My first story.

[YerKiddin]

(with apologies where appropriate to those who are serving in Iraq and can tell from my story I have never been there)

A couple of details that are important before you read this story: I set it in a drilling compound for a new well somewhere in Iraq. The compound is a large rectangle with a fence enclosing it, with a drill rig still in place in the center, a tower at the main gate, and facilities for an infantry company (about 160 people) but the facilities are set up around the drilling facilities, and somewhat poorly laid out. In the center of the compound, to one side of the drilling rig is a mudpit, used to store the muds that bring drilled material to the surface. As this well is actually completed, there is also a rather large amount of crude mixed in with the muds that have been used, creating a tar-like toxic mix in the pit. At the start of the story, there is a bad sandstorm still lingering over the camp...

One VERY Bad Day in Iraq

Chelsea was a sergeant. She knew how to obey orders, especially when the order in question made perfect sense. Unfortunately, she was also stubborn as hell, and it had been now three days that she had been near a shower facility and yet unable to use it, and she was due back out on patrol again in just two hours. In the meantime, they had been confined to quarters due to a severe sandstorm. The forecast was for the storm to be letting up just in time for her to leave on it, but until it did, everyone was to remain inside. While Chelsea would have been hard as nails if ANYONE had been there to see, it just so happened that every one of her habitat-mates were out for one-or-another reason, and she had their little box shelter to herself. This meant she could *bend* an order and go get a shower, then dress out again and be ready to take her seat in the humvee on time with nobody the wiser. This storm was blowing a bit weaker already, so to get there and back before it was over, she headed out into the windblown sand...

Bravo Co. was set up in an abandoned drilling facility, mainly because there was already a perimeter fence and watchtowers in place when they got there. The place even had a rig for what the locals considered "potable" water, which they used for a main shower/toilet facility. Drinking water that met Army standards was provided in the living quarters, but the rigging for showers and such for them was not in place yet. (Someone local had set off an IED and damaged that truck, so they had to make do with the one bathroom facility that had been lovingly named "The Fish Farm".)

As she left her quarters, she had her shower gear and a clean uniform inside a trashbag slung over her shoulder. She had goggles to protect her eyes, and a spare towel covering her face to block out the worst of the sand. She wore just a dirty shirt and pants from her uniform, with nothing under it, so she would come out fully geared (helmet included, but not the body armor or weapon) carrying a trashbag with dirty clothes. She did have to wear something on her feet, and the flip-flops she might have worn back in the states would have never lasted here. Luckily she had appropriated a pair of old cheap sneakers from her nephew when he outgrew them. She had only to get to the far corner of the facility and a shower would be hers!

As she passed the end of her quarters, the wind changed directions and kicked up a lot. She considered turning back, but decided she might as well keep going. The storm could stop at any second, and she wanted to be finished with the shower before anyone had any chance to decide she was disobeying an order. While the goggles kept sand out of her eyes, there was such dust that even she began to wonder just which way she was going, and the bag with her uniform was taking on a life of its own. A few determined steps later and there was a sudden lull in the wind, with the general direction returning to blowing from dead ahead. As the dust settled a bit, she could see she was still headed the same direction she started out in, exactly where she would have thought she'd be. "Damn. I am good!" she thought to herself. She switched the towel and trashbag to her other arm, and tried to pick up the pace again.

Walking across the compound should have taken maybe 15 minutes without the weather. Naturally, about 10 minutes into the walk, the wind slammed her from the side again, this time shredding the plastic bag with her uniform in damned near the blink of an eye. She nearly lost her towel as she jerked in an attempt to grab her uniform, but she might as well have tried to grab for a passing F15. She stood just a moment, watching the shreds of remaining plastic flutter in her hand before letting that go too. No shower. Not only was that gone, but so was a uniform, and if she ever thought she was dirty before, now she had sand everywhere. There was nothing to do but turn back and do what she could, washing with drinking water in the sink.

She looked around a second. Trouble. Which way was "back"? That one little jerk grabbing at her uniform had cost her her sense of direction, and she couldn’t see much in all this dust. Well, this place had a fence all the way around it, and there wasn't much of a chance dunes would pile up over the top of the fence, even in this storm, so there was nothing to do but walk until she found a terrain feature, then figure out where she was by that and head back to the quarters from there.

