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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
New England weather
Recently the weather here has been nasty: cold, rainy and windy! Ugh. Reminds me of New England. SPC Jake Smith and I were on guard duty the other day when this weather system was at its worst. We were in a concrete bunker that sits up on pylons so that it looks over the barb-wired wall. There’s a big opening about the size of a living room window to the front, two smaller regular-widow-sized openings to the right and left and a door-sized opening to the rear. The only corner that doesn’t have an opening has a hole in the roof. Rain was running through the hole and then also gusting at about a 45-degree angle through all the windows, sometimes simultaneously hitting us in the face and the backs of the legs at the same time. Smith and I did what we could, as our body armor and uniforms became soaked, our boots chilled from all the mud caked on them, and my glasses ran beads of water, to pass the hours.
I started telling Smith some of the mountain climbing stories that I’d read, stories about guys surviving overnight at 20,000+’ in a snow cave with no food, trying to make our situation seem not quite so cold. As big gusts hit us though, we would just start screaming back at the storm, trying to yell as long as the gust hit us. So conversations went something like this:
"So these three guys were dug into a snow cave on Mt. McKinley, completely out of food and with only one sleeping bag left."
"Man, that’s nuts."
"Yeah and they still had to get down. So they – AAAAARRRRRRGGGGG!"
"AAAAAWWWWWWWAAAAAAAHHH!"
"Oh man, that one was bad."
"Yeah. I just got rain in my friggin’ ear."
"Ugh. Okay, so these climbers start their descent and they climb back down into the storm that just hit them, because it AAAAAAWWWWAAAHHAAAHHAAAHH!"
Yeah, good times… good times.
I started telling Smith some of the mountain climbing stories that I’d read, stories about guys surviving overnight at 20,000+’ in a snow cave with no food, trying to make our situation seem not quite so cold. As big gusts hit us though, we would just start screaming back at the storm, trying to yell as long as the gust hit us. So conversations went something like this:
"So these three guys were dug into a snow cave on Mt. McKinley, completely out of food and with only one sleeping bag left."
"Man, that’s nuts."
"Yeah and they still had to get down. So they – AAAAARRRRRRGGGGG!"
"AAAAAWWWWWWWAAAAAAAHHH!"
"Oh man, that one was bad."
"Yeah. I just got rain in my friggin’ ear."
"Ugh. Okay, so these climbers start their descent and they climb back down into the storm that just hit them, because it AAAAAAWWWWAAAHHAAAHHAAAHH!"
Yeah, good times… good times.
Posted by: Unknown / 2:12 PM 
