Camel patrol

There are finally a few birds around! Just today I saw a quail, two great grey shrikes, four isabelline shrikes, five hoopoes, and a desert wheatear. I haven't had a chance to take any pictures yet, but hopefully by the next post I'll have a photo of some neat and unusual animal.

For this post I have some from a patrol where we stopped to check a Bangladeshi herder called Samir, and I ended up arranging some camel rides for the soldiers in the squad. We also got some camel's milk (although most of the soldiers were afraid of drinking something that didn't come with a USDA label), and I exchanged a few words with Samir. Surprisingly, he spoke a little Arabic and even a couple words of English. Most of the herders out here speak only Urdu, Hindi and other Indian subcontinent languages. This photo is of Samir telling the camel to rise up while Cañal hangs on for dear life:

And here is a photo of specialist Bates, who seems to think he is a méhariste (a French soldier specialized in camel warfare):

The French have a lot more experience fighting wars on camels than the Americans do. Whereas the American army never really got the hang of using camels and eventually abandoned or sold all the animals that had been imported, the French have a long history of using them for raids and regular operations. One famous méhariste is the French naturalist and adventurer Théodore Monod, who I really admire. This fun little interlude reminded me of him, and of how pampered we are here. He once crossed 900 kilometers of desert without a single water point! And many people around here think it is a big deal to run the 2 mile standard Army run!

One of my soldiers recently got hurt, and he won't be part of our operations anymore, so here's a photo I took of him on what turned out to be one of his last patrols:

Private Kirkpatrick, from Valdez, has been an infantryman in the Alaska National Guard for almost five years now. He had been trying unsuccessfully to pass the Army physical fitness test for the past year, but he'll probably never take one again. I was really angry when I found out he was too badly hurt to do any kind of work, because our missions are very easy and lacking in physical stress. I even got in a loud argument with the platoon sergeant, but in the end there was nothing I could do about it.

Herding camels, and raiding Plywoodtown

We've been here for over ten months without any problems, but it seems we haven't relaxed a bit. In fact, we now work longer hours, and we'll be doing more training too. So sleep will keep being a scarce commodity until October. We've been passing the time by chasing camels out of restricted areas, patrolling, drinking coffee, and talking for hours about how we hate everything about this place and we can't wait to have a cold beer in Alaska.

We did get to raid one of the plywood "training villages" that are scattered out in the desert. My squad, however, got stuck in a support-by-fire position and although we did get to see the enemy (people who get paid to play terrorist with Warsaw pact weapons), we didn't get to shoot. That's to be expected, however. In fact, most people involved in raids never even see the enemy, or if they do they won't be able to engage because we have to respect strict rules of engagement and sectors of fire. Here's my squad leader, a good sergeant who recently got back from Afghanistan, at the position from which he reported village activity to our maneuver element.

And here's my platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Shaw. He joined the Army during Vietnam, and was in the Special Forces. He was also in Iraq as part of the brigade that relieved the one I was with, which means he only got a few months' break between deployments. So why is he skylining himself and leaving a broken night vision bracket on his Kevlar helmet? Well, I guess he must be getting soft. In this picture, he is telling me and my M240B gunner to get ourselves and a ton of equipment up a soft hillside.

Wait... Did I say hillside? Don't be confused: there are no natural hillsides here. That was merely a 15ft high tailing. This place is completely flat, save for a few shallow open-pit mining areas. This is a picture of us exfiltrating trough such an area, using the tailings as cover and smoke as concealment.

Let's go downtown!

I got to go to Kuwait city again, which was a welcome break. The trip's stated purpose was to visit the aquarium, eat lunch, and visit the Kuwait Towers. I did those things and liked them, but by far I was happiest just walking along the seashore in civilian clothes, and looking for birds in the palm trees. Most of the birds were introduced species, such as the common mynah Acridotheres tristis, the domestic sparrow Passer domesticus, the white-cheeked bulbul Pycnotus leucogenys, and the collared dove streptopelia turtur. There were, however, a few laughing doves and hoopoes with the pigeons, and some terns and gulls offshore. Most of the birds were surprisingly skittish for a city. I am guessing that may have something to do with the hundreds of stray cats that live in the rocks along the seafront.

