The magic white Rabbit

The base is laid out on a wide desert expanse that ends five miles away against a line of low hills in the north and east. The city of Tal Afar itself has been built up over thousands of years in a little crook of the hills due north of the base. Millenia ago it was a thriving settlement known as Karana. It commanded a view across the vast plain to the south and west where the ancient city of Qatarra was only a small dot in the distance.

The Syrian Desert, as barren and dusty as it is, sustains an amazing variety of animal life. One of the most prevalent animals is the lowly Jack Rabbit. It uses its speed and agility to avoid being caught by the foxes, fennecs, hyenas and jackals that live out their lives at night in the desert. The rabbit is prey, and so it hides. The Jack Rabbit’s fur is the same color as the desert floor and it blends with its surroundings and it uses its camouflage to hide from its enemies. The rabbit is a burrowing animal, able to dig into the hot, dry earth to create a cool refuge from the heat of the day.

One night, while driving along the base’s back road I watched a panic-stricken rabbit gallop across the headlight illuminated road while a pair of jackals bore down on it in hot pursuit. The wide-eyed rabbit suddenly disappeared from sight in the middle of the flat earth and the jackals dug at the ground and sniffed the hole as a last-ditch effort to get a filling meal. The wily rabbit had escaped with its life.

“Rabbit’s been identified on the daily list from KBR in Houston as one of the top 100 abusers of internet privileges in the entire corporation!” Maxx was agitated as he read the report again. “That Rabbit is absolutely worthless as an employee. This is the second time he’s come up on that list! If I get the chance to send him packing, he’s gone! I’m not putting up with this kind of B. S. any more.” That was my introduction to Rabbit. I hadn’t met him, but I knew that he was keeping himself busy at night cruising through the endless maze of the World Wide Web.

In 2008 Maxx had gone home for a vacation and he’d left me in charge of the department. I followed in Maxx’s footsteps by changing up my schedule to keep people guessing about when and where they might run across me or be observed. One night I opened the door to the Fuel Department office to check up on the employees there. Rabbit was alone, his back to the door, and when the door opened there was a flurry of activity on his keyboard as I watched an internet site disappear. “Is everything all right?” I asked. “Uh, yeah, fine.” Rabbit was shaken by the sudden, unexpected intrusion into his internet abyss. I closed the door and left quietly, making note of the reaction to my visit.

The next morning, after his customary trip to the weight room, Rabbit walked passed me as we met on the dirt road. “What were you doing last night?” he asked. “I was out checking on our people.” He’d never really met me before, let alone had me walk into his night shift routine and I could tell that he was wondering whether Maxx had specifically asked me to check up on him. Maxx hadn’t, but I thought it would be a good idea to keep everyone honest. Rabbit had a reputation and I was going to keep him on his toes.

Fuels had just recently been annexed to the Transportation Department and it had created some bad feelings already between Scalawag and Maxx. Maxx hadn’t asked for the assignment to assume control of the Fuel Department, just as he hadn’t asked for the assignment to come to Tal Afar in the first place. He’d just been ordered by management to “straighten things out.” It was a gift that Maxx had, getting things “straightened out.” Maxx sensed the ever-growing tