As we got used to living on our little spot on Mars, we were there to do a job. We actually started missions about a week before the rest of the unit arrived at TAA Henry. Toxic, diesel-filled kerosene heaters, stand-to cold showers, and T-Rations were all easy to leave behind and head out onto the roads. This allowed us to actually do things, see things, and avoid having to stay behind to burn trash and human waste. There was no downside to this.
I was paired up with Dan, a staff sergeant who was a good guy but known for having a short fuse. But he was easy to ride with, and we hit the road for our first real mission. We never knew exactly what we were doing for the mission; we were simply given orders on how many trucks to use, where to drive, and when to be on site. We would then be loaded, told where to take the cargo, offload, and then return to TAA Henry at night, where we could freeze to death under the clear desert sky while pulling overnight guard duty. The next morning, we'd be out on the berm for Stand To.
We were summoned to Log Base Alpha. It was an established freight point that was south of Hafar Al Batin. 3 trucks were requested. We met up with a Chief Warrant Officer there, who said that they would have 21 more 3-truck missions. They loaded our trucks with 40-foot shipping containers after a couple of hours. They told us where we were going to take them, which was in the direction of TAA Henry, so that was convenient.
The Chief Warrant Officer was a robust and generous man, very friendly and talkative. You could tell he always got what he wanted, as his presence was larger than life, but he treated others as his peers rather than riding a power trip that some in his position are so famous for. We thanked him, assured him we would be on our way, and asked him not to worry; his cargo was in good hands.
"Wait! Where are you boys going? It's late." He held up his wrist, looking at his watch. "1430. The day is just about over." That is 2:30 PM. We didn't really see that as the end of the day. But this man was not having it. He told us to park the trucks and pointed to three different tents. "First, you boys head over there. Sergeant Reyes is our resident gourmet; he is making stuffed pork chops tonight. That tent over there offers hot, pressurized showers. When you are done there, that tent is for the helicopter pilots; they have VCR movies, and you all can sleep in my tent." Needless to say, we NEVER wanted to leave.
Sergeant Reyes was an artist. He had a small GP tent, complete with an old log-burning wood stove. It was still cold in the desert at night, so cooking in the tent was fine. He used this stove in ways I have never seen anyone use one. He managed the fire just right, cooking with the door open in a pizza oven style. He was making stuffed pork chops. They were amazing. I like to think of this moment as a foreshadowing of my culinary future. At this point, I could do Durkee Rib over cooking bags, Shake 'n Bake pork chops, and Hamburger Helpless, but there was something here that caused the needle to jump in appreciation for food prepared with skill. This would not be the only time this would happen to me in Saudi Arabia, either.
This poor guy had so little light in that tent that he was just about cooking by the light of the fire itself. We went out to our three trucks, stole a dome light from each, obtained some wire, and strung the lights across the ceiling of his tent on the wire, hooking them to the battery of his Humvee outside the tent. Light was now not a problem. We reasoned that this misappropriation of government property involved stealing dome lights from the totalled trucks when we were next at the port of Dharan.
When you haven't seen a hot, pressurized shower since Fort Devens back in the States, it gives you a strange perspective on how spoiled Americans are. Standing in a crowded GP Medium tent with steam all around you, washing the last few weeks of desert off you, is a strange definition of paradise, but it ranked high on the scale.
After what was probably the best shower of my life, we retreated to the helicopter pilot's tent. These individuals appeared to have been here for a long time. They most likely were called up last August when Saddam first invaded Kuwait. They had developed a living space that not only offered numerous comforts, such as delicious food, television, VHS movies, stoves, and other electronics, but they had also devised very clever methods of maximizing the use of their tools. One super clever thing I noticed was their toaster. They had a Chinese cook stove, which I would eventually have too. They connected some 550 cord to a small wire rack and hung it from a metal crossbeam of the tent. When they wanted to make toast, they took the rack down from the beam, where it then hung suspended just above the Chinese cook stove. They would then light the stove, place a piece of bread on the rack, and gently pull it to one side before releasing it. This caused the rack to swing slowly back and forth over the flame, like a pendulum in a grandfather clock, toasting the bread without burning it. I have created a few of these over the years in honor of this simple yet ingenious idea.