I really enjoyed the aquarium at the Scientific center. Of course, with a typical naturalist's fascination with strange creatures, I absolutely loved the cuttlefish, the bats, and the one lungfish they had stashed in a small tank behind a counter. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were Kuwaiti students (from high school and college) who were volunteering their time as interpreters there. I was even handed a pet long-eared hedgehog by a couple of shy, hijab-wearing high school girls. As for the sharks, cute mammals and tropical fishes, well... They're so heavily promoted that they seemed rather like an extension of the giftshop to me.

I had an ungodly amunt of Lebanese food for lunch, and I had still had enough leftovers for an entire dinner after we returned to the camp. Then we went to the Kuwait Towers - again! It's a lot like the Space Needle, but smaller and surprisingly dirty for a national landmark in a country where labor is very cheap. The only advantage it has over the Space Needle is that it's by the Gulf, so I went beachcombing and found dozens of Dentalia shells. Dentalia are strange little mollusks that live in a shell like a hollow tusk, which is buried in the sediment. Contrary to what I long thought, they live with the pointy end out, and the wide end is where the "foot" (more of an anchor, really) comes out. In this photo, there is a small Dentalium at the bottom right.

Not much new under the sun

The sun is still mercilessly beating down upon us, but it seems that we have largely gotten used to it. It seems wonderfully cool at 5:30 in the morning when the sun rises and it’s a mere 95º F. This is rather worrying, because we’re going to be miserable in Southeast Alaska in late October when the typical weather is cold, horizontal rain.

When on duty I've been having hours and hours of "jail time," where I just have to be around, ready for a war to start. I now routinely spend twelve to fourteen hours a day doing very little beyond just cooking in the heat while listening to radio trafic and watching the desert.

So I read. I just got done reading La Reina del Sur by Arturo Perez Reverte, and La Sombra del Viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - two Spanish writers I had never heard of before, but I guess they are famous. I really liked La Sombra del Viento, a literary mistery that takes place in post civil war Barcelona. It really reminds me of Jacques Tardi (a French cartoonist who tells stories set in the underworld of Paris), who also fills his stories with bizarre male characters, beautiful women, corrupt cops, empty streets where little-known landmarks are visited during misty nights and turn out to house evil creatures.

As for La Reina del Sur, I had high expectations for it because the author had great reviews on the internet and the book is about drug traffickers in Mexico and the Straits of Gibraltar. I loved the Mexican slang and drug world he evoked, but for a "thriller," it turned out to be rather run-of-the-mill stuff.

The migration is still picking up, very slowly. I saw a desert wheatear, and a dozen hoopoes (the Kuwaitis know the hoopoe well; they call it Hudhud). Right around 10:00 in the morning, the hoopoes started looking really distressed. I found this one in a small patch of shade at the foot of a border police building, where it kept wedging itself against the somewhat cooler wall and sticking its beak into the dirt. The hoopoe is still one of my favorite bird.

I feel that I don’t give enough credit to the people who are out here with me; it’s mostly because I have a hard time mentioning them without running into opsec problems (basically, I’d have to get vetted by military intelligence even for relatively mundane information). This guy is SPC Cagle, a Tlingit Indian who is in the same squad as me. Cagle is a really hard worker who has no fear of saying what he thinks. For that reason, he’ll probably never get promoted so I guess he’ll just keep being one of those under-recognized “grunts” who run the army from the only position that is truly indispensable – that of infantry rifleman.

Pratincoly nothing to report

We just got through a pretty bad heat wave. Although the high and low temperatures today are still a respectable 88 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit (about 30 and 47 degrees C), it feels quite a bit cooler than last week when the wind was really hot.

