As The Sparks Fly Upward

Unbelievable as it is to me, it is true: as of this writing, I have only three Sundays left in Iraq. Exactly five weeks from this moment, I will be at Ft. Benning, GA, reunited with my sweetheart Lorri, completing the CRC redeployment process. Yet, as I watch the days tick down on my little desktop counter thingie, that date seems a long long way off, and I can’t quite feel it. That may be a good thing at this point; I’m guessing that once I am close enough that I can almost taste the clean, dust and/or diesel-free air, the seconds will start to drag a bit. Right now, I am still (mostly) enjoying the ride.

This week’s Saturday-to-Sunday routine was fairly typical. On Saturday night, my neighbors and I had our usual get-together, in this case to watch Band of Brothers just outside of our cans on CPT Baker’s ridiculously oversized big-screen laptop. After two episodes, a few of us hopped into Barney and headed to the DFAC for “midnight rats,” the half-dinner-half-breakfast meal served for those workers who can’t get to the regular meals because of work. I had a nice omelet, a couple of waffles, and grabbed some cereal for Sunday morning. Back home around 11:30, at which point I caught the remainder of the (crummy) Red Sox game versus the Angels on AFN. I usually stay up late on Saturday nights, because I don’t have to be anywhere on Sunday until 1 PM (first church meeting of the day). So, on Sunday morning, I attempted to catch up on my sleep.

I choose my words carefully here, because the reality is that, though I attempt to sleep late every single Sunday, I rarely succeed. This failure is, in itself, remarkable, as it is truly difficult to conceive of a more sleep-friendly scenario than mine on Saturday nights in Al Asad. To wit:

• I have no work to get to in the morning, since I’m generally off on Sundays.
• My family is out and about doing their own Saturday stuff thousands of miles away, and they generally do not call me after 11 PM (often, due to my spotty internet access, physically cannot do so). I’m like a doctor without a pager.
• I stay up late on Saturday nights, surfing the net, watching Saturday-afternoon baseball, blogging, etcetera, which means that I should be very tired by the time I hit the hay.
• I eat breakfast at midnight, stuffing myself to the gills with high-protein foods. (Mmm, L-tryptophan.)
• I have a small personal living area with entirely user-modifiable temperatures, and a nice, cozy bed, inside a hermetically-sealed plastic container. It is like I am in a sensory deprivation tank. Eerily like that, in fact.
• I am “The Major,” so none of my co-workers dare to knock on my door, barring emergencies. (This is not because I am mean; it’s just how my very professional soldiers have always treated me.)
• There is not much else to do except sleep.

In spite of all of this, my attempts to crash past about 0730 have generally been unsuccessful. I have diligently attempted to ascertain the reasons for this, so that I can eliminate them. One possible explanation was that I am awakened and stripped of melatonin by the very bright light that comes shining into my window starting at around 0430 (Iraq does not follow daylight savings time). I have eliminated this as a possibility by hanging my thick green army blanket over the window on Saturday night. Didn’t help.

Another possibility is the noise. I do, in fact, live not only near, but actually inside the confines of the airport. Planes, helicopters, and strange creatures which are combinations of the two (true story, that) constantly fly over my tin can, rattling the walls in attempt to find the harmonic frequency and bust me open like Joshua at Jericho. This kept me up a bit initially, but now I hardly notice it; the machinery sounds are simply a part of the aural landscape, and they block out the Halo sounds next door. At this point, I’m pretty well convinced that when I finally get home, in order to get any rest I’ll probably have to go and buy one of those “soundscapes” alarm clocks, but one with a “Combat” setting (perhaps right in between “Ocean” and “Rainforest”). So, I don’t think it’s the noise.

So what gives?

