The
first big storm of the season has come and gone, leaving a good eight inches of
snow on the ground. I've done my duty, digging out the car, moving it so the
plow could clear the parking lot, and moving it back. For the job I donned my
old army poly-pros. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about Afghanistan (it
never really leaves my mind) because of the snow, because it’s been ten years
since I was there, but mainly because Afghanistan is my setting in my
Nanowrimo novel.
The
title I’ve chosen for this post partakes in some sensationalism. I confess we
were never in any imminent danger. No, I use this title as a nod to the show Friends, which used the phrase “The one
where…” in all its titles: “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate” for the
pilot, “The One Where They All Turn Thirty,” “The Last One,” for the series finale.
We
watched a lot of Friends, seasons one
through nine at least twice, plus whatever we could buy of season ten on the
black market. When we first arrived in country, bootleg DVDs ran about a dollar
a disk. By January, only six months later, demand had driven costs up to five
dollars. (Despite the fact that stateside DVDs went for at least fifteen bucks, we were
outraged. For some perspective, I remember buying the first season of X-Files as soon as it was released on
DVD for something like eighty dollars. It’s $16.56 on Amazon today.) I watched
so much Friends I had memorized the
plot of each episode and a good chunk of the dialog. Especially the punch lines.
My knowledge of the show proved to be a bit of a parlor trick, if not amazing,
then bemusing anyone who happened to be around me when an episode was on cable.
“How do you know so much about Friends?”
someone asked a party where we passed around Trivial Pursuit cards based on the show. “From Afghanistan,” I’d
say.
In
December and January op-tempo slowed because of weather. The locals told us it
had been decades since they had seen so much snow. We were also down to two
men, our third team member having been promoted to a staff position at HQ up in
Bagram. There wasn’t a lot going on in town either—much of the populace had
migrated for the season to the warmer climes of Pakistan, much like retired New
Englanders head off to Florida at the sign of the first frost. And even though
Humvees are branded as all terrain, they didn’t do well in snow on the small
roads that covered the countryside. So there wasn’t much to do. If you’re
thinking to yourself, “Come on, you should have gotten out there, searched for
Taliban, or Al Qaida, done something better than watching sitcoms,” that’s
fine. I will take full responsibility for losing the war in Afghanistan. That
is, if anyone ever decides if that war was won or lost.
We sat
in Mags’s room, he on his cot, I in a folding camp chair, playing the DVDs on a
laptop perched on a desk Mags had made himself. Our living quarters was a small
mud building, with a long common room and three small bedrooms off the side. On
the opposite wall of the bedrooms sat a small army-issued heater. It was
gravity fed, drawing fuel through a hose attached to an inverted diesel can on
a stand in the corner of the room. When the wind blew down the chimney pipe,
the heater rumbled and belched, emitting smoke and fumes. It kept the main room
a steady fifty degrees and did better than the previous heater, an older “potbelly”
model that had caught fire. For extra warmth during our Friends binge, we’d lit the mesh grate on a blue propane tank. It
hissed along as we watched, pumping heat into the small room, the wires of mesh
growing orange over time.
Each of
us had a propane tank in our room. The heating grate could be changed out for a
burner, which we used to boil water for tea, instant oatmeal, instant mac and
cheese, or any other instant food for which the only preparation was “add boiling water
and stir.” The tanks were all sorts of colors except for the white you find on
tanks under barbeques here in the US.
We watched a good three or four hours
of season seven, or maybe season eight. Chandler and Monica are about to get
married, or Rachel is pregnant and the question of paternity drives the
narrative. Things get fuzzy in my mind. Episode after episode, hour after hour,
we watch. Mags has timed perfectly the fast-forward of the opening credits. All
the while, the propane heater hisses on, filling the room with steamy warmth
and carbon monoxide.
At some point I realize I have a
terrible headache. Chandler would say in his sarcastic cant, “Could I have a worse headache?” Mags tells me
his head is killing him. Staring at a small screen for hours couldn’t have
helped, but Mags looks at the heater and says we need to get out of there. I don’t remember what we did next. Went to the
chow hall, maybe. More likely we popped some muscle relaxers we’d traded the
medic for, or bought from the pharmacy in town. I honestly can’t say. Did we think
about almost dying in that small room, our bodies subjected to the unending
loop of the Rembrandts theme song? Not at all.
The
Military Industrial Rumor Complex had churned out the rumor that soldiers had
died from carbon monoxide poisoning from propane heaters. There was no proof of
this, but after that day I could see it happening, if not to soldiers, then to
civilians unprepared and under-dressed for a snowy winter. Another hour, perhaps,
and we could have nodded off into a long nap. We didn’t use the heaters when
sleeping, and I suspect that any deaths caused by carbon monoxide poisoning were
due to using the propane tanks at night.
So no imminent danger, just the
creeping, silent kind. We didn’t think ourselves lucky, just not unlucky, this
brush with danger only significant in hindsight. And, unfortunately, our Unit’s
luck wouldn’t hold through the end of January.
Like a second language learned in
college, my encyclopedic knowledge of Friends
has waned from disuse. I can still remember the Mandarin word for love, for
friend, for WMD (some things are hard to forget), and I still remember the
larger story arcs of the series, but the small details, the setups and punch lines
are lost. I’ll still mention to April when I’m reminded of an episode’s plot.
And if I run into an episode while channel surfing, it’s like running into an
old war buddy. Remember that day on the firebase? The one where…
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