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pecunium18 April: There is an army truism that a foxhole is never finished, and the same seems true of camps like this. None of us expects to be here long, but the improvements are already underway. We have a shower, of sorts, and our own latrine.
The MPs have brought up their field kitchen, and we can eat there. They have also been improving the latrines they built before we got here. Clotheslines appeared yesterday. Mail has started to arrive (I got a letter, which I was loathe to open. Until I open them they are pregnant with wonder. I want to save that. After I open them I read them, repeatedly).
But we know, not just because we have been told; but in our bones, that we will not be staying here. The Combat Service Support units (there are three categories of unit, Combat {Line}, Combat Support {CS}, and Combat Service Support {CSS} I'm in a CS unit) are not here, are not scheduled to be here anytime soon. Which means we are on our own for comforts. When we leave, anything we've built we be abandoned, or turned over to some new unit. Then we can do it all over again at the next place.
We will get pretty good at making shift in the construction of showers and latrines and laundries. Nothing is permanent, and the only things one cares about are those one can carry.
We can hear the war. Not often, but sometimes. Yesterday afternoon had a loud explosion. I turned, so I could see if I needed to run for cover, and saw a billow of smoke. The assumption is the engineers were clearing something, but we'll never know.
Convoys are still being shot at. We can see pillars of smoke in the distance, and the smell of burning drifts on the wind. Not always the smell of the latrine detail, or the trash pits, but of someplace more distant.
The only aircraft we see, or have seen; for the past month, are military. In Kuwait it was Jaguars heading north, two or four; one at a time, in five minute intervals. Here it is choppers, Blackhawks mostly. Some are Dustoffs (Medical Evacuation. They gained the name Dustoff from a pilot in Vietnam who used it as a call-sign and refused to refuse to make landings to haul out the wounded, no matter how hot the Landing Zone) because we have a Combat Support Hospital; and a M*A*S*H})or Chinooks, as well as the occasional Apache flight.
But we seem even more unworried than we were three days ago. I don't know why. We are even closer the front than we were, but we carry less gear (MOPP 0, mask carried, JLIS within 10 minutes). Our ammo and weapons are racked (same reason as before, the MPs will protect us from the prisoners).
The closer we get to the front the more this feels like a training exercise, and less like a war is supposed to feel.
But we have some of the attitudes one would expect. We all have a sense of how privileged the folks in the rear are (even as we know, because we bitched too,how rough they think they have it). We long for mail, better chow (what we will eat when we go home is a popular topic of conversation. I must have at least a dozen menus/restaurants in mind) cooler days; and warmer nights, less dust, hot water, &c, &c.
As well we have a greater disregard for the lack of these things. Fatalism, I suppose. We don't have them, and won't get most of them (better chow and mail are about the only things we can expect, and those will come and go) so why complain? Which we don't. We gripe about things (a lack of prisoners, mostly) but for that list we don't gripe, we wish.
The conditions here are grinding. Not because it is terrible, but because it the same. Everywhere are berms (this was some sort of petroleum storage facility, and the tanks on the other side of our northern berm stink of spoiled diesel) and sand and not much else.
The sunsets are lavender, slow and milky-smooth. The stars are brilliant, Draco and Gemini, Leo and Virgo. Orion in the early evening, and Scorpio rising at my feet when I drift to sleep. One morning I saw a baby lizard, maybe three weeks out of the egg. I flipped my sleeping bag up for the day, (so it shan't blow away if the wind should rise) and there he was.
That was far more pleasant than the evening I got back to my cot and found a scorpion on my JLIS bag. I don't know how long I walked with that thing on my back, a few inches from my swinging arms. He was angry, arms out, tiny little claws spread and his tail up, tracking me. I was in shock. That small thing (about the size of my thumb) was deadly. In those ten minutes I was walking I was probably closer to death than I've been in the five weeks the war has been going on.
Camping is a swell hobby; it makes a difficult way to live. When the winds blow, they make my sleeping bag flap (being from S. Calif., and familiar with the Santa Ana, I sleep through this but many cannot). When the dust blows, I breathe it, feel it, eat it on my food, taste it on my lips). When the rain comes, I have to rouse enough to protect what might be damaged.
And the rhythm of my days is hard. No single one of them is too great a trial, in fact they are easy. What passes for work is rarely more than two hours of research. I give a briefing and I make my starlit way to bed.
If only one day were distinguishable from the next. If only there were some sense of time passing. If only there was some rhythm other than rise, eat, work sleep; each day slipping into another and no sense of time really passing. It is the life of Sisyphus.
To add insult to this injury there is very little to do. The prisoners we get are mostly tomato farmers, or some other local who had the misfortune to awaken the smallest spark of suspicion in an MP. Which is not to slight our MPs, they
do great work (Guardsmen from Arizona, we get along) but our MPs are not making the arrests.
So we play cards, we do pull-ups, we talk, we sleep, we read. Usually we have no prisoners, then we get 30-80, of whom, maybe, half-a-dozen are worth the
effort of talking to.
