Vignettes: War

Explorations of ephemera

These stories were related to me by others, or maybe they were invented by me, a pastiche of fact and fiction.

Tits McGee

A friend of mine was a soldier deployed to Iraq in the aughts. One of his platoon’s missions was to escort State Department officials once a month to a fish farm several miles outside of Baghdad. The way it would work is that a State Dept. official would helicopter out from BIAP, hang around base for a few days, then they would truck out to the fish farm and pull security in the dust while the American and Iraqi officials would go inside and drink tea.

This mission was a great favorite with the soldiers because the particular State Department official assigned to the project was a young woman in her late twenties. She would come to their base in her “outside the wire” outfit: aviator sunglasses, khakis and the iconic tight polo shirt that had earned her her moniker. In front of her the guys would try to stay buttoned up but sometimes she’d be a little wicked and try to puncture this attitude of professionalism; teasing the LT about his haircut or playing music from her phone while waiting to LD. She wasn’t self-serious, she was pretty. She was fun.

So this touch of feminine lightness combined with the wonderful hilarity of a fish farm in the Iraqi desert gave the whole mission a festive air that made the dust and boredom worth it. The dust is important, because there was nothing else. The fish farm was entirely notional, a series of shallow-scraped trenches interrupting the monotonous expanse of hard-packed Iraqi earth and scrub that stretched from horizon to horizon.

Every month they would go visit, and every month the owners of the fish farm, a tribe distinguished by being the blessed recipients of the fabled suitcases full of cash, would serve tea and discuss, prevaricate and complain about: the need for earthmoving equipment, the inability to source gravel, the unreliability of local labor, the disappearance of the project’s lead engineer, and et cetera. Every month Tits McGee would listen and promise they were working on sending more equipment and more funds, a source of bottomless entertainment for everyone involved. “What excuse did they use this time?”

Some time later it became known to them that part of her diligences also involved visiting the company commander’s CHU all night, in the late evenings before and after each escort mission, which finally answered many questions about the State Department’s interest in the whole matter.