Dispatch from the Desert #24
begin transmission:
20Dec04-Monday-2127
My second war wound:
Shortly after I was “fighting” in the last war (you know, the one in Afghanistan, where I was unofficially tasked to “Operation: Paperweight” for a yearlong crap odyssey in a military cubicle at a base in Colorado) I received my first war wound. I blogged about it on my old blog at Diaryland (search the archives, I’d link to it, but can’t actually get to my LJ site from this base, so a friend is still updating these words for me…everybody say “Thank You, Daggon.”). For those of you who do not know this story, you should look it up, but the long and short was that I tore a piece of cartilage in my shoulder out while I was spending a day sledding after a blizzard covered Denver. I was trying to keep up with the kids. I failed.
And again, I have injured myself during the war. This time the war is less just, the damage to my shoulder less severe, but my self-mutilation methodology was surprisingly similar.
The Carrefour mall (AKA the BAM, or Big Ass Mall) is one of the largest malls I’ve ever seen in the world. It rivals the skyscraper malls in Japan, or the Affluenza Farms in America. It has an ice hockey rink in it, arcades, restaurants, shops etc. Everything you’ve ever seen in a mall and more. It’s massive. This country has little in regards to natural resources beyond one of earth’s richest supplies of oil, natural gas and space to spread out. And with this mall, they have spread over a several square mile area, complete with an ice slide/sledding hill.
A few days ago, five of us went to the mall…again. Myself, The Adulterer, MSgt Techie, Lt. Riddlin and The Short Log-Dog. I’d seen more of the mall than I cared to, but I didn’t argue because it 1)got me off base, and 2) had the ice slide. After a few hours of wandering the banal-shops-of-tacky-shit-you-can-buy-anywhere, we arrived at the arcade and had a gargantuan meal of tender lamb/chicken kebobs, bowls of hummus, gallons of warm rice, exquisitely fresh fruit salad, dozens of different dips, breads, spreads and organic edibles we could never name. Mostly Mediterranean food but with the Middle East twist to it, it was wonderful. And the 5 of us ate for about $35.
With our stomachs no longer in the traditional “J” shaped configuration, but leaning more towards a more gluttonous “O”, we waddled to the ice slide. I paid my 15 Qatari Riyals and ran into the snow room where I of course set up my ambush. It’s a small room, no larger than your bathroom, with all of an inch of hardened slush on the ground, but it made for the best snow for a thousand miles in any direction. The first man through the door was The Adulterer, who had fallen into an ambush of mine the last time we were here and wasn’t going to do it again. But the second was Lt. Riddlin, who I tagged at the base of the back of his neck, a perfect shot to ooze down the back of his shirt. He got off a few good tosses, but never came close. The workers broke us up far too quickly and dragged us up the long metal staircase to the top of the slide.
Together, the five of us armed ourselves with our sleek nylon coated inner tubes and looked down the slide; a 30 foot wide ramp of ice a half a block long. At the bottom of the slide is a gap about 40 feet long before you hit the padded wall. In that gap were a group of 4 women, dressed in the long tar black robes with the eye slits that look more and more seductive the longer you live in the desert. They were watching over 2 small boys, dressed in jeans and t-shirts who scrambled around the ice throwing snowballs at each other.
The revolution I had started on my last trip was still in action.
“We’ll all go down together. Run and jump at the same time and see if we can reach the back wall with the slide.” I was trying to organize our frictionless departure from the top of the ramp into the most fun possible.
MSgt Techie responded, “We can’t hit that back wall, it’s too far away from the end of the ice. We’ll never reach it.”
“Fine, try it anyway.” We all lined up, sprinted towards the ice, and dove forward onto our inner tube sleds.
We did not take into account the increased mass of our stomachs when estimating our downhill acceleration.
To say that we hit the back wall with enough force to leave a DNA sample wouldn’t put enough emphasis on the incredible velocity we attained on that ice slide. There are now 5 human shaped indentations in that wall which will forever portray the same kind of hideous grace of the shadows burnt into the walls at Hiroshima. And we did not all hit at separate areas. All 5 of us slammed into the back wall at the same 3 foot area. The dog pile of awkward bodies and inner tubes left as a result was so impressive that the crowd of employees, the snowball revolution children, and the group of black robed women all applauded. They were positively cheering at what we had done. After three and a half months in this desert, my group had finally made a positive impression on the locals. A catastrophic wreck such as ours required not only bad luck and no small quantity of human stupidity, but also a certain lack of finesse that is only seen in the American tourist. What we had created was a true work of genius in the artistic medium traditionally termed “Gagglefuck”.
As we peeled ourselves from the back wall and checked each other for internal bleeding, one word pervaded our collective subconscious: “Again!”
We each snatched our respective sleds and sprinted up the staircase to go again. The workers looked at us warily and wearily, and we lined up in the V-wing formation with the silent and efficient professionalism of the soldiers we are. Lt. Riddlin, being the highest ranking, gave the command, and without hesitation, we charged again.
And again.
And again.
