...Tom Foolery...

03 APRIL 2010

Happy April Fools, everyone. The giddy childish play of this practical joke holiday was not lost on the soldiers of my team; in fact, it seemed to define our last mission.

The list of things to do before your gun trucks can leave the gate is much longer than we’d like it to be. Hours of inspections, packing, functions checks and so on. So you can imagine our relief when the trans unit we were going to escort told us the mission would get a late start the following day. We occupied the hours of night with movies and Starbucks and phone calls home, the variety of amenities here at resort Buehring. Some of us hadn’t made it to bed still, when our boss came running through the billets half naked. He was screaming, “Let’s go” and “Move your ass” and other little NCO clichés of motivation. The whole team was late, late for a time hack that never existed, our naked boss included.

When morale is high and bad things happen, Joe doesn’t get mad, Joe catches a bit of the crazies. Couple that with a holiday built around the crazies and what you get is a bunch of grown men giving their best impressions of their children.

Two of our gunners had a battle with Honey Buns, throwing thousands of calories at each other while their trucks moved in and out of the convoy. Another soldier’s doggy bag of chicken wings was secretly slathered in hot sauce, sending him to the latrine for the better part of an hour. And at our transit tent the first morning, our boss woke us all again, told us to be productive with our time and when the last man left, our boss laid back down and slept. The Army Combat Shirt is a form-fitting top worn underneath our tactical load. We switched our 5’10, 220lbs boss’ top with one that belonged to a 5’7, 150lbs Joe. It was like watching the Hulk try to put on his mild-mannered counterpart’s clothes after he had already made his transition to rage.

Soaking in the spirits of all this Tom Foolery made it difficult to believe our youngest truck leader, a corporal, when he told us our return trip would roll out at 0200. It was made more difficult to believe when our trans unit pulled into the staging lane an hour and some odd minutes later. I’m still not sure if it was shenanigans on our part, or incompetence on theirs. Oh well, I guess.

The last of our annoyingly comical set backs brought just a glimmer of real world affect. As we snaked our way through the FOB exit and merged to the southbound lane, one of the rear trans trucks broke down. I could still see the guard towers when I stepped out of my truck. A friend of mine from another gun truck—a veteran of Iraq from a time when you could still call this a war with a straight face—walked back to give me a hand with security. We walked the desert, kicking up dust and sand, and cleared it of bombs and bullies. It felt like real Army work, just a little quieter than I remember.

The repairs were finished as the sun met up with the horizon, and we had to share the road home with the civilian traffic that comes with morning. The children were out of bed and along the roadside. And our gunners were tired of their April Fools games and turned their efforts to dropping bottles of water to the boys and girls of the baking desert oven.

But Private Murphy had one last zinger in him. Our convoy limped across the border with bloodshot eyes and sore backsides. We were less than an hour’s drive to warm meals and hot showers and the familiar cushion of a cozy bed. But before we could enjoy any of that, we would have to hoist a humvee, and change the flat tire.

- The Exodus