It's Austere Here
Life at Al Sheeb
Part One of Three
By J.p. Lawrence
JOINT SECURITY STATION AL SHEEB, Iraq – If you’re looking for a getaway featuring the glitz and glamour of the rich and famous, then the Royal Villa at Grand Resort Lagonissi in Athens, Greece may be for you.
The three-bedroom Royal Villa, priced at $34,088-a-night, has an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, a massage room, a gym, a fully equipped kitchen (with private chef upon request), a piano (with pianist upon request), private marina and a private beach.
Joint Service Station Al Sheeb is no Royal Villa.
But if you’re looking for a austere base with no running water, tents, cots and camels, then perhaps JSS Al Sheeb is for you.
As part one of our series “It’s Austere Here”, here are five reasons why the Soldiers of JSS Al Sheeb have it tough.
1.It’s hot
From the air, JSS Al Sheeb looks tiny. If you get lost in JSS Al Sheeb, there’s something wrong; the entire base is a square about the size of a Little League baseball park, and there’s probably more fun things to do on a baseball field than in JSS Al Sheeb.
Located smack dab next to the border, the Soldiers of Al Sheeb have two things to do: advise the Iraqi Army and watch the border for hours on end. “We got guys up 24 hours a day,” said Staff Sgt. Rudy Alvarado, a Fresno, Calif. native with the 2nd Squadron, 13th Cavalry Regiment. “It gets pretty hot. Right now, it’s cool. But usually around 1400 it gets pretty hot.”
Of course, cool is a relative term in the desert. One of the desert’s most devious tricks is its ability to skews all normal standards of temperature. Ninety degrees becomes normal, 100 degrees becomes acceptable and anything higher becomes expected, especially in August. By cool, Alvarado meant around 80 or 90, which compared to the average temperature in August, which hovers around 105 and sometimes conspires with an ironic form of desert humidity to weigh down upon Soldiers like a soggy wool blanket.
2.You sleep in cots inside of marshmallows
In order to combat the heat, the Soldiers live in tents covered in two inches of polyurethane foam. “A lot of these tents have been here a while, but these just recently got foamed, like a month ago,” said Alvarado. “Before that, it was hot, hot! in the tents.”
While the foam insulates the tent and blocks heat, dust and even wind from entering the tent, it also has the unfortunate effect of making each tent look like a dirty melted marshmallow. However, the foam can drastically improve conditions inside the tents, which is all Soldiers really care about.
“If it wasn’t for that foam we would probably be cussing you out right now,” said Staff Sgt. Swinston Siba, a native of Kosrae, Micronesia and a scout with the 2nd Squadron, 13th Cavalry Regiment.
When you enter the tents, you’ll find that each of the eight to 10 Soldiers has partitioned off his area with a system of towels and blankets in a bid to regain some privacy. It is not the only example of makeshift engineering.
“Some guys have actually made beds,” said Alvarado. “They’ll get a piece of wood and they’ll a get a bed frame and they’ll buy a mattress from an Iraqi store and sleep on that.
“The majority of us are on cots,” said Alvarado. “I sleep on a cot still. I just got a cot and an air bag. I like to keep it where I can just pick up and move.”
3.There’s mines and camels and dogs
In addition to sleeping on a cot, Soldiers also have to get used to sleeping with the sounds of nearby minefield.
“Did you hear that mine go off last night?” said Siba.
“There was one this morning too. You could see it, we saw the little cloud of smoke,” said Staff Sgt. Enrique Torres, a Wimauma, Flor., native and a scout with the 2nd Squadron, 13th Cavalry Regiment.
“Dang, those things are going off left and right,” said Staff Sgt. Joseph Melanson, a Bryson City, N.C. native and a scout with the 2nd Squadron, 13th Cavalry Regiment.
“The dogs, they’re a pretty big nuisance,” said Alvarado. “They run around here and try to scavenge. I think one of them hit a land mine the other day because we heard a huge explosion so we came outside and we saw that something tripped a land mine out in the back.”
