I try to keep my head inside my sleeping bag to filter the fumes. When living in a GP Medium tent, with a nasty old kerosene heater that had the wick burned down too far, that was now running on diesel, waking up in the morning felt similar to the feeling of waking in a tent on a mountain top, in subzero temperatures, wrapped in an extreme cold weather bag. There was nothing good to look forward to if I got up, by which I mean being cold, dirty, with no coffee, and having to lie down on the cold desert berm for Stand To for the next 40 minutes. I can hear Hawkeye Pierce yelling, "Who goes to bed at night and dreams up this nightmare!"
This is the one thing that being in the military has taught me. You can make yourself do things that you would absolutely never do, and you can get through them. As awful as every moment of that has been in all its versions, it has come in handy at times.
This particular morning, the sun rose on the Martian landscape, and amazingly, we were not overrun by enemy forces. It was time for coffee, so bad that there should be an award for being able to destroy its core generative properties the way they did. Breakfast was not much better, but this was never about taste; it was only designed to ensure that Army property did not go to waste.
We received our mission. To my delight, we were headed back to Log Base Alpha to move containers for our favorite Chief Warrant Officer. Yes! Another change was made to the driving teams. Today, I would be driving with Jeff, a Staff Sergeant in the unit, with whom I had only had minimal interaction.
Jeff had a brand of directness about him that some people found off-putting. None of that mattered to him. In reality, people were a bit jealous of him because he moved through the ranks faster than most. He couldn't care less what people thought of him because, despite the digs, Jeff had earned everything he had. His focus was unbreakable. Behind his back, people who did not apply themselves nearly as much, but somehow felt they should be allowed the same privilege, called him "Pretty Boy Floyd," which was a shot at the fact that Jeff's uniforms were always pressed to perfection, his jump boots like mirrors, and his hair always seemed to be the exact same length.
He always seemed like he could not be bothered with more than a couple of words, and it was what it was. Being in the truck with Jeff, I was greeted with the same passive attitude as always. He did not appear to allow people to get close to him. I was becoming known for being able to drive with anyone. I have always given people a chance, and that chance always came with the opportunity to let the other person be themselves and be seen for who they are, with no preconceptions.
Running the Log Base Alpha run was a great first mission for us. We received the same great treatment we had the first time we were there. Warm tent to sleep in, gourmet meal, hot pressurized showers, and movies were as close to a stay at the Holiday Inn as you could get on Mars. On this mission, we supplied 7 trucks. How long would it last?
Conversation flowed nicely between Jeff and me. We were definitely not alike, but we were a combination that complemented each other. It was the easiest truck partnership so far, but you never knew how long things would last.
Before I knew it, some sort of wall dropped between Jeff and me, and we were talking like I had not talked with anyone I rode with before. It actually brightened up our time in the sand. Our leadership must have seen the positive effect we had on each other, to the point that we were actually improving others' morale. We created an irrelevance that took ownership of our presence in the desert, which felt like it took authority away from the Army, and we were just driving around.
We quickly developed a label for this. Back in the 1970s, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, a.k.a. the original Saturday Night Live crew, specifically Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin. SNL fandom describes it as this:
The Festrunks is a sketch performed by Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin, debuting on September 24, 1977. The recurring sketch follows Yortuk (Aykroyd) and Georg (Martin), two brothers who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the United States. Culturally inept, they went to various social hangouts (bars, art exhibits, dance clubs) trying to connect with attractive American women ("foxes"). However, their obnoxious behavior was almost always a turn off for the women they approached. They were often referred to by their catchphrase "We are, two wild and crazy guys!"
There was a numbing effect of these alter egos for Jeff and me. It took this baby-power desert sand and made it slightly more tolerable. We spoke in public almost exclusively with Czech accents and poor grammar, and walked with exaggerated swagger. We told everyone we were "Two Wild and Crazy Guys, just Crusin' for chicks in the desert." Our method brought much happiness and levity to a dismal place. People would shout out to us, "Hey! How are you doing?" Often in bad Czech accents. We monogrammed the outside of our truck doors with our alter names, Georg (Hoar-Gay) Youtuk (which, thanks to bad memory, we pronounced as Yor-Gay). The rhyme made it funnier, so all the better.
