Riding in the Running Race

Photo by Jelena Bozic, Tallil Ali Air Base

Every Wednesday at 0600 is the “First Light 5k” race at the “House of Pain” gym. For almost a month now I have not been allowed to run because of a bone spur in my right heel. So while I can’t run, I have volunteered to be the “Pace Bike” for the weekly event. The course has six right turns and two lefts on double oval so every week for the first few weeks, someone would get lost. One new racer who claimed to be able to run under 18 minutes for the 5k got off course while in the lead, so the pace bike is actually useful. I also like being at the race since almost forty of Echo Company’s hundred soldiers run every week. The top runners in the company are training for the Army 10-miler in October. We will have a team. But the majority are training for a passing time or a better time on their two-mile run. In any case Echo Company is about 1/3 of the field most weeks, but is out of the prize categories.

The organizers—the base Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) office—give medals to first and second place in 10-year age groups from under 30 to 50+ and medals to the overall male and female winners. I got a medal in the only race I ran because that week the usual winner was on leave. The overall winner for the last three weeks is a 55-year-old warrant officer who runs between an 18-flat and 18:30 5k. So my medal was a matter of good timing. There is supposed to be a lieutenant who is currently on leave who runs a 17-minute 5k, but for now the old guy rules.

In Chapel Choirs Men are the Majority

SOME MEMBERS OF THE TALLIL GOSPEL CHOIR AND DANCE CHOIR

At first glance, chapel choirs look and sound like their civilian counterparts—except they are several octaves lower. Women are the majority in churches and choirs everywhere reflect that. But in the chapel choirs, we see all the variety of the civilian world, with men doing most of the singing.

At Fort Sill, the choir in the Anthrax Chapel for the protestant service was one young lieutenant with a guitar who sang a solo every week and provided the music for the hymns.

In Tallil, every faith community has a choir and they are as different as the denominations they represent. At the Sunday evening Catholic service, the choir was three men, one with a guitar, leading the singing for a service with almost 100 soldiers. At the contemporary Protestant service in the Air Force area, they had a 6-member choir with a keyboard and several other instruments and PowerPoint Hymns for a congregation of 25.

The traditional Protestant service in the Army chapel had a keyboard player and three singers and also had hymns on PowerPoint on a screen. The Sunday afternoon and evening Gospel services are the choir showstoppers. They have 30 men and 10 women backed up by a half-dozen drums and other instruments in front of a congregation of more than 100. A mostly male Gospel choir sounds like any other Gospel choir until they crescendo at the end of a song. Thirty male voices almost shouting shakes the walls of low, concrete Adder Chapel. In addition to the drums, clapping and singing of the main Gospel choir, the same group has a dance choir that performs at the beginning of the service. This choir is mostly women in black costumes with white gloves dancing to Gospel music and performing passages of Scripture.

One other thing that happens to those who attend multiple services at the Chapel is that all services are held in the same rooms at different times. So one week I heard the Gospel choir raise the roof and the next week listened to the three-man choir at the Catholic service in the very same room. It would certainly save Churches in America a lot of money of they had every Church in the neighborhood meet in one building at different times.

I hadn’t thought until this moment that I have gone from Anthrax to Adder, a deadly disease to a deadly snake. Army chapels may have good choirs, but they need help with their names.

The Chapel Menu is as Long as the Chow Hall Menu

Pro Deo et Patria is the Chaplain's motto

The Chapel here at Tallil can't cover every spiritual practice, no organization can, but they try. The first service on the Sunday morning schedule is Orthodox, I have not been to the service, but I believe the Romanian unit provides the priest. Next in rapid succession are traditional Protestant, Catholic, contemporary Protestant, Latter Day Saints, and then repeat services are held in the evening.

On Friday Muslim and Jewish services are available, followed by LDS and Jewish services on Saturday. Every day of the week there is Mass, intercessory prayer, choir practice, praise and worship service, Christianity 101, and other beginner Bible studies. The schedule is changing because a new unit is running the base. I am hoping to get one of the chaplains to start a mid-week Bible study for soldiers who are familiar with the Scriptures.

