It’s 2200 (10 pm) and I just now got back to my room. This isn’t an exceptionally late night, I’ve worked until 10 pm several times since I’ve been here. The difference being that on those nights, I was working.
Tonight, I had very little going on; I browsed facebook, I reluctantly ate some sugar cookies since the DFAC didn’t serve the usual Friday night molten lava cake that I generally look forward to, I enjoyed the fruits of my engineer friend’s oil barrel meat smoker and the “brisket” he had been cooking for the previous 7 hours. (I put brisket in quotes because to acquire meat here, we give some money to our linguist friends who have connections in town and hope that they bring back the cut of meat we ask for, but it’s kind of a crap shoot)
While we were out on the patio enjoying morsels of smoked beef and beginning to clean up the mess, the Big Voice sounds. Whoop Whoop Whoop, Incoming Incoming.
I didn’t think much of it. We don’t often get indirect fire (IDF) at this base. Not to mention, just yesterday the Big Voice went off saying there was a ground attack. This would mean that someone had penetrated the ridiculously fortified gate and is attacking us from inside the base. Of course, this alarm was sounded either by mistake or it was an unannounced drill. We never found out either way, which made tonight’s alarm seem like a subterfuge too.
Then we hear a thud behind us. It resembled a large volume falling off the top book shelf in a quiet library. My friend Matt and I turn around and look over to a building about 40 yards away where a plume of smoke is rising off the roof.
The Big Voice then says to Shelter in Place, so we make sure to put the tupperware lid over the container of meat, carefully ensuring it’s sealed, and take our meat back inside the office.
For the next three hours the Big Voice would whoop whoop whoop our hopes up for an All Clear, but continually dash them again with There Is A UXO (unexploded ordinance) on Base, Remain Sheltered in Place until the bomb squad was able to locate the round and ensure it would’t detonate. During that time, we kept up office morale by making jokes about our efforts to save the meat.