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.

A View from the Porch

by Chucky Sept 23, ‘03

The environment is the most striking thing. In the summer it is too hot to sit out. In the fall its pleasant enough after 11 am after the shade crawls up to my chair. There is no scenery. Oh. There is but not like the center of London or from the window of a farm house in Southern England with the dairy cows and sheep in the barnyard and the farmer walking by and the smell of bacon and coffee wafting up from the kitchen. It’s all a light shade of tan with sun and shade contrasting on the burning sand. The Army tents are tan; the giant Quonset hut hangars that the French built for Saddam are tan except where the skylights are courtesy of Apache gun ships during the attack. The desert floor is tan, the dried vegetation is tan. The plywood on the porch is tan. I’m tan. There is vegetation, all dead and dried. It’s tan except where the soldiers are dripping water on the desert floor either by accident or on purpose to water whatever seems to be growing. Grow it will if the ground is watered.

Before Allah changed his mind this place used to be the Garden of Eden. There is little enough activity, except for the ants on their never-ending food parade. The soldiers are either resting or working at their assigned tasks, few of which are outside in the heat except helicopter crews readying for another mission. Mercifully, there seems to always be a little of a breeze; either that or its blowing a gale and the sand is so intense that it is blinding. Most of the time though there is a pleasant breeze, enough to take the sting out of the heat. Except in the high summer, then it blows like a blast furnace such that it feels like it will cut a person in two. With a few exceptions all of the tents are standard issue 4 man Army tents. Mine is one of the few with a porch. I made it myself out of pallets. They are equipped with a custom canopy, which provides some insulation from the outside elements, the layer of air between the tent and canopy renders an insulating layer. There is a lot of dust in the air particularly during sand storms but passing trucks create their own sand storm downwind.

One learns the significance of wind direction quickly, especially in the vicinity of the chemical toilets. In our area they are on the other side of our tent and down wind next to the road, except when the wind swings around, then we may as well be living in them. I can no longer see the road, with its myriad of convoy trucks because the Army constructed large dirt berms. They are made out of wire re-inforced cardboard boxes about 7 feet high and almost as wide. They are placed and filled with dirt. Iraq has plenty of dirt. The berms provide a bit of protection from the opportunistic pot-shooter who makes it past the perimeter guards and ever-circling Apaches. We are in what is most likely the safest spot in Iraq because the base is so large. The enemy can’t get close enough to launch anything effective. A few months ago some kid on a motorcycle ran the range line with his AK-47 but they nailed him before too much damage was done or anyone was hurt, except him of course.. Besides providing protection from Ahab with his motorcycle and AK, the berms also spoil the view, which is a good thing because there isn’t a view worth looking at anyway.

Welcome to Camp Speicher near Tikrit, Iraq, where the only worthwhile view is on the pages of the book you are reading or on the game you are playing. My game is chess and we pass many an off-hour ignoring the view by playing the Royal Game; the challenge of the game broken by an occasional upward glance that subtly remind us:”Yep. We’re still in Iraq”. Not even West Texas is as desolate, although I found the Sahara a bit emptier.

The constant din of the diesel generators and the flow of Blackhawk, Chinook and Apache helicopters provide varying degrees of background drum roll, when you remember to hear it. The mind automatically blocks it all out after a while. We have a pee point. It’s a men’s urinal surrounded by plywood. That’s how we know God is a man, because doing it standing up is so much more convenient. I had a wife once who could duck behind a tree and never seem to miss a beat in the conversation on the other side. It was a large tree but nevertheless..uhh, that’s another story.

Two 4” pipes are driven into the ground and urinals are nailed to the plywood and drain into the pipes. Its about 50’ away from the porch. Its kind of funny to see men standing there behind the plywood, doing what appears to be nothing but staring at the horizon until it comes to you what they are doing and look away. Men usually avoid eye contact around showers and urinals. We tend not to look around a lot there so I make it a point not to look over toward the urinals if there is someone standing there or I see someone walking in that direction. These are not places where we strike up casual conversation.