Until the workers had to kick us out. We went down the slide far more than the purchased “two trips”, and by the time we were being dragged away from the artificial snow, there was a large crowd of black robed women watching our antics through a window nearby, their erotic eyes could be seen laughing through the small slits in the fabric of their veils.
Laughing and soaking wet, we walked through the mall cheering and drawing far too much attention to ourselves for soldiers in a foreign land ordered to “stay low and avoid the radar”. We piled into the car, and drove right into largest cruising strip I’ve ever seen.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the local football team (soccer to us Americans) had just won some game against Iran (?), and the celebrations were nothing short of ferocious. Purple and white Qatari flags were flown from every car, racing and honking down the strip on the coast in front of the Emir’s ocean-side palace. It was near anarchy. Cars going down streets in circles, any direction they wanted to go, pedestrians hopping on the hoods of various vehicles and telling them to go faster. Flags worn as capes by people actually standing up on top of moving cars and screaming and waving. Noise, noise, noise, with inflatable decorations standing as pillars on every roundabout, proclaiming the defeat of the opposing team.
We had no idea what was going on. Totally clueless. We were suddenly 5 damp Americans trying to lay low but obviously sticking out in the middle of a celebration just short of a riot. We pulled alongside a car with the driver literally standing up on the door-well screaming and waving a flag, with kids jumping up and down on top of the car. We were trapped between him on the right and the sports car on the left that had a decal taking up his entire rear window proclaiming him to be “The #1 Terrorist” (who knows, it could have been Osama himself as far as I know). People were lined up along the sidewalks with every digital media recording device you can think of, from professional television crews to individual cell phone cams, and we were being filmed at all angles.
We definitely could have been in some trouble here. So what does one do when you’re supposed to lay low but find yourself surrounded by a writhing mass of crazed football fans driving $40,000 cars with a lunatic on the right and a terrorist on the left? Well, if you are a smart soldier, you’ll roll up the tinted windows, honk along with the others and try to blend in with the caravan until you can turn off. If you are me, you reach out the window to try to steal one of the lunatic’s flags and tell the driver to step on it.
Hey, in for a dime, in for a dollar, right?
We made it from the coast to the base in 10 minutes, a trip that usually takes a half hour. The Colonel’s truck can MOVE when you want it to.
It was the combination of a massively dense stomach, slamming into a wall while covered with ice, and then shaking in the back seat of a truck moving at mach 1 that did us in. We all woke up the next day with one thing or another sore. My personal souvenir from the evening was a shoulder aching all over again. Not badly enough that I want to have it seen, but badly enough that I know I need to take it easy for a few days.
Just another night on the town.
end transmission.
20Dec04-Monday-2127
My second war wound:
Shortly after I was “fighting” in the last war (you know, the one in Afghanistan, where I was unofficially tasked to “Operation: Paperweight” for a yearlong crap odyssey in a military cubicle at a base in Colorado) I received my first war wound. I blogged about it on my old blog at Diaryland (search the archives, I’d link to it, but can’t actually get to my LJ site from this base, so a friend is still updating these words for me…everybody say “Thank You, Daggon.”). For those of you who do not know this story, you should look it up, but the long and short was that I tore a piece of cartilage in my shoulder out while I was spending a day sledding after a blizzard covered Denver. I was trying to keep up with the kids. I failed.
And again, I have injured myself during the war. This time the war is less just, the damage to my shoulder less severe, but my self-mutilation methodology was surprisingly similar.
The Carrefour mall (AKA the BAM, or Big Ass Mall) is one of the largest malls I’ve ever seen in the world. It rivals the skyscraper malls in Japan, or the Affluenza Farms in America. It has an ice hockey rink in it, arcades, restaurants, shops etc. Everything you’ve ever seen in a mall and more. It’s massive. This country has little in regards to natural resources beyond one of earth’s richest supplies of oil, natural gas and space to spread out. And with this mall, they have spread over a several square mile area, complete with an ice slide/sledding hill.
A few days ago, five of us went to the mall…again. Myself, The Adulterer, MSgt Techie, Lt. Riddlin and The Short Log-Dog. I’d seen more of the mall than I cared to, but I didn’t argue because it 1)got me off base, and 2) had the ice slide. After a few hours of wandering the banal-shops-of-tacky-shit-you-can-buy-anywhere, we arrived at the arcade and had a gargantuan meal of tender lamb/chicken kebobs, bowls of hummus, gallons of warm rice, exquisitely fresh fruit salad, dozens of different dips, breads, spreads and organic edibles we could never name. Mostly Mediterranean food but with the Middle East twist to it, it was wonderful. And the 5 of us ate for about $35.
With our stomachs no longer in the traditional “J” shaped configuration, but leaning more towards a more gluttonous “O”, we waddled to the ice slide. I paid my 15 Qatari Riyals and ran into the snow room where I of course set up my ambush. It’s a small room, no larger than your bathroom, with all of an inch of hardened slush on the ground, but it made for the best snow for a thousand miles in any direction. The first man through the door was The Adulterer, who had fallen into an ambush of mine the last time we were here and wasn’t going to do it again. But the second was Lt. Riddlin, who I tagged at the base of the back of his neck, a perfect shot to ooze down the back of his shirt. He got off a few good tosses, but never came close. The workers broke us up far too quickly and dragged us up the long metal staircase to the top of the slide.