As we were watching a movie, a couple of the pilots came in. They announced that they had taken some enemy fire up on the border. The way they spoke of it was not laced with adrenaline, but with familiarity. It happened all of the time. It was just another night.
As we approached the Chief Warrant Officer's heated tent, we were informed that with our three trucks, they had enough containers to keep us working for the next 21 days. We were fine with that, and it wouldn't have hurt my feelings if we had just stayed in our unit, which was freezing and choking on diesel fuel from the kerosene heaters, with its T-rats and that stupid Stand To. This was home. As transportation experts, it was our job to transport goods, and as far as I was concerned, by gosh, that is what we were going to do. Yes, my little, pathetic, lowly PFC, E-3 rank said so.
The following day, we were off and running, and the containers were delivered in the morning. I wanted to go again, but my voice held no responsibility when it came to taking the heat for things that we did. So we went back to the unit. TAA Henry was just as terrible as ever: Bad food, low morale, no backbone to stand up to the Battalion and tell them to leave us alone with their stupid rules.
We received orders the next day to move some cargo, but it was not for our favorite Chief Warrant Officer at Log Base Alpha. Dan and I picked up a trailer somewhere and moved it to another location. We were headed back to Henry when I could hear air escaping from the right front steer tire on the tractor. He had been driving hard and fast through the desert, and a sharp rock had cut the side wall. We stopped. I pulled the jack out from under my seat, and we managed to get it under the I-beam axle before there was no room left to fit the bottle jack underneath, as the clearance was closing up as the tire deflated. I suggested that we get the jack under the truck before it got too low, before loosening all the lug nuts.
Changing one of these tires is no picnic; there are like 100 lugnuts torqued to what seems like three thousand foot pounds. The tire and spare tire themselves weigh slightly more than a Volkswagen and have to be winched on and off to the catwalk behind the truck's cab. As strong as Dan was, it took both of us to break the lugnuts and to torque them back on afterwards.
Why am I talking about changing a tire? That's boring. It is how Dan's telling of this mundane event in the years that followed that is so noteworthy. At first, the story would be told as it happened. As the years passed, however, Dan became a maverick star. A hero taking decisive action in dramatic ways to save the day. By the time this story had its complete upgrade, Dan would tell it like this.
"We were speeding through the desert on our way back to Henry when I heard this hissing noise. I pulled the airbrakes on the tractor, jumped out, and ran around the truck, flung Jackson's door open, tore open the toolbox, and grabbed the bottle jack. I leaped under the truck just in time before the tire was too low for the jack to fit under. Jackson did not know what I was even doing. He was like, 'WHAT???'"
This story got more action-packed as the years passed. So to poke a little fun at the exaggerations, I would say back to Dan things like, "Gee, Dan, I really do not recall the snipers shooting at us." Or, "I don't recall the part about the artillery rounds."
Just when it looked like Dan and I were a permanent truck team, it changed. The following day, I was paired up with Bob, our assistant platoon sergeant. It was always fun to ride with him. He was a state legislator at the time. In fact, thirteen months from now, I would meet the president, George HW Bush, with him.
Bob and I had the task of picking up medical supplies for a CASH (Combat Army Surgical Hospital) unit that was not too far from our own company area. We picked up the supplies down at LBA and headed back up MSR Dodge, then west on MSR Sullivan. There was a giant Saudi Arabian military installation called KKMC (King Kalid Military City). It would be a detour off our path. I needed smokes. I had exhausted all the books I had, and we were passing around reading material, but most of it wasn't appealing to me. The last good book I had read was The Beans of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute.
Bob, being the assistant platoon sergeant, always had more responsibility on his shoulders than the rest of us. We, the people of New Hampshire, saw a sign pointing south to KKMC, expecting to see it within a couple of minutes. Still, it was actually about 15 miles off the route, meaning we added 30 miles to the mission and had not delivered the medical supplies. We had no radios and no way to communicate with the other trucks behind us, except through hand signals and pulling over, which was not always easy in the desert.
