Conspiracy Theories

This post is inspired by my boss/friend/slave driver, Laurie's last couple of posts on her blog www.pepperguy.com/laurie. In her last couple of posts, she voices complaints about facts of life here that probably don't carry much meaning back home. I wanted to lend some credence to Laurie's complaints since I know how heavily they can actually weigh on us - the issues, not the complaints themselves.

First, I have to tell this story to provide a context. A little over two years ago our horse brothers and I found ourselves in this part of the world. We started in Qatar, but many of us branched out to various other places, each of which had some advantages over the other, but all of which were pretty shitty in the grand scheme, if for no other reason, than because the places were thousands of miles away from our families and the growing honey do lists we'd left behind and would have killed to get done with all the time we found we had on our hands when we weren't actively engaged in our global mission that time around.

I was fortunate enough to be farmed out to an air base in Kuwait and my job there called for me to spend a lot of time in a leased Chevy Suburban. It had a worn out leather interior, air conditioning, and, the most important item, a radio that actually found two or three AFN Radio stations depending on where the clouds were that day. As far as contingency jobs go - meaning jobs you get stuck with, but never signed on to do - mine was a pretty good one. But after only a few trips in the Suburban, I noticed that Sheryl Crow got a lot of airplay. And not just Sheryl Crow in general, but one song in particular. Before I tell you what the song was, I have to describe a Kuwaiti summer.

Did you ever see Three Kings (Clooney, Walberg, Ice Cube)? When I first saw that I figured the wierd coloring of the desert was all Hollywood creation. When I set foot off the airplane in Qatar in 2000 (my first of 3 visits to this lovely part of the world), I realized it wasn't Hollywood special effects, it was real. In spite of the fairly limited color palette of the desert, the intensity of the sun brings out more shades of brown sand and blue sky than I ever thought possible. The hues of blue displayed during a desert sunrise put the samples at Sherwin Williams to shame. In Qatar, we worked from 4 am to noon to avoid the worst of the day's heat, so we were awake when those sunrises began. It was incredible, but this isn't about Qatar sunrises, it's about the summer in Kuwait.

I only did this particular job in Kuwait for a little over a month, but during that month, the temps reached 140 more times than not. And that intense sunlight burned off any hint of humidity. It became surprisingly easy to take in spite of what you might imagine, but I still longed for just one midwestern thunderstorm. It was there I learned that camel spiders don't really like people, they just like the shade that people in the desert created. While on duty (which occasionally involved standing around watching contract laborers), I would watch a spider take up a position in my shadow. When I moved, the spider would startle, then move into my shadow again. I was amazed by how fast these critters moved, but even more amazed that these local inhabitants wanted shade as much as I did, but I was the only thing creating it for miles. So the sun was intense - so much so that camel spiders befriended Americans just to get out of it - get it?

So guess which song of Sheryl Crow's AFN radio djs played the crap out of in the summer of 2002? Uh yeah, "Soak up the sun." The two things that stand out most to me from that trip were the loose, dusty sand that tempted you to take a step as though you might get firm footing, only to lose half the distance you tried to cover when your boot slipped in it, and that damned song. Though there was no escape from it, Sheryl encouraged us to soak up the sun at least once per hour when the radio was on. Both of these "aspects" of the trip were like daily slaps in the face from everyone who told me I was stupid for reenlisting. I'm now convinced that the song was a conspiracy by terrorists using psy-ops to push us over the edge.

Fast forward to 2005: The terrorists no longer need psy-ops (psychological operations) to push us. We do it to ourselves. In spite of the overwhelmingly large scale bad decisions made from the invasion itself to the details of our particular deployment, the first real issue, the first real information we received from the top down upon hitting the ground in [unspecified country] was that some of us were wearing our hats wrong. Rather than actually correcting this major issue on the spot in one case, the individual's name was "put on a list" and finally told to stop doing it once the list was passed through the right hands.

As Laurie pointed out, the depositing of toothpaste spit has also risen to the top of our worry list, yet notification that the earth-shattering booms we hear regularly are just controlled detonations by our demo team escapes the list of important things to pass on. (although we're getting better about that particular issue) The wear of battle rattle for specified times is rarely explained - an exercise, or based on intel of possible attacks? - yet what uniform one wears to a chow hall is of the utmost importance.

Back home, when we practice in the field, it is understood that you don't salute officers because you don't want to identify them to any bad guys who may be observing from outside the wire. We get here - the closest to the real bad guys that most of us have ever come, and we're given the clear instruction: "there are no no-salute areas" on the base????

Combine this illogical silliness - and it really would be silly if I could just walk away from it and spend the evening with my family, but I can't because this is my life for the next several months - with the lack of any clear objectives or help or guidance in achieving the foggy ones, and each little issue balloons into a major roadblock to strong, make that acceptable, mental health. More often than that, each little issue ballons into a major roadblock to getting anything accomplished as well. It's pretty frustrating, so don't give Laurie a hard time for venting about these "little things."

I happen to know that these little things are part of a growing mountain of circumstantial evidence against the conspirators who mean to thwart our efforts here. What really scares me is the growing list of those conspirators who came here on the same plane that I did.

But enough of my complaining about the weather - the school baseball team where I teach back home, has their first scrimmage tonight. The last I heard, they still had snow on the ground! It's still January back home in my mental picture, so it's encouraging to know it's really baseball season already... that means my sentence here is progressing nicely.

Type at ya later.
Luth