“Camels - we’ll see them running around. There’s donkeys that have actually gotten into the base,” said Alvarado. “And we actually caught them one night in the trash and we had to run them out. Every now and then, the guys in the towers will see the same two donkeys floating around here. I think they hang out in this area.”
4.There’s crickets in the showers
In addition to the larger wild animals, Al Sheeb also has colonies of mice and bugs. There is not much to do, the colonies of mice and bugs can sometimes be a welcome distraction.
“We had this huge trap, like a rat trap, and we didn’t think that we’d actually catch anything,” said Alvarado. “But the next day, there one was.”
“It’s our entertainment,” said Torres.
“That and camel spiders,” said Melanson. “We caught two of them once.”
“There’s probably one in the showers right now,” said Siba, referring to camel spiders.
“The showers are kinda of rough right now with all the bugs,” said Torres.
“There’s like eight million crickets in there,” said Siba.
“They swarm all over you,” said Melanson. “It’s like, oh, I have dirt all over me. No, wait. I don’t even know how the crickets get in some of the places they’re in.”
“They’re like best friends with the sand fleas,” Melanson added. “They, like, high five and stuff underneath the floorboards.”
Because there is no indoor plumbing in Al Sheeb, Soldiers use gravity showers, which are big green baskets that hang from the ceiling. “You fill it up with water,” said Alvarado. “Pull it up. You turn the bottom of it and it will work like a regular showerhead.”
Soldiers are given anything from five gallons to 30 gallons a day depending on how many Soldiers are living on the base. For comparison, an average American taking a five minute shower can expect to use 15 to 25 gallons.
5.The best PT is going to the bathroom and running in the LZ
Outside of the showers, you can see a long, thin wooden board and a mud-spattered mirror. “This is where we shave,” said Alvarado. “We use these little shaving pans; it kind of looks like an old hospital bedpan. Basically what we’ll do is we’ll fill up a five gallon jug, fill up the little bedpan and shave.”
Bathrooms in Al Sheeb consist of a system of porta johns emptied by an Iraqi contractor every day. Because of the concentrated heat that gets trapped inside each porta john, Soldiers time their bathroom breaks to avoid the hottest parts of the day.
“If you go in there, you’re just asking to get dehydrated,” said Torres.
“You better walk in there with two cold water bottles,” said Siba.
“It’s intense,” said Torres.
Taking a bathroom break might actually be the most intense thing to do on base. Because the base is so small, there isn’t really anything else to do. Most of the Soldiers work at night, and during the day, you’ll see most Soldiers either sleeping or contacting their friends and family from the five computers and three phones on base. If you want to do physical training, the only options are going to the gym for some strength training or going to the helicopter landing-zone for some light jogging.
That’s right. You run where the helicopters, or birds, land. “It is more than just a landing zone for us,” Alvarado explains. “We use it as a PT field because we don’t have that many helicopters coming in and out of here.”
“Yeah, we actually had one guy running and then all of a sudden birds started landing,” said Alvarado. “So he turned around and ran back after getting dusted.”
The experience
JSS Al Sheeb is no Royal Villa. There’s no pool, no massage room and no pianist. If you want food, there’s plenty of Meals Ready to Eat in the dining facility. But for the Soldiers of JSS Al Sheeb, what they’ve got is good enough. “Yeah, we don’t actually have it that tough here,” said Torres. “Have you seen the d-fac? We got the best cook in the division.”
“In Iraq!” interjected Siba.
“This is the place to be,” said Torres.
At this point, I spoke up. I told them that the base that voters choose as the most austere base gets free gym equipment from the commanding general of Multi-National Division South.
There was a pause as Melanson and Siba and Torres looked at each other.
“What?” said Melanson.
“Whoa!” bellowed Siba.
“Aww man! Why didn’t you tell us that beforehand?” Torres said. “We got it rough!”
