peter qualifies as a what-if.

Anyway, when Yankee Stadium P.A. announcer Bob Sheppard asks the crowd before the seventh-inning stretch to remember our servicemen and women around the globe, at least you know who he's talking about. Guys like this—homesick, sandsick, death-sick Americans who would give anything right now just to be waved home.