Wolves of a Different Color

The Bantering Welshman
8 min readAug 25, 2021

Caveat: This is a true story with a moral that comes only at the end. The story is meant to entertain and demonstrate the humor in real life, but sadly this story is a memory that is recalled during a tragic moment in our nation’s history. If you want to get the point, you must read to the end.

All character names have been changed.

Bedouins taking our tent in Iraq.

Ironically, recent events — decidedly not humorous at all — have led me to recall a humorous story from 30 years ago.

I was a recently turned 20-year-old Army specialist (E4) serving in Northern Saudi Arabia along Tapline Road during the first Gulf War. I was a heavy equipment operator for Charlie Company, 844th Engineer Battalion, a reserve unit from my hometown of Greeneville, Tennessee. It was shortly after the ground war, which lasted less than three days, and the US and its allies quickly pulled back from the border to more permanent camps like King Khalid Military City or just left the country all together. As more and more units left the area, Charlie Company’s equipment became critical to return the Saudi desert back to its natural state, flat and devoid of life.

Log Base Echo was a huge supply facility that grew right up out of the dirt during the buildup, but with forces dwindling, it was no longer needed to support frontline troops. I was on the mission to help disappear Log Base Echo. I was in a five-man team consisting of four operators and an NCO. We showed up to the base with one Caterpillar D7 Bulldozer on a flat-bed tractor-trailer rig, a 5-ton truck with mounted 50-callibre machine gun, our M16s, full-load of ammo, and ruck sacks with a sleeping bag and personal items for an expected week worth of work. The base personnel set us up with an empty tent and generator right in the middle of the still large, spread-out facility and almost immediately we went to work. We kept that dozer pushing dirt and burying garbage for nearly 24 hours a day stopping only to change operators and do routine maintenance.

Living in the desert ourselves for nearly two months, we were accustomed to seeing Bedouins tooling about the desert in their white, 4-door Nissan trucks given to them by the Saudi government. The Bedouins are peaceful, nomadic people but they are pilferers and opportunists. They have no respect for boundaries because they have never lived within them. If they come across something outside another’s reach then it is a gift from Allah, even if they had to walk over multiple earthen berms to get it.

We soon discovered that securing the log base from invading Bedouins looking for gifts from God had been a demanding task for the unit and they had resorted to a lot of unorthodox measures. One day while operating the dozer digging a hole and burying a load of discarded material, I saw two men drive up to the edge of the perimeter berm in the official Bedouin wagon. One of the men got out of the truck, walked over the berm as if it were not there to keep him out, sauntered over to me atop my noisy belching beast and made a drinking motion with his hand and mouth. Are you freakin’ serious, I thought to myself.

I motioned to my NCO who was on the ground spotting for me. He looked around my machine and saw the man then walked over to see what he wanted. He made a couple hand gestures to the Saudi man, and the Saudi man repeated his drinking pantomime. My NCO then went back to the CutVee Chevy truck on loan from the log base, produced a bottle of water and returned to give it to the gentlemen for which he seemed grateful. The Saudi man returned over the berm to his friend still in the Nissan truck and I was about to return to my work when I saw two soldiers fly up in a Chevy Blazer coming to a stop just in front of the Nissan sending a cloud of dust into the air. The two soldiers jumped out of the Blazer wielding aluminum baseball bats and screaming but the two Bedouin men were undaunted. The two soldiers went to swinging the bats against the Nissan truck busting the headlights and the windshield and denting the hood but the two Bedouin men just waved and smiled and offered kindly gestures to the soldiers. These Bedouins were like fearless chickens, no matter how much you stomped and lunged at them, they just refused to run. Before it was over, the Bedouin men offered the overstrained young soldiers bottled water from their truck, bottles they clearly acquired from the log base. They shook hands with the soldiers in their usual weak-wristed way, then returned to their beaten truck and drove off. The Saudi government will just give them a new truck.

I remember talking with a combat engineer who frequently pulled guard duty at the main entrance to the log base. He passionately expressed to me a specific agenda he had longed to achieve for weeks and with his time running out at the base, he was on high alert. He was an M88 driver. The M88 is an armored recovery vehicle on an M60 chassis with a boom and a spade.

“I want to drop my spade through the bed of one of their trucks,” he confessed to me, buzzing on a little too much coffee, “but I just can’t catch the little f — kers.”

It was shortly after his confession I saw him pivot his 70-ton beast and take off across the desert after a patrolling Bedouin truck that sped off in a cloud of dust upon seeing him. He never caught one of those trucks before he and his machine were redeployed away from Log Base Echo.

