Riding with the Oven Door Open

I try to ride at dawn when it is below 90 degrees or near dusk when the temperature drops below 100, but the last two days, I had to ride a few miles in the middle of the day. Today at 1pm it was 115, yesterday it was 117 degrees.

On a hot day in Pennsylvania (at least what I thought was hot last year--between 95 and 100 degrees) I could ride 17 to 20 mph on a flat road and cool down a little. Uphill I was going to drip sweat and downhill would be very cool. Here there are no hills at all, so the high speed breeze is the best I can hope for. It works in the morning or in the evening when the sun is low in the sky, but the last two days, riding at midday, the air felt like I was riding past an open oven.

A light headwind kicked up, no more than 10 mph, but that felt like I was riding behind a heater blower. The good thing was this evening's ride, when the temp dropped to 100, I was sweating on my 10-mile loop of the base, but the air felt like air, not oven blast.

There is no humidity to speak of here and I suppose the temp would feel worse if it was humid, but 115 degrees is hot--dry heat or not.

Marriage and Romance in the Army

For most soldiers "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" is the best we can do for romance in the Army. A large group of us are in some kind of committed relationship, another large group has no relationship and is not likely to discover true love among the other soldiers and civilians assigned to our base. And since we are not allowed off base, the potential candidates for Love seekers are all here on Tallil Ali Air Base. If my deployment to Germany in the 70s is any indication, the romances that flare to life among the soldiers here will burn out just as quickly.

So who does have romance on a deployment to Iraq? As it turns out the small minority of married couples (6 that I know of) among the 600 soldiers in our unit have relationships that at least allow for the possibility of real romance. They get to live together in one of the CHUs I described a few days ago. In fact, three of the couples live in the same CHU in three adjoining rooms. This is a great mercy to everyone involved. As I mentioned in several other ways, in this Socialist empire we inhabit, envy is the fastest way to corrode relationships. These couples are the dozen people among 600 of us who can have sex on a regular basis. For the rest of us, sex and alcohol can only be enjoyed during the 15 days we are on Rest and Recreation leave during this year.

The married couples here include a pair of pilots and a pair of aircraft maintenance sergeants (she outranks him in both cases) a pilot married to a crew chief and two clerks (he outranks her in these couples), plus two sergeants who I believe are mechanics and are the same rank. I asked three of the five couples (both members of the couple were present when I asked) how they felt about the other soldiers looking at them and wishing they had the same arrangement. The three women--an officer, a sergeant first class and a specialist--all answered as if from a script. They made sacrifices to be in the Army. It's not easy to be married to another soldier. If someone else wants the privilege, let them make the sacrifice. No wavering from the women.

The men were more varied. The warrant officer shrugged and smirked. He could deal with it. The young sergeant could see the problem, but was willing to take the hassle. The staff sergeant who had deployed before said he wished they ended up in tents (meaning no living together). He saw envy as a big problem--one he could deal with, but he could also give up the privilege without a big fight.

At Fort Sill and in Kuwait, the married couples were not allowed to live together. So except for the 4-day pass, the married couples were just like the rest of us for the first three months. Except that they could talk face to face. So they still got the kind of time together that most married couples say they never get enough of--time to just talk.

This whole situation is new to me. In the 1970s Army, there were no arrangements for couples to live together in combat barracks and very few soldiers married to each other. Couples in camouflage still look somewhat strange to me.

Linguistics Update

While I was thinking and talking about our CHUs, I noticed another Army pronoun I do not remember from the 70s: Bitch. I do not mean the act of complaining or a derogatory reference to a woman, those uses are no different than the civilian usage. But when I cataloqued the use of Shit as a pronoun, I did not notice there is an upper size limit on the use of that word.

When a soldier refers to a truck, or a building, or other very large object, he will often say "This bitch is ready to paint" referring to a recently repaired truck or "This bitch has a busted air conditioner" referring to a CHU without the most important creature comfort. So there is a line somewhere between a duffel bag and a Deuce-and-a-half truck where the item referred to is no longer "that shit" but "this bitch."

Home Sweet (Trailer) Home

My youngest daughter Lisa is graduating from Lancaster Country Day School in two weeks. Her older sister Lauren graduated two years ago. A few years ago, the school underwent renovations so my daughters and all their fellow students had some classes in temporary classrooms next to the buildings (trailers). But the students were not allowed to say trailers. These metal-sided buildings were "learning cottages."

Since moving to Iraq, we have had a huge upgrade from 70 roommates in a tent in Kuwait to 2-man rooms for sergeants and junior officers, three-man rooms for enlisted men, and one-man rooms for the senior officers. Here's the basic building:

The Army needs an acronym for everything, so these 30-foot long, eight-foot wide housing units that can be transported on a truck are not trailers, they are Containerized Housing Units (CHU), pronounced "Choo." Most everyone calls them CHUs. When dozens of CHUs are surrounded by 12-foot-high blast walls with latrine CHUs and Shower CHUs in the middle, the result is called a Living Area (LA). There are ten LAs on Tallil. Members of our unit live in most of these living areas numbered from LA1 to LA10. A few of us make jokes about living in trailer parks and putting cars up on cement blocks in the yard, but most people use the acronyms.