She started walking. She looked down and saw that she was walking in a lot of loose sand. No surprise there, but it would have been a lot more comforting if she had seen some sign of pavement. She kept going, scanning right, front, left, down, over and over, looking for a landmark while watching her footing. After a few steps that seemed to be a bit downhill (“Guess the sand is starting to dune up a bit,” she thought) she saw pavement! She went to double-time in her excitement, but something was wrong. The pavement seemed melted. A little melting was no big surprise, the blacktop did that around here in the sun, but this felt different. She stopped just a second to scan, and thought she saw a low wall to her right and maybe ahead too. When she looked down again, just that bit of shifting her weight forward was the last thing needed for the toe end of her shoes to disappear as the tar from the drill mudpit began to close over her feet.

She tried to lift one foot, then the other, with neither seeming inclined to budge toward the surface, but both quite happy to descend further into the black. The surface of the tar had a skin before she walked onto it, but that appeared to have broken in rings around her feet, and the tar coming out of the break was the blackest stuff she'd ever seen. She had difficulty keeping balance with her feet sinking as they were, but managed to do so even with one hand holding the towel to her face. She tried to yell for help, but doubted it could have been heard as far away as the edge of the pit, and if there was anyone closer, they were likely in the same trouble she was. She knew that moving would speed up the sinking, but she could tell she was going down way faster than the storm was letting up. Desperately, she looked around again and saw nothing but sand and tar and dust. She did notice that the tar had closed to her legs now, and was slowly moving from mid shin up toward her knees. At least this was making it easier not to fall over. As she watched, sand began to fill the dimples around her shins in the tar, as well as adhering to the top of the black liquid that formed rings around her legs. She looked around her on the surface, and saw that in every direction, dust and sand covered the actual surface of the tar pit. With the tar rising to her knees, she got the idea to sit in the sand behind her, and use that support to pull her legs out.

As she sat, she could feel the surface of the pit adjust to her new distribution of weight. She then set about trying to pull her right leg out. It turned out most of her upper pantleg seemed unstuck by the tar, though she could tell by the feel on her foot and ankle that they were. Nothing wanted to move anywhere fast, but by leaning backward and lifting as best she could with her abs, the knee slowly rose from the pitch, with just little strings, here and there, where the pitch had managed to get a good hold on some bit of her pants. From just above the ankle down, however, was a different story, and the stress from having lifted the right leg to where it was only buried from the ankle down had left her panting for air (and panting for air in a dust storm was a whole new kind of pain!). Around her ass, a new dimple was forming, and sand was filtering down into it, but that same sort of ominous black ring now circled around the dimple her ass was in, and the time she had taken pulling her right foot up as much as she had had allowed the tar to get a bit better grip on her left.

She took a moment to look around again. She did her best to pull more sand in under her butt, and then went back to lifting her left leg. It was s l o w and painful going! It barely wanted to move at all, and the ring of black around the sand seemed to be forming faster than the windblown dust could paint the surface. After seconds that lasted forever, she had both feet up higher than her butt, but the tar still held them, having risen above the surface in strands that started above either ankle, anchoring her to the surface. Around her, the dimple had deepened, and in places the tar from the broken surface oozed slowly inward. It was clear the advancing tar would trap her ass if she didn't move it, so she had to find a way to move. She tied the towel around her head as best she could, to free up her other hand. She then scooped what sand she could reach and used it to cover all the bare tar to the right of her, planning to flip in that direction, then used what strength was left in her abs to try and snap her weight up out of the hole her butt was in and flip sideways and get her weight onto a different part of the surface.

It worked. Mostly. She had flipped out of the hole, and over onto her right side. Now, her hip and arm were holding her weight, and she had to adjust her arm to keep her elbow from poking a new hole in the soft surface of the tar. Her feet were one-atop-the-other, with the right a bit more buried beneath the left. She lifted her left leg off the right, but to do so, she had to press her right back down a bit. The left leg came free: with a lot of tar still slowly oozing off it, but free. Her right foot was just even with the surface again, with tar all over it, binding it down. Tar from around the ankle with a much better hold on her leg as well. Her first try to move it went nowhere, but she tried rolling a bit forward, slowly twisting the leg out, heel first. It actually worked, and she rolled over onto her back in the sand to rest a moment before trying to get the rest of the way out.

