"Hey guys, can you believe this?" he yelled to his fellow soldiers inside the Humvee, just before snapping a few photos and driving off. "Hockey in Iraq. Now I've seen everything."

There is basketball for soldiers in Iraq, college courses for soldiers in Iraq, even salsa dancing lessons for soldiers in Iraq. But roller hockey for soldiers in Iraq must be among the rarest recreational activities of all.

At Warhorse, though, near the city of Baquba, about 60 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, hockey has become a nightly ritual.

Soldiers from Company B of the 203rd Forward Support Battalion, 3d Infantry Division, gather at 7 p.m. to lace up their inline skates and play hockey on an area of concrete separated from the base's helipad by blast walls.

The soldiers' 16 sets of inline skates and 13 hockey sticks were donated by a sporting goods stores in Wisconsin. The single net they use was fashioned with tent poles they welded together, and netting normally used as a sun barrier.

Some soldiers had skated before. Some had played roller hockey before. Others, like Staff Sgt. Glennville Fox from Palatka, Fla., had done neither.

"I'm not very nimble, but this just helps me pass the time," he said after missing a shot on goal, losing his balance and falling to the ground face first, spread eagle.

On the other side of the goal, Spc. Eric Armstrong let out a belly laugh as he weaved around other players, an orange ball on the end of his stick. He shot and scored. Then the players promptly lost the ball in the darkness.

"While still in Kuwait, I joked that we'd be playing hockey here in a few months, but I was totally kidding," said Armstrong, 20, who is from Appleton, Wis., and has played hockey since he was 10. ``Now it's weird to play this here, because Iraqis have probably never even seen hockey, or ice, for that matter.

"But after a while, I couldn't watch another movie, couldn't play another video game," he said. "I needed hockey."

Armstrong and a few other players work security, escorting convoys down the perilous roads to and from Warhorse, an area rife with roadside bombs. Other times, Armstrong searches people entering the base, including injured Iraqis en route to the aid station.

"We search them even though they have cut-up legs and shot-off arms or flesh hanging off of them," he said. "People have been known to strap bombs to their legs even then, so we have to keep the base safe. Now you know why we use hockey to distract us from our day jobs."

Convoy security missions are just as stressful, but sometimes boring because there may be long waits at either end of the trips. Before his hockey equipment arrived, Armstrong said he often spent that down time dreaming about playing in the National Hockey League or trying to remember how it felt to dance across the ice with a hockey stick in his hand.

In other times of ennui, he found different ways to occupy his time. Once, he ran full speed at a giant roll of Bubble Wrap to see if he would bounce off. (He did.) He then had grand plans to leap from the top of his housing unit while bear-hugging that Bubble Wrap, but one of his non-commissioned officers put a stop to it.

Finally, after a few months in Iraq, he decided to ask his mother, Kris Armstrong, to buy 13 sets of inline skates, 13 hockey sticks and two sets of goalie equipment with the money he had saved while overseas. When she went to sporting goods stores to buy them, store managers agreed to donate more than $2,000 of equipment.

Kris Armstrong spent about $150 to send that gear to Iraq. The equipment arrived two weeks ago and was the best package from home that Armstrong could dream of, he said.

Since then, more and more soldiers have shown up to play. One night last week, before the game began, Armstrong quickly fixed the goal with duct tape. The night before, another soldier had trouble braking and skated through the metal frame. When Armstrong was finished, the group set out for nearly two hours of gliding and, in some cases, colliding.

"Hey, did you do this damage to me yesterday?" Sgt. Thomas Miller, 25, from Carmine, Ill., said to Armstrong, while pointing to a welt on his shin.

"Better me than some Iraqi," Armstrong said.