Preparing to Get Very Sandy

Monday was my first day that I actually ran a project “outside the wire”. A quick refresher: we all live inside a rather large base surrounded by large berms of earth and many guard towers. Any time you are inside such a camp, or even a small base, as long as it has protection from direct fire (gunfire), you are considered “inside the wire”. This means you don’t have to wear your PPE (personal protective equipment-- flak jacket and Kevlar helmet among other things) when you’re walking around, you don’t have to take special precautions when driving, etc. When you go “outside the wire”, you wear special uniforms that are designed not to melt, you wear your PPE, and you have to have security vehicles when you drive around.

Our project was pretty simple: a HESCO pit 14’ tall and 30’x30’ inside. EOD wanted a protected location to do some work with all of the unexploded ordnance, or UXO, that they find, so we loaded up, went outside the wire, and built some HESCO for them. The purpose of HESCO is to replace piles of sandbags. It’s essentially a chain-link fence that folds out in squares with a special textile on the inside to hold in the sand. You open it up, get it in place, and then use a tractor to dump sand inside it. Once you’ve dumped the sand inside, you get some Marines on the top with shovels or rakes to level it off. You can stack HESCO once it has been filled, and it comes in many sizes—from 2’x2’x2’ to 7’6”(H)x7’x7’. It’s much quicker and easier than having Marines with shovels stacking individual sand bags.

So that was our project. It was about 100m outside of camp, right between two guard towers. We had to drive a little farther than that to get from the gate to the place where we built it, but we never went farther than a kilometer away from the camp. So it was a nice little milk run—a practice run for me for all of the different tasks and procedures needed to successfully run a trip outside the wire.

It took two days. The first day went really well. The second day…had a few more hiccups. Our TRAMs (tractor, rubber tire, articulated something-or-other; what we were using to shovel dirt into the HESCO) will only fill HESCO up to 11’ high. Our first layer was 7’. Our second layer, yes, was 14’. So instead of our two TRAMs filling HESCO, we had one excavator filling HESCO. Turns out our excavator operator was not that experienced, so it took a little while longer to fill the top layer than it did to fill the bottom layer, even though there was twice as much dirt in the bottom layer.

It is by far not the operator’s fault. We are attached to 9th Engineer Support Battalion, which is based in Okinawa. Due to restrictions in Japan, the heavy equipment operators are not given many chances to practice moving earth around. So he was a little new to his trade, and it took a little longer. That’s okay. We lived.

We also had a nice little sand storm the second day. I was splitting my time between monitoring the BFT, which I told you about last time, and going out and checking on the Marines. When the sand storm hit, I had been sitting in the truck, reading The Face of Battle (very slow to start, but picked up once I got past the first chapter), and glancing up at the BFT every once in a while. This particular time, I looked around to my gunner and asked him how he was doing.

“Preparing to get very sandy, ma’am,” he told me. I looked out the front window to see that the sand storm was about a minute out. This was wasn’t nearly as bad as the one the night of the fire, and it lasted less than five minutes. But, yes, it was very sandy. We were a few hundred meters away from the work site at that point, so I couldn’t see the Marines at the work site while it lasted. Once it was over, I attempted to regain communications with the COC (Combat Operations Center) and couldn’t. I waited a few more minutes, occasionally glancing back to the work site, which I could see in my rear view mirror. When I didn’t see the excavator running after a few minutes, I went out to check on them.

They were fine, if a bit sandy. We got the excavator up and running again, and I mentioned to my PltSgt that I was having trouble getting comm with the COC. He wasn’t surprised; the atmosphere wasn’t very conducive to electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere. We kept working, completed the project, and returned to base.

Turns out we were out of touch with the COC longer than I had thought, and much longer than we were supposed to be. The BFT messages I had been sending throughout the day hadn’t been making it to the COC, which was a problem. I had been sending BFT messages back to our company offices (one at our camp, and one at another camp a ways south of here), and those had been making it through, and I had been getting messages back from them. But not the COC. So I learned a big lesson for next time.

This is the part I hate most about being a 2ndLt. I already put in time as a junior worker bee, and now I’m back to square one, making mistakes that I should know not to make. It’s frustrating, and every day is a learning experience. I like to think I’m getting better at it, and then I go and do something stupid that makes me wonder if I matured at all in those five years after college. Sigh.

Happy 29th Anniversary to Mom and Dad! You are amazing examples as both parents and spouses, and I could not be more proud of them. I love you!