by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)
Dr Garatti also has the only CT scan in the country, so at any given time there is a mile-long queue at the front gates. On a daily basis, Pashtuns wait alongside Tajiks and Hazars for a consultation; everyone just sits down and quietly waits their turn. No-one gets turned away.
We walked back around to the main wards and I asked Dr Garatti if there was anything I could do. ‘Follow me,’ he said and took me into a ‘clean room’, where I put on a big blue coat and special covers over my boots. We walked through another white door into a ward full of children. Every one of them had stepped on a mine. Some were just toddlers, ripped apart but somehow alive. Three hundred and fifty children a month arrive here in pieces, and a quarter of Afghanistan’s children die by the age of five. One little boy’s face was completely unrecognisable as human; his eyes blankly stared through me. My heart fell into my boots, I could feel the blood drain from my face, my mouth went dry.
At the end of the ward there was a playroom filled with old wooden toys, half-deflated balls, and dolls also with missing limbs. Half a dozen children were there spending time with their parents. One toddler sat motionless next to a nurse. I watched him for a full five minutes. He just looked at the other kids playing and ignored the nurse’s attempts to read him a story, although his gaze occasionally darted to the entrance. ‘He’s waiting for his mother to arrive,’ the good doctor quietly explained. When his mother appeared through the door her eyes found her baby instantly. She dropped her basket, spilling fruit and precious milk across the floor, and ran to her little dismembered boy. The child launched himself from the chair and tried to run to his mother on what was left of his legs, then he suddenly floundered and ducked behind a chair. He pouted, angry with her for abandoning him. She stopped and fell on her knees, her arms open, her fingers trembling, tears streaming down her cheeks. The sheer force of her emotions almost sucked him across the room; he flew through the air into her arms, burst into tears and wrapped everything he had left around his mother. Safe in the warmth of her love, the familiarity of her hair and everything that makes a mother special. They sat there, oblivious, moulded together. Men with guns could not have separated them. I had to move away, as I realised I was crying.
We left the gut-wrenching children’s ward and Dr Garatti introduced me to a boy on crutches. He was around twelve, his right foot had been blown off by a mine. The boy smiled and politely engaged us in conversation. His English was excellent. On a bench next to him sat his mother and sister. He was waiting for his prosthetic foot to arrive. I was amazed at how quickly he had already started to overcome his disability. He was just happy to be alive. With ten million mines littered around the country, it’s inevitable that when kids are playing or just moving around they are going to set them off.
I had taken up enough of the doctor’s time, and as we walked to the main entrance he put his hand on my shoulder and said that if I knew any doctors who had experience with ‘penetrating trauma’ and wanted more, I should direct them to ‘Emergency’. ‘The salary’s not bad, and you would learn more in a week about gunshot and shrapnel cases than in a year in any major Western hospital. We also need anaesthetists, gynaecologists and midwives,’ he beamed and shook my hand. Then another doctor came running up, his stethoscope swinging wildly. He rattled off a lot of high-speed Italian, and with that Dr Garatti was off, shouting ‘Ciao’ as he sprinted down the hall.
I wandered outside the hospital, rewinding the last few hours in my mind the way you do when you’re walking out of the cinema. Did I just absorb all that? The street was full of people waiting to get into the hospital; clouds of dust kicked up by passing traffic had turned everyone into the same shade of light brown.
The car was waiting, but I wanted to take a bus. ‘You what?’ said Sami the driver.
‘It’s okay, Sami. I’ll be fine.’ I smiled, gave him my best ‘I know exactly what I’m doing’ look and walked across the road to the bus stop. The buses basically go from one side of town to the other, so all I had to do was get off near the centre and I could walk to the hotel.
Kabul has 108 public buses and more than four million people. Crowded does not begin to describe it. I waited for five minutes, long enough for the dust to paint me in the same way it had everyone else. At home where people are truly free, a crowd waiting for something will automatically form itself into a queue, a single line incorporating almost military precision where personal space is respected and no-one pushes. But in parts of the world where the people are mostly free only to get shot or blown up or run over, a line for anything is more like a mosh pit.
