Ad Dhammam was the goof-up capital of the world. What we did near Jeddah was something akin to cars drawing up to our garage door with cartons from the supermarket and then sending it forward to neigbouring houses in smaller cars.
Dhamman was different. It was 'MAHA KUMBH' in military gear ,with added tanks and battle cars. In Dhamman, there was no respite , compounded by recalcitrant Saudi suppliers who they had their own ideas of how to run a war which was comic book class, but still great semblance of order was achieved and men and materaial still moved . The operation were run with ultra- hi tech equipments and satellite imagery by head honchos from Centar Logistical Command ,Army Command Support and Army Corps of Engineers .
Contract staff were hardly noticed and it was work and work all the time. Charles had his job well cut out , rapid engineering and consctruction being his specialisation ,and was in charge of that division. He was well ahead of his task, stocks of fast setting cement ,premixed slurry,welded steel formwork required for laying landing pads and strengthening roads were already moved into the many strategic points in a semicircle , many miles south of the kuwait-saudi border. These depots in the desert were " ready to run", laoded trucks that could be deployed at great speed in emergency . And that's how I lost my job.
Towards the end of October, Charles and his team had moved to Dhamman and Lambertin had moved staff and a thousand heavy load haulers to the east, some of which were sitting loaded in the desert and some of which was running free. Lambertin did not own the trucks, it was hired from as far as from Sweden to Pakistan and drivers from even further,who spoke in tongues from excellent English to broken French which were all the same , nobody understood a thing the other said.Confusion is the general word that can be used mildly to describe the situation .
Mobilisation had been stepped up several fold , requests poured in every second, and goofups flashed like lightening, exposing the perpetrators for all to see. Every order had to be cheched ,rechecked and validated before action, which had to happen in seconds.
One day , a massive pipe burst and the crude pumped in high pressure , ripped the pipe that many million gallons of thick oil slick had turned the part of the desert into a quagmire. Three hundred abhrams were being rolled across the desert towards the Kuwait border and "shit,shit,shit" blasted from the wirless.
Charles swung into action, identified the nearest "ready to run" depot and asked me to move it to the site of the accident,Al Nijab , an oil installation, one hundred and fifty kilometers to the southeast from the dump. Al Nijab somehow became Al Nijaf and sixteen heavy loaders moved as I directed them on the radio. The lead driver was from my home town and we spoke the same language, so I was in constant touch, and they were moving south and responses matched the land marks.
Although on the same route up to a point,the convoy took the wrong turn and reached Al Nijaf,more than three hundred kilometers away from AL Nijab. These desert oil installations had almost similar names , land marks and the terrain looked the same and though we could have tracked their position , nobody did as nothing seemed wrong. Everything was an emergency and only very, very top priority sitautions got the attention from the communications command centre.The communication centre did.
It was mayhem after three hours,the projected time for the convoy to report. Any way , three hundred miles away, the convoy was hit by a blinding sandstorm which lasted several hours and by the time crawlers cleared the raod ,a good ten hours had passed and when the tanks crossed the oil slick,it was a 24.00 hrs. It raised the tank comandant's hackles.
The papers were fetched and validation had not been done! The first entry, Al nijab looked like Al nijaf , the second entry was al nijaf and third confirmation entry was al nijaf, which was mine. The rule was that the second person had to connect it to the earth's grid coordinates before confirmation .
Sometimes,in emergency sitautions, these were done after the things arrived at the place as nobody had time to go through these processes and goof ups were celebrated if it didn't cause to much disruption. But here, the officer in charge came back by copter and kicked out all Lambertin staff involved. Adrian escaped, but two Englishmen above me and I were cermoniously demoted to 'mess haul', driving food to bases.
Whenever Charles crossed my path he would draw imaginary grid lines in air and mark a point in air.....
" I am gonna sit there.. and don't send mafood to my mama in albertsville."
Charles sometimes talked like a black man, in jest, but I have never ever been with a person who spoke with such precision and diction. You could see what he was saying, so lucid and clear ,bereft of any slang,but for the American accent and he used his communication skills to such effect that it left hardly any scope for misinterpretation. He was aware that this was one of my rare mistakes and that too not solely mine. Anyhow we were to catch up soon, in Kuwait,after the war.