Here is an LA on another base. Ours is similar.

I'll try to get some photos from here soon.

Inside a CHU we each get a bed, an end table, and a wall locker. Some soldiers are already finding refrigerators and TVs. As of Saturday night, I have temporarily have the not-available-at-any-price luxury of my own room for one month. My roommate got temporarily reassigned to another base. He will not be gone long enough to take all his gear or reassign his bed, so I am alone for 30 days or so. When he left he said, "Enjoy the library while I'm gone." You can just sit in here and listen to nothing. Which is not exactly true. Since he is so careful to put on headphones to listen to Gangsta Rap or watch movies, I seldom listened to anything in the room. But with the room to myself, I can listen to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" the BBC World Service, several New Yorker podcasts and Distillations from my work. But mostly, it's quiet in my trailer, I mean CHU.

Flat Out of Luck

My bulletproof Gatorskin tires turned out to have a weak spot: the sidewall. I rolled between two blast barriers to stop at the Base Exchange in the Air Force area and hear the tell-tale hissing that meant I would be walking home. I have two tires and three tubes, so I could change the flat--except my tire tools are somewhere in Oklahoma as it turns out.

But my luck got better almost immediately. I brought the bike to my room and walked to chow before it closed. At chow was another soldier who just got a bike from home but no pump. I have a floor pump. He used my pump and loaned me a spoon so we will both be on the road tomorrow.

My oldest daughter Lauren is home from college so I called her and asked her to send me spoons and another tire and tube, so I should be able to stay on the road even if the gravel here claims another tire.

Today, I installed printer drivers on four maintenance computers, but our commander and one of our platoon sergeants flew in last night. We may have a lot more to do next week.

Doing Nothing, 7 Days a Week

Those of you who read detective novels may have noticed a dog that isn't barking in my recent posts. It has been almost a month since I wrote about us doing anything. That is not because we are on a Top Secret mission. It is the opposite. As you know our assignment was changed just before we left and long after our bags and baggage had been sent on to Camp Cupcake. So instead of moving in where another unit was moving out and taking over their assignment, we are starting from scratch in a place that was not quite set up for us. So we are building a motor pool in a few unused buildings that are not exactly suited for what we do.

So we are painting, building shelves and tables, wiring buildings for telecom and computers, and generally cleaning out dust-filled unused spaces. Since we are in a war zone, we can't actually do nothing. We have to be ready for emergencies, so we are on duty seven days a week, rotating days off in shifts.

When a big unit like ours changes course, the support people like us have to wait for equipment to arrive and start needing maintenance before we have work. So we clean, paint, pull security duty, and try to get ready for when the rest of the unit needs us. Until then, we will be busy doing nothing, seven days a week.

What the PT Test Doesn't Measure

I will be starting remedial PT (Physical Training) again next week for the soldiers who failed the last PT Test and need to get ready for the next one. In Iraq, more than in Oklahoma, the gym is one of the few things to do so I am able to divide the group into two groups:
1. The self-motivated ones who know what they need to work on, have a workout partner and have committed to a plan to pass the test.
2. Those who need some level of push or they will stay as motionless as possible, usually in front of some sort of video entertainment.

For group one I already have five individual plans of action and will check in regularly. For group two, I will be taking over a SPIN class on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday of each week at 0530. The less motivated will join me in the SPIN class pedaling for an hour bright and early on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Our entire company does a 5k race each Wednesday morning and individual squads do PT Monday and Friday morning early.

THE PT TEST ISN'T EVERYTHING. . .
It is my job to help get these soldiers ready to pass the PT test, which I think is very important. But over the last three months I have noticed that the PT test does not necessarily predict who will be the best soldier, especially for tough, dirty jobs. There are certain jobs for which I ask for Group 1 soldiers who have failed or barely passed the PT test. When we load and unload and hundreds of duffel bags; when we have to carry dozens of machine guns, barrels and tripods; whenever there is a job that requires lots of muscle and little speed, I am looking for some of the big guys who struggle to reach their required time on the two-mile run or the required number of sit-ups, but can lift lots of weight easily and will work for hours.

The PT test is a good measure of fitness, but not such a good measure of brute strength or willingness to work long hours. And there are many times in this manual labor job where the race is neither to the swift nor to the agile but to the big guy who can barely run two miles in 17 minutes but can bench press 350 pounds.

. . .BUT IT IS IMPORTANT
One more note on the Group 2 soldiers who bitch about PT, many of whom need to eat less in addition to working out more: These same guys watch a lot of war movies and really don't seem to see the connection between fitness and being a soldier. In fact, when 70 of us lived in one tent and there were no secrets anywhere, I started to notice that the guys who hated PT were the ones who tried to look "bad" in the group photos. Young soldiers are perpetually taking photos of each other, like all of their generation. I noticed the same guys who shirk every dirty job and grumble about PT were the ones who had their weapons prominent in the photos they were in. They like the look and idea of being a soldier. Maybe they somehow believe that if the worst happens they will have a Hollywood transformation into movie-hero fighting machines.

My guess is they will just be out of breath.