As more and more tents, equipment and materials started leaving the base, things started to get a little eerie for we few engineers left to mop the floor and shut the door behind us. More Nissan trucks were appearing in wait outside the berm. I felt a little like a character from a Jack London book, stranded in the Yukon, surrounded by wolves that got a little closer as the fire died down and I was running out of wood. Interactions with Bedouins on our side of the berm became more and more frequent. We had to maintain two guards, one at either entrance of our tent, at all times to protect our personal belongings, our food and water. With the mess tent and supplies packed up and moved out, we had all the MRE’s and water we were going to get for the remaining couple days we had to finish our work.

Our last day got really hairy. The last of the log base personnel rolled out that morning and we were all alone. We had two guys with the dozer, truck and trailer, one guarding the 5-ton and two setting in the center of our tent facing opposite directions with all our gear between them. Periodically, a Bedouin would walk into the tent, say something in Arabic then walk out with a cot that nobody was sitting on. With the dozer work finished and it safely bound to the flat-bed trailer, we all coalesced back at our tent to gather our gear and bolt — unfortunately that was the same plan the gathering hoard of Bedouins had as well.

I was one of the two left in the tent and so thankful when my colleagues decided it was time to go. My buddy Steven came through the tent door first walking past a couple of loitering Bedouins. “You ready to get the hell out of her,” he asked.

“F — k yeah,” I said. “Thought you would never ask.”

“Stuart is in the 5-ton, and Sgt. Butters is guarding the truck,” Steven said. “You guys stay here, I’ll start carrying stuff out to Stuart.”

Steven grabbed two rucks and headed out the door as more Bedouins pushed into the tent. I was left there with Messer surrounded by Bedouins tugging on our fatigues at both sides pointing at the tent and grabbing at the rucks and duffle bags under our feet and the cots we were sitting on. They would say things in Arabic that sounded like a question at first, then a plea and finally a demand. Steven returned this time pushing Bedouins aside to get to where Messer and I sat on our personal gear. He hoisted a duffle bag and another rucksack on his shoulders and forced his way through the crowd that grabbed at straps as he fought his way out of the tent. Messer got spooked and jumped up.

“I’m going to carry some of this shit out,” he said.

“I can’t hold all of this myself,” I protested.

“We got to get out of here,” he said slinging a duffle bag on his back and unapologetically smacking hard two Bedouins in the process. Then he manhandled two more duffles, one in each hand and forced his way through the mounting wall of Bedouins. I was left alone to secure two rucksacks, a duffle bag, a box of MREs and a case of water. I straddled the center of the cot and pulled the duffle and rucksacks under me. The MREs were first to be lost, but we were going back to our own base so no major loss. Then the case of water was ripped apart and bottles were distributed among the crowd leaving an empty plastic wrap, but we had more water in the truck. To my left a Bedouin said something and reached for the last duffle bag. I pulled it closer and slightly displaced one of the rucksacks to my right and a Bedouin boy tried to seize the opportunity, but I quickly pushed him to the ground and felt a little sorry for it after.

Steven was trying to push back into the tent, but a scuffle was brewing in the center around one of the main poles as two Bedouin groups were arguing over who should claim the tent.

“Let’s go,” Stephen shouted.

I tossed him the duffle, grabbed up both rucksacks, tucked my head and drove through the crowd like a fullback through a wall of linemen. We barely cleared the doorway before the tent started coming down. Outside, Sgt. Butters had pulled out his pocketknife and was running around the tent cutting all the tension ropes. We threw our bags up to Stuart and Messer in the back of the 5-ton and climbed up to watch what happened next. As Bedouins poured out of the falling tent, Butters found the oldest man in the crowed, whistled loudly, raised the old man’s arm and pointed to him and then the tent. At that moment, the bickering stopped and the crowd of Bedouins worked together to collect the old man’s tent. We cranked up the trucks, rolled off what used to be Log Base Echo and left the Bedouins to sort out whatever was left.

That is a funny memory with a pleasant ending where nobody was hurt and good relations were maintained. Not funny at all however is the current state of affairs in Afghanistan that led me to think of that memory today. The wolves that gather outside of Kabul International Airport are armed and hostile. They aren’t looking for the discarded refuse that we leave behind, they are overcome with bloodlust, and they want revenge. They want to embarrass us and end anybody who helped us. As our forces withdraw, they will close in and wreck their havoc on the unfortunate few left to cover our retrograde operations. Opportunists much like the Bedouins of my story, the Taliban differ in that they wish to plunder and destroy all that we did that was ever good in Afghanistan.

God forgive us, and God help us.

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The Bantering Welshman

M.S. Humphreys is The Bantering Welshman, an East Tennessee native, author, journalist, storyteller, marketing specialist, husband and step father.