Then through a giant cloud of diesel fumes and brown air lumbered the bus, its brakes making the mosh pit cringe in unison. The driver pulled on a lever to manually open the door and gave me a blank surprised look. He said something to the man standing behind me. ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ I presumed. The man smiled at me and moved forward, there was a brief debate between the driver, the man and everyone on the bus, with occasional hand gestures in my direction. As it turned out, the debate was over whether or not I should pay. Afghans, when they’re not queuing, are gentle, generous people, and given the opportunity will extend every imaginable courtesy, including free bus rides for random bald foreign guys. I got on, nodding thank you to the packed bus’s passengers, who all smiled and pointed towards the back of what looked like a dusty version of Dante’s Inferno. There at the back in the middle was a free seat, next to an old man who was, remarkably, fast asleep.
After less than a kilometre I realised why the seat was free; the old bloke was letting go with the most horrendous farts. I nearly gagged. A pothole sent him careering into the roof. He landed back down on his seat, awake, but with his headgear pushed down over his nose. He rearranged his ‘shamag’, and in doing so retrieved a big fat joint, then he licked the end and winked at me. He’s going to fire that up, I thought, and he did. By the time we were in the city centre, I was quite stoned from the various fumes he happily wafted around the bus. We had come to a grinding halt in the standard traffic-jam nightmare that is the centre of town.
A couple of passengers got off to grab a kebab from a roadside vendor who also sold bottled water and bags of mixed nuts. The more I inhaled my new pal’s smoke, the more the water and mixed nuts caught my eye. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, I had the munchies. With a fist full of Afghanis that say in bold text across the top ‘Da Afghanistan Bank’, I walked towards the front of the bus to get off, but suddenly two men stood up and stopped me. It’s unusual for Afghans to touch you, but these two guys were physically restraining me. Both were talking super-fast Dari, then one pointed outside and made throat-cutting gestures.
The penny finally dropped. It wasn’t a place for someone like me to get out. I thanked them and went back to hide under my seat. After a few moments the bus started moving and I got up and shot a quick look out the back window, seeing what looked like six or seven cops in some kind of scuffle over an accident and some kind of protest march being led by the Kabul Municipal Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Marching Band. To my surprise, Sami was following the bus; he saw me trying to look straight and grinned at me.
I spent the rest of the day taking out-of-focus photos in the highly depressing and totally deserted National Mine Museum. With the compassion of a cluster bomb, every device designed to maim and kill was laid out on tables. Perhaps I should have come here first, either way I was left with the same lingering hollow-fist-in-my-gut feeling.
I had a quiet simple meal in the hotel that night. I thought about the lucky ones who have no idea what they have, and struggled to fall asleep against my mind’s need to unfold the day’s events and somehow make sense of them. Feeling truly philosophical distended into myriad real and humbling emotions that in the end just made me angry. Tomorrow my alarm would go off at 4 a.m. Sleep eventually came through Kabul’s confusing dust.
It was still black outside and surprisingly cold as I stood by the hotel entrance, rubbing the sleep and dust
from my bloodshot eyes, my breath making clouds under the fluorescent lights. It was Anzac Day. The car pulled up, its windows clouded over. The boys were quiet as we made our way to camp ‘Eggers’, the US base located in the centre of town.
‘Good morning, gentlemen. You’re here for the service,’ said the guard at the main entrance.
We were processed through and freely moved around within the walls. The service was about to start, so I found a spot off to the side and waited for the soldiers to parade.
The ‘Last Post’ hung in the air as the sun crept towards the top of camp Eggers’s razor-wire fence. The thirty or so men and women from Australia, New Zealand and America’s armed forces stood rigid in the morning light as flags snapped overhead. A small group of men stood motionless in the corner. Dressed in old fatigues, not showing any rank or unit, all sporting big bushy beards, they watched then quietly left. ‘SF—Special Forces—guys,’ Tom later explained.
