An overview of the Abu Ghraib prison the Mainers inherited.

The whole place was covered in trash and human feces. The soldiers were surrounded by the worst elements of human existence: pain, fear, hate, and garbage, endless garbage.

Detainees conduct their morning prayers.

Guard towers were cobbled together out of shipping containers and ingenuity.

Much of Ganci was located on top of an old landfill. Detainees could dig down through the dirt floors of their tents and find all manner of garbage that could be used to make weapons and even a radio.

One of many impact craters from insurgent indirect fire (a rocket or mortar).

This empty warehouse space would serve as the combat support hospital during the mass casualty events.

An old cell door in the courtyard became known as the Door to Hell. “If anywhere had the entrance to hell,” Kelly Thorndike said, “it was Abu Ghraib.”

Nearly every wall was decorated with smatterings of bullet and shrapnel craters, testament to what the Mainers and detainees alike endured.

Abu Ghraib was also home to stray cats. The Mainers adopted one of these and named it Hajji-Pussy. After Dizl saw that some of the KBR truckers had eaten a different cat, they made Hajji-Pussy a little collar that said “Please don’t eat.”

The Mainers hunted the plethora of rats that cohabited Abu Ghraib, competing to get the largest.

The yellow dots are confirmed points of impact, or where indirect fire like mortars and rockets landed and exploded. The purple dots are confirmed points of origin, or where the round was fired from. In the time it took the soldiers to figure out where the round had orginated from, the insurgents would have blended back into the civilian population.

Supply trucks that the 152nd brought with them to Iraq didn’t have sufficient armor. So, the Mainers “up-armored” their vehicles with steel plates acquired from Abu Ghraib. These “homemade” armored vehicles were not unique to Abu Ghraib. Units all over Iraq were ill equipped with unarmored or too lightly armored vehicles.

KBR fuel trucks burn after getting hit by an insurgent ambush. Resupplying Abu Ghraib became more and more difficult as the insurgency focused on the prison camp as the photos of the abuses there circulated the world stage.

A CH-47 Chinook helicopter lands carrying Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for his visit to Abu Ghraib.

Kelly “Dizl” Thorndike passes time during a moment of relative calm. Relaxation was almost impossible for the soldiers of the 152nd as mortars and rockets were nearly everyday occurrences.

Dizl and other soldiers from the 152nd at Fort Dix in New Jersey before they stepped off to the Middle East. Temperatures were in the single digits and they had no radios for the training event. Turns out, they wouldn’t have them for their deployment either.

Dizl and some of the other Lost Boys snap a photo in Kuwait just before stepping off to head to Iraq, where they would spend the next year at Abu Graib prison.