Living at Nelligan, sleeping on a cot, and eating in a mess tent made it feel like we would not be going home anytime soon. After all, shortly after arriving in the Middle East, we were extended from a six-month active duty order to a twelve-month commitment.
I noticed cracks in the people around me. Personality conflicts that I thought the people I knew were above. We had been together for too long. True colors were showing, and it was not attractive. I wanted a mission. I wanted to sleep on the hood of my truck and roam the desert again with Jeff, maybe with two other trucks. To be like we were before the invasion started.
The days at Nelligan passed. We had dug very deep trenches around our tents for drainage, and what a good thing too. An overnight storm had filled these as if we had a giant mote around each GP Medium tent. You would think the water would just go right into the ground, but it took a while.
Anytime you got stuck with your company, it was inevitable that you would eventually be ordered to burn trash and latrine waste. This was a miserable duty that lasted all day, during which you dumped a significant amount of diesel onto garbage or into the 1/3 steel drums pulled out from under the latrine seats and set them on fire. From there, it was just a smelly babysitting job. I smoked, read, and just talked with others through the long hours of this necessary task. There was a shared observation, a silver lining if you could call it that, to this job. No one messed with you when you were doing it. It provided natural exemption from mid-rank egomaniacs from irritating you, trying to make themselves feel more important. Perhaps this was from the "There but for the grace of God go I" factor. Unspoken, but there.
I lost track of the days when we received a mission. We were to go to the supply area and move 5 trailers with MREs to Kuwait. Finally! Jeff and I loaded up our supplies like we always did, planning for more than we expected, and went to pick up our trailer.
When we got there, the load was dangerous and ridiculous. One case of MREs was a 20x12x6 inch-ish box containing 12 meals each. The load was 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8 feet tall. There were thousands of these on our flatbed trailers. The trailers had the four-foot sideboards up, but the load of meals was actually eight feet or more high, with a few 2-inch-wide hand straps thrown over it every few feet. There was no way these things were going to stay where they were as we off-roaded through the desert. I thought we might deliver somewhere between 45% and 50% of what now sits on the decks of these trailers.
You cannot argue with the stupidity of military leadership reasoning; they have an unending supply, so they will win every time. You just state your case, then you prove them wrong. The only time you outright defy them is when you know that you will hurt or kill others by doing it their way. If it is a loss of financial resources, that is how they roll. We win wars, well, most of them, because our checkbook is bigger.
It felt so good to be out on the... The ..... Well, actually! It WAS a road, sort of! Since all of these trucks have been getting stuck in the desert and spent more time sitting than moving, the Army Corp of Engineers thought it was a good idea to grade roads inro the desert sand, by running a grader blade through to cut the loose top sand layer away and push it off to the side, leaving a more firm road base of harder sand to drive on.
Before they did this, being in the tracks of someone before you was a bad idea, because they had loosened the sand, and it was "sand soup" for you. Now we were driving along these hastily made roads, passing entire companies of others from many nations. The British guys were always wild and crazy. They did not fit my preconceived notion about Brits, but here they were.
We were right about the loads. We were dropping cases of MRE's like we were Oprah Winfrey on happy pills. The waste was disturbing and sickening. There was nothing we could do. But then there was. Coincidentally, many of the people whom we encountered on the "road" were low or out of food. We pounded through these graded tracks through the sand, hard and fast. People saw what we were carrying and would wave, jump, and shout at us, hoping we could stop and share with them. There was no need for such inefficiency, though.
One snappy, half-turn up the steering wheel, down, and then back up, would cause the trailer to rock side to side, and you could drop 10 to 12 cases of meals right at the feet of those watching us speed by. That's 120 to 144 meals delivered right at their feet. They cheered as they collected their delivery, and we felt so much better about losing part of the cargo we were carrying. We were forcing the meals there, which were jettisoned from the trailers at strategic drop points.
Where we were going was a long drive. We would not make it in one day. As the sun was setting, raindrops peppered the windshield. Hopefully, this would not last long. Sleeping in the truck is a brutal way to not sleep. We were parked in the graded "road". At dinner, we pillaged the MREs we were carrying and talked. The news from Africa offered no clues about when we would be going home. Lately, the news has been discouraging because it's so nebulous. At least before the ceasefire, there seemed to be something measurable happening.
The rain did not let up; in fact, it got much worse. Something like monsoon season assaulted us and our cargo. No sleeping on the hood tonight. I was so looking forward to that. When there was no point in saying or doing anything else, Jeff and I took our respective stations; he leaning on the steering wheel, me propped up against the door window. I was managing with sleep coming in waves, dipping into unconsciousness. It was an on-and-off excursion in and out of dreams. One moment, I was in Southwest Asia, the next, in one of my many childhood homes, or working back home. There was one consistent feeling. No rest.
The rain pounded the truck with a mighty roar all night long. I was sure the cardboard MRE cases were absorbing a good deal of it. That would make them even more unstable when we started moving again during the day. The roar of the rain on everything, the steel of the truck, the graded roadbed, and the glass made the night seem like it would last a few days.
I was in one of my decent attempts at sleep when I noticed something. Something unrelated to the rain, sore muscles, and fatigue. My stomach was sending me an alert. I was not happy with the food choices I made the day before. I glanced at my watch in the deafening drone of the rain on the truck; 3:06 AM. Could I wait? The answer was clear: No. This was an emergency. I would need to step out of the truck in the rain, squat behind the tractor's tires under the trailer, and take care of business.
