Back in the office, my email revealed more news I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear. Josh and I had been expecting another team member would eventually be assigned to fill the vacancy left by Cat’s dismissal, but instead of keeping me in the team leader position as we both had hoped, the detachment headquarters wanted to send a replacement from a different team, a staff sergeant.
“Nothing against you, it’s just how the manning worked out.”
Gerry tried to make nice preemptively, anticipating my disappointment with the decision. He, Cat, and Stephenson, the man slotted to take over, were due to arrive at Al Qa’im sometime in the next week to conduct an inventory of all the equipment and do an official changeover.
I typed out a terse reply, stating I would rather meet them in Al Asad. As a pay agent for the small rewards program I needed to sign some documents at the finance office there, and Josh had a piece of registered mail waiting for him that would be sent back if he didn’t claim it soon. Besides, I reasoned, with preparations for Operation Spear looming on the horizon, Josh and I might not have another opportunity to enjoy all the facilities the big base offered for a long time.
Major Knight was not keen to allow us to leave due to the upcoming operation, but after some carefully worded reassurances that we really would be back soon, he finally approved our request to fly back to Al Asad.
Early the next day Josh and I hitched a ride to the flight line and waited for the helicopters to arrive. The Super Stallions came in low, choking us for a moment with a cloud of lung-burning blown sand. We squinted through the debris cloud and jogged up the ramp, thankful to trade breathing hot, powdery dust for the somewhat more tolerable hot, oily fumes inside the chopper, and wiped the grit from our eyelashes. The aircraft shook vertically into the cloudless sky and we watched Al Qa’im shrink beneath us.
Gerry waited at the helipad when we landed, with a broad smile on his face.
“Long time no see, guys! How was the flight?”
I hoisted my bag into the back of the van.
“Uneventful. How you been?”
“Can’t complain. You got here at a good time. All the other teams are here, for once.”
“How come?”
“Just a coincidence, but it has been nice catching up. You should come see everyone before they take off.”
“Yeah, definitely. Where are they?”
“Oh, PX, sleeping, chow. I think Rivas and Munoz might still be down at the cans making leaflet boxes, though.”
I watched passing rows of olive trees through my window in the passenger seat, noting that the scenery had changed since our last visit. Areas once piled with rubble had been cleared, and there were even new buildings under construction.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked, pointing to the skeleton framework of an unfamiliar building, not yet fully clad with aluminum siding.
“That’s going to be the new MWR [Morale, Welfare, and Recreation facility].”
“It’s huge!”
“That’s what she said,” Gerry snickered.
I shook my head in mock disgust.
“Whatever. Not to you.”
The cans, too, had undergone some minor remodeling, and a new plywood deck connected each of them down the line. The door of the first was cracked open. I jumped up onto the new deck and poked my head through the door to see who might be inside. Rivas and Munoz were barely visible behind a forest of haphazardly stacked cardboard boxes.
“Yo, man!”
Munoz greeted me with a wide grin, looked up from the box he stuffed with dollar-bill-sized leaflets and asked, “You want to help us make leaflet boxes?”
He slapped the top of a completed box that would later be dropped over a town from a plane or helicopter, bursting open to explode into a paper cloud of propaganda, raining down like so many thousands of falling, rotating autumn leaves.
“Sure. What do you need me to do?”
“You know how to make these, right?”
“Hmm. Don’t remember offhand, no.”
“Here. You have a knife? Cut slits in the bottom, like this.” He deftly sliced four cuts in the bottom edges of a box. “Then take your engineer tape and put it through like this.”
Munoz routed two pieces of white fabric tape through the holes to fashion a makeshift harness and turned the box over.
“Leave your ends out. And then just put the leaflets in.”
With his knife he sliced open another sealed box, this one containing freshly printed leaflets delivered from the main print facility in Qatar. He lifted out a brick-like wad of leaflets.
“How would you like to have that hit you in the head?”
He smacked the brick against his palm. The leaflets had been printed, stacked, and cut so quickly that when the wet ink dried, it glued the sheets of paper together in a wood-like mass. Munoz twisted and riffled the edge of the stack to break it apart, and threw the less-than-lethal single leaflets into the box.
“You know,” I recalled as I helped him break the leaflet bricks apart, “they say the first confirmed kill in Afghanistan was some guy who got hit in the head with one of these leaflet boxes.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Munoz stirred the full box with his hand and fluffed the contents. “Okay, when it’s full, you tie your ends together and hook up the static line like this.”
He attached a yellow nylon line of the type normally used to deploy a paratrooper’s parachute to the white cloth tape harness and taped shut the lid of the box. With another piece of tape he fastened one of the leaflets to the outside of the box as a label.
“And that’s it! We only have to do, oh …” He turned and tried to count the unfilled boxes left over in the stacks. “About twenty more.”
“Where are these all going?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied, shaking his bald head.
“Karabilah, Ubaydi, I don’t remember. I just make the boxes. Lots and lots of boxes.”
When we’d finished I retired to our old room a few doors down, somehow no longer familiar. It seemed strange and sterile, devoid of the comfort it had offered after our first return from the dam. Al Qa’im felt like home now, and I missed the familiarity of my own bed after sleeping on cots in Husaybah. Napping proved impossible. I could not deny it felt relaxing and safe in Al Asad, but for me, it was too quiet and artificial. Some of the Marines referred to the base as “Camp Cupcake” because it seemed luxurious compared to the other camps, but I no longer cared to spend my days haggling over DVDs or lining up for a morsel of over-cooked American fast food.
Stephenson, it seemed, did not feel the same way. After our initial reintroduction he spent most of his time asleep or watching movies. He was friendly but quiet, and I got the impression he’d been assigned to lead the team specifically because he was incapable of upsetting anyone. The first time I’d met him in the States I had wondered for days why it felt like I’d met him before, and then suddenly realized it was because his spectacled face had reminded me of “Ralphie” from A Christmas Story.
I wasn’t complaining. Our new team leader seemed pleasant enough, and other than the hour spent filling leaflet boxes, I did nothing that could be called “work.” I even considered word that our return flight to Al Qa’im had been cancelled due to dust storms as good news, since it translated as an extra day of vacation. Unfortunately, the impending operation meant we could not afford to wait very long for another flight, and so Josh, Stephenson, Rivas, Munoz, and I all crammed into their Humvee for the convoy back to Al Qa’im.
The camp was crawling with visitors, including a significant contingent of Iraqi forces in new plywood huts by the power station. During the night even more convoys arrived. The tarp covering the roof of our SEA hut was soon ripped off again by the prop wash of ceaselessly arriving and departing helicopters, which sometimes sounded like they would land on top of us. The flimsy walls shook under their thrumming blades as the choppers descended low and slow to the nearby helipad, returning from the covert insertion of snipers and special teams ahead of the main assault force to guard the approaches to Karabilah against IED emplacers and insurgents who might attempt to ambush oncoming convoys.
Sunlight streaming through holes in the roof awoke me the next morning. I lay in bed and reluctantly blinked up at the sky which shone through the jumbled boards, wondering how I had managed to sleep in spite of the racket. It had been an un-refreshing sleep, an exhausted surrender to fatigue after hours of waiting tensely for the operation to start, only to have it postponed another 24 hours. On the way to breakfast I stopped abruptly at the edge of the hill overlooking the chow hall, shocked by the unexpected vastness of the lines of armor and uniformed Marines below. This was going to be even bigger than Matador.