Afterwards the Americans laid out a generous breakfast that included rum and coffee. I heard just how bad it was getting in Helmand, and more than one person advised me to stay in Kabul. I was told that within a week riots would break out in the city. This ‘insurgency’ is not a simple black-and-white struggle of fundamentalists versus foreigners. I had as many conversations with as many different people as I could. It was confusing, and even the name ‘Taliban’ may be misleading as it has now become a ‘tag line’ for a super-complex dynamic of narcotics, oil, corruption, tribalism, warlordism, PMCs, Arabs, Iranians, Chechens, NATO and, in the middle of it all, the West shovelling Western precepts on a postmedieval economy. No-one knows what’s going to happen, no-one ever will. The only certainty, as in life itself, is that people will die for all the wrong reasons.
Two days later I was at the airport. It’s a lot easier to get into Afghanistan than get out, especially when the city is rioting. Getting through customs and immigration is like 250cc motorcycle racing: all knees and elbows. After a few well-placed dollars and weird hand signals to a man in uniform who held my passport upside down, Sami and Tom had me at the stairs to the departure hall. We said our goodbyes, short and sharp, the best way. The passengers nervously boarded as random people were pulled from the queue and questioned. I kept my head down and shuffled along, my eyes fixed on the first step of the boarding ladder to Clare and home.
Only after our aircraft was over water and descending into Dubai did I start to feel my shoulders relax. What did I learn from this? I sat there and let what I could replay in my head. I reminded myself of human dignity, resolve, compassion, fear, hope. Afghanistan reminded me that it changes you, more than you change it. It’s sitting in freedom’s nursery, but learning from all the bad kids. The man sitting next to me shifted in his seat and folded his newspaper; ‘Kabulseye’ said the headline.
9 TURNING MARGARITAS INTO SWEAT
Coming home to Clare after Afghanistan I felt like the luckiest bastard in the world. Even packing my bags for the next gig in the Philippines, I felt lucky. That’s what happens when you’ve been to the other side, to the places where you’re lucky to make it to puberty.
We arrived in Manila without incident, the flight was great and so was the hotel. It was late so everyone just went to their rooms and hit the sack. The following morning we gathered in the lobby after breakfast, as our instructions had us checking in on a 7 a.m. chopper. Ambu had three croissants shoved in his shirt pockets and was slurping coffee while trying to read some businessman’s newspaper without him noticing. I had phoned the rig at 6 a.m., they filled me in on the operation and, according to them, the weather was perfect for our scheduled flight offshore. It was a quarter to seven when the concierge came up and handed me a fax. I read it then turned to Ambu. ‘Never mind that nice man’s newspaper. Now’s your chance, mate,’ I said, handing him the fax. ‘Aloud if you please.’
Ambu handed me his coffee, wiped the crumbs off his mouth and cleared his throat. ‘Chopper cancel no go rig today,’ he said and smiled.
There was a mixed reaction. ‘Yes!’ Don was happy. He was going back to bed so he could go out tonight and play; he has the sex drive of a gorilla in mating season. The others went back into the restaurant with Ambu. I sat down with them.
‘Why’s it cancelled?’ Erwin asked me. I handed him the fax. ‘Weather?’ He looked out the window. ‘It’s perfect here. Did you phone the rig?’
‘Yup, and it’s perfect out there too.’ I shrugged my shoulders and ordered coffee. It’s like all things men plan when they’re single. The plans are perpetually tentative because, no matter how big or serious the plan, if there’s the slightest chance of getting laid, all bets are off. It’s the unwritten rule between men and it’s been that way since the dawn of time. If you hear, ‘Nah, let’s go for the summit tomorrow’ or ‘The launch has been delayed due to technical difficulties’ or ‘The captain has to turn back to port to take on more fuel’, you know that’s not really what’s going on. I was guessing that one of the pilots met someone on his way to the chopper. He was probably out there on the tarmac, with his sunglasses on, leaning against the cockpit, talking to her.
That night we all decided to go out with Don. He had been offshore for a few months on another job before this one, and it was his first break in what must have seemed like years so he was only interested in getting laid. As we walked into the ‘Firehouse’ he made a beeline straight for the toilets. I just parked myself at the bar, ordered a margarita jug, and waited for the dancing girls to slide down brass poles and land on a fire truck behind the bar, hence the name, and shake their moneymakers at me, small pleasures. For now they were playing some God-awful country song, you know, ‘She peed on my carpet, She shot ma horse, She left me with nothing’ and so on.
