Life lesson number 1 – Always be careful what you ask for.

Case in point.  A few days ago the post Mayor sent a work crew over to our living area to pull down all the sandbags stacked up next to our Containerized Housing Units, henceforth know as CHUs.  This was a good thing, as they’d been put in years ago and were starting to fall apart from dry rot.

The dust this kicked up was significant.  The entire CHU area was covered in a fine layer of silt.  Some of us were bitching about getting so covered in dust on the way back from the shower that we needed to shower again before we got to our CHU.  We were all moaning that we wished the dust would somehow go away.  Friday night it did.

It went away when the thunderstorms rolled in.  Now, these weren’t big thunderstorms as far as thunderstorms in NoVa go.  Really it was more like a nice shower that kick starts your garden in spring.  But in this shit hole nothing is what it seems.

The fine layer of dust turned to a fine layer of mud.  The mud is sitting on top of hard packed dirt and asphalt with nothing to grip to.  So you end up with a mud slick that slides around under your feet.  And it’s sticky mud. 

Sticky mud that clogs the treads of your boots so that you can actually grow an inch walking less than a hundred yards.  Of course that makes it hard to walk when you finally get to a dry patch of land.  And it’s nearly impossible to stomp it out of your boot treads.  The boot brushes outside of the chow hall or office get clogged after one or two uses.  Trying to use them only cakes more mud onto your boots, which you then track in every building you enter.

The ground at Camp Taji doesn’t absorb water well at all.  Our night and day of spring showers is going to be with us for at least a week.  Unless of course we could have a couple of days in a row with a stiff breeze and temperatures in the low 100s.  That would clear up our mud problem.

But then we’d have dust again.