In a previous diary, Cheney Has A Slight Ethics Problem (
http://www.dailykos.com/...) I went into my career at Schlumberger. Strange times, most of them spent in the Middle East. My year in Iran was memorable to say the least. There I was, traveling half way across the country, with a beautiful wife back at Ahwaz. It was a tough game. But I was young and very stupid. I should probably have found a job in California where we could go surfing. But both of us were happy enough, for no good reason. A truly weird, indeed surreal, aspect was that there was a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away where I could get cans of Lowenbrau beer. To this day I consider Lowenbrau the Nectar of the Gods.
I was stationed in Cairo for a while. The Schlumberger offices and truck yard were located only a few miles from the Great Pyramid. It was amazing to see the Great Pyramid at Giza every day just by looking out the window. My wife (then girlfriend) and I once went on a tour directly into the very heart of the Great Pyramid.
When a job came up we had to go to the Western Desert, where the Egyptians were drilling with old Russian drilling rigs. These were nightmarishly decrepit. Once, with the senior engineer at the wheel of our pickup, a tough practical Frenchman named Jacques, we were driving west through the desert in the night. We came over a rise and there was a young, nervous, Egyptian soldier pointing a rifle at us. Behind him was a military outpost.
Jacques very calmly turned on the interior lights and switched off the exterior lights, so as to not blind the soldier and to let him see us. "A little trick I learned a while ago." Scary experience though - hey, I thought all I had to do was go to rigs and work, not have guns pointed at me.
After Cairo, I was assigned to Ras Gharib. This was a village on the Red Sea coast. The Egyptians were drilling in the Red Sea. I went out there in a van, along with several other people. As we headed east, away from the Nile, I remember a point at which we crossed the line where the Nile no longer irrigates the land. And it was a line - looking north and south, it was like a knife blade. On one side it was green and fertile, on the other side, pure sand.
I was assigned to a particular drilling rig at Ras Gharib. Whenever they reached a depth where they could do some well logging, I'd take a tugboat out to the rig. The rig was a 'jack-up'. It had 4 legs with ratchet-like teeth. It would be floated to a location, then they'd ratchet the legs down and down, until they hit bottom. Then they'd continue to ratchet the legs, until the platform got lifted out of the water. They attached a barge to it, which was used for living quarters and a mess hall. The barge was vintage WWII; I once looked at a name plate that said it was built in the 1940s. But I only had to stay on it for a few days at a time. I got to be friendly with a young American driller, who helped me a bit once when I ran into a problem. Troy Hudson - I still remember his name all these years later. I also talked a bit with an Egyptian, whose first words were basically about whether I believed in God. "Man, all these guys do is talk about God", I thought. But I said, "Yeah, sure" and then steered the conversation elsewhere.
Once when I was on land, we were having dinner in the common Schlumberger house in Ras Gharib. Suddenly the two-way radio crackled. The tool pusher on my rig came on the air and told everyone else to get off the radio. There followed a frantic night. It turned out that my drilling rig had just sunk, at night. They had recently floated it to a new location, jacked it up, and started drilling. When you drill you pump fluids (called 'mud') down there and when it comes up it brings up the rocks you've drilled. When you start drilling at the surface it's not uncommon to lose some of the mud, since the rocks are so porous. They had been losing quite a bit of the mud. It turned out that it had washed out a cavern under one of the ratchet legs and suddenly, without support under one of the legs, the whole platform had flipped over. The people on the barge were ok. Everyone on the platform died, 18 people, including Troy Hudson and the young Egyptian I knew. They were working the night shift. The currents in the Red Sea are incredibly swift; they had no chance.
I was shook up for a long time. Schlumberger reassigned me to Alexandria, a lovely city, after a trip to Paris for training.
I was working in Kuwait, and had recently gotten married. A Schlumberger engineer came through Kuwait and we hung out for a while. He was assigned to Basra, Iraq. He invited us to take a drive there one day. So we did, knowing nothing about Saddam Hussein. It was a moderately interesting drive, some parts of Iraq were green and looked ok. Basra was dull. The Schlumberger folks regaled us with stories, like how an Iraqi worker had been told to fill up the gas and check the oil on a pickup. He came back saying that the truck hadn't needed hardly any gas, but it was taking a lot of oil. It turned out he had pumped oil into the gas tank, and vice versa.
We drove back to Kuwait. At the border the Iraqi customs agent looked at our passports and said we didn't have a stamp! The jerk when we came in hadn't stamped our passports! He said, "You wait here!" and went to talk to his supervisor. My wife said, "Hit it." I said, "Whaaaat?" She said, "We don't have stamps. I'm scared. Hit it!" So I did. The customs guys must not have had any guns; at least I didn't hear any bullets whizzing past.
I had an assignment in Iran. I had to be at a drilling rig by morning. So I started driving at about 2 am, since it was a pretty long drive. During the drive I had my wits scared out of me when a donkey crossed the road directly in front of me, in the middle of nowhere, in pitch black darkness. I managed to avoid it and kept driving through the night.
About daybreak I came to a bridge, quite near the rig I was looking for. The bridge was designed for one way only traffic, maybe 1 1/2 times the width of a vehicle. The surface of the bridge was metal. I slowed, but even so I completely lost control. The dew had condensed on the bridge, and combined with the small amount of oil on the surface, turned it into a frictionless surface with about the adhesion of teflon. The pickup truck tried to go sideways, but the bridge was too narrow, so eventually I crashed. I smacked my forehead pretty good on the windshield, so I was somewhat groggy. I couldn't start the truck again.