I ran the weekly early morning five kilometer race twice recently, with much tougher competition than before. I finished in the low 18 minute range as usual, while a couple of runners made it in under 17:30. I was glad these guys showed up, because otherwise I never would have mustered the motivation to run fast in 90 degree weather.

Upon finishing today's run, I was rewarded with a great bird: at first, I thought it was another white-winged tern, but it got closer and I realized it was a collared pratincole Glareola pratincola! What a beatiful bird! I thought about running after it to get a longer look, but I was already tired and it was flying fast.

More hints that birds are starting to move: I saw two hoopoes, several brown warblers that I couldn't positively identify, two barn swallows, and a few high-flying unidentified laridae.

I got three Economist magazines in a week, and since it takes me about six hours to read one issue, most of my reading time was taken up by those and the daily Sitka and Military newspapers.

I haven't taken a single picture in the last ten days but I feel somehow obligated to post one so here's an old one, of the common bush Astragalus spinosus. Its thorns are actually longer than its leaves!

The things I did do during the past week

I have been trying to post something once a week at least, which makes me look back on what I did, what I read, what animals I saw, and so on… Even if I don’t write it all down because it is boring, classified, or too similar to something I did the previous week, it makes me feel better about myself. All right, I did do something after all!

The highlight of the previous week was reading Delirio, by Laura Restrepo. The book’s style is rather challenging, but I read it and enjoyed it. And I am really proud of my progress in Spanish. The story is divided between three (four, if we count the aunt) alternating narrations, but each one of them is mostly linear so that helps. The real challenge is this: what would normally be a paragraph is made into a sentence; what would normally be a chapter is made into a paragraph, and the whole novel is treated as if it were one chapter. Sounds weird? It is, but it is also surprisingly easy to get used to, and then I wondered why we insist so much on setting out dialogue, etc…

Here’s a random example:

Aguilar a duras penas logra pegar el frenazo para no atropellar al mendigo que
de buenas a primeras sale de la lluvia y se le atraviesa a su camioneta, Pero
qué mierda hace este loco suicida, por poco lo mato y el corazón me patea del
sobresalto pero según parece a él toda la escena le importa un bledo, simplement
hace parte de su rutina y de los gajes de su oficio, y sin que yo sepa a qué
hora ya está metiendo una mano por mi ventanilla mendicante, Dame para un
cafecito, hermano, que el frío está berriondo, me tutea como si … [sentence goes
on for another half page].

Condensed and roughly translated version:

Aguilar almost runs over the beggar, But what the hell is he thinking, I almost
killed him, and my heart is pounding but he doesn’t seem to care, it’s just part
of his routine, and now he’s sticking a begging hand in my window, Give me money
for coffee, brother, it’s cold, he tells me familiarly as if…

She does capitalize the would-be sentences, but the language still flows right past the comma simply because we’re used to moving on. Obviously, the biggest challenge is that there are three distinct voices crammed in there: the narrator, the beggar, and Aguilar. So it works, but I only think her technique is effective so long as it is unique.

I saw two gulls! The first one was a young slender-billed gull Larus genei in flight, and the second a summer plumage adult white-winged tern Chlidonias leucopterus. They both surprised me, since I am not really expecting any interesting birds for another month at least. I finally got some pictures of the desert foxes, but they aren’t so good so I’ll try again. I did, however, catch this neat pipistrelle-type bat (I know nothing about bats):

Then I solved the problem of the blue-less Trapeles persicus lizards. It is indeed the female that has no blue on the underside, and the male that does. Even on the male, though, the blue becomes hard to see when they are on the lookout for big predators like me, because they start to hug the ground and fold their throat pouch. I caught a female and a male, but I couldn’t take pictures of the male’s underside in my hand because he bit me really hard (he drew blood, actually). So here is the male after he bit me and I involuntarily gave him his freedom back:

And here is another cute Stenodactylus gecko. This one is called Stenodactylus doriae. He looks somewhat like Stenodactylus arabicus (which I also photographed in my hat), but yellowish and spotted, and more aggressive-looking.

