It’s difficult to work out the division of time exactly, but I reckon that for every hour spent in the field or in battle, there are 5 hours spent waiting for the order to go somewhere or do something. And these waiting hours are awful. They are tense, breathless, emotional and nerve shattering. After all, these could be your last few hours. So you need something to get your mind off the depressing thoughts. What better way to divert yourself than a little online gambling?

I am sitting on the end of a wooden bench in the corner of a torn old tent, supposedly resting and preparing myself for the next sally into enemy territory. Who can rest? Most of the guys are smoking themselves into an early grave. I log into the Silver Spanner, my favorite online casino and select craps. If the action outside is going to be noisy and violent, I will gamble to the same theme. But after 10 minutes of this I find I cannot concentrate enough to play a decent game. The betting in craps is complicated and I have other things to think about. I switch to slot machines where I don’t have to think about anything other than clicking the mouse. This is much more like battlefield online gambling. The reels spin, I feed in coins, click the “spin max” button and hope. 

In the distance I can hear a machine gun chattering away and very occasionally a loud bang as something bigger goes off. It’s all very unpleasant. No one really seems to know what’s going on. Men run in and out of the tent, and a couple crowd around my laptop but the slot machine in the online casino doesn’t hold their interest and they wander off. I play furiously, one ear tuned for the jackpot bell and the other for incoming artillery shells. The gambling in these circumstances is much like what’s going on outside. Lots of noise and nobody’s winning.

Posted on: March 11, 2008

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