What Is An Expat?

No shit, this really happened.

So there I was, in our crappy little gym-container because I was too lazy to brave the cold for 10 minutes getting down to the real gym. I could have borrowed a vehicle to go down there, but that’s unbelievably lazy and I can’t lower myself that far. I had just finished my cardio fun and was heading to the bench, thinking about killing myself to the sweet tunes of Jewel, from her early days of music to slit your wrist by. Tears course down from my puffy eyes and drip forlornly to the floor. On the other hand, maybe it was just sweat coming from above my eyes. But that’s not important right now because BANG!

And I’m out the door. That was a strange sounding one, and the fact that the gym container has pretty much no sandbags around it doesn’t thrill me to be there anymore. It was a noise of bang on metal. I come out past the HESCO at the front, smartly remembering from a previous trip that the entrance to this bunker doesn’t seem to be where I want it to be. It is therefore no surprise when I go face-first into a sandbag wall where the bunker entrance most definitely is not. It’s not fair; the other time it was daylight out and I could see. Now it’s 10PM or so and I’ve gone from a lit container into black night. At least the idjits over at the old consulate have had someone with a brain consult them about the fact that being lit up like a Christmas tree is a really bad idea. I’m sure the inaccuracy of our AIF friends would merely result in a cluster of rounds into our AO. Anyway, I blind-man shift over the few feet into the actual entrance in record time and pause to catch my breath, while my nasty sweat condenses and steams in the frigid air, thankfully not currently filled with pieces of metal, tiny and those that ain’t. Contrasted with the anti-brevity of this paragraph, I expect it took no more than 4 seconds from sound to safety. Eventually, nothing happens. I head back into the container, and just as I open the door…

…the second outgoing round goes off. I jump, on account of it’s loud, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that I am not provably insane. I hear and understand what made it sound so strange the first time. This container is of different manufacture than the others, and it has more in common with a tin shack. The noise sort of seemed to slap the walls oddly. This is when I remember the 2200-2400 window for outgoing. I take great relief and humor in my own stupidity, and now you can too!

Of course, they didn’t fire off again til I was in the shower.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 18th, 2004 at 1:33 am by Robert and is filed under Camp Life, Iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.