Haji Ants

Haji Ants

 

By Chuck Michael

9/22/03

I am sitting on my porch at Camp Speicher, an Army airfield in the Iraqi desert near Tikrit. The crumbs from my granola bar are on the move. Closer observation reveals a little black ant pushing on a piece of granola three times his size. He is working it like a D9 operator would a tree stump. Pushing, gunning the engine till it exhausts itself and the tracks started to spin in the soft earth, then backing out and going around the other end and shoving it from that direction. In an attempt to vent his frustration at the granola he hares out and about, running around in circles for 5 or ten seconds and then back at it. Another ant approaches and he sallies forth to chase him away. Deciding finally he isn’t getting anywhere, he tears off in the direction of his nest as fast as his 6 legs would carry him. I know because I follow him. He is incredibly fast. For his size and considering the terrain he has to negotiate, it is quite amazing; as fast as my normal walk. These fellas have minds of their own. They get out of your way when they see you coming. They travel alone and never form a chow line like regular ants at a picnic. About 5 minutes later here he comes back again, pushing and biting and pulling like the Little Engine That Could. A few minutes more and a bigger ant arrives which the little one doesn’t try to chase off. Can’t you just hear them at the nest. “SPIKE! Spike! I just stumbled across a gold mine. You are not going to believe the size of this food Man. It is like stupendous Spike, and it’s like too good to be true Man.!This is some sort of new-fangled man made energy bar stuff or something. Its like the Empire State Building or something Man. I can’t move it by myself. C’mon Spike. Lets go get it”.

“Yeah, yeah….I’ll be along in a few minutes. I got to finish stacking these fly eggs for the Queen’s banquet tonight. Here. Grab that last carcass over there and push the payload out of her. I’m a mess. How does she stomach this crap? I’ll be along after I get cleaned up”, says Spike.

“Sure Spike. I mean you smell like you’ve been rolling in someone else’s vomit to be honest. Gad! This stuff is yucky. This is what she eats? Or is this just what she feeds her suitors? Hey. Hurry up though Huh? Like we have to get back out there before those red ants from B Company find it. You know how they are. We’ll be all day fighting them. “ They double-team that lump of granola all the way back to their nest, which is about 100 feet away. They dispatch half a shelled peanut with the same determination. Figuring the scale to our size would work out to dragging 10,000 lbs for miles, I estimate. Maybe these are imported Egyptian pyramid builder ants that hitched a ride through the Red Sea on one of Moses’s camels. The Bible isn’t clear on this point but it is feasible that these guys are decendants of Pharos ant farm. Wouldn’t that be cool, the ant farm Pharo had when he was a kid and one morning before heading off to be worshiped he has a closer than usual look and notices little teeny tiny pyramids…Naaaahh! Occasionally one of these ants would stop long enough for me to observe her closely. Their rear ends stick up in the air at about a 45 degree angle which reminds me of a funny car. They are built like a fork lift rigged for the Daytona 500; like something out of the Monster Garage. Their legs are long and light compared to their stocky bodies. The rear legs are jointed in the middle like a deer, which I suppose gives them their mind boggling speed; reminds me of something George Lucas would dream up. Their mouth is surrounded by large mandibles. I have seen them grab something, lift it up and when they started to move, the top heaviness toppled them forward but they didn’t let go, rather turned upside down, still gripping the food verticaly, head down, swaying back and forth, 6 legs flailing, trying for control again, then take a few steps further and repeat the process all the way rolling and tumbling to the nest. It’s funny to watch because when it happens they are repeating their rolling and tumbling routine every couple of seconds or so. You can see her out there 70 feet away; a little black dot on the desert, somersaulting with her granola on her torturous path to the crib. These guys don’t build mounds. They just have a nest with multiple entrances-holes in the ground if you will. Truly, if they were our size, we wouldn’t be here. They are picky about their food also. As if they have a lot of choice in the Iraqi desert. They won’t eat dead flies I swatted, but rather grab them and look in the carcass for eggs. If they find none they drop it and continue on their everlasting egg hunt to the next one, and finding one with eggs, scurry off to their nest fast like lightening. You can’t see them for dust. Watching closely, its almost as if you can watch them making a decision and once made nothing deters the sprint to the nest. Bee line. No time wasted. I dumped a packet of sugar out on the ground. They haven’t taken an interest in it. Surprisingly, they avoid any water I spill in their vicinity. They will walk through it but I’ve never seen one of them paying much attention to it; which reinforces my Red Sea Theory. They are perfectly suited to their environment. They remind me of HoDaddy surfers that love the beach but hate the ocean of which in their environment, there is plenty of the former and absolutley none of the latter. I crumbled a whole bar of granola for them, expecting to see the entire colony out there eventually. No, there were more ants gathering up the spoils but not many more. Seeing as how they are Hajji ants, maybe they are all Muslims and discourage women working outside of the home. For that matter they could be Amish, who generally feel the same way. No way they’re Baptists. Nevertheless, the next morning there was only one oversize crumb, which they were still sawing up. Given a choice, they seem to hunt around for the biggest piece they can carry at first before scrambling off. They know about power to weight efficiency. Like the song goes: “These guys ain’t dumb” I have a plywood porch supported by a 2 x 2 boards. Nooo. I know what you’re thinking. They didn’t try to carry off the porch. Once they decide on a piece worthy of their efforts off they go like some high school kid peelng out of the parking lot after school, fairly leaping off the porch’s edge rather than walking vertically down.” No time to waste. Got to get this back to the Queen so she can spawn more ants (or make her boyfriends eat it) and increase the size of the colony”; almost like they are awarded points for showing up with the most chow. Politically, I think they are Communists. Yes, it sometimes does get boring out here. And that’s all I got to say about that.