Each shift-change we leave, to sleep, and awaken, knowing that the next day will repeat the last, like mice on a wheel.
The MPs have brought up their field kitchen, and we can eat there. They have also been improving the latrines they built before we got here. Clotheslines appeared yesterday. Mail has started to arrive (I got a letter, which I was loathe to open. Until I open them they are pregnant with wonder. I want to save that. After I open them I read them, repeatedly).
But we know, not just because we have been told; but in our bones, that we will not be staying here. The Combat Service Support units (there are three categories of unit, Combat {Line}, Combat Support {CS}, and Combat Service Support {CSS} I'm in a CS unit) are not here, are not scheduled to be here anytime soon. Which means we are on our own for comforts. When we leave, anything we've built we be abandoned, or turned over to some new unit. Then we can do it all over again at the next place.
We will get pretty good at making shift in the construction of showers and latrines and laundries. Nothing is permanent, and the only things one cares about are those one can carry.
We can hear the war. Not often, but sometimes. Yesterday afternoon had a loud explosion. I turned, so I could see if I needed to run for cover, and saw a billow of smoke. The assumption is the engineers were clearing something, but we'll never know.
Convoys are still being shot at. We can see pillars of smoke in the distance, and the smell of burning drifts on the wind. Not always the smell of the latrine detail, or the trash pits, but of someplace more distant.
The only aircraft we see, or have seen; for the past month, are military. In Kuwait it was Jaguars heading north, two or four; one at a time, in five minute intervals. Here it is choppers, Blackhawks mostly. Some are Dustoffs (Medical Evacuation. They gained the name Dustoff from a pilot in Vietnam who used it as a call-sign and refused to refuse to make landings to haul out the wounded, no matter how hot the Landing Zone) because we have a Combat Support Hospital; and a M*A*S*H})or Chinooks, as well as the occasional Apache flight.
But we seem even more unworried than we were three days ago. I don't know why. We are even closer the front than we were, but we carry less gear (MOPP 0, mask carried, JLIS within 10 minutes). Our ammo and weapons are racked (same reason as before, the MPs will protect us from the prisoners).
The closer we get to the front the more this feels like a training exercise, and less like a war is supposed to feel.
But we have some of the attitudes one would expect. We all have a sense of how privileged the folks in the rear are (even as we know, because we bitched too,how rough they think they have it). We long for mail, better chow (what we will eat when we go home is a popular topic of conversation. I must have at least a dozen menus/restaurants in mind) cooler days; and warmer nights, less dust, hot water, &c, &c.
As well we have a greater disregard for the lack of these things. Fatalism, I suppose. We don't have them, and won't get most of them (better chow and mail are about the only things we can expect, and those will come and go) so why complain? Which we don't. We gripe about things (a lack of prisoners, mostly) but for that list we don't gripe, we wish.
The conditions here are grinding. Not because it is terrible, but because it the same. Everywhere are berms (this was some sort of petroleum storage facility, and the tanks on the other side of our northern berm stink of spoiled diesel) and sand and not much else.
The sunsets are lavender, slow and milky-smooth. The stars are brilliant, Draco and Gemini, Leo and Virgo. Orion in the early evening, and Scorpio rising at my feet when I drift to sleep. One morning I saw a baby lizard, maybe three weeks out of the egg. I flipped my sleeping bag up for the day, (so it shan't blow away if the wind should rise) and there he was.
That was far more pleasant than the evening I got back to my cot and found a scorpion on my JLIS bag. I don't know how long I walked with that thing on my back, a few inches from my swinging arms. He was angry, arms out, tiny little claws spread and his tail up, tracking me. I was in shock. That small thing (about the size of my thumb) was deadly. In those ten minutes I was walking I was probably closer to death than I've been in the five weeks the war has been going on.
Camping is a swell hobby; it makes a difficult way to live. When the winds blow, they make my sleeping bag flap (being from S. Calif., and familiar with the Santa Ana, I sleep through this but many cannot). When the dust blows, I breathe it, feel it, eat it on my food, taste it on my lips). When the rain comes, I have to rouse enough to protect what might be damaged.
And the rhythm of my days is hard. No single one of them is too great a trial, in fact they are easy. What passes for work is rarely more than two hours of research. I give a briefing and I make my starlit way to bed.
If only one day were distinguishable from the next. If only there were some sense of time passing. If only there was some rhythm other than rise, eat, work sleep; each day slipping into another and no sense of time really passing. It is the life of Sisyphus.
To add insult to this injury there is very little to do. The prisoners we get are mostly tomato farmers, or some other local who had the misfortune to awaken the smallest spark of suspicion in an MP. Which is not to slight our MPs, they
do great work (Guardsmen from Arizona, we get along) but our MPs are not making the arrests.
So we play cards, we do pull-ups, we talk, we sleep, we read. Usually we have no prisoners, then we get 30-80, of whom, maybe, half-a-dozen are worth the
effort of talking to.
Each shift-change we leave, to sleep, and awaken, knowing that the next day will repeat the last, like mice on a wheel.
