I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

—T.S. Eliot

Sundays here are NOT “groundhog days” for me. Thanks to the luxury of having both a physician and a nurse practitioner in our troop medical clinic, I am able to give LTC Bullock Saturdays off, and I take the Sundays. This means I get to sleep late one day a week, and I remained in bed until almost 8 this morning. The best thing about sleeping late here (aside from the obvious beauty of pure laziness) is the fact that an extra hour or two of “Iraq time” drifts away from me unconsciously.

Today I woke up a bit headachy, probably from sleeping too long. Breakfast was a BSC pop-tart with some Gatorade to wash it down, and then I listened to some talks as I wrote a bit, surfed the web, read, and did some minor straightening around the canister. Around noon, a couple of people needed to be dropped off at the post office (it is open seven days a week here, though sometimes no mail will be flown in for 2-3 days in a row), and I was the only available person who could drive a stick shift. The upshot of this was that I ended up having the truck to myself, which meant that I’d have a ride home from church (I usually end up walking or taking the bus). Sweet!

Church was even more reserved and quiet than usual, as there were only 11 of us there, including one lone sister and a bunch of balding (or close-shaven) men in uniform. A funny thing about having such a small congregation is that it only takes about 5 minutes to pass both the bread and the water. We then tried to watch a talk by President Hinckley, but there must have been dust in the DVD player (a chronic problem here), and the video kept getting unfixably stuck, so we eventually abandoned it, and instead we ten men and one woman enjoyed Sister Beck’s talk on “Mothers Who Know.”

The early PM was naptime, and after some reading, I fell asleep listening to George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London,” which I downloaded from audible yesterday, and wholeheartedly recommend. Around 5:30 was dinnertime, and yet another unexpected, unique experience.

After we had eaten, I walked out into what I expected to be the typical blinding Iraqi sun, but instead the sky in front of me was dark, and behind me it seemed to be an ominous purple color. I did a double-take, and on closer inspection noted that this was not, in fact, sky at all. It was a unspeakably huge (ginormous, humongous, massive) mountain of sand, and it was rolling and billowing in our direction, with occasional lightning flashes at its edges. It is next to impossible to describe the massiveness of one of these things, and unfortunately, none of us had our cameras with us. To give you an idea, here a couple of pictures of a sandstorm over Al Asad in 2005. These pictures are very similar to what it looked like today, but do not convey the enormity of the thing, and do not quite reflect the deep purple color of today’s massive cloud.

If you look closely, you’ll notice the tiny-looking people in the forefront of these pictures; that will give you some idea as to the size of the typical Al Asad sandstorm. More (and larger) pix of this same sandstorm can be seen here.

When I pointed out to my companions that we were being stalked by a giant dust cloud, they suddenly became very wide-eyed and started literally running towards the bus, and yelling at me to do the same. I didn’t hesitate, and once we were all in, we started heading back to the canisters. Unfortunately, everyone in Al Asad had the same idea, and so we ran into a bit of a traffic jam, even as we watched this ominous thing billowing in our direction. We were about a quarter-mile away, when I saw the cloud climb over a bank of tents to our right, and come literally screaming towards our bus. A brown, sandy gust of wind hit the right side of the bus, and the force of the thing, though not enough to lift up our vehicle, was nonetheless very palpable. At that moment, everything outside of the bus suddenly went pitch black.

The blackness of a sandstorm is unlike any darkness I have experienced before. It is thick, and it is heavy. There was a car just ahead of us (maybe 10 feet), but its tail lights were absolutely gone. We slowed down to a crawl, and eventually made it to our camp. SGT Evans parked us as close to the cans as possible, with my permission to leave the bus in this not-quite-legal spot overnight. We all got up and poised ourselves for the three doors, and Evans signaled to us: “Ready? Go!” The three doors were opened up simultaneously, and we jumped out of the bus like it was about to explode, and ran towards our canisters. I could taste the dust in my mouth, and felt the grit in my eyes and my nostrils. I held my breath, kept my eyes closed to a tiny slit, fiddled with my keys and eventually opened my door just enough to slide in through the crack.

Once inside, I assessed the damage which was only minor. My glasses were covered in fine sand, and my clothes had turned a dull grey on the front and the right side. I had expected that the air in my can would be cool and relatively clean, but was sad to notice a layer of dust on the shelf that is directly in front of my air-conditioner unit. The filter was not keeping much of this particulate matter out, and I could see it blowing into the trailer. My whole room smelled of silt and dust, and I decided that I needed to remedy this as soon as possible. Within a few minutes, my A/C had been rigged with a wet, brown Army towel in front of it, so that any dust that was blown out would hit the front of the towel and drop from there, rather than blowing all over my living space, like so:

Not too fancy, but it did the job. About 30 minutes after the sandstorm started, it began to rain. Hard. A good thing, I thought, as it would bat down the dust a bit. I also noted that the gritty sound of sand hitting the side of my trailer had ceased.

Then, I had an idea. I grabbed my Army-issue wet weather gear, along with my Dopp kit and soap. I then hid a towel under my coat, opened the door, and ran towards the showers. The landscape outside had changed: there was a thick layer of dust and/or mud wherever I stepped, and everything was greyish-brown, including the air visible beneath the outside lights.

But no matter: for the first time in a month, I had the entire bathroom to myself.