The Electric Shower

Tikrit Summer of 2004

by Chucky


The Army hired some Hajjis to build us three shower units. Really great! No more trooping to the shower point four miles away. We got showers right here behind the tent. We are all eagerly awaiting their completion. All of us were pitching in offering suggestions and helping carry wood and making sure our Hajji friends were well supplied with water, soda and MREs. Picture Hammid the pipe fitter and Aachlid the boss and the whole gang banging and sawing in eager anticipation of our new shower. Before they were finished I went on leave to the States for a month. And when I returned they were done! Oh Boy! I couldn’t wait to use our new shower facility. After a briefing from one of the shower vets on how to tell if there was enough water and turning on the water heater and all I was ready for my first try. There is lots of construction going on now. The unit has plenty of wood and are busy as beavers building themselves hooches. I noticed Top; the Unit First Sergeant was working on his when I entered the shower. Oh Boy oh boy oh boy. New shower just steps away from the tent. For those of you that have luxuriated in simply stepping into your bathroom to shower, you have no idea of how spoiled you are.


Our new shower hut is made entirely of wood. There is no metal except for the galvanized piping, water heaters and the piping…and the wiring supplying 220v to the water heater elements and lights. In the shower room there is a standard shower setup as you might expect to find in the facilities of a stateside campsite. There are the expected hot and cold knobs, and a middle knob to select between spigot and shower. Then there is the shower itself, which rises from the control unit and terminates in a plastic showerhead. There are two rooms in each of the three units. One room with the actual shower in which is built a small shelf for shampoo etc. and another area of equal size for shower prep and dressing. There is a chair and a shelf also. Just like camping out. Oh and there is a latch on the door. The unit is designed with slats in the floor so the wastewater drains out on the desert floor. No biggie. Hah! Having just returned from my green marble Jacuzzi tub and shower with multiple showerheads and heat lamp in Texas the thought had occurred to me that relatively speaking, this setup was nicer.


I turned on the cold water and got a good flow going from the showerhead. I then reached through the water stream to turn on the hot water. I got a pretty good shock. As an electronic technician the biggest jolt I ever took was 115 volts at 400Hz from an aircraft radio dynamotor. That one literally knocked me across the room. Any proximity to electrical potential since then has always been with that experience fresh in my mind…for going on 30 years now. I jerked back and just stared for a moment. No! That was just a nerve twitching or something. No one told me about this. I couldn’t have gotten shocked. I reached for the knob to hit it a glancing blow to test whether it was the knob or me. It was the knob.


