Water

You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky.

- Amelia Earhart

Boy, do you take access to water for granted back home. Not so here. Here you are in a constant state of procurement of water. Two reasons.

1. It’s HOT. Damn hot. Unbelievably hot! At night when the temps fall because the sun has been down for 5 hours it finally gets down to the range of hot that I remember from living in Las Vegas and Phoenix. Daylight is like living in a hair dryer on full: wind blowing 5 -10 miles an hour with the sun beating down and the the moisture being sucked right out of your body. The flies are horrid because they seek moisture and head straight for your eyes, ears and nose. Man, is that annoying!!!



B. There is no potable water on this part of the base. Seriously, there is no drinkable water available unless it is trucked in in plastic bottles. We have running water, and shower and latrine facilities, and the dining hall seems to have water for food preparation, but none of the available water is fit to drink. Here’s an excerpt from the base paper:

“Tap water throughout CC, OPSTOWN and the CAOC is NOT POTABLE, in other words, it is NOT suitable for drinking. While you are in CC, OPSTOWN or the CAOC please remember the following:

The water from the sink faucets can be used to wash your hands and face.
You should drink only bottled water and use only bottled water to rinse your mouth and brush your teeth.
The water used for the showers is intended for bathing use only. Do not rinse your mouth or brush your teeth while taking a shower. Combat shower rule (3 minute max!) still applies.”

This I gonna kill my friend Miranda: So we have about a zillion bottles of water being brought in each day. They set them up by the pallet in storage stations located all around our residential compound, and you can just walk up, grab a case and take it back to your room. Of course with that is a huge disposal problem with all that plastic. I have no idea where they dispose of all those bottles, but they do. We toss them in the trash, and they eventually disappear. I suspect there is a big hole in the middle of the desert where they dump these things. Kind of ironic, don’t you think? We pull the oil out of the desert, turn it into plastic, pour water into, ship it back to the desert, drink the water and then dump the plastic back into the ground for next couple zillion years….

Here’s an interesting tidbit: We have all this free water laying around, yet you go in the base exchange (i.e. store) and you can actually BUY it…??? Same stuff! Not sure what is up with that, but knowing how much people will pay for bottled water, I guess someone figures people’ll pay for it even when it’s freely available all around them!

Oh did you notice the item above about the 3 minute combat shower? Yep, in an effort to save the non-potable water, they instituted the “combat shower” (My kids didn’t believe me when I started pontificating on the merits of this concept after I got my first water bill after my last deployment!). It basically goes like this: You get in the shower and turn on the water. You have 1 minute to get wet all over. You turn the water off. Apply shampoo and soap all over your body and lather up. When completely sudsed up from head to toe (one eye closed because soap is seeping down from your hair…), turn on the shower (hopefully you remember the correct position of the handles…); you now have two minutes to rinse off. STOP!!! Turn off shower and dry.

Try it sometime. It works, I swear! Of course I don’t think everyone really follows that here, but it’s the idea that helps save some water. I will say it sure isn’t as relaxing or invigorating (depending on the time of day) as a nice 10-15 min (or 30 minute – kids!) shower we’re used to at home.