Happy New Year!

All the sleep books say a schedule is the most important thing for the baby, so despite the appeal of battling drunkards on the streets of Northampton in near-zero degree weather, we chose to stay in this year and celebrate 2014 in our little apartment while Truman slept in accordance to his seven o’clock bedtime.

We made some finger foods and watched The Hobbit. April had fun remembering which parts Truman had kicked her during our viewing last Christmas. (We've adopted, and enjoyed, the tradition of Chinese food and a movie for two years now. We did it again this year, but, like New Year’s Eve, we stayed in, ordering takeout.)

This was the first time in a long time we didn't go out for the evening. Every year prior, April and I did something for the New Year, even if it meant watching my parents fall asleep at half past ten.

Ten years ago I was celebrating the arrival of 2004 in Gardez, Afghanistan. In the military, Thanksgiving and Christmas are celebrated in specific ways. The brass get behind the counter and serve the enlisted men and women their holiday meals. This is what we did on the firebase. On Christmas the commander of our firebase, a lieutenant colonel who we didn’t like much, dressed up in a Santa outfit and dished out sizable helpings of ham, turkey, potatoes, and I took a slice of pumpkin pie and a slice cheesecake. For what it is, it’s an enjoyable time.

New Years in Afghanistan lacked any similar planning. No food, no count down, no fireworks (at least none planned). So it was up to us enlisted to plan an impromptu celebration.

It had snowed for most of the week. Enough snow to keep us from doing anything more than taking the main road into town on short missions. We had spent most the time on the firebase. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Humvees don’t do great in the snow. So I think many had a case of cabin fever. Adding to the feeling of being trapped, a weather system had moved in and socked us with low clouds and icy rain. It was like walking through fog spiked with tiny biting pellets of ice. The worst thing about the shitty weather was it kept the supply helicopters  from coming in, which meant no mail, and no mail meant Christmas care packages.

We lacked good weather. We lacked any good mission tempo. We lacked the snack food and sweets our families sent us for the holidays. What we didn’t lack for was a good supply of booze. One of the benefits of being out on a firebase was you could get away with things that wouldn't fly at the larger Air Force Bases in Kandahar and Bagram. Drinking was prohibited by General Order One Alpha, which included prohibition of porn, pets, sex, and entering a mosque. I can safely say none of us entered any mosques. At least not on purpose.

We made regular trips to the capital city of Kabul for booze runs. Despite alcohol being illegal in the country, international soldiers and civilians could drink. There was a liquor store in the international zone outside of the embassy. (I’m pretty sure this is where it was, though my memory of its exact location is hazy, like an icy fog.) My team frequented the establishment, never going overboard, just picking a bottle of Beam for ourselves and any requests made by those who couldn’t make the trip. Usually vodka and wine. On a firebase in rural Afghanistan you had to little to choose from in the way of mixers, so you had to drink your liquor straight or have something versatile enough that you could use what you found in the chow hall (juice boxes) to mix it with.

So most of us had started drinking after chow and collectively managed to find ourselves just outside the gate to our section of the fire base. In Gardez the firebase had two parts, the Provincial Reconstruction Team, headed by Civil Affairs, and the ODB, a company of Special Forces teams and their command element. I was part of the former. Between the two sections was a dirt road with a small wall on one side. It was at this wall where we gathered.

Cold night, frosty fog, lots of boozed up soldiers with loaded weapons. What could go wrong? Well, luckily for us, not much. We shot off a lot of rounds. The intelligence team fired off their M4s, which are fully automatic, emptying entire mags into the night. Someone loaded a flare into the grenade launcher of the M203 tube on their rifle, shooting off the round into the sky with a thunk. He didn’t aim high enough for its parachute to open. It ignited in the field, sputtered, and died. The next one caught the wind, sending an orange orb into the fog. I shot one of the interpreter’s AK 47s. I hadn’t drunk enough to not be rattled by the recoil. Over at the SF base they were shooting Soviet antiaircraft machine guns, the tracers cutting green streaks into the clouds.

The night came to a climax when someone (senior enlisted, from what I recall) in his drunk wisdom decided to attempt to fire an AT4. AT stands for Anti Tank. A bazooka, in other words. When I first arrived at the firebase, I was surprised by how many of these were just lying around, one in our truck, a couple in the room we slept. Just there. Ready to take out a tank. The AT4 has a series of safeties that make it impossible to fire by accident. As it turns out, this also makes it too difficult to fire while inebriated. The two soldiers, after a couple of tries, yelling out “back-blast area clear!” on each attempt, gave up when they got nothing out of the weapon except for a flaccid click.

Needless to say, I left shortly after this, and retreated back to our house in the corner of the firebase. I don’t think there was much of a countdown. There was drinking. There was celebration. (When we went into town the next day the locals were worried that we had been overrun in a big battle.) But no countdown. No kisses. No Auld Lang Syne. Other than the change of the year on the calendar, there wasn’t a whole lot to celebrate.

This year was the best new years I’ve had.  Good food and a good family, a fun movie and, best of all, no hangover the next day. I’m figuring 2024 will be the first year Truman will be able to stay up late enough to celebrate with us. I look forward to it.

The One Where We Almost Died

                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…