The Long Haul

Frequently in Scouting there comes a time when the effort gets hard and the reward is difficult to see. For me, when I was the Cubmaster, it would happen sometime around March or April, when the Cub Scout program was starting to wind down for the year and the boys started to drop off for softball or soccer. Admittedly, it gets hard to stay motivated at times like this and I have struggled with it. I sometimes refer to it as getting “scouted out”. However, when I get this way, I try to remember a time in my life where the days were long, the work was hard, tedious, even dangerous, and the rewards were very difficult to see or understand. I’m talking about my time in the Army during the First Gulf War. I served as a Military Policeman whose job it was to carry a machine gun, keep it clean, watch out for my fellow team mates, other soldiers and the occasional civilian. I did this in Saudi Arabia and eventually in Kuwait after we liberated it. I got to see a great deal of Saudi Arabia and I spent many a night stealing glimpses at the night sky during my scant down time, when I wasn’t dead asleep. The routine on paper was 13 hours on, 11 hours off. But in reality it was more like 15 hours on and maybe 9 off. When we were on day shift we would get up at about 6:00am as the sun was coming up,shuffle over to the mess tent get some warmed up food and cold Army coffee. We would then proceed back to the tent gather up our weapons and gear, put them on and once again shuffle out to the hummer. There we would prep the vehicle for the day, load up some food and water, check the gas, oil and air filter. We would then wait for our team leader to arrive with the challenge, password and radio frequencies for the day. This grind went on for months without end, to the point where when we would find a phone to call home on, we would ask our loved ones “What day of the week is it?” On and on this went with no time off, or break in the monotony, until it came time to switch from days to night and vice versa. The switch from day to night was great as it meant that we got about 24 hours off to catch upon letter writing, phone calls, showers and sleep. By contrast the switch to day time from night time was a 24 hour grueling slog through a seemingly never ending shift. It was on one of those shift changes that I nearly shot a fellow soldier who had come over to check on us when our team leader had fallen asleep at the radio and hadn’t checked in with the battalion. The poor guy had walked up on us while I was looking in another direction and set off a trip flare at 3:00 am making me think that we were under attack. Thankfully, I noticed as I sighted in on my target that they guy was carrying his weapon at sling-arms and no one else was shooting at us, so I relaxed my finger and put the machine gun back on safe, woke my team mate to fetch the wayward soldier, who was just as freaked out as I was. It was things like that, that would wear on you and after nearly four months without a day off, one of the most difficult moments of self motivation and yet a truly rewarding experience of my life came about. We had moved up to the town of Khafji just south of the Kuwaiti border, where a major battle had been fought and the area was littered with landmines, burned out tanks, and unexploded ordinance such as cluster bomblets, grenades and the like, it was a surreal scene. We had been on patrol there for several days when it came time for us to do a shift change from night to day. After a 24+ hour shift we were tired, worn out, just absolutely stark raving exhausted. Our relief came just as the sun was setting and it took us a while to get back to the camp, clean our weapons and prepare for the next day. Just as my head hit the pillow, the Platoon sergeant came in to our tent and said “Everybody up! You have a mission! You have five minutes to get ready.” I remember hearing several muffled complaints and grunts to which I added my own. But we were so exhausted that none of us moved. The Platoon sergeant returned and this time stayed until he had kicked, pulled and yelled at us to get moving as the mission was apparently very important and the other teams could not perform it as they had to stay on patrol. We had to go back out, drive up to the border check and wait for a convoy to be handed off to us for escort. Tired, worn out and very grumpy, we made it to the check point with some time to spare. Sucking down what coffee and soda we had scrounged up, we did what we could to prepare for this “important” mission that had us upset. Then we saw the first vehicle of the convoy, it was a fellow MP hummer from another platoon. We waited for them to pass, then got up to speed with them, and took their place in the convoy while they peeled off. The convoy consisted of a squad of three MP hummers which we replaced, and 20 or so ambulance Hummers, all headed south. I remember waving to the machine gunner of the hummer we relived and him waving back. I even remember waking up even more at that point and becoming very alert to our surroundings and looking out for trouble again. For about an hour we escorted that convoy of ambulances down to the end of our territory handing them off to the next company of MPs down the road from us. When we got back to our camp the Platoon sergeant greeted us and let us know what it was that we had escorted. Those ambulances had carried the American prisoners of war that had recently been released by the Iraqis and we had escorted them through the town and battlefield of Khafji, and to safety. I smiled at what it was that I had just done even though none of the escortees would ever know my name, and I instantly fell asleep in my bunk. So no matter how difficult it may be to carry on scouting at times, remember that its about service to others and they will usually see the benefit. For me that’s the greatest reward in and of itself.