Unfortunately, I and many (all?) of my family members are blighted with the “Rupard Curse.” This is a multi-functional curse, including (but not limited to) the following items:

• Male members get receding hairlines at an astonishingly early age. Want proof? Check out my yearbook picture. My high school yearbook picture.
• Multiple chins, again at an early age, and even when the rest of the body is at ideal weight.
• The “John Travolta” syndrome, in which approximately five-sixths of all weight gained at any given time goes directly to the noggin. Rupard men all have big heads, but when we get a bit overweight, they become medium-sized planetoids. I swear, some of my med school pix look like I had just moments before discovered my latent peanut allergy. (By the way, this is also known as the “Barry Bonds Phenomenon.”)
• Proctalgia fugax. I’m not even gonna tell you what this is, or link to it; you’ll just have to look it up yourself. (If you don’t have it, you won’t understand it.)
• A retentiveness which (let’s face it, compadres), occasionally crosses that fine line into the nether reaches of OCD.
• And finally, the raison d’etre of this particular digression: Rupardian Insomnia. This is not quite like regular insomnia, in which the poor sucker has to wade through two post-Letterman infomercials before finally dropping off to abbreviated-but-productive sleep. The Rupardian variant renders the protagonist willing and often able to fall asleep, but unable to remain out for more than about 45 minutes at a time. He/she is constantly waking up, looking at the alarm clock (”Crap! Only 2:45″), and laying there in the dark for 5 to 500 minutes or so, before eventually drifting back to sleep for another 45 minutes. I like to think of this as “Reverse Narcolepsy” and I have been suffering for years, as have all of the rest of us. It wasn’t until I was married and able to enviously watch my wife as she slept, on-and-on, with no alarm-clock-checks and no full-body-pillow-reshufflings, that I figured out my sleep behavior was not that of a normal hunam being.

So, I conclude that my inability to sleep beyond 7:30 is multifactorial, with my sleep genetics being the primary culprit. Ah well, at least I’m good looking…

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Rupard Mailbag

About two weeks ago, I sent a true desperado of an e-mail to mom and dad, asking for a few items which were completely, entirely NOT essential, but which would make my time here a wee bit nicer. They responded, as they always do, by sending not one, but two packages just a few short days later. Unfortunately, when the United States Army and the United States Postal Service meet, as they do here in Iraq, the vaunted efficiency of both organizations dwindles just a bit.

So, although my parents sent the two packages quite literally at the same time, I received one last Saturday the 12th (included baby wipes, almond butter, Propel flavor packets, and the all-important Jelly Bellies), and spent the rest of the week expecting but not receiving package #2. After Monday and Tuesday passed, my hopes dropped a bit, and by Friday, I had given #2 up for lost. On Saturday, however, SGT Hert gave me hope when he told me that his wife’s boxes regularly got delivered a week or more apart from one another, and yesterday (Sunday), SPC Penkert knocked on my door and delivered said package #2 (more almond butter, much-needed black socks, more flavor packets, more baby wipes). Thanks very much, LymeRupards!

This bodes well for my post-office-happiness this week, as I am expecting a couple of packages from my sweet wife, who has an uncanny knack for sending me exactly what I need.

Riding The Loop

My biking companion of the last few months has been COL Guy Gober of Tiger, GA. Next week, COL Gober and the majority of the doctors at the Combat Surgical Hospital come to the end of their three-month tours. Why do they get three months while I get six, you ask? Among other things, those docs are in the Army National Guard, while I am active duty Army. Must be nice to be a 90-day rotator.

So, yesterday the COL and I hit the 14-mile loop one last time before he heads back to GA. Al Asad temperature at launch was 111 degrees, and the wind was mild. We rode around in good time, with a mild breeze, and a lot of water in my Camelbak. Good to see COL Gober for that last time.

Now, through the magic of the internet, you can see him too.