If the Chapel services are varied, the Chaplains and lay ministers cover a wider range. I'll write about some of them soon.

Boom, Boom, Yawn

We began the Memorial holiday weekend by being woken up at 3:54 am by a series of explosions. Rockets fell near the fence on our side of the base. After the blasts the sirens wailed and we all went out into the pre-dawn light to check in and be counted--100% roll call after an attack. Most everyone went straight back to bed inside our 12-foot blast walls, and everyone knew we were safe because once they fire, they have to hide or an Apache helicopter will get them.

The only complaint I heard was one of our platoon sergeants. He was looking forward to Spin Class (bicycling in the gym) and knew that by the time everyone was accounted for, the 0530 class would be cancelled.

Later, around 1100 hours, several of us were unloading shipping containers in the motor pool when we heard two big explosions about 600 meters away. The tall thin mushroom clouds in the relatively still air said these were big artillery or mortar shells. The first had a brown cloud--probably hit a dust pit, the second was white and thinner. It must have hit concrete.

As the clouds dissipated we decided to keep working until the sirens wailed. They never did. We found out later these were controlled explosions--they just forgot to tell us. Again, the only complaint was from two soldiers, one on his first deployment, one on his second, who did not want to be in a blast shelter in the heat.

Many proverbs say that stress brings out the true character of a person, whether good or bad. In a place like this, it's good to know I am with people who yawn at missile attacks and complain only about the inconvenience.

Food, Fiber, Friends and CS Lewis

Last week it became clear to me that the endless bounty of food at the DFAC (dining facility) was not providing me with enough fiber. So I went to the only store in town--the PX--and found that they sell every conceivable sugared snack, but no high fiber food. Coincidentally, I got an email from my 20-year veteran uncle asking if there is anything I need. I asked for a case of Grape Nuts cereal.

I was already eating the top five high-fiber foods on the web lists. Then I thought I could go on sick call. But that thought only lasted a second or so. I don't mind going on sick call for a bone spur or an acute illness, but the medical unit is mostly staffed by women in their 20s. So I did not want to go on sick call and explain my problem.

As usually happens when I think about human interactions for more than a minute, something from CS Lewis comes to mind. I remember reading in more than one of his essays that we are apt to judge a man as having a spiritual problem when he really just suffers from chronic indigestion. So rather than go on sick call, I asked for help from a nearly-50-year-old ex-Marine who sometimes sits in the DFAC and yells back at the TV news when "Liberals" are on. It turns out he has had digestive trouble for many years and had lots of good advice plus a huge stash of fiber supplements. And he was happy to share. I am going home in 11 days, so I will be able to go to a real store and get all the fiber that America has to offer, but in the meantime, I got by with a little help from my friend.

Tanks for the Memories

Shortly after joining Echo Company I realized that part of my suffering in 2009 would simply be showing up in the motor pool. The glacial pace of motor pools, the problems that can only be diagnosed by experienced mechanics, the whole fellowship-of-the-falling-apart-truck is something that excites me just as much as death-metal music, sitcoms, comedy movies, and zombie movies.

So I spoke to my squad leader already about the form 4100 evaluations we will be receiving in the fall, that's when Sergeants are evaluated for promotion to staff sergeant. I am already at the top grade of 63J so I will have to be retrained to be promoted, as an air conditioning mechanic, a wheel mechanic, or a generator mechanic.

Right.

So I had the bright idea of submitting my paperwork in my job specialty from before 19E--actually 19E30, tank commander/section leader. That way when we got back to the states I could revert to the job I had when I left in 1984, get familiar with the new tanks and finish out the final year of my enlistment working on a vehicle I get to shoot at least a couple of times per year.

Wrong.

An armor unit just moved in. I had a latte with one of their soldiers last night and ate dinner with two soldiers today. They both told me about a "chat" they had with their sergeant major saying tanks are being phased out in the Middle East and probably someday from the Army in general.

It makes sense. Tanks were invented in World War 1 as land battleships. They dominated land combat in World War 2, were massed to fight World War 3 in Europe, then in Viet Nam, Afghanistan (Soviet) and our wars, they are not exactly central.