Kuwaiti foods, a few books, and the newspapers

Life has been rather eventless lately. I made several unsuccessful attempts at photographing the desert foxes that come out at night, and I caught another long-eared hedgehog a couple of nights ago. I’ve been reading books and newspapers to pass the time, and I’ve been getting more time to talk to the Kuwaiti border police personnel. I’m not even trying to improve my Arabic, since any progress I might make wouldn’t really be significant enough to make this mission much more enjoyable. Spanish is much more important to me at this point. I still have a long way to go until I am fluent in it, but not nearly as long as Arabic.


One of the advantages of spending time with the Kuwaitis is that their food is far better than ours. This is a light meals, in comparison to others that I have had. I still know a lot of food names, but I just make the Kuwaitis laugh with the Iraqi dialect I am used to. Some of the sergeants on the border now call me Abu Timmin, because I didn’t know that the Kuwaiti word for rice is ’Aysh, and I used the Iraqi equivalent: Timmin. From the American point of view they look like a bunch of uncivilized picnickers, but in fact there is a whole set of unwritten rules on how to handle each kind of food. I guess my table manners are bad by Kuwaiti standards. Oh well…

I just got done reading Mi País Inventado, by Isabel Allende. It was not a great book (informal, and too short), but it made me re-evaluate the other books by her that I read this year (Cuentos de Eva Luna, Hija de la Fortuna, Zorro, La Casa de los Espíritus, and Retrato en Sepia). What surprised me most is just how much of what she writes as “fiction” is actually straight from memory. I still get impatient when she has female characters act and think like upper-class, modern American women (such as a nineteenth century Chilean woman who opens a microcredit bank for poor women). However, I had to completely re-evaluate La Casa de los Espíritus and Retrato en Sepia, in light of the fact that they turn out to be almost all family lore.

I also got some interesting comments on Chilean society from this book. Some anecdotes are really funny, like one about a powerful landlord who used to say the following rhymed prayer after having raped the women on his property:

Señor, no fornico por gusto o por vicio, sino por dar hijos a tu servicio.
(Lord, I do not fornicate for pleasure or for vice, but to provide children who
will serve you)

I really wish she would just go ahead and write a people’s history of Chile. Her description of the late 1800’s expansionist war against Peru and Bolivia is extraordinary, and Zorro is unexpectedly full of neat descriptions of California, Spain and New Orleans in the early 1800’s.

According to the crown prince of Kuwait, the Amir is Father to all Kuwaitis, and he has “inherited from his honorable ancestors deep insight into the present with all its reality and, in tandem, exploring the future with all its dimensions and potential either on domestic or foreign policy at all levels.” I know, this is grammatically dubious, but this is exactly how it was reported in the Kuwait Times a few days ago. The original Arabic. probably sounded even more like a badly translated Hindu scroll. His deep insight decided that Kuwait needed a new weekend. Starting in September, Kuwaitis will get to rest Friday and Saturday, instead of the current Thursday and Friday.

Hey, if I had his abilities, I’d adopt a new weekend too: Tuesday through Sunday.

Nobody seems to mind the coming of the new weekend, since unlike the US where the weekend tries to encompass the Sabbaths of Jewish, Catholic, and Adventist traditions, here everyone that matters is Muslim, and there is only one sacred day of prayer – Friday. So the day of rest is just a recent addition, a western import. As for the imported labor that does 99% of the work in Kuwait, most of them never get a day off so they aren’t impacted.

I also learned about a really neat office in the Kuwaiti government: the “Supreme committee for the ideal mother.” Its chairperson is Sheikha Fareeha Al-Ahmed. She thinks Kuwaiti youths are corrupt because of insufficient satellite TV censorship.