The Debunk-inator

When I first came out to Iraq, I heard a lot of things about how hot it gets here in the July and August, with people telling me that it hits the 130s regularly, and 140s occasionally. People would quote me temperatures from their prior tours, swear that there were days in July and August that hit 145, etc. After the very modest temps that we have had in July thus far (110-115, but nothing higher than that, and it has actually cooled off a bit lately), I began to wonder if these claims of intense heat were merely exaggerations. So, I embarked on months of research, performed at our massive, 300,000-volume scientific library here on Al Asad. (Okay, actually, I looked it up on wikipedia five minutes ago. But still…)

It turns out that my suspicions were confirmed. Not only has it probably not been 145-plus degrees in Iraq, I seriously doubt that it has been 145 degrees anywhere, at least not in the past century. According to the Wikipedians, the hottest temperature on official records is 136 degrees, which occurred in Libya in 1922. Second highest? Death Valley, California hit 134 back in 1913.

Those alert readers who are skeptical of my skepticism might suggest that, as Iraq has not always had a plethora of scientists, perhaps some very high temps were not recorded. Weather Underground to the rescue! At wunderground.com, you can look up the past few years’ worth of July and August temperatures. Turns out that the peak temp in July 2007 was 118. August actually had a cooler peak at 116. 2006 was a bit cooler, peaking in the low teens.

Just to make it clear: 118 is still pretty darned hot, and the consistency of heat here is remarkable. If you look closely at the Weather Underground numbers, you’ll see that the average minimum temp in that same July 2007 was 84 degrees farenheit, which means that even in the wee hours of the morning, it’s pretty warm. And though this is a dry heat, the sun seems to bore right through me, especially during the middle of the day (10 AM to 6 PM).

But 140 degrees, it ain’t. Let’s hope it stays that way.

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.

Those of us who are members of both the LDS Church (”the Mormons”) and the United States Military eventually figure out that we are, indeed, in two separate very small worlds, in which the twain shall not only meet like the circles in a Venn diagram, but shall do so repeatedly. This Sunday, I had no less than three of these “small world” experiences in the space of an hour during our first church meeting of the day.

Exhibit #1

Around 12:50, ten minutes before our services began, I noticed a new face in the small crowd. He was a Army Specialist with short cropped hair, a kind and friendly face, and the sort of ruddy complexion which made me bet silently to myself that that hair would be red when in full bloom. As soon as he found himself a seat and put his stuff down, this gentleman introduced himself as Brother Karl Kurtz of California, and asked if he could help prepare the sacrament. As he took his seat behind our makeshift sacrament table, I thought he looked vaguely familiar. However, since I have begun to suffer (unofficially, as yet) from early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, I have learned to distrust these impressions. I have such impressions frequently, and have investigated some, only to find that the Person In Question simply had a physical trait or mannerism (i.e., a haircut, gait, or accent) which reminded me of someone else I had known. So I tossed this one out, and church proceeded on.

Next came a talk (Bro Neff), an interlude musical performance (the three members of the group leadership, Bros Diaz, Lloyd and I sang “O How Lovely Was The Morning”), and a testimony by Brother Phillips who will be redeploying after 15 months (!) in the Brown Zone. Finally, my lesson on Chapter 13 in the Priesthood/R.S. manual. During the lesson, I referenced and experience I had on my mission, though I did not mention where I served. After class, Brother Kurtz came up to me and asked if I served in the Texas San Antonio mission. Indeed, I had, and as he asked the question, I suddenly pictured a younger but no less smiley Elder Kurtz, who served in Austin, TX (among other places). I remember him at that time being a faithful, humble missionary, and he does not seem to have changed a bit in that respect. We talked about our mission president, the great Dale Huntsman, who was such an inspiration to so many of us, and I learned that his wife Karma had passed away many years ago, which saddened me. Brother Kurtz will be here for the rest of the year, and possibly a bit beyond. It was great to see him again, and I look forward to talking with him some more, and feeling of his tremendous spirit.

Exhibits #2 and 3

During the aforementioned lesson, I also referenced a very unique experience I had in/around 1984 when I was involved in an LDS Encampment of the Boy Scouts of America in upper New York state (Litchfield or Letchworth, something like that—google is not helping me much here, perhaps Mom Rupard will remember?). It was a huge gathering of Latter-day Saint scouts and we had a great time.

