The wind changed on Tuesday. It brought with it the humidity of the Persian Gulf, so for the last few days, we’ve had 115 to 120 degrees, with 40% humidity. As one officer pointed out, we're surrounded by sand in 7 of the 8 compass directions, and wouldn't you know it, the wind is now coming from the one direction that carries the ocean humidity!
I know this first started Tuesday, because that’s when I went for a morning run and first noticed it...about 5 seconds after stepping outside my CHU! Normally, when I run I’ll sweat a little bit, so little that the heat often evaporates it before it dampens my shirt. Not Tuesday! As the photo tries to show, I was drenched after a 5K run around the COB at 5:30am.
In temperatures like this, there’s a critical laundry issue: it takes 2 days to get your laundry back, but if you’ve got a normal amount of t-shirts and underwear in your laundry bag, 2 uniforms in your bag puts you over the weight limit. Which means that if you’re going through 1 uniform a day, but only getting 1 back every two days, you’re destined to run out of uniforms! Some soldiers have two laundry bags, but not everyone. Not just any laundry bag will do, unlike other bases such as Adder. You have to have the official heavy-mesh bag, with a color-coded numbered tag. They started running out of bags as the base grew last April & May.
