The Greatest Christmas (Part II)

The men and women back as base camp were hastily preparing the place for Christmas. We had plenty of those "chem-light" things of various colors. Those are the plastic sticks filled with fluid, and when you snap them in half, they emit a glow for several hours. Dozens and dozens of these were placed in and around the multitude of tents we all lived in. The most adventurous of them were digging a huge pit, while others went on a 2 hour scavenger hunt to try and find 5 to 6 inch round rocks. This was not easy, as the desert floor was 99% pure sand, and they had to hunt and dig to find what they could. You never wanted to dig too far though, because the insects that were prevalent in the area never migrated during the winter, they just dug tunnels and set up shop beneath the surface until the hot sun reappeared in March or so. A couple of mechanics, assigned to take care of our equipment, went to work dismantling a grill from the front of one of our command vehicles, an M-113 Armored Personnel Carrier. Until this moment, those grills never did serve any kind of useful purpose.

Meanwhile, I and my cohorts had arrived at the village, and we were poking around trying to find some sort of food store. Keep in mind, a village in the middle of nowhere Saudi Arabia is just that. Several dilapidated buildings, some of the adobe in nature, scattered around. You might wander into what you think was a Mosque, and it was actually the town hall, and vice versa. Fortunately for us, we all spoke Arabic somewhat fluently, and we soon found what we were looking for. To our surprise, the store contained an abundance of exactly what we were looking for.

The nature of how things are done in a combat zone would be as foreign to the average American as trying to decipher some tribal Australian language. When the food came in to the main supply depot in Daharan, Saudi Arabia - a port town - all the pre-fab meals were palletized by type. Rather than switching and mixing up the various meals, the supply guys took the easy route and just loaded up the pallets as they were and shipped them to the various units. Subsequently, we ate beef and noodles with carrot sticks every morning, noon, and night for over 3 months. Other units were eating chicken and pasta, while still others were eating ham and beans. Every meal; every day. Fortunately, the weekly supply runs included hundreds of loaves of bread, complimented by these plastic filled packets of peanut butter and grape jelly. After a very short period of time, this is what we took to eating. P, B, & J 24/7. We ate it for breakfast, we ate it on 2 am guard shift. It sure beat the hell out of beef and carrots for the 150th straight time.

What my eyes were seeing in this market was almost too good to be true. There were whole chickens, hundreds of them, but not such a big surprise. What surprised us was seeing bags of Lays potato chips and cases of Pepsi, which in Arabic was spelled out the word "Beebza". After some frantic negotiations with the shop manager, I ended up buying 85 whole chickens, and probably 20 or 25 cases of "Beebza", and every single bag of chips he had. He managed to produce a few cardboard boxes and some ice to pack the chickens in, and we happily loaded up the hummvee with all of this and sped on back to camp. The boys stayed watchful in their turret mount, careful to keep an eye on our cargo as well, and we made it back without incident.

Upon arrival, we found the hole was dug, the rocks were in place, lots and lots of loose kindling had been procured (I found out later, some others had done another run and came upon these trees, which they promptly pulled out of the ground with the hummvee's winch, then brought back to camp and hand sawed into hundreds of nice pieces for a fire. With this all done, the logs in the hole were soaked in gasoline, left for a while to stand, then the grill from the APC was placed over the entire thing, and someone threw a match in.