Together, the five of us armed ourselves with our sleek nylon coated inner tubes and looked down the slide; a 30 foot wide ramp of ice a half a block long. At the bottom of the slide is a gap about 40 feet long before you hit the padded wall. In that gap were a group of 4 women, dressed in the long tar black robes with the eye slits that look more and more seductive the longer you live in the desert. They were watching over 2 small boys, dressed in jeans and t-shirts who scrambled around the ice throwing snowballs at each other.
The revolution I had started on my last trip was still in action.
“We’ll all go down together. Run and jump at the same time and see if we can reach the back wall with the slide.” I was trying to organize our frictionless departure from the top of the ramp into the most fun possible.
MSgt Techie responded, “We can’t hit that back wall, it’s too far away from the end of the ice. We’ll never reach it.”
“Fine, try it anyway.” We all lined up, sprinted towards the ice, and dove forward onto our inner tube sleds.
We did not take into account the increased mass of our stomachs when estimating our downhill acceleration.
To say that we hit the back wall with enough force to leave a DNA sample wouldn’t put enough emphasis on the incredible velocity we attained on that ice slide. There are now 5 human shaped indentations in that wall which will forever portray the same kind of hideous grace of the shadows burnt into the walls at Hiroshima. And we did not all hit at separate areas. All 5 of us slammed into the back wall at the same 3 foot area. The dog pile of awkward bodies and inner tubes left as a result was so impressive that the crowd of employees, the snowball revolution children, and the group of black robed women all applauded. They were positively cheering at what we had done. After three and a half months in this desert, my group had finally made a positive impression on the locals. A catastrophic wreck such as ours required not only bad luck and no small quantity of human stupidity, but also a certain lack of finesse that is only seen in the American tourist. What we had created was a true work of genius in the artistic medium traditionally termed “Gagglefuck”.
As we peeled ourselves from the back wall and checked each other for internal bleeding, one word pervaded our collective subconscious: “Again!”
We each snatched our respective sleds and sprinted up the staircase to go again. The workers looked at us warily and wearily, and we lined up in the V-wing formation with the silent and efficient professionalism of the soldiers we are. Lt. Riddlin, being the highest ranking, gave the command, and without hesitation, we charged again.
And again.
And again.
Until the workers had to kick us out. We went down the slide far more than the purchased “two trips”, and by the time we were being dragged away from the artificial snow, there was a large crowd of black robed women watching our antics through a window nearby, their erotic eyes could be seen laughing through the small slits in the fabric of their veils.
Laughing and soaking wet, we walked through the mall cheering and drawing far too much attention to ourselves for soldiers in a foreign land ordered to “stay low and avoid the radar”. We piled into the car, and drove right into largest cruising strip I’ve ever seen.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the local football team (soccer to us Americans) had just won some game against Iran (?), and the celebrations were nothing short of ferocious. Purple and white Qatari flags were flown from every car, racing and honking down the strip on the coast in front of the Emir’s ocean-side palace. It was near anarchy. Cars going down streets in circles, any direction they wanted to go, pedestrians hopping on the hoods of various vehicles and telling them to go faster. Flags worn as capes by people actually standing up on top of moving cars and screaming and waving. Noise, noise, noise, with inflatable decorations standing as pillars on every roundabout, proclaiming the defeat of the opposing team.
We had no idea what was going on. Totally clueless. We were suddenly 5 damp Americans trying to lay low but obviously sticking out in the middle of a celebration just short of a riot. We pulled alongside a car with the driver literally standing up on the door-well screaming and waving a flag, with kids jumping up and down on top of the car. We were trapped between him on the right and the sports car on the left that had a decal taking up his entire rear window proclaiming him to be “The #1 Terrorist” (who knows, it could have been Osama himself as far as I know). People were lined up along the sidewalks with every digital media recording device you can think of, from professional television crews to individual cell phone cams, and we were being filmed at all angles.
We definitely could have been in some trouble here. So what does one do when you’re supposed to lay low but find yourself surrounded by a writhing mass of crazed football fans driving $40,000 cars with a lunatic on the right and a terrorist on the left? Well, if you are a smart soldier, you’ll roll up the tinted windows, honk along with the others and try to blend in with the caravan until you can turn off. If you are me, you reach out the window to try to steal one of the lunatic’s flags and tell the driver to step on it.
Hey, in for a dime, in for a dollar, right?
We made it from the coast to the base in 10 minutes, a trip that usually takes a half hour. The Colonel’s truck can MOVE when you want it to.
It was the combination of a massively dense stomach, slamming into a wall while covered with ice, and then shaking in the back seat of a truck moving at mach 1 that did us in. We all woke up the next day with one thing or another sore. My personal souvenir from the evening was a shoulder aching all over again. Not badly enough that I want to have it seen, but badly enough that I know I need to take it easy for a few days.
Just another night on the town.
end transmission.