She could tell the surface was not going to hold her, even with her weight spread out horizontally over the sand. She adjusted her towel and looked around again, noticing that the surface to her left and right was starting to show black leaking through the sand. This wasn't going to get any easier, so she pulled her feet toward her ass and stood up. The tar on her legs dropped toward the surface even as her feet began to dip lower into the surface of the pit. She awkwardly set off toward the edge of the pit. Each step was dragging up more sand stuck to the tar on her legs with every step, but by moving quickly, she was able to get to the edge of the pit.

The lucky part of that was that the sand appeared to be a bit deeper, but it was all loose. She couldn't reach the lip of the pit from the surface, and could not jump in the soft sand with the extra weight on her feet. At least she could sit on the sand a bit and rest. Finally! A break. Right up until the wind changed again, thirty seconds later!

The sand she sat on was blowing away. She got up and started running to her left, with the wind, but the sand kept on thinning, and she could only run so fast with all the tar on her pant legs and shoes. As the sand covering the pit surface continued to thin, she tried to pick up her pace. Turned out falling on the sand-covered surface of a tar pit can be a lot like falling on asphalt paving, but getting up again is very different. It was just one too many things at the same time, when she needed to pay attention to all of it. Her body ached, she was tired, her feet were weighted, her pants were glued to her legs, and she was running across a tar pit in a sand storm while trying to adjust her towel so she could keep breathing. It was too much; she tripped and slammed down *hard*, leaving her dazed for just a few seconds too long, and without thinking she had levered herself up on an elbow until her head cleared. By the time it did, her elbow was somewhat stuck through a soft spot, and the stuff here just seemed to be all around softer, now that she wasn't falling on it face first while running.

She got a knee under herself, flattened a hand out on the surface, and slowly pulled her elbow out, along with a good chunk of tar, but then had to sink her left foot a bit to get the right knee out, so no more running. As she looked around she could tell there'd be no layer of sand, either, as the wind had taken it all somewhere else. She went ahead and put her right foot down, evening out her weight, and getting ready to drown. She looked ahead again, and could actually see a break in the wall ahead, but there was little chance she could reach it. Too far. No sand. Fuck that, she was a sergeant! She actually made two steps more toward the break, sinking up to her groin in the process. Now she was going nowhere without a winch, except down. Her hands grasped at the side of the pit, but aside from weathered tar, there was nothing there to get a hold on. When she looked down again, she could no longer see her pants. The tar had already claimed the bottom of her over-shirt, and was starting to roll up her ribcage.
Funny thing about sand storms: they can die out almost as abruptly as they start. It takes a bit for the dust to settle, but when the wind suddenly quits roaring, it’s TIME TO START YELLING! “HELP!” she all but screamed, “GET ME OUT OF THIS SHIT!” At first, she got no answer. It wasn’t easy to yell, either, after having sucked sand for what felt like eternity, and with sludge pressing against her from all sides now. She whipped the towel off her head and yelled some more, and began to hear voices replying. She had been holding her arms up, but as she sank to her armpits, she spread her weight on the surface with her arms, slowing her descent, but she could see where the surface around her was starting to slowly dip.
Finally, a head appeared over the edge! “Hold on, Sarge! We’ll get ya outta thare!” She couldn’t count the number of times she wanted to kill that lazy, good for nothing hillbilly, but he was the sweetest sight she’d seen in her life, just then. He quickly found rope from somewhere, tied it off to a nearby truck, and dropped it over the side. Even then, it had taken so long that it was difficult to pull her arms off the surface to get the rope, but she did. She was able to hold it well enough to keep from sinking anymore until they got another soldier over the side to get a harness around her and very slowly pull her out.

When she was finally free from the pit, she took off the goggles, looked down, and said, “Damn. I need a shower.”

[PM2K]

Cool story! Thanks for posting it!

[Viridian]

Phew. That was quite a comprehensive story. Well written and well done!