Don came out of the toilets with a lump in his pocket, sat down next to me, and eagerly rubbed his hands together while looking at the girls who had just descended the brass poles and started lip-syncing to a Madonna track.
‘Why the dash to the toilet? Have you got the shits, mate?’ I asked Don.
‘Nah, I just took off my boxers—easy access.’ He pointed at his crotch and winked at me.
‘Oh Christ, put on a fuckin’ rubber!’ I handed him a margarita, but he was in a world of his own.
Don is my age, but he looks younger. He grew up in Texas, the son of a disturbed alcoholic father, and a mother who resorted to self-medicating with painkillers. That in turn transformed her into a reclusive shut-in, and as an only child he grew up fast. Don initially did very badly in school, the product of a desperately unhappy home. He was a loner labelled as stupid by the system, until his teachers gave him an IQ test as he was slated to be held back a year. That’s when they discovered his triple-digit IQ, realised he was a fucking genius and put him in a school for gifted kids. Don excelled in chemistry, art and mathematics. He’s a social chameleon, able to blend into any group and look like he was born there. He can go from brawling with wharfies in a harbour bar to attending a dinner party in town. I’ve sat there fascinated while he was being anecdotal and getting laid. Don is intelligent, resourceful and thoroughly ruthless. As an adult he is the one I have to watch, as Don could have done anything he wanted to in life. I think he’s in oil because, on some base level, he likes the lifestyle. A global transient, he’s independently wealthy, has no real fixed address and he’s free of any ties to anyone—there is no surviving family, his father died in prison, his mother passed on back in the 1980s. He’s moved in and out of places around the world on the back of our modern oil addiction, sometimes places sealed off to everyone. Don is fit and good-looking in an indifferent way. He can turn on the charm with anyone if he wants to, manipulating a situation as easily as you or I order a burger. Sometimes I think Don’s a serial killer.
The rest of the crew wandered in over the next half-hour and we all sat at the bar, drinking margaritas and swapping stories. Don finally settled on one of the dancing girls and called over the mamma-san to talk price. She clapped her hands and
pointed at Don’s new girlfriend, who came down faking a smile at Don. She must have been half his size, poor girl; Don is a skip-the-foreplay kind of guy.
Twenty minutes later Don was back on the stool next to me. We all gave him a hard time but, hey, Don is single and in need of female company. Another half-hour went by, we were all enjoying ourselves, and a few other guys also waiting to go offshore came in and joined us. They had just flown in from other parts of the world so we asked them all the usual questions about what’s going on with the well and who had done what to who and why. I noticed Don had been scratching his arse for a full ten minutes. ‘Have you got fuckin’ fleas, Don?’ someone asked him.
He just smiled, but ten minutes after that Don’s right hand was buried up to the third knuckle in his backside and he was scratching like an old dog. We were ignoring Don’s mad fishing in the back of his pants when his new girlfriend came running up in her boob tube and high heels, the tassels stuck to her nipples propellering around in hypnotic circles.
‘Honey, honey, I loose,’ she said to Don.
We all stopped talking and looked at her. She held up her right hand; on the end of each finger was a huge talon-like false fingernail with glitter, palm trees and other assorted shit painted on it—except her middle finger, it was missing its fingernail. Don’s face dropped in complete horror, he banged his glass down on the bar and bolted out the door.
‘Oh fuck. Run, Don, run!’ yelled John. ‘Should I go with him?’ he asked me.
‘No.’ I was laughing so much I could hardly speak.
Don’s new girlfriend was already back on the fire truck waiting for another punter to ask her to poke her finger up his bum.
Three hours later Don came sheepishly back and sat down at the bar. He received a standing ovation. Don’s new girlfriend was waving like a lottery winner at him from the fire truck. He pulled a small biohazard ziplock bag from his pocket and waved it at her, there was her bloody glitter-clad fingernail.
