Blather

Tonight I'm resting up from shoveling gravel in the backyard. Watching TV, I thought about my time in Iraq. One of the nicer memories was Heskette. She was a kitten that lived under the pallets outside the Brits' PX. Being small and young, she was at the mercy of the other cats. But she knew that humans were OK. She was very food-driven. I'd sit in one of the cheap aluminum deck chairs outside the container hooch that was the PX and she'd come by. She wasn't fussy; Heskette ate anything that I did. Poor silly girl, she even tried to eat my lit cigar a few times. She never learned that a lit cigar isn't a good thing to eat. The photo above is her second home, the former motor pool. After the Brits pulled out, they took the hooches and removed the pallets that were the adjacent patio. Her mother, another cat I called Gigi, wasn't very maternal. I guess an adult cat was just more competition in the fang-and-tooth world of FOB Quebec. Heskette was smaller, so she had to live wherever Gigi wouldn't bother her. I think she lived for awhile in a tree next to the main building. For awhile, she lived in the motor pool. That's where she was living when I took this photo of her. Jeff and I had snuck a bit of chicken out of the chow hall. She knew us, and even let us hold her so we could put the just-visible flea collar on her. After living there for awhile, she moved to a storage space under the building. We moved to Camp Bucca. Then I went on leave. When I got back, she was nowhere to be seen. A few times I'd walk by where I thought she could be, but I didn't see her again.

Had a few happy moments with this feline. I'd give her a bit to eat, smoke a cigar, and wonder how I got to the same place Alexander the Great did, just a couple of millenia apart. Once or twice, she'd put her face under my elbow, closing off her ears and eyes to the world. I interpreted this as a lot of trust- that I would neither eat her nor let another animal eat her. When I got back from Iraq, I found a couple more cats in California, but they have their own stories.