7. The Thanksgiving Incident (Slightly Graphic)

     Friday, November 26, 2004. The day after Thanksgiving. I awake to a world of darkness and pain. Cold sweat seeps from my pores. I jam my feet into my boots and barely remember to grab my rifle in my panicked dash for the door. I would body-slam a general to the ground if he got in my way. Or the President. Nothing will stop me from reaching my goal, except for what I saw when I tackle the barracks door and breathe in the crisp air of an Iraqi dawn. There are lines of soldiers queuing for the port-a-johns.

In most settings, people lining up to use a toilet would not constitute a scene of horror, but I was already starting to shit a little. Hundreds of other soldiers were obviously in same situation, or very near it. I looked to the bushes and trees. There were few of either of these and all were at or beyond their maximum occupancy. Soldiers ducked around every corner, dropping their trousers. They ran for the cliffs, between trucks, looking for anything that even resembled cover. I was just one of that agonized mass. My definition of cover was stretched past its limit. I just ran for the wire fence separating our living and working areas from the guard shacks along the plateau perimeter. I’m not really sure why I chose that target. Perhaps because it lay in a straight line from the barracks front door. It offered no camouflage in any meaningful sense of the word.

I didn’t make it and all the way and was forced to let nature take its course on the field near an outhouse. Not that being near an outhouse gets you anything. No partial credit in this game, no points for taking a shot at field goal. At least I had company.

 

An investigation would later determine that a leak in the kitchen tent had allowed bacteria-contaminated water to drip into the Thanksgiving gravy overnight. Although the bacteria had grown vibrantly in their new setting, their budding civilization stood no chance against our urge to feast, winning us a pyrrhic victory that resulted in that morning’s nightmare.

     I didn’t have much time to recover before reporting to guard duty. Nathan Hackey and I were up for a day shift at one of the perimeter observation posts. Hackey, who should have played the lottery given his luck that day, was blissfully unaffected by the plague sweeping our battalion. The only thing running against his luck was having to suffer through an entire shift listening to me shout “Cover me!” every few minutes when I jumped out of our shack and ran to the cliff edge to deal with my rebellious intestines. At some point, we noticed that the children in the house below us had taken note of my frequent cliffside trips. From what we could tell, they appeared amused.

     They say that when it rains it pours. I was scheduled for a shift at the battalion aid station immediately following guard duty.  My first patient:

myself. The little luck remaining to me left me with a helpful dose of an antidiarrrheal, which at least got me through that shift. It was grim. Most of our battalion, nearly a thousand strong, had severe diarrhea. We ran through our stock of antidiarrheal meds before the day was over and ran our stock of IV fluids dangerously low. Only a handful of soldiers remained in fighting condition.

     I suppose that we’re lucky that no one picked that day to assault our base. Fortunately for us, that war was not fought with large groups and heavy assaults, but from the shadows, by small groups and individuals, none of whom were aware of our state of distress that day. Given the number of people involved, Thanksgivings are never perfectly peaceful affairs and in the years since have involved anything from an unexpected fire to a leaky cat to pulling the heads off of quails. None, however, has been quite so painful as that one poisoned Thanksgiving in al-Taqqadum, nor quite as memorable. I’m not complaining.