Entry # 56: June 25, 2006

Camp Buehring, Kuwait (Somewhere near the Iraq border)

Ok, so summer began. Big deal. We’ve been averaging 125 degrees for the past two and a half months. Apparently, Abdullah has never heard of spring or fall. Just summer and two weeks of winter. Shawn and I were walking back to our trailer from the gym in April when the subject of the absence of spring and fall came up.

“Hey, is it considered springtime here? What happened to winter?” I wondered aloud.

“Remember those couple of weeks at the beginning of January when it dipped into the upper 40s? That was winter,” replied Shawn. The temperature at that time in April was climbing towards 115. It was the only time I can think of when I sweated more during my “cool-down” than my actual work-out.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to autumn. Summer used to be my favorite season because it meant no school and trips to the beach. Well, not this year. The beach ain’t much fun without the ocean to accompany it. I didn’t used to look forward to fall so much, cause for us Long boys it meant performing the one chore that scared us to death—cleaning gutters.

We’ve all done it. We’ve all hated doing it. Nonetheless, gutters have to be cleaned. My brothers and I used to beg and plead with our Dad to get him to buy “gutter guards” that will keep out pine straw and leaves. Each time we’d ask, he’d say, “What do I need those for? I have y’all.” Then he’d wax poetic about him having to clean gutters when he was a kid and how he’d be leaning over the edge of the house while crouching on the roof.

Now if you’ve ever been to our house, you’ll notice that it’s pretty tall, meaning the gutters are way on up there. There’s no way in heck that my brothers and I were gonna crouch down and lean over the edge, staring at the ground and the broken bones that awaited us 40 feet below, if we survived the fall. Sometimes when we couldn’t finagle a ladder that could reach that high, we’d resort to Plan B. Plan B involved all three of us. It involved rope, rapelling skills, and now that I think about it, a couple of carabiners and pick axes would have been useful. I had Matthew and Joseph tie a rope around my waist. They would head over to the other side of the crest on our house and anchor themselves to support my weight. I would crawl, walk, rapel, down to the gutters and set about cleaning the muck out of them, half confident, half scared to death about my brothers holding the rope on the other side of the house, praying that they wouldn’t get an itch on their nose at the same time.

In the Army, if there is a chemical attack, we don our masks for the duration of the attack. To check and see if the danger has passed we use sticks of paper that tell us if the chemicals are still present. If no paper is available, then we use Plan B. Plan B means finding the lowest ranking private (i.e. the most expendable) and make him take off his mask. If he’s breathing and alive after 15 minutes, then it’s safe. Maybe I should have used the Army’s way of thinking and had Joseph be the one to rapel down to the gutters. Oh I’m just kidding, everyone knows we would’ve sent Matthew. And so the Soldier’s life continues…