On one of the innumerable field ops leading up to the order to cross the line of departure into Iraq, we ranged deep into the desert of Kuwait, farther yet than we had been.
By that point, we of the Comm Platoon were used to our assigned jobs; as soon as the vehicles stopped, we raced out of them and set up the antenna hill as quickly as humanly possible. We became very efficient over time with putting together and throwing up the 20-foot-tall OE antennas, breaking only one or two of the things per op.
The breaking was inevitable; as one person would stand, braced against the horizontal antenna, three other people would stand with the guidelines, ready to pull them taught when the center man threw the antenna up into the air. Of course, there would be the occasional slip-up; someone would pull too hard on the rope, or the antenna would come off of its base, or it would snap in half, or someone wouldn’t pull hard enough, and the antenna would come crashing back down to the ground, smashing the delicate instruments inside the ceramic top.
We were on the sixth or seventh such field op, setting up communications with the rear crew (stationed back in the tent city, the bastards,) and one of my buddies walked over to me after we finished, as we were walking out beyond the antenna farm to dig the night’s fighting holes.
“Isn’t tomorrow your birthday?” he asked me in his eternally nasal voice; the guy had had botched dental surgery in boot camp and was forever stuffed up as a result.
I did a quick mental calendar check and realized that yes, the following day was indeed my birthday. I thought about the poppy seed cake in my MRE and wondered if I could trade anyone for some peanut butter as a topping for the thing, kind of a poor man’s birthday cake for myself. I knew I had two packs of cheese saved up, and that stuff was as good as money. I might even be able to get some M&Ms in the bargain, or at the very least some Skittles.
We dug the fighting holes and broke up into the night’s watches (Corporal Soulless declared that I would take a double watch that night for some imagined bullshit insult), and I bundled up. It got plenty cold in the holes at night, though the desert was beginning to warm up for the approaching spring season. In the distance, I could just make out tall, imposing brown clouds, the sure sign of an oncoming sandstorm.
I hoped that it wouldn’t hit us during the night. Driving, I could deal with a sandstorm. Stuck in a hole? Not such a good deal; Just the week before I had left a hole during one such sandstorm, tried to find my way back to the vehicle for a few hours’ sleep, and tripped over one of the camouflage netting ropes and smashed the rear light of a vehicle in with my helmet, knocking myself out for a few minutes.
Thank God for kevlar helmets; put a nice ding in the thing, but at least it saved my skull.
I could taste the sand in the air, along with the change in pressure; it was hard to draw a full breath most of the night.
The morning dawned brown and gritty; the sandstorm was blowing in quickly, and we called back to the tent city to be advised. Our antennas would have a hard time in a big storm, so the rear group told us to pack it in and come back. As we were packing up, the storm broke.
You may have seen a sandstorm in a movie before; you may have even been in a sandstorm yourself before. Let me tell you, I’ve been in quite a few, but this was not a regular sandstorm. It was, in fact, the largest sandstorm on record for several years. We scrambled trying to get the antennas down before the storm blew them all over and smashed them, but we ended up losing about five of them that morning. A sergeant, frantic to not lose any more, grabbed my buddy and shouted at him to get the antennas down NOW NOW NOW! Thing is, he shouted my name at the guy; the sand had coated everything so thickly that the sergeant couldn’t even tell a black guy from a white guy.
“I’m black,” my buddy said, in defense of being called the wrong name.
“I DON’T FUCKING CARE GET THE FUCKING ANTENNA DOWN NOW” the sergeant screamed.
After everything was packed up, we all got into our vehicles and prepared to leave… and then just sat there. The sandstorm was too furious to move in; we’d lose half the convoy and probably never find them again.
So we sat.
And sat.
I attempted to eat my poppy seed cake with the peanut butter I had managed to procure, but it quickly turned into a brick of sandstone on me and I flung it out the window, disgusted. Soulless clambered into the back of the vehicle and covered his face with a skivvy shirt, asleep inside of a minute.
I pulled out the Dean Koontz book I had nabbed from a guy in the motor pool and tried to read it through my stinging eyes; there was very little difference between the storm outside the vehicle and the one inside it. This was, of course, in the time before all the HMMWVs in the Marines were up-armored, a time when most of them were still made with canvas doors that were shit for keeping dust and sand out. Not like anyone really thought that through before sending a fleet of the things overseas to a desert or anything.
The sandstorm lasted for hours; I have no clue how long it lasted. Periodically, an officer would run down the line of vehicles and make sure we were all awake and ready to go at a moment’s notice. It was a scary thing to step out of the vehicle; we had pulled all the vehicles together so that the front of every one touched the rear of the one in front, so that if you had to go out, you could keep your hand on the vehicle and not be lost. The storm was thick and fast enough that you could not see out of the windows at all; a solid block of brown, fading to black as the night came on, was the only sight to be seen.
The Koontz novel was shit anyway; I occupied the hours trying to figure out just where the hell I had gone wrong in my life plan, just what the hell had led me to this place on my birthday, and wondered if I could smother Soulless and bury him in the sand and get away with it.
The storm blew all through the night and finally blew itself out shortly before dawn. We were finally able to get out of our vehicles and stretch, and to try to shake some of the sand out of our various orifices. Orifici? Orifi. Orifeces.
Holes.
Just as we were about to start moving, the first drop of water hit my windshield. I stared at it in disbelief; it did NOT rain out here. This was Kuwait. It got cold and it got sandy, but it did NOT get wet.
Then another drop, and another hit the glass. Fat, dirty drops that traced murky rivers through the arid desert bed of my windshield.
I got on the radio.
“Anyone else getting rained on? Over.”
“Yeah, up here. Thought I was leaking something. Over”
“Cut the shit, you two.”
“Beadwindow*.”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THAT BEADWINDOW SHIT.”
Patter. Patter pitter patt patter.
The rainstorm that followed the historic sandstorm was something of a historic curiosity itself. It mired the entire region in choking, sandy mud for an entire day until the scorching sun dried it all up, and we ended up stuck right in there along with it; our tires simply could not churn through the stuff. Every time any of us would try to drive out, it would only get us stuck deeper in the stuff. Eventually, we had to get out and use broken antenna poles to brace the tires with to drive out on. In the end, we got all of the vehicles out, and managed to finally get on the road back to the rear, looking like a zombie army that had crawled its way out of a cemetery full of mud.
We found out later that some insurgents had taken the opportunity the sandstorm presented to ambush a column of Marines at Fallujah, killing several of them, in one of the earliest instances of aggression during the whole ugly Iraq affair.
Later, scrubbing the mud and dried sand clumps out of everything I owned along with the other field Marines in my unit, I was teased about the sandstorm.
“That’s why you don’t have birthdays in the field, you moron; they’re bad luck.”
My hair was in such a wrecked state that I ended up shaving it all off; as I hunched behind the shitters, bare to the hips, my pale, gangly body and hairless head glistening in the moon, a doc walked past me and chuckled.
“Easy there, Smeagol; I don’t have your precious.”
The nickname stuck.
*Beadwindow is an FCC warning given when profanity has been uttered on a live radio.
