Welcome back! It’s been a few weeks, as I am posting every first and third Wednesday of the month and April had five Wednesdays. Anyway, we are back with another tall tale from “the War.” This one harkens back to my time in the 332d. You may have noticed the (virtual) shelves in the shop are bare. Due to an impending move, all the inventory was shipped out to our new location. Once I get settled, we will get it all up and running again.
“It doesn’t matter whose cooler it is, its been back there for weeks!”
Joe, our Senior Enlisted Leader and an avid collector of left-behind things, protested to Danny and I in the smoke pit. Danny and I sat in the plastic Adirondack chairs that were held together by spit, duct tape, and prayers while we smoked our pipes. Joe had his feet kicked back in the reclining camp chair he found wandering around the base one day.
“It’s the Maintenance Squadron’s cooler, Joe,” Danny said around the pipe clenched between his teeth. “I’m sure they’d want it back.”
“Nobody loses a cooler that nice and doesn’t come looking for it,” I chimed in.
“No, no, no you guys haven’t been close to it,” Joe insisted, “the thing stinks.”
Danny removed his pipe from his mouth and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke. He held the bowl containing the smoldering tobacco with his thumb and forefinger and pointed the stem at Joe leaned back in his found chair. “If it stinks, why would we even want it?”
There had been a fair bit of drama with the Yeti purchase. Buying name-brand specific items is often a tricky proposition, especially when there are essentially equivalent coolers for much less money. It took months to get an approved Brand Name Justification, which ended up just being a list of Yeti Cooler marketing hype printed on an official Air Force Form, causing a bunch of high ranking officers to bicker back and forth over the relative merits of Yeti, Rtic, Igloo, and Orca coolers.
The Maintenance Squadron commander had gotten involved in what was truthfully a tiny purchase, and he gloated when the approval to buy the Yeti and not the Rtic, Igloo, or Orca coolers we offered came down from the finance and JAG shop. Abbie dutifully bought the coolers that same day.
Then, since Yeti Coolers are much heavier than regular coolers, the damn things took months to ship out to the desert. This delay frustrated our eager maintainers even more. It felt like every day someone from the Maintenance Squadron called Abbie to ask if the coolers had been delivered. Ironically, had they accepted an alternative cooler, it would likely have arrived much faster.
“We want it because the its basically brand new,” I chimed in, “Abbie said the Yeti coolers got delivered just a couple weeks ago.”
“Exactly,” Joe rocked forward in his chair, sitting fully upright, “A little bit of bleach and some elbow grease and we are back in business.”
“What would we even do with the cooler, Joe?” Danny asked pointedly, before returning the pipe to his mouth and continuing to exhale soft clouds of white smoke.
“The sky is the limit,” Joe grinned, holding up his left hand. “One,” he raised his forefinger, “we can store our meat in it when we go shopping downtown.”
“Two,” he raised his middle finger next to his index, “we can store drinks in it.” Joe raised his ring finger, “And Three, we can keep ice in it longer than a regular cooler.” I thought these were great arguments, and despite the murky ethics regarding the ownership of the cooler, I was fully on Joe’s side now.
“Ice?” Danny laughed, “Where are we going to get ice?” This was a good point, I admitted to myself. We hadn’t seen ice in months, except maybe at the base’s bar.
“We can find ice,” Joe insisted. “Look, let’s ask Justin what he thinks.” Justin, a relative newcomer to the unit sauntered up to where the three of us sat and pulled up another plastic Adirondack chair. “Ask me what I think about what?”
“The cooler behind the bunker near the latrine,” Joe replied.
“Oh it stinks, but its a nice cooler,” Justin said. “And it’s been there for over a week. We should reappropriate it for the ECONS.” It was settled. Danny knew he was outnumbered 3-to-1, and knew which battles were worth digging in and which ones to let coast by.
Joe was a man of constant motion. I probably could have counted on my fingers the number of times I saw him sitting over the six months we were deployed together. I am pretty sure I would only need one hand to count the number of times I saw him sit for more than ten minutes. His energy was contagious, doubly so when there was a project to work on. The cooler brought us a new project.
Justin and I followed Joe to the cooler’s hiding spot, where we discovered it did indeed smell awful. The cooler was stuffed behind one of the sandbag-covered concrete bunkers that dotted the base, where it had been heated by the desert sun. Upon opening the cooler, the unholy scent of rotting meat leapt unrestrained into the air.
The Maintenance Squadron held a burger burn on the large community grills in Black Rock Park a couple weeks before Justin, Joe, and I stood retching over the cooler behind a concrete bunker. By our best figuring, we decided the most likely reason for the left behind cooler was the folks responsible for bringing the cooler back to the Maintenance Squadron’s building simply forgot. That didn’t really explain why the cooler was wedged behind the bunker, several meters away and hidden from the grills.
As I had pointed out, this was a nice cooler, so my best guess is that some NCO sent the nearest at hand, lowest ranking Airman to recover the cooler. Upon finding the cooler right where they left it, the Airman discovered the cooler stunk to high heaven and decided to hide it and let nature take its course. The Airman probably intended to return to the hidden cooler, when the decay ended and smell dissipated, clean it out, and bring it back.
What this hypothetical Airman did not count on was Joe’s scavenging abilities and the easily suggestible nature of two Captains. Two Captains and Joe who had a taste for expensive coolers and were always looking for projects to fill their spare time.
We dumped the rancid remains of an unused ground beef patty onto the ground, to the immediate delight of the fat, black flies buzzing around, and lugged the cooler quickly over to the ECONS storage container. Joe unlocked the container, and the three of us gathered cleaning supplies from inside and bottles of water from the nearby water drop point. Within minutes, the smell was gone, replaced by the welcome antiseptic smell of bleach and a Middle Eastern knockoff of Fabuloso.
After thoroughly disinfecting the cooler, there was one last thing to do. I went back to the ECONS office to grab a dry erase marker and a permanent marker. Returning to Joe and Justin, I traced the permanent marker marks declaring the cooler the property of the Maintenance Squadron. It was then a simple matter of wiping the old markings away, and adding new ones.
The three of us stood there admiring our work. Now we were the proud owners of a lightly used Yeti Cooler, Property of the ECONS emblazoned on the lid.
“What are you three doing?” Our adoration of a job well done was interrupted by the ECONS Commander on her way past the storage container to the office.
“We re-appropriated this cooler,” Joe replied for us. “We found it behind a bunker.” The Commander’s eyes drifted downward to the cooler. A flash of recognition, then she looked at each of us.
“Looks like a nice cooler,” the Commander nodded, “We will definitely put it to good use.” She waved and continued on to the office while Joe, Justin, and I closed the storage container, our new cooler discretely hidden inside.
Thanks for reading! We will catch you again next time, here on the third Wednesday of May 2026! If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing the article and subscribing to the blog. You support means I may someday be able to free myself from the corporate grind and just write silly little stories for you to enjoy. If you read this and thought “Hey! I was there and that wasn’t how it happened!” Blame my memory and the concept of creative liberties.