“The general wants to make sure that you understand how much of a favor he is doing for you,” the translator said, without a hint of sarcasm in his voice, “he will allow you to inspect the manhole cover, and you may do so in two weeks time.”
I fully understood two things about this meeting. The first was that the General most definitely spoke English well enough to conduct this meeting in English, but had opted to stick to his native tongue in the interest of showing us who was in charge of the meeting. The second was that he really was not doing us a favor at all. The manhole cover was part of a project that the Qataris had asked us to fix in the first place.
The Qatari General in charge of the Qatar Emiri Air Force (QEAF) security had not bothered to get out from behind his desk when taking this meeting, and had utilized the services of a translator. I was sitting in the meeting room with an Air Force officer in charge of Host Nation Coordination, two Qatari military officers, and my contractor. We were all sipping on heavily sweetened tea, and waiting for the long winded QEAF General to conclude his monologue.
What the General did not realize was that my contractor, Najji, was a native born Arabic speaker and he had dutifully sat next to me and whispered quick translations to me as the General spoke. Najji’s translation was much more in depth than the QEAF translator’s, and it illustrated that the General had a less than favorable view of the intelligence of the Americans in the room.
I was able to ascertain that something was wrong with the General’s speech by watching the other Qataris in the room. The one that worked closely with the Coalition Forces on the base started looking around the room uncomfortably.
After his message was delivered via translator, the General picked up his iPhone and turned his attention to whatever was on the screen, before popping in the white earbuds and making a phone call, laughing loudly at whoever was on the other end to signal the meeting was over. The U.S. Air Force officer thanked the General for his time through the translator, and we left our teacups on the table to be picked up by one of the General’s servants.
“I am so very sorry about that,” Najji said as we left the building.
“Why?” I asked. I had been in Qatar for almost seven months now. I understood how a lot of the QEAF officers acted, the little power trips they would go on.
“Well, it was very rude,” Najji replied. I merely shrugged it off. At least we could finally rip open the manhole.
The manhole in question was situated outside the confines of what was considered the “American” side of the base, which was why we had to go ask for QEAF approval to pull it open and see what the problem was. The QEAF engineering department had signed off on the request with no questions asked. If anyone wanted the sewage backup to get fixed, it was the QEAF engineers.
QEAF security on the other hand, made it everyone’s problem. The request was denied twice, and they even went so far as to revoke the base pass of one of the contract workers after conducting a “further review.” In order to get the request to even look at the manhole and sewage lift station approved, we had to attend a meeting scheduled by the QEAF Security General at his office.
When we first showed up, he was not there. He had scheduled the meeting during his time to play soccer, and his Executive Officer instructed us to come back later.
“When?” We asked the QEAF officer, who merely shrugged and responded, “Later” before picking up his phone and ignoring our existence.
We ended up having to meet two weeks after the originally scheduled meeting, after having to push up our issue through the U.S. Leadership on base for them to engage with their Qatari counterparts and encourage them to take the meeting.
That they had set in the first place.
With the meeting finally out of the way, and the project nearly eight months behind the original schedule due to this problem and many others relating to coordination with QEAF, we finally got over to look at the manhole and the pump-house that were the crux of this sewer upgrade.
The Coalition presence at Al Udeid had ballooned in the twenty years prior to my rotation there, which was evidenced through the massive number of projects on my Construction Flight’s docket. As the base made the transition between what is considered an Expeditionary posture, where the buildings are mostly temporary and the plumbing is outdoors, to an Enduring Posture, where the accommodations are nicer and the plumbing is mostly indoors, many upgrades had to be made.
In the case of the sewer system, Al Udeid had been pumping all of its sewage into a series of storage tanks. For several years, those tanks would fill, and then a contractor would come with a series of tanker trucks and suck the sewage out before hauling it off to be dumped in the legendary “Industrial Lake” somewhere out in the Oil Fields.
After years of being beaten by the wind blown sand and roasted by the brutal sun, the tanks had started to degrade, and the massive increase in personnel on the base started to necessitate a change.
The first thing that was accomplished was that the Coalition sewage system was tied into the commercial Qatar sewage system by connecting to a single lift station and pump house on the QEAF side of the fence. A lift station that had been designed to service the excrement of the one-thousand or so QEAF personnel on that side of the base.
I’m a bit fuzzy on the actual number of people on Al Udeid at the time I was there, but suffice it to say the Coalition side of the base accounted for an exponentially higher amount of human waste and other excrement than the QEAF side produced.
Within a few months, the Qatari lift station failed. The QEAF Engineers managed to get it back up and running at roughly half capacity, and the QEAF leadership submitted a formal request for the Americans to fix the issue we had caused. A couple rotations before me, a contract was awarded to Najji’s company to fix the Qatari pump house and lift station, as well as to improve our own system.