Back to the chess game or the book. Out past the pee point looms a large black diesel generator, which supplies the 220 power for my air-conditioners. It looks ominous and gives a secure feeling but looks are deceiving. Until they replaced the radiator it quit everyday. It had a plastic radiator. Some Hajji hi- tech that certainly didn’t work very well. It’s doing ok now with a radiator the soldiers salvaged from an old crane they found in the desert. Out by the road is an old armored combat vehicle. Everything is old over here. The wrecked armor, the abandoned cars, cranes, ruins of Babylon. I’m old. Its upside down and stripped of anything useful. I think it got blown up during the war and then looted before the Iraqi Army fled. It looks Russian and has that camouflage paint that isn’t used in the Western Hemisphere except in war movies where the director wants the audience to know it an enemy vehicle.

Hajji is a GI word for Iraqi. Actually, most of the Arab world subscribes to Islam. (If that is news to you are not watching enough T.V. ) One of the tenants of Islam is that, if possible, a true believer will make a trip to Mecca, the birthplace of Mohammed, in Saudi Arabia. The trip is called the Hajj. Consequently the generic handle Hajji for anything native here. The GI s have always made up names that say a thousand words. Words sometimes that are better off forgotten after the conflict.

With Hajji there is the possibility that the common foot soldier is becoming more ethnically sensitive. It’s your new age Army. On the side of the porch, which is made of plywood on top of the pallets and shaded by an awning is the place where we keep the buckets and soap for doing laundry. I’m the only one who uses it. Everyone else sends his or her laundry to the free Army laundry. If they get it back, it may return in a big ball looking tie-dyed. I do my own, but then who cares what you are wearing here.

The warrant officers tent is directly across from ours. The ‘senior warrant officers’ as they prefer to call themselves. They have a big table and chairs outside shaded by a camouflage net and surrounded by water melon plants they are tending, grown from seeds they must have salvaged from the chow hall watermelon slices. I’m going to bring some seeds back next trip and grow some flowers. It’s a good idea. They will mitigate the never-ending tanness. Truthfully, everyone here is ruined for camping.. Casual Kaki is out also.

Looking left is the System Operators tent. These are the guys who crew the A2C2S mission equipment (that’s my raison d’etere) They scrounged up a large Hajji tent on their own and spent a week making it home. I think they got sick of living in their two man pup tents. They were busy bees hammering and sawing and pounding in the heat of the day, the four of them. Now they have an entrance forrier, a living room, kitchen surrounded by their own plywood-enclosed bedrooms. Nicest hooch in the whole campsite; shades of No Name City. They even have unit plaques and a movie roster on the wall. I wouldn’t be surprised if I see a Palace chandelier hanging there one day. They built the floor out of pallets covered with three quarter inch plywood. I’m jealous, but they invite me over for the movies so it’s ok. I wondered why senior sergeants and the Warrants were leaving in a hurry after visiting the SOs in their new digs until I learned that they were suggesting that they move themselves in.

I saw two clouds drift by yesterday. Four months in Iraq and my first clouds; progenitor of things to come? The brown desert grass and weeds must have been green at one time. Just forward of the porch is a large ditch that says backhoe. It was here when we got here and there is a large lizard living in a hole that is on the inside of the ditch. We trapped a mouse once and threw it in there. The lizard emerged and bit the mouse in half. There are animal tracks all around here each morning ,some hoofed, some paw. This place is scary for more than what appears in the news. I wonder what the rainy season will bring. Or what is living in all those holes of varying sizes dug at varying angles into the desert floor. A pay raise might be in order. The sky is brilliant at night. Mars is in the vicinity bigger than Christmas, and Orion is obvious along with the Big Dipper whose outer two stars line up with Polaris. It’s prettier here after dark when nothing is visible except the stars. We are too far away for the lights of Tikrit to run interference in viewing the night sky. I sit out watching the Milky Way, Orion and the Seven Sisters on their westward trek wondering the names of other star formations in view also spinning in their orbits, leaving nary a sign of their passing. (Compliments to “Free Flight” by Doug Terman, my current read) Other stars passing through recently : Ollie North, A parade of senators, Arnie Schwartznegger, Bruce Willis. They didn’t stop by to say hello, but then again I didn’t leave my porch to see them either. That isn’t entirely true. The SOs are showing Terminator 3 tonight.