Yo Top! Your $%##$% shower is a torture chamber. I just got the #$%&* shocked out of me in there. Top dropped his hammer and returned a blank look.

“I got a load of girls here” he said as he walked toward the showers.

“Look”, he said. “Here is how you do it. First you move the shower head to one side so that the stream isn’t hitting you. Then you turn on the water with one hand behind your back. I’m not sure why this works but it does. Now keeping one hand behind your back you test the water being sure not to touch both the water and the pipe at the same time. When the water temp is where you want it then you reach up and re-center the shower head by manuvering it with the plastic head. Simple. And you won’t get shocked. OK?” All electronic techs and engineers quit laughing there’s more.

I would give anything to have a picture of the expression on my face. I stood there, jaw drooping in disbelief. “Where is he hiding the bodies?”, I thought.


Top walked back to his hammer mumbling something but all I caught was: :”…load of Nancy’s” I walked into the tent and announced that I am not going to use the new showers and am going to the shower point. I left with their ears ringing about how those showers were going to kill somebody. I then got a Hummer and drove to the shower point because I needed a shower bad.


Notice!

Showers closed until further notice due to lack of water.


“Oh Great. That’s just &%$##$ing great!!”, I screamed. “Welcome back to Iraq!!” At that point I realized why they don’t issue civilians rifles because I would have shot someone.


Four days Later

I’m standing in front of the middle shower, toilet kit in hand, towel draped over my shoulder, staring at the shower head through the open door. My eyes drop to the slatted floor. I see myself lying there, twitching; the water streaming from the showerhead ice cold, and I’m lying there. My naked body is giving off little jerks. My eyes are closed. My hair is standing on end. There is a burning smell. My feet are black. Scenes from “The Green Mile” are materializing. I stand there rationalizing away every pre-caution I have ever learned about electrical safety in 30 years of working in the field. I have worked on Klystrons as tall as I am, traveling wave tubes, High power HF. I’ve Masted radio antennas on tuna boats while dangling from a rope seat 100 ft up in the air. I have worked on hi-voltage power lines. Tuned 20 Megawatt search radars. I have wired up cable tv, climbing poles with spikes on my boots in close proximity to 16000 volts. I have wired up 220v electrics hot at remote sites at midnight because the electric company wouldn’t give me the keys to their junction box. All this I did wrapped in the relative safety of knowledge and caution. Now I stand at the doorway of death, filthy. Staring at that showerhead “Everyone else seems to be getting away with it”, it says. It’s talking me into grabbing hold of an unknown voltage while soaking wet. I turned around and headed back to the tent. .

Three days after that


I’m standing in front of the middle shower, toilet kit in hand., towel draped over my sholder, staring at the shower head through the open door. I am thinking: “If I’m going to smell like I’m dead I may as well be dead”

Having survived I’m going to have a tee shirt made: “Electric Shower Survivor”.


The next day Top informs me he has fixed the “zapper” and proudly points to a metal stake he has driven into the desert floor about 15 feet from the showers. I lift the stake out of the ground.

“Hey. You are ungrounding the zapper there”, Top says. I stare at him with a quizzical look.

“Huh?”, I say.

“Sure. I grounded the zapper so’s you won’t get shocked anymore. “

I replace the stake in its 6-inch hole and follow his arm pointing to a 22-gauge wire he has wound around the pole to the other end terminating in three wraps to one of the water pipes on one of the water heaters behind the shower. “

I replaced the ground with my own 18” copper stake driven into the ground next to the water heaters and hooked it up with a large double aught copper cable I salvaged.

The next shower zaps me anyway. I notice someone has covered the shower knobs with electrical tape. I leave the shower to the awaiting taunts of the Warrants and nco’s still building their hooch. “Hey Chuck! Nothing like a good zap in the morning to get a contractor going huh?” Hey Chuck! We notice that you are checking out the new combo shower/heart defibulator we installed for you”

“Yeah Yeah Thanks guys”, I respond.

“Hey Chuck! Why don’t you just use the Shower Point?”

“Because they are out of water till further notice”, says I.

“They’ve had water there for 6 days now Chuck. No one uses the zapper anymore. A person could get killed in there. “