So I'll have to think of something else. As tanks disappear from armor units, the soldiers who want to stay in armor will compete for fewer and fewer slots. So at least for me, by the time I get home, tanks will be on the way to being just memories.

Sensing the Sun as I Ride

Every time I ride I am aware of the sun. Whether the solar orb is low on a bright cold horizon in a Pennsylvania winter or the searing sphere straight up in the in the southern Iraq sky, the sun dominates my riding.

I have been thinking a lot about the sun with the passing of my mother-in-law. Her area of professional study—solar astronomy—helps me to focus my wandering thoughts as I ride alone around Tallil Ali Air Base. As soon as I get away from traffic, I review consciously what my unconscious already knows: it’s 6pm, the sun is in front of me, south is to the left, my shadow points back to the east, the shadow is long so sunset is an hour away, and so forth.

Because the earth orbits the sun on a tilted plane, the sun looks different on every part of the earth in every season. In Pennsylvania, the sun is never straight up in the sky. Even at noon on June 21 (the longest day) the sun is 15 degrees below vertical passing through due east and due west almost two hours after sunrise and two hours before sunset. Also in Pennsylvania and across the northern latitudes, the length of days vary dramatically over the course of a year, from more than 16 hours in mid June to just over eight hours in mid-December. In the north the sun creates long shadows, hundreds of feet long on bright days near dusk and dawn.

In Iraq, just ten degrees of longitude south, the sun looks very different. Here the sun is almost (but not quite) straight up on the sky at noon. But there is an odd respite from the blazing sun at dawn and dusk. In most of the US, the sky is bright (in a clear sky) shortly after it clears the horizon. Here the sun is obscured until it has been up almost an hour and for the last hour of the day. The heat of the day starts an hour after dawn and begins to subside before sundown because the air is so full of dust that the sun almost disappears and becomes just an orange glow an hour before it sets and is hidden for the first hour of the day.

The effect is enhanced further because we are on the eastern end of a wide time zone. The sun rises before 5 am and officially sets by 7 pm. So the sky gets suddenly dimmer at 6pm before dark just after 7pm. Because we trained at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, before coming here, the body clock effect was even greater. Fort Sill is at the western end of a time zone at roughly the same longitude. The day is the same length, but in mid-April as we left Fort Sill, sunrise was after 7 am and sunset was well after 8 pm. When we landed in Kuwait, the day was the same length but started before 5am and ended before 7 pm.

When I traveled more the sudden change is the sun was even more dramatic. I once traveled Edmonton, Alberta, in July. On a Saturday evening at 7pm I started a 5000-foot climb up to a lake in the Rockies west of Edmonton. At 50 degrees of longitude in July, the sun did not set until after 11, long after I climbed to the lake and rolled back down to the rental van. I visited Singapore several times. Just two degrees north of the equator, the sun is the same year round. The sky is dark until just before dawn then in just 15 minutes the sun is bright and fully visible, going straight up till noon then dropping stright back down—and disappearing just as quickly at night—no long Pennsylvania sunsets in Singapore.

South of equator is the weirdest riding of all. When I rode in Australia and South American I could not get used to the sun crossing the northern sky. If it is Noon in Australia and the sun is on my right shoulder, I am riding WEST. That is just wrong. I could get lost in an empty parking lot in the southern hemisphere just because the sun is on the wrong side of the sky.

The other association I have with the sun is as a source of light and light’s place as the ultimate reference of all physical reality. When the Apostle John wrote about light he could not have known that 20th century physics would show that the speed of light is one of the fundamental constants of the universe--the one that determines the ultimate reality of space, time and energy. Several years ago a read a book by a Cornell physicist (and agnostic) David Mermin called "It's About Time" which explains relativity physics very well and showed me why light is so central to to faith--it really is the symbol and the substance of physical reality and the closest thing in our daily experience to physical reality.

I love the sun in all its complicated glory and in the spiritual glory it symbolizes. Now it's time ot get my uniform on and go to the motor pool.