Welcome back! On this somewhere-around-ten-year anniversary of my return from my first deployment to Al Udeid, I present to you a vignette about temptation, a caution against haste, and a warning to listen to your Contracting Officer. I hope you enjoy, and please remember this tale is a decade old. The lines between fact and memory are not so clear anymore.
My burner phone vibrated, rattling across my desk with every pulse. I picked it up to check the caller ID. The number belonged to Buzz, one of the Civil Engineers, and I figured I might as well see what he wanted.
“Hey, Jacobson,” Buzz sounded frazzled on the other end of the line, “I need you to come with us to inspect the new dorms.”
“That’s a Corps project,” I replied.
“Yeah, I know. We have a walk through today for the final punch list, but the Corps inspectors and their contracting officer didn’t show up.”
“Okay, I can’t direct their contractors if there’s anything wrong,” I cautioned the frustrated engineer.
“You can now,” he replied. “The General is so pissed they aren’t here, he called the Corps leadership to bitch them out, and they sent over a memo saying they would accept and enforce whatever we recommend.”
The new dorms were an Army Corps of Engineers project and were a big deal. Every Wing Construction Update Brief I attended during my nearly seven months of deployment contained a discussion about the project. For the past couple of weeks, the Wing Commander had grown increasingly frustrated with the Army construction project as it neared completion.
Frequently, the Army engineers and project managers just didn’t show up to the briefing. The General did his best to hide his frustration when that happened, but it always fell to Buzz and his team to brief in the Army’s absence. They did a pretty good job covering the basics of the project schedules, overruns, and issues. A good Lieutenant can bullshit their way through just about any briefing, it is a core skill taught at all Officer commissioning sources.
I grabbed the keys to my flight’s beat up Dodge Dakota and drove over to help out. Buzz and I exchanged greetings, and he introduced me to the lead project manager from the construction contractor who built the new dorms.
The dorms were colloquially referred to as “the Chicken Coops.” Long, brown, and windowless, they did look more like housing for poultry than for hundreds of junior enlisted Airmen. The 379th Air Expeditionary Wing’s leadership hated this name, of course, and took every chance they got to remind everyone not to refer to the Chicken Coops as “the Chicken Coops,” preferring “the Stacks” instead.
If there is one thing that will cement a nickname, tradition, or underground ritual, it is disdain from the highest levels of leadership. Personally, I hadn’t heard anyone refer to the new buildings as “the Chicken Coops” until the Command Chief went on a rant warning Airmen not to refer to the dorms as such. As soon as the Chief said “Chicken Coops,” I immediately thought “Those DO look like chicken coops!”
Buzz and I were joined by another Lieutenant from the CE Squadron. This Lieutenant was new to the Deid, replacing the old Inspection Flight chief. They introduced themselves, and I immediately forgot their name. The three of us followed the Project Manager into the first Chicken Coop to start our inspection.
The Chicken Coops were pretty much completed. Most rooms had furniture installed and assembled, and there were only a few nit-picky items to put on the final punch list before the Wing started moving airmen into their new homes.
After the walkthrough was done, the two CE Lieutenants, the contractor Project Manager, and I were all standing in the entry vestibule on the top floor of one of the Chicken Coops. The other Lieutenants and the Project Manager were excitedly talking to each other. I was studying a large, red, metal wheel in the corner.
“What’s that?” I pointed to the wheel. I had noticed similar wheels on each floor of every Chicken Coop. I suspected I knew what it was, but didn’t want to assume.
“It’s the master fire suppression control,” the contractor said. That is what I thought it was, although I had never seen the master valve in such a public part of a building before. Time to ask some leading questions.
“How does it work?” I asked pointedly. The two other Lieutenants looked at me, Buzz with a sudden realization and the new guy as if I was a moron.
“Well,” the Project Manager answered with a look on his face that indicated he too thought I was a moron, “if there is a fire, someone comes in here, turns the wheel, and activates the sprinklers for this floor.”
“For the whole floor?” I followed up.
“Correct,” the Project Manager replied. “Sprinklers will go off in the hallway and each room.”
“This dormitory is for the junior enlisted, correct?” I asked another question I already knew the answer to.
“Yeah, Jacobson,” Lieutenant Inspector butted in. “E-4 and below.”
“One of them is going to turn that wheel,” I stated matter-of-factly.
“Oh no,” Lieutenant Inspector said. “The residents will know not to mess with it.”
Buzz and I shared a look and shrugged together. We had been at the Deid for almost seven months at that point. “I recommend you secure that wheel before we take possession of the building,” I said.
“Noted,” Lieutenant Inspector didn’t exactly roll his eyes, but his tone indicated he probably wouldn’t accept my recommendation.
We finished our walk through, and we forwarded our findings to the Corps of Engineers. I made sure my recommendation was included in the final report.
The Corps of Engineers recommended the Air Force take possession of the new dorms. The Wing Commander was ecstatic to finally get this project off his books. Our next Construction Update brief was the Wednesday after the walkthrough, and the Wing Commander ordered a phased occupancy of the dorms.
A week later, I watched the first Airmen start moving into the Chicken Coops. The Airmen dragged their belongings across Al Udeid’s walking paths en masse, many cursing and bitching the whole way to their new home away from home.
The next week, I woke up to the distant sounds of fire alarms ringing early in the morning. Stepping outside my dorm in shorts, flipflops, and a t-shirt, I saw what appeared to be an entire Chicken Coop floor’s worth of Airmen standing outside their new home. I couldn’t be sure from that distance, but they all looked soaking wet.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the urban legend that filtered through the active rumor mill was an Airmen received the equivalent of a “Dear John” letter, the “Dear John” SnapChat or whatever the kids used to communicate. To make matters worse, that Airman’s roommate consistently stayed up late into the night talking to his own girlfriend on video chats.
Distraught, angry, or just plain mean, the heartbroken Airmen left their dorm room early in the morning, giving that big red wheel a spin on his way out the door. The water from the fire suppression system flooded the top floor, and as I stood there watching the evacuation of the brand-new Chicken Coops my work cell buzzed in my pocket.
It was Lieutenant Inspector. “Jacobson,” he sounded exasperated, “someone messed with the master valve for the fire suppression in building one!”
“You don’t say?” I asked sarcastically.
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