Interesting People and Places

Believe it or not, but for the first time in my life I am gaining weight. It seems that the food here might be too good. I have been told the food is very high in calories and very high in carbohydrates because that is what a soldiers body demands when this physically active. However, that is not a great diet for someone who sits at a desk and drives around a truck all day. So to battle this I have started to work out. I run about 3 miles and do a 40 min weight lifting. I hope to do more once my body gets used to working out. I am filling out nicely, not so scrawny anymore.

That aside, I have come across some cool things and people while here. I had the chance to talk to a Srilankan bus driver while waiting for my truck to be worked on. After talking to him for no more then one minute, he asked me if I was from Pennsylvania, which I thought was a odd. How the heck did he know? He told me he could tell by the way I talked that I was probably from there. I don’t know if I could have picked out a PA accent, and he has never even been to the US. He then asked me, “What ever happened to the red Indians, do they still have wild tribes in your country?” Which was a question I wasn’t expecting and it was more then a little bit hard to answer. I wasn’t sure what he knew about the Native Americans let alone what the US Government did to them. So I explained that they are still around but integrated, for the most part, into our culture.

And the coolest thing on base. A few days ago James, a co worker, took me to an area outside of the garbage incinerators. He took me over to what looked like a really crappy cement pad with a 1 inch PVC pole sticking out of a 20 inch hole. The hole was covered by an old garbage can lid. We removed the garbage can lid to find the busted open opening. It wasn’t a manhole or entryway; it was a smashed open spot of an underground container. Inside was crude oil filled to the brim. The pole was around 12 feet down into the stuff. When I pulled the pole in and out of the hole I could feel sand at the bottom of the pit. Perplexed, I asked James what was with this. Why would there be crappy underground container of crude oil here? He explained to me this is what Saddam did to hind certain items. He would put whatever at the bottom of the container, cover it with sand, and then fill it with crude oil. So there could be, Goodness knows what, at the bottom of an oil pit here on base? He said, “yep, and the military wants no part in it, for some reason they just ignore it.”

I personally would love to drain out the dam thing and see what is at the bottom of the pit! Who knows what could be down there. I later found out these pits are all over the country and everything from stacks of gold bars to guns are found in it. Some even connect to large underground tunnel systems. That is pretty awesome! Maybe one of these nights I’ll sneak over the vacuum truck and do a little investigation.