Reality: Iraq is Hard Duty (part 2 of 4)

“Behold, the day of the LORD comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the earth a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it. For the stars of the heavens and their constellations will not give their light; the sun will be dark at its rising and the moon will not shed its light. I will punish the world for its evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; I will put an end to the pride of the arrogant, and lay low the haughtiness of the ruthless. I will make men more rare than fine gold and mankind than the gold of Ophir.

And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the splendor and pride of the Chaldeans, will be like Sodom and Gomorrah when God overthrew them. It will never be inhabited or dwelt in for all generations; no Arab will pitch his tent there, no shepherds will make their flocks lie down there. But wild beasts will lie down there, and it houses will be full of howling creatures; there ostriches will dwell, and there satyrs will dance. Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces; its time is close at hand and its days will not be prolonged.” (Isaiah 13:9-12, 19-22)
Exhaustion. Mind-numbing exhaustion. Up for thirty hours or more of loading and unloading trucks, driving truck, and that most quintessential of military activities: “standing by.” Sentence fragments. But then the zoned-out mind thinks in sentence fragments. Prowords, comm, truncated thoughts ala Orwell’s 1984. Wired awake, road hypnosis, mesmerized. The thought occurs to me that you could get almost anyone to do almost anything if you deny a basic need long enough – rest, freedom from pain, bathroom privileges, water, food, you-name-it. Just dangle that carrot in front of the donkey. But I don’t think on this long – thinking hurts. Being. Pure being.

My mind drifts on to what I put in my combat pack. I almost packed a stuffed ladybug that my daughter had sent me in an Operation Homefront box. It was either the ladybug or all my ammunition. The thought to leave some ammo at “home” and pack the animal was almost a rational one at the time; tired people don’t think straight. In the end every round I have squeezed its way into my pack. (As corny as it sounds, I had made a promise to a guy I don’t even know at Don Sommermeyer’s birthday party that I would never get an “I don’t give a care” attitude over here, and that was the tipping point for the ammo over the ladybug.) I bid the stuffed ladybug adieu and left it standing sentry over my gear at Camp Cupcake.

Stay awake. Have to stay awake. Yawns. Micro-tremor in the eyeballs. Pale skin. Bags under the eyes. The temperature never seems right when you’re at the brink of collapse. Twenty hours awake and on duty. Thirty hours awake and on duty. Forty hours awake and on duty. (Of course there are rules against all this but they can be waived in wartime.) Finally the head bob.
I know all the tricks. Keep pumping caffeine into your system. The military has this energy drink called Rip It. They also give you this espresso stuff called Shock – it comes in Mocha or Latte cans that look like automotive fluid containers. When this quits working you get your a-driver (assistant driver) to talk to you. Keep shifting in the seat. Keep moving your head around. Then you blast the air conditioning until you’re frozen (the windows don’t open on most tactical vehicles). Then you try pain, which is actually pretty effective – everything from pressing on nailbeds, rubbing my sternum, pinching myself hard, et cetera. After that you make up some bologna excuse for why the convoy has to stop – convoy commanders are loath to stop in “Indian Country” – and you get out and walk around the vehicle checking your cargo straps for ten minutes while Al Qaeda is supposedly zeroing in on you and your position. The remedy of last resort for head bobbing is this nasty chewing gum called “Stay Alert.” I cannot convey in words how disgusting this stuff is; it is absolutely enough to make a maggot retch. The longer you chew it, the more bitter it gets. It comes with a cheerful endorsement: PROVEN EFFECTIVE AND SAFE BY WALTER REED ARMY INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH. Great. The same people who brought us the anthrax vaccine are now in the gum business. I would have hated to be taking care of the monkeys the day they fed them this awful/offal stuff – thousands of hyper-energized, ticked-off lab primates simultaneously shoving their fingers down their throats. I must confess that when I’ve chewed Stay Alert my first instinct is always to look for a dead camel on the side of the road, hoping that if I could just chew on its moribund mohair fur and some desert lice, I could just possibly get the taste out of my mouth.

At some point in these marathon work stretches, my mind always wanders to a cousin of whom I have no memory: Allen Adams. I haven’t heard anyone speak his name in years – you know how it is with the names of those long dead, it is almost taboo/eerie to speak their names even when one is alone. Anyway, he tried driving from Nebraska to Wisconsin or some such thing and fell asleep at the wheel a few miles from home. He thought he could drive a few more miles but he died instead. I bet he was a good guy; I bet he THOUGHT he could make it. And I bet I’m no less human than he was. A big thing touted around here is that last month there were more non-combat deaths than combat-related deaths in Iraq. Awesome. The U.S. pushes people beyond human limits more often than the enemy kills us. Strange thing to brag about.

