The internet and the electricity have both been down most of the day today, and the former just came back up a few minutes ago. I figure I’d better blog quickly, and get it posted before we crash again.

Catching up a bit: on Friday of last week, the electricity went out in Centurion Can City, the very exclusive gated community in which I and my fellow TMC personnel reside. This is unusual: it is actually more common for the lights to go out in the clinic and other parts of the base, as they are on the “power grid.” Our cans have their own separate generator, so usually we stay up when other areas go down. But, as I learned on Friday, when we go down, we go down hard.

My computer tells me the lights went down sometime between 1 PM (when I received an e-mail message) and about 2:30, when one of our patients informed us that our cans had gone dark. By 5 PM, when I got out of clinic and back to my hermetically sealed container, it had to be 110 degrees in that thing. The sun beats down on our tin cans all day long, and without A/C, they’re about as cool as your average parked car in Arizona. I went to Family Home Evening, and was happy to find electricity and A/C functioning at the chapel. When I returned home an hour later, as I rode my bike past the commons area, I could see that the lights were still off, and in the low ambient light I could just make out a large circle of my compadres, sitting in their captain’s chairs, escaping the stifling heat inside the lightless trailers. I grabbed my own chair and sat out with them for a while, but at around 10 PM, I decided to try to hit the sack.

I put my weatherproof Army blanket on top of my bed, in attempt to not sweat all over my sheets, and lay there in the heat, with no breeze, and my door propped open in attempt to encourage the tiniest bit of air flow. Didn’t help much. Throughout the next hour, my homies slowly made their way back to their cans, but most did not last inside for long, eventually opting to lay on a table outside their trailer (CPT Baker), or in a chair (my civilian neighbor Ron and SPC Santiago, among others). A couple of the women, CPT Hall and SSG Macomber, went back to the clinic, where the A/C was intact.

For my part, I forced myself to remain on my rubberized bed, because I knew that if I lay there long enough, I would eventually nod off. I had done it many times before in the stifling heat of San Antonio during my mission. When one is trying to go to sleep in the heat, it is crucial not to have any parts of one’s body touch any other parts. This means that the legs have to be scissored a bit, and arms flailing under and above the pillow, going in different directions. It requires a lot of maneuvering, too, so as not to let the sweat concentrate too much in one place. But I did eventually fall asleep in my contorted position.

A bit after midnight, the lights went back on, with accompanying shrieks of joy among the Marines next door. It took a good thirty minutes to cool my room, though, and I used some of this time to de-stickify myself with a long, cool shower. I then called Lorri and found out that, in some twisted approximation of sympathetic suffering, she was having A/C problems of her own, with our Georgia home’s entire lower floor unit not working. The HVAC guy was over as we spoke, checking it out. Strange brew.

I eventually hit the sack around 2:30 AM, with two thoughts in my head:

1. This was easily my worst night in Iraq to-date.
2. If, at the end of my deployment, this remains my worst night, I will be very grateful.