This synchronicity between Jeff and me put us in step, so we could almost read each other's minds. There was no clash, no abrasiveness. We were a smoothly operating machine, which was good for us, the unit, and the military as a whole. The news of our team made it all the way back home across the world, and our families started spending time together — wives and kids — as though they were assigned together.
We were running missions back and forth from the port up into the desert. We were living in our truck. The sleeping arrangements were that Jeff would put some bags between the truck seats and sleep across them. I would put my sleeping bag up on the hood and sleep under the stars. It was the most comfortable place I have ever slept. Don't ask me why. Having slept on those marble floors in Khobar gives one a unique perspective.
These days were all a blur. We felt like freelancers. The roads in Saudi Arabia looked like something from a Mad Max movie and were almost as dangerous. It was nothing to see many fatal accidents daily due to the multinational coalition of military forces overwhelming an infrastructure that was rural at best.
As the weeks passed, we could feel an escalation of everything. More hardware was moving north; we were the ones doing the moving. The last night we were ever at TAA Henry, we ate steak. There is an old tale in the military folklore canon that states that if you eat steak for dinner one night, combat is inevitable. Kind of a last supper rite of passage.
We left the next morning and headed down to the port to retrieve more of our trailers. It really felt like we were pretty much on our own. I slept on the deck of a trailer, under another trailer that was backed onto it. I was awakened by a very bossy Colonel very early, who was yelling at us that we needed to get those trailers up into the desert to Log Base Echo. I complained, "What is that annoying noise?" Got up reluctantly and made coffee. I had bought a Chinese cookstove in Hafar Al Batin for $4. A basin, mop strings, and a double-layered barrel with pinholes throughout. That is what it really was. We burned diesel in it, and it worked well.
When we got up into the desert at Log Base Echo, we noticed that our company had moved and they were now there. Echo was cramped like a city. I hated it. By the configuration, I was sure that Stand-To was no longer happening, so there was that. Oddly, our entire leadership structure was nowhere to be found. They were somewhere else, having a meeting or something.
My squad leader, Bud, was mixed on what to do. I said, "Let's grab some clothing and food and head back to the port. There are more trailers to get." He did not like that idea without orders. This was where I shone. I told him that if orders were what he was concerned about, then we HAD to go get trailers.
"How do you figure? Bud asked. "General Order Number One, Bud! 'I will guard my post and not leave my post until properly relieved.' Our post, or assignment in this case, was to go pick up trailers; the job is not done, and we have not been relieved of it. In fact, if we do just stay here, I think we ARE leaving our post without proper relief!" He looked at me for a moment and said, "You know that is not what that means." I smiled, "Isn't it?" The next thing I knew, we were hammering down MSR Dodge back south towards the Port of Dammam for another haul of trailers. That is the 2nd time since arriving in theatre that I used General Order Number One to suit what I wanted or did not want to do. You never know what that and a pair of gray Army sweats can get you.
(Photo courtesy of the National Archives)
On this run, we really had this maverick style down; we would find odd places to park and sleep, away from military brass and their annoying orders. We were self-sufficient, living in our trucks. We had favorite stops, a routine, a click of people in our convoy. We were creating our own version of the Saudi Arabian dream. We would slide into Log Base Alfa, where the hot-pressurized showers are, get cleaned up, and then hit the road again. We were riding high, and I felt that I could live like this indefinitely.
Every now and then, other than the millions of weapons around us, we were reminded that we were in the middle of a war. Jeff and I met a female MP at Log Base Alpha one night after taking showers. We talked with her for over half an hour. She told gruesome tales of what it was like on the roads each day as a Military Police Officer. One of her unfortunate tasks was to respond to the countless fatal accidents that happened constantly. As she told the stories, she had a strange detachment that was laced with a lethal dose of pain. The longer we listened, the more we could not imagine what it would be like to live her life. Jeff and I walked across the compound to our truck. Jeff said, "There are not enough years in that girl's lifetime to have enough counseling to undo the things she has seen.
We turned left onto MSR Dodge with our latest run of trailers. Things were about to get real.