Halfway through the design phase, the project ground to a halt. Najji was Jordanian by birth, and despite spending his high school and college years being educated in England and having a company that had worked in Qatar since the early eighties, the QEAF security screening had determined that his base pass would no longer be accepted on the basis of his ethnicity.
That is where I came into the project, and the damn thing sat for months, waiting for Najji’s pass to be approved. So when we were finally on our way to inspect the faulty lift station less than a month before I was supposed to rotate home, I looked over at Najji in the back of the green camouflage painted QEAF Landcruiser as we were being escorted first to the lift station and then to the pump house.
The timid Jordanian was pinching himself.
He caught me watching him and chuckled. “It feels like a dream, Lieutenant Jacobson.” Najji grinned sheepishly and I could not help but laugh.
Rolling up to the lift station, the QEAF engineer assigned to escort us stopped well short of where I remembered the lift station to be based on maps I had been reviewing just before departing.
“Why are we stopping here?” I asked the Engineer, an Egyptian who had expressed concern that his visa would be denied without explanation when he went to renew it at the end of the month, much like Najji’s pass had been.
“Sheet,” was all the Egyptian Engineer said, putting on a pair of work gloves and zipping his green jumpsuit up to his neck before hopping out of the Landcruiser.
I clambered out of the passenger side door and followed the Engineer, noting that he pulled wrap over his mouth and nose. After walking just a few meters, I could immediately tell we had grossly underestimated the level of work that needed to be done to the lift station.
The manhole cover was raised roughly one meter above the ground via a cement housing, which kept it visible and accessible through the unusually green grass that was growing near the manhole. Surrounding the manhole was a small pond worth of dark, stinking water. The engineer turned around, and gestured to the manhole in the center of the wretched pond.
“See? Sheet everywhere.“
I had pulled the collar of my uniform undershirt over my nose and mouth, but it was doing very little to block the stench that was baking in the July sun. Najji had pulled a scarf out of his pocket, one of the Shemagh scarfs that were ubiquitous in this area, and was wrapping it hurriedly around his face, tears streaming down his cheeks.
The Egyptian Engineer strode across a narrow bridge, hastily constructed by throwing cinder blocks into the bond and laying wooden pallets over them. The bridge led right up to the manhole, and the man gestured for us to catch up to him. I walked across the bridge with Najji right behind me, and the Engineer handed me a metal rod to help him left the manhole cover off the lift station.
After a quick, Arabic three count we lifted the manhole cover off, and were greeted with additional sewage just below the rim of the manhole.
“You see?” The Engineer said through his face wrap, “Americans tied into sewer, add thousands of assholes to system, a river of sheet flows into commercial sewer. Now we have this.“
When the sewage overloaded the pump house, it had backed up into the system, completely flooding the lift station. Any components to the sewage system had been totally submerged in sewage, and would have to be replaced. In reality, the entire system from our side of the fence to the QEAF pump house would have to be totally overhauled, and much of it would need to be replaced.
Najji bent over to peer down into the flooded manhole cover, muttering something about needing to pay his laborers more. He straightened up and announced that he had seen enough. Our motley group walked across the street, where the stench was much more bearable and where the pump house was located.
From the outside, the pump house appeared to be in great shape. There was actually a cleaning crew pressure washing the outside and a tanker truck parked next to the pump house.
Inside the structure, however, was a different story. Pumps, controls, and piping all looked to have been installed at the turn of the twentieth century, and were clearly vastly outmatched by the sheer level of sewage that was flowing through the system.
“You see, this is designed to accommodate three hundred people at a time,” the Engineer explained, “it was all installed many years ago, when the base was just Qatari. Now there are far too many people.”
Najji was walking around the small structure, taking notes as he looked over the controls and pumps. The Engineer continued with his explanation.
“Every day, we have a tanker truck come in the morning and in the afternoon,” he pointed to the truck outside, surrounded by the light-blue jumpsuit clad workers, “we fill the truck with sewage and haul it away, but it is not enough.”
Neither Najji or I responded, as we were looking around the pump house. I did not know anything about sewer systems, but I did know an increase in contract requirements when I saw them.
“This is why you pay,” the Engineer said.
Pretty hard to argue with that.
Our fact finding mission drew to a close, and we drove back to the Contracting office in relative silence, the local radio playing softly in the Landcruiser. The Engineer dropped us off and we thanked him before he drove off. Najji and I went in to the office to go over few details before he left to head back to his office and redraw his plans.
He left the base and the Qataris “temporarily” revoked his pass the next week. I never saw him again, and the project was doomed to sit for another, indeterminate period of time.