Inbound
We drove south all day tucked into another convoy and hit Doha after dark. The convoy split up and our several vehicles parked outside some office waiting to get clearance to enter the part of camp where our unit was living. After twelve hours, two wrecks and a shooting (not by us) it sucked to wait on a piece of paper, but we were back in the rear now and rear is just another word for asshole. So we got the paper, stuck it under the wiper blade of each of the Humvees and drove in to unload our gear. It was close to 9 PM, which meant that the food court in the PX would close soon, and since we hadn’t had lunch 9 PM really meant something. I left the humvee and the gear and went over to order some pizzas.
When I came back Chris and Miguel had started unloading, and the rest of the non-deployed folks were just watching us work. Our unit, like many this time around, has been fragmented from day one. It started three months before the deployment, when our command replaced most of our senior staff with outsiders from another region of the US. Not a great way to go to war. It got worse from there. Our unit, like others, is broken down into groups called functional teams. The joke is that they really are dysfunctional teams. We have been split up and re-organized so many times in the last fourteen months that any sense of unity or esprit-de-corps has been eclipsed by the Army of One.
So we ate pizza in between hauling loads of gear into our bunks, inside the huge warehouse that had been the home to most of our unit for the last six months. We finished, drove the vehicles back to the motor pool, and walked back to showers and sleep. All we had to do now was get the vehicles washed and ready for shipment; that couldn’t be so bad.
Wrong. The wash racks, over a hundred of them, were basically ramps onto which you drove your vehicle so you could access the undercarriage with the nozzle of the power washers. The standard (in the military everything has a standard) is NO DIRT. Pretty simple, until you understand first-hand just how many nooks and crannies there are in a vehicle like a Humvee. Forget about tanks and personnel carriers, we had our hands full just blasting away the parts of Iraq that hadn’t been blasted away during combat. After one hour behind the spray gun, we were pretty cocky. I went up underneath the vehicle and ran my hand around and on top of the drive shaft. Oops.
Two hours later I ordered more pizza for the twenty or so of us still left on the racks. We finished the pizza and the washing about two hours after that, for a total of over five hours just to do one vehicle. As one team passed inspection, they peeled off to help the people next to them. The army of one turned back into the one that I remembered from the early eighties, a team. No one could leave until all the vehicles were done and we all were soaked with a cocktail of water, grease, Simple Green® cleaner and Iraqi sand. We finished the job by actually cleaning down the wash racks the same way we cleaned the vehicles. After all was done, we drove the Humvees to the sterile lot where they were to wait for the call forward to the port. That day we were all we could have been.
-30-
Copyright, 2004. Tom Kinton
Camp Doha, Kuwait
When I came back Chris and Miguel had started unloading, and the rest of the non-deployed folks were just watching us work. Our unit, like many this time around, has been fragmented from day one. It started three months before the deployment, when our command replaced most of our senior staff with outsiders from another region of the US. Not a great way to go to war. It got worse from there. Our unit, like others, is broken down into groups called functional teams. The joke is that they really are dysfunctional teams. We have been split up and re-organized so many times in the last fourteen months that any sense of unity or esprit-de-corps has been eclipsed by the Army of One.
So we ate pizza in between hauling loads of gear into our bunks, inside the huge warehouse that had been the home to most of our unit for the last six months. We finished, drove the vehicles back to the motor pool, and walked back to showers and sleep. All we had to do now was get the vehicles washed and ready for shipment; that couldn’t be so bad.
Wrong. The wash racks, over a hundred of them, were basically ramps onto which you drove your vehicle so you could access the undercarriage with the nozzle of the power washers. The standard (in the military everything has a standard) is NO DIRT. Pretty simple, until you understand first-hand just how many nooks and crannies there are in a vehicle like a Humvee. Forget about tanks and personnel carriers, we had our hands full just blasting away the parts of Iraq that hadn’t been blasted away during combat. After one hour behind the spray gun, we were pretty cocky. I went up underneath the vehicle and ran my hand around and on top of the drive shaft. Oops.
Two hours later I ordered more pizza for the twenty or so of us still left on the racks. We finished the pizza and the washing about two hours after that, for a total of over five hours just to do one vehicle. As one team passed inspection, they peeled off to help the people next to them. The army of one turned back into the one that I remembered from the early eighties, a team. No one could leave until all the vehicles were done and we all were soaked with a cocktail of water, grease, Simple Green® cleaner and Iraqi sand. We finished the job by actually cleaning down the wash racks the same way we cleaned the vehicles. After all was done, we drove the Humvees to the sterile lot where they were to wait for the call forward to the port. That day we were all we could have been.
-30-
Copyright, 2004. Tom Kinton
Camp Doha, Kuwait
posted by tomk at 10:54 AM
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