Geoff stirred and stuck his head down inside the sleeping bag. Turning his left wrist, he pressed the light button on the watch with his right thumb. Just a few minutes before 0200 hours and he almost chuckled at how at least one part of his aging body had already synchronized with the local time zone. Freeing his right arm from the sleeping bag, he reached for the large-mouthed empty bottle he kept under his cot for such cases. No need to leave a warm sleeping bag for such things.
Others were apparently poorly prepared for such Spartan living conditions. Somewhere in the distance was the faint sound of retching and moaning, almost taken away by the moderate winds blowing over the tent. One of the last things he had done before night fell was wander around the area collecting rocks to hold down the windward side of the tent skirting. Apparently it was enough, because there was no significant draught. More importantly, no one in this tent was affected by what brought at least one man so much misery in one of the other two tents.
Geoff had been watching out the window of the Chinook in the glow of early dawn as they passed over this little draw on the way to the LZ. After the choppers touched down, the men exited the tail ramps, clinging to the loose ends of their carry-on baggage against the artificial tornado of the still spinning tail rotors. Prominent in his mind as Geoff trudged with the others toward the edge of the village while the chopper crews pushed out the heavy cargo pallets was what had occupied that little draw their chief indicated as their new home: goats. There were a couple of stone-walled pens at the bottom of the draw.
There were two different teams on the choppers with their gear. This village was chosen because it was far enough from the operations areas that they would have plenty of lead time if the order came to bug out. Not because everyone was expecting to stay here that long, but because the larger team was there to build a fleet depot for supply trucks, and eventually to construct an airstrip in the valley below. They were rowdy and rude. Geoff was on the team that would stay only long enough to set up communications, to include generators. Most of them were some kind of geek, and suffered some measure of abuse from the construction guys. As the choppers lifted off and the men began unpacking their pallets, another chopper came in low from the opposite direction and disgorged a couple dozen troops. Geoff snorted and mumbled something about advance-party security.
However, the troops were sharp enough to quickly secure the draw with the goat pens and palaver with the older men from the village about some kind of compensation for the losses. This was supposed to have been pre-arranged, Geoff had heard, but that didn’t stop the locals from whining to improve their payoff. Apparently this was so common that troop leaders actually carried extra cash for it.
As the other team began aggressively laying claim to the choice siting for tents within the existing stone enclosures, Geoff held a hasty conference with his team chief. Pointing to a large rock ledge half-way up the northern ridge, he convinced his boss that they were better off erecting their quonset-hut tent there.
Geoff didn’t like the idea that military contractors and troops were so brutal about evicting folks from favorable spots like this draw, but he was far more worried about something else. Though not exactly a country boy, Geoff had been around domestic herd animals enough to remember the peculiar stink that clung to any place occupied by goats. These were not the same breed as the critters common in his home state; still, Geoff had never encountered goats that didn’t have some version of that stink, especially when they were clustered together in a small space. The weather was cool this time of year up in these mountains, so those tents were heated. The loosely packed sand left from removing the stones to make the pens would be warmed after a few hours, especially around the heaters. Warm air rises along with whatever smells it carries, and then runs back down along the tent walls where cots were placed. The communications team had been careful to sweep all loose material off the flat stone surface off their tent site.
Geoff replayed all of that in his mind as he lay in his sleeping bag. More of the construction crewmen were awake now, as their grousing occasionally drifted up against the wind. For all the noise, he managed to drift back off to sleep with a faint smile on his lips.
Another book? 🙆
Not likely.