At last the outpost. Usually some forlorn spot in the desert although one time I did drive to one of Saddam’s old palaces. The opulence of the palace, contrasted with the squalor and poverty of the nearby cities (I am not allowed to name them but they are some of the most notorious names on the planet), makes one boil with righteous indignation. And then again the thought occurs to me that if most of the world walked through most of America they’d probably be indignant. In a philosophical tone I tell myself, “The despot is dead. Tried and executed. Why begrudge him this monument to his megalomania?”

But today it’s an outpost of the plywood and canvas variety. Time to bed down for the day like a vampire or some creature nocturnal anyway. There always seems to be a rodent-infested tent set aside for travelers to make up food at any hour. None of it really appeals but I force something down to accompany that mashed-up protein bar I squirreled away in a pocket. Rodents. I don’t like rodents. Besides being vectors of disease they attract snakes. Iraq has forty or so venomous snakes – asps, adders, cobras, who-knows-what’s. Supposedly two of the asps are so deadly that they won’t even send a Medevac if one of them bites you. (You’re already dead so why risk a helicopter crew’s lives?) I think in reality somebody would call for a helicopter anyway – no one out here has a PhD in zoology and reptile identification. I find a GWOT cot. Good. I hate the Vietnam ones that are still floating around – they have this metal bar that goes across the small of my back. I put my rifle beside me and then: Collapse – utter, total surrender to physiological reality.

You always seem to wake up a few hours later; you never seem to be able to get back to sleep. The reasons vary – air ops, heat, cold, millions of flies, tentmates, residual caffeine, a full bladder, a cough, who-knows-what. Today I wake up sweating to death and my sleeping bag sticking to me. The power’s been off for a couple hours and there is no air conditioning. I stare at the ceiling of the tent and all its holes letting the daylight in. Most of the holes are taped; the age and type of the tape makes for different colored holes. The effect is that of a planetarium. The red hole is Mars. The next is Betelgeuse. The one over there is the Morning Star. A landing helicopter swoops in so low and loud it feels as if it will land in the tent itself. My planetarium shakes violently to and fro. At last the Day of the Lord, when the firmament will shake and pass away with violent intensity and heat. Isaiah, Zephaniah, the rest of the prophets – they were right, I knew it! Well maybe not, the helicopter passes and “the heavens” return to their previous serenity.

Dust everywhere and in everything. Moon dust. Dust like talcum powder six inches deep. Dust midway up the boot or higher generates suction to the ground. And merely walking around generates a cloud up to one’s waist. Dust even has a smell to which I have still not quite accustomed myself. They call it the Sandbox for a reason. We are naturally filthy. Water is in short supply. Some outposts have showers. This one does not so I make do with some baby wipes and a liter of bottled water. I offload my truck.

Now I have to do the pre-trip checks on my Oshkosh truck. My truck is my life out here. The fluids and everything had better be right. Get some fuel. I walk past a pile of unexploded ordnance – IED materials. This stuff’s the real deal. No one hauls that stuff very far or keeps it for very long. A guy I knew from my squad at the Green Bay reserve center got killed by an IED over here – Chuck Kiser from Cleveland, Wisconsin. He was in the Naval Reserve with me and then joined the Wisconsin National Guard. It makes you think. A recent Navy Times had an article stating that two years ago they were finding/exploding 2600 IED’s a month in Iraq and that now they’re finding around 550 a month and they tend to be less lethal. How comforting. I generally spend my last several minutes of freedom on the hood of my vehicle reading the Bible. I’ve been into Saint Paul’s letters lately.

A couple last checks of my gear and it’s time to put on my “battle rattle.” The whole get-up must weigh fifty pounds. Groin protector. Bulletproof vest. Kevlar helmet. Flameproof flight suit and gloves. Ballistic glasses that look like something Robin wore on the ‘60’s TV series “Batman and Robin.” Sometimes a wire hanging out of my ear, sometimes not. Oh well, there’s no one here to witness how patently ridiculous I look except for a desert fox and her kits. And those bats. And that scorpion.

Back out into the desert night. A patch of earth lighter than the other terrain – I don’t like that. Natural calcium deposit? That ubiquitous greenish clay stuff? Nighttime mirage? Freshly disturbed earth concealing an improvised explosive device? Green cheese? The Sea of Tranquility lies just beyond the horizon you know, or so the landscape suggests.
At last Camp Cupcake, my home away from home. Fuel up. Check in. Go home for some sleep and be back later the same day for more loading and unloading trucks and cargo.
The typical workday is about 13 or 14 hours long at Camp Cupcake, longer when I’m away from here. I have not written one note/letter since getting here. I apologize to all who have written me and “heard” silence in return. I just have no time at the end of any of my days here. I have been in Iraq for more than two months and I have had two days off… and they weren’t “really” days off. I truly love all of you and appreciate the time and effort it takes for you to write me. I will try to call everyone who has sent me anything at some point. Lord-willing, I will return to you in the spring and we will celebrate together. Thank you.

In the meantime, meditate on these words of beloved Saint Paul, “I coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities, and to those who were with me. In all things I have shown you that by so toiling one must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (Acts of the Apostles 20:33-35)