Try not to breathe the air
August 2nd, 2009 | Morale Personnel Shore duty The deckplates The Middle East | Posted by Phil Ewing
CAMP LEMONIER, DJIBOUTI – A putrid haze is settling over the base tonight, making an already uncomfortably humid evening all the worse. Djibouti City’s landfill is just over a wall adjacent to the camp, and Djiboutian sanitation officials have evidently deemed it their policy to burn the city’s garbage every night, apparently in open pits. Service members at this post, who come from all four services, complained to Scoop Deck that the poison smog robs them of one of their few forms of recreation – running.
The camp’s black flag flies almost every day, indicating that temperatures are considered too high for exercise outside in the murderous African sun. But the smog from the trash fires is so thick and so close that it ruins the experience of jogging after hours on the base’s track. My senior colleague Kelly Kennedy has written about this problem in Iraq, but I was surprised to discover it was an issue here on the Horn of Africa – different, to be sure, because the fumes here don’t come from U.S. military burn pits, but the potentially deleterious effects are all the same.
It helps that most of the billeting I’ve seen are double-stacked trailer rooms, set up on the base’s gravel footprint like city apartment blocks. My quarters for tonight has two fluorescent bulbs and a Formica floor that make it feel like staying in the dressing room of a Family Dollar. But there’s a window air conditioner unit to keep out most of the pollution, and either the base or this room’s previous occupant helpfully left a fly-swatter that I’ve already put to good use.