I got out and stood around. Eventually traffic from both directions built up. Finally there were enough men to simply grab the truck and drag it off the bridge with their hands. I got a ride to the rig and completed the job. Later, Schlumberger mechanics drove out, towed the truck back to town, stripped it completely down, and straightened the frame, which had been warped. Put it together almost good as new.
I had to drive to a rig near the Iran-Iraq border. At a junction I went left instead of right. After a few twists and turns I came to a high-walled military compound. It was night. A nervous young soldier was pointing a gun at me. Very slowly I turned on the interior light, and switched off my exterior lights. After a while an officer who spoke a bit of English came out and we sorted things out. I came to the realization that I don't like guns pointed at me by nervous young men.
I had to go to a rig a long distance away. I had an English trainee, Nick, to keep me company on the drive. Young Englishmen from the lower middle class often can't afford cars, so they are lousy drivers when they're fresh out of university. Nick acknowledged this, so I drove. The drive was mostly across flat desert plains. It was such a long drive, and so disorienting, that we once got out and looked at the stars to see if we were heading in the right direction. At one point we hit a very slight dip in the road and the lights went out. The entire electrical system on the truck went out momentarily, then came back on. Both of us, naturally, said, "What the hell was that?" We continued driving and it happened once more. But we eventually reached the drilling rig. We were tired but we had to go to work right away and worked through the night.
After we were finished I looked for a bunk. Nick, with a bit more energy, went exploring the area a bit, and found a store. He bought a carton of Camel cigarettes. Horrible, terribly strong, but he liked them. He then also went to sleep. When we woke up it was night again. We decided to drive back anyway, not wanting to spend any more time on the rig. For some reason we either forgot about the electrical problem, or just hoped we'd be ok.
We weren't. Roughly in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, we hit a small bump and the electrical systems shut down. But this time, permanently. We coasted to a stop. We opened the hood, and pulled out a flashlight, but after maybe half an hour we couldn't find a problem. We figured we'd probably have to sleep until daylight and then maybe we could see the problem with better light. Suddenly a car pulled up. Where they had been, we didn't know. We didn't see them coming. Maybe they were sitting in a field having a beer, chillaxin', which was frowned upon even then in the more religious rural areas. Who knows? Maybe they were gay, even more frowned upon. One of the two guys spoke a bit of English. He said, "Me electrician!" The other guy nodded. "Yeah", I said, "and I'm an electrical engineer." But the electrician grabbed the flashlight from my hand and started looking.
After a while he said, "Give me cutters!" I really didn't like the sound of this, but after a bit of arguing we got some cutters out of the toolbox and gave them to him. He promptly grabbed a bunch of wires and cut them all. Unbelievable! Disaster! My knees went weak. I thought he was going to maybe cut a single wire or two. Not ten! He then started touching some of the wires to the engine block until one of them sparked. He tracked that wire back and forth and found the problem. It turned out that the bundle of wires had come loose from its mooring and touched the engine block. Eventually the heat had melted the insulation on one of the wires and it had shorted to the block. We got some electrical tape, he spliced together the wires and covered the uninsulated spot and told me to try to start the truck. It started immediately.
We offered them money and the Camel cigarettes. "No, no! Allah! Allah put us here!", they both cried, pointing up. After some arguing it was apparent they were adamant. We were on our way half an hour after we were dead in the water, screwed to the wall, absolutely boned, in the middle of nowhere in Iran.
I knew a French engineer in training school. We hooked up again while I was in Paris training, and drove around in a sports car he had rented. We had some wine together. He was a fairly short guy, maybe 5 feet 9 inches, compared to my 6' 1". He was built something like a fireplug and had an obviously broken nose. He was the youngest person to ever have achieved a black belt in Judo in France at the time, at the age of 14. He had been assigned to Syria.
He kept his black belt secret, but somehow it leaked out. Everyone said he had to fight a worker who was maybe 6' 5" and muscled like a Titan. The guy had never lost a fight. After begging off repeatedly, finally he did it. They met in the middle of the Schlumberger courtyard. The Syrian literally had no clue. How could this small man over and over and over again put him flat on his back? Finally the Frenchman started giving the Syrian a handicap, until it got to where the Frenchman was starting on his hands and knees. Didn't make any difference. As in everything, superior technology, properly used, wins over brute force. Well, maybe if there were 6 Syrians things might have been different. Everything has limits.
I once had to go to a rig in the mountains of Iran. I drove at night. Since there wasn't enough money to build gas pipelines, gas that was produced along with oil was burned or 'flared' at well sites in the mountains. In the daylight the mountains are bad enough - it feels like you're driving to Mordor and the Cracks of Doom. But at night the flares cast eerie, shifting, red glows on the mountainsides. There is no other traffic to give you a grip on reality. When you're sleepy at 3am you really have to work to get a grip on yourself. It seriously felt like I was driving through the gates of hell. A very strange experience.
A Dutch engineer I knew, very plainspoken (as all Dutch seem to be), wrote on his yearly evaluation: "Iran is the dark side of the moon. I hate every square inch of Iran."
I have to agree. Iran (at least the southwest) is hell on earth. An individual, or a military force, would be swallowed up without a trace. Perhaps not the best vacation spot, visit at your own peril.