I opened the door and climbed down the steps. As soon as I touched the ground, I knew this was much worse than I thought. Another great military decision was made to cut roads through the desert so military vehicles could move more easily. Now, the roads have become aqueducts. The water was halfway up my calves, the sky was dumping buckets on me, and I somehow had to get my pants down without letting them touch the water I was standing in.
As I performed this brutal acrobatic exercise, and my stomach hurt like I was being stabbed, rage hit me out of nowhere. "I AM THE STUPIDEST PERSON ALIVE!!! WHAT AM I DOING HERE? I signed up for this crap! I could be home! TEN FEET FROM THE BATHROOM!!! TEN FEET!!! I made this nightmare all by myself! I didn't have to do any of this."
Anger is something I channel well into strength and power. This was how I coped, and it got me through. After the ordeal, I was back in the truck and back to my lousy night's sleep.
The sun came up, and the skies cleared. Although the roads were no longer aqueducts per se, they were still a mess with washouts, deep puddles, and places to get stuck. I made coffee on the Chinese cook stove and was recounting my miserable night with Jeff. "At least you did not have to worry about Tumble Papers," Jeff said in his best Czech accent.
Tumble Papers: One of the most feared things we have encountered living in our truck in this war. As a soldier, you are self-sufficient; you carry first aid kits, ammunition, sufficient clothing, food, water, a weapon, and, of course, toilet paper. When nature calls, the standard procedure (when there is not a 3 AM monsoon in an aqueduct) is to walk all the way to just in front of the trailer's 3 axles, where the smooth sideboard boxes are. You can lean your back up against this box, hovering just above the "cat hole" that you just dug. The problem is, the air currents in the desert are weird, and around a large tractor and trailer, they are even weirder.
As each used piece of toilet paper is released into the hole, it does not stay there. The air currents under the trailer grab it and blow it out into the open, up into the air. It wouldn't be so bad except that, for some reason, the currents circle the back of the trailer. These white papers, with their frightening brown faces, start a relentless attack, bursting up into the sky, circling, and dropping like a bird of prey, diving for the kill, often, way too close for comfort, just before hitting the ground, shoots back into the sky and tries another run at you. After a few papers are deposited, this can look like a brutal distortion of an Alfred Hitchcock classic. Tumble Papers. I could never have imagined this horror when we were deployed last November.
We got underway to deliver these much-needed meals, but in much smaller quantities than we started with, to someone in Kuwait. Along the way, we encountered more people shouting at us for food. The dilapidated cardboard cases made it even easier to wag the trailer to drop a load of meals on the side of the road. We were very generous, and I dare say some were even dropping some to see if they could hit certain targets.
We arrived at our destination around eleven. The commander of that unit was very surprised to see us there. "We don't want this stuff! We are leaving tomorrow!" They were relocating to another area the next day, and these trailers with MREs falling off all over the place would be a problem. We started dropping trailers, but the commander protested, telling us not to. We continued anyway because that was our mission. If he could provide direct communication from our leadership to support his position, we would follow that order.
We decided we needed the straps on the trailers, which would make moving them another foot even more difficult. One person from 1st platoon began taking straps off our trailer. Jeff got in his face and demanded an answer for this theft. Jeff had a way of making people explain their actions, and if they could not do that, it would highlight their selfish motives all by itself.
An hour passed, and the standoff continued. Jim, from our platoon, finally had an idea. He told the commander that we could not take them back because it would violate our orders. They also could not be left here because they belonged to the United States Army. So, in order for Army property not fall into unauthorized hands, there was only one answer: the trailers needed to be burned.
There was enough food to feed a city on these trailers, and setting it on fire would be such a horrific loss, but this was a real solution. The white phosphorus grenade could be set on the hood of a military truck, and that would burn so hot that it would burn through the hood, through the engine block, and down into the ground. When Saigon fell, the US Navy was pushing perfectly good helicopters into the ocean off the sides of the ships to make room for the people they took on. Waste has a mighty history in the US military.
The commander, realizing that Jim could and more importantly would do what he just suggested, reluctantly signed for the trailers of MRE's. We were free to go, now bobtail (that is, without trailers), meaning the ride back to Nelligan was the bumpiest, hardest ride ever, and if we didn't wear seatbelts, we could be beaten senseless inside the cab of our truck.
The ride was brutal. We carried everything we owned on our truck. We had duffel bags strapped to the cab's roof, and the strap ran through the inside of the truck, giving us something to hold onto during the bumps and slams. The ridge was so hard that my duffel worked its way out of the strap and flew off the truck at one point. We had to pull over and hunt for everything I had lost.
An unofficial behavior was starting. We were in the territory that the Iraqi Army had occupied for the last 6 months. It was becoming common for American soldiers to treasure hunt in the abandoned Iraqi bunkers and vehicles. This posed hazards from unstable munitions, unexploded ordnance, and booby traps. The war was over, and one could elect to find souvenirs and make it so his family might never see him again. Because of this, the military took a hard stance against treasure hunting and started a campaign called "Not One More Life". We, of course, twisted this into: "Not One More Day." Neither of these sayings appeared to have an effect.
We finally arrived back at Nelligan the next day, wanting to just be done with this mess and go home. We knew that was not going to happen. Not knowing what was in store for us was normal. It was our lives, yet our lives did not belong to us; they belonged to George HW Bush, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, and Norman Schwartzkopf, respectively. None of these figures was obligated to tell us anything. Period.
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