The whole way out to KKMC, I kept my foot to the floor, trying to pacify the guilt that Bob had for making the decision to allow us this detour. It seemed to take forever to reach our destination, and Bob kept lamenting, "I think this was a very bad call." He said this a lot. I did feel bad for him as I was feeling the weight of it too, but he did outrank me by double, so if anyone was going to take the hit for this, it was him. I also needed cigarettes. It was a critical deviation.
When we arrived at KKMC, a giant PX was set up. Everyone in our group was able to restock on personal items, whatever those were. I picked up a couple of cartons of Newports. I was smoking menthols back then, eeeew! Newport was the Lucky Strikes of the menthol world. A harsh punch of a flavor reserved for those who are probably criminals or assassins.
I also found a book written by Tom Bodet called "End of the Road." Tom was well-known at the time for being the Motel 6 "we'll leave the light on for you" guy. He had an innocent humor to him that would not be seen as sophisticated. But his perspective was lovable in a two-dimensional Mayberry sort of way. Let's face it, when you are in a war, you need all of the Mayberry you can get! Mister Bodet's characters were people that I wanted to know. A story of the quaint residents of a small, unknown town deep in Alaska called End of the Road, the folks were painted with emotional primary colors. They bore a small likeness to the folks from Cicely, Alaska, whom I met this summer during the Thursday night 10:00 PM hiatus of Knots Landing. Although Northern Exposure and End of the Road were written about mismatched people in a remote Alaska town, they did have similarities in how they made you want to come back to them. They were like a warm, soft blanket in a barren wasteland all around us.
On the way back, I got to see the power of this book. Whenever there was a sandstorm coming, you could see it far off. Once it was upon you, you stopped moving, set the brakes on the truck, and just waited as little shapes of sand pyramided on the dashboard by the windshield. As the sand blasted the outside of the truck, I read. What a feeling it was reading about how Kristy Storbock should look around for her Chevy Blazer a little more since the last snowstorm. The chief at the public works department explained that they have passed a few Subarus through that giant highway snowblower, but he thought the guys would notice if it picked up a Blazer. Yeah, these End of the Road people were transporting me thirteen thousand miles away to a land where things were not so heavy. I needed this.
KKMC and the sandstorm made us late, so we decided to pull into TAA Henry and get supper before continuing onto the CASH unit with their medical supplies. You could almost see the CASH unit as somewhat of a speck on the horizon, so what could possibly go wrong?
After a tragic dinner, Bob and I got back into the truck with our friend Kenny, who was driving one of the company's Chevy Blazers to lead us to the CASH. Because he could alledgedly see the unit, we drove diagonally accross the desert to that unit. We did not follow the colored barrell roads that would have been 2 and a half times the distance of the way we went.
We left the trailer and headed back to home base. Now it was dark. For all of the civillians reading this (if you exist), you cannot just turn headlights on in a war. So we were in the desert, in Blackout Drive, a second set of lights all military vehicles have that are almost subliminal pinpoints of light, that disappear in numbers the further you get away from them. This clever method actually allows convoys to follow each other in total darkness while maintaining an exact distance between vehicles at all times. For all of the stupid ideas I have seen in the military, this invention really makes up for most of them.
We wandered around for what seemed like an eternity. At one point, Kenny stopped. For a second, he turned on the headlights, and there in front of him was a 4 foot drop off. That would have been a disaster had he driven off it. As for the headlights getting turned on, let's just say thankfully the Iraquis had no superiority in the air.
Bob was smart, he had signed out a portable radio when we left and we established contact with the guard post at our unit. They were able to guide us in eventually. The lesson we learned was, those barrel roads were there for a reason, and now we knew.
It was clear to me that life was changing. Honestly, I would have been much happier permanently on truck missions, sleeping where ever as opposed to going home every night. The one thing that needed fine tuning was actually my partner. I had now had 3 driving partners in Saudi Arabia and one in New Hampshire. That needed some work to really feel like home. I did not know it, but that was about to happen.
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