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After finishing the Convoy Operations Course in 29 Palms, our detachment headed back to my new home: Area 43, also known as Las Pulgas ("the fleas"). Located approximately halfway down Camp Pendleton on its north-south axis, Pulgas is the home of the 11th Marine Artillery Regiment--The Cannon Cockers. The regiment breaks down into batteries, and my unit, Civil Affairs, is attached to Headquarters Battery.

Before heading to 29 Palms, I had left everything I brought in my car, which I parked in the Headquarters Battery parking lot. We turned left on the first road past the baseball diamond/soccer field and I let out a long-held breath: the old Buick was where I left it and appeared intact. Petty theft is not unheard of on base, especially with vehicles loaded to the gills with military paraphernalia.

The convoy pulled onto the parade deck (a big concrete tarmac with metal bleachers on one end) parallel to the Civil Affairs building and we offloaded our gear. Being a Saturday, we could not turn in the vehicles so they were staged in a dirt lot several hundred meters down the road. We also had to take our radios and turn them once they were deemed suitably clean. After everything was completed to our leadership's satisfaction, we were let go and told to be back "on deck" and ready to train on Monday at 0630.

I had one of the Marines show me where the junior enlisted (Sergeant and below) slept, and he directed me to the Duty NCO, a sort of on-call Marine who takes care of problems during the evenings and weekends. She gave me the key to a temporary room used for newbies like myself and a rough sketch of how to get there. Despite my recent work with map reading, navigation, and GPS, I found myself lost in a series of small quadrangles and spent a full twenty minutes finding the room.

A flickering bulb greeted me when I flipped on the light switch. Dusty wall lockers, incomplete bed frames, and a small army of detached lamp shades filled what little space existed. I dropped my stuff off and wandered around Pulgas to get some food and a better sense of the place.

Immediately outside my barracks to the west is the Johnson Mess Hall, named after an old Sergeant Major from WWII. A tiny hill sits behind, crowned with the enlisted club and gym. To the southwest is the PX and parade deck along with most of the regimental headquarter buildings. Further on lies the Chapel, a small but clean white building occupying the highest point in camp.

Radiating out from the center of the base are supply, the armory, a tiny post office, and countless non-descript buildings of various uses--administrative, tactical, and so on. A new barracks is being built just north of my housing complex, and it promises the latest and greatest for the Marines of 2012 and onward.

Several sports fields lie on the eastern portion of the camp near the main access road. Groups of pull-up bars sprout like metal weeds from almost every bare patch of ground. I stopped at the the edge of the camp and shivered suddenly. A cold breeze pushed me back to my barracks room, where I continued reading Craig Mullaney's "A Soldier's Education" and breathed the stale air of my temporary quarters.

Afternoon dissolved into a cold night as I listened to the sounds of young men preparing for a night out with their buddies. Music, bravado, and alcohol flowed all around me and I smiled at its familiarity. Almost like being at Stanford, except the testosterone's about fifteen times higher. I drifted off the sleep around eleven, the barracks finally abandoned by my neighbors in search of the elusively memorably night. I slept soundly, my roots digging tentatively into this new home.