The story I told was of one of our adult leaders, a man named Frank (he had us call him that, so his last name escapes me), who was a Vietnam veteran. Around the campfire we would beg him for stories about his experiences, and he would tell us a bit here and there, probably scaling things down a little, but occasionally letting loose a PG-13-rated word, if you get my drift. He was a crusty guy, not used to being around a bunch of squeaky-cleans, and at one point he taught us (motivated us, really) to march very closely and well. We eventually used this new found skill to march our entire platoon into the Hill Cumorah Pageant, where our very crisp and in-step cadence garnered our unit, among the dozens there, the only standing ovation offered by the crowd before the show itself began. In my lesson, I told how this bearded, hardened veteran of a terrible war had gone with the rest of us into the Sacred Grove the following day, and broken down and wept as he gave his testimony of the marvelous events that had occurred in that place. That moment moved me greatly, and is one I will always remember.

After the lesson and at separate times, two Marines came up to me (Brother Callahan, Brother Martz) and told me that they had also attended that encampment, and we shared memories of the event. One of the nice things about the Church and the Military is that members of each have surrogate family wherever they can find another member. In both cases, it is our mutually-held values, our colliding spheres of activity, and in many cases our shared experiences which bind us together. I treasure the “small world” moments which this closeness affords.

I am writing at 0014 hours Iraq time, from the not-quite-comfort of my can (getting there, though), where our electricity has just come back on after a very long day of spoiled food, 100-degrees-in-the-absolute-darkness heat, and scarce generator parts which affected only our small section of the base. Air conditioning is, even in the high-desert, still a luxury, but tonight it verged on necessity as the members of our camp found our hermetically sealed can-tainers simply not habitable after a day in the sweltering sun. More tomorrow on the impromptu outdoors get-together that this situation fostered as it persisted through the evening and finally into the next day, but suffice it to say that, as I lie here on my sweaty bunk, I am grateful for the white noise of the working fan next to me, and for the modest ambient light of my laptop as it sends this message out to you.

Goodnight.

A quickie tonight. I am currently having the unexpected pleasure of watching the Yankees game (a day game to you; a night game to me) against the Tampa Bay Rays—a rare opportunity for me to root FOR the Yanks, since the Rays are currently in a solid first place ahead of the Sox. Sox are also playing an early one and are currently holding a tenuous lead over the Twinkies.

Clinic has gotten busy again, which makes the time go by quickly and is therefore officially a Good Thing. During our daily noon-time walk to the gym, my colleagues and I marveled at how moderate the temperatures have been here: only in the high 90s today. We all expected it to be sweltering by this point, but except for a few days, it hasn’t been too bad.

I spent much of the afternoon filling out my “OER Support Form,” which is a document in which an officer describes to his superiors in great detail all of his accomplishments during the period being evaluated. This document is then used by one’s “senior rater” to write the OER (Officer Evaluation Report), which is a form completed annually or at the end of an assignment, and is filed in the officer’s permanent record. The OER is brought out when the individual is being considered for an award or a promotion in rank.

I’m sure that it appears to you, the alert and incisively observant reader of this blog, that my description above sounds suspiciously like I am, in effect, writing my own evaluation for this deployment. There is a good reason for this perception: I am, in fact and to a large degree, writing my own evaluation. This is how the OER process works in the Army in all cases, but even more so in mine due to a unique aspect of my situation: because I am the highest-ranking officer in our Company, there are no 581st officers who are eligible to be my “rater,” so a LTC from our Battalion will complete my OER and decide whether I am eligible for a medal or other recognition of my service. Since this particular LTC has never met me, he will be, in large part, relying on the written opinion of one who knows me quite well: me.

Works just fine for this soldier. God bless the U.S. Army!