Sweat drips from every pore on my body. For the last two hours I’ve been reorganizing this full-tracked cargo carrier at the barking order of my sergeant. He’s a towering black man, with more expletives directed at me than I’ve ever heard him utter. Normally he’s pretty quiet and nice, but right now he’s neither one, as he’s punishing me, in the hot Iraqi desert, for stealing.

I was definitely guilty and I’d probably take some people down along with me. That’s probably why my sergeant was so livid.

It started when my company went on a mission in western Iraq, leaving about five soldiers, myself included, to help the mechanics fix our broken vehicles.

After about a week of not receiving new parts, most of us got rather restless. Without any major authority, things started to get more and more relaxed. People started to sleep in, choosing not to do our regularly scheduled morning exercises, something that had never been a choice before.

We all became experts at Spades, Hearts and Poker. Games that we played all day, it seemed. Other pastimes included stealing food from the makeshift mess hall. That’s what eventually did me in.

Stealing is obviously wrong, but you have to remember that we were in the middle of the Iraqi desert, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, with nothing to do. It’s not like I could drive my cargo carrier to the nearest McDonalds drive-thru and get a milkshake if I felt the urge.

We’ve been eating lightweight field rations, called MREs (Meal Ready to Eat), for the last two months. To say they’re like eating gourmet would certainly be a stretch.

And these MREs weren’t always available. Therefore it’s easy to see the fascination we had when the makeshift mess hall started serving small boxes of cereal, waffles with jam, and Gatorade. It was like God had answered all our prayers. People started volunteering for kitchen duty.

On kitchen patrol, I found out that all the luxury items? were being kept in an unlocked shed. I shared my discovery with a couple of friends, and after everyone had gone to bed, we plundered.

We took everything we could get our hands on. We found black trash bags and basically looted the place. We went back to my cargo carrier, and sorted out our winnings.

My vehicle was the perfect place to store all the goods, because it had been used as the company’s primary haul asset for most of the war and only carried extra supplies that no one seemed to care for.

We repeated this night mission every four or five days, and felt like kings. Eventually the cooks started locking the shed, and we’d have to go through the window instead.

Nothing could stop us.

Then out of nowhere, my company commander comes down for a surprise inspection. They found everything, the cereal, waffles, tubes of jam and the Gatorade.

The punishment was stiff. I was uncovered as the chow-hall thief. I was forced to do kitchen duty for what seemed like half a century, and was subject to countless inspections. Because most of the battalion was still doing missions, the whole thing seemed to blow over rather quickly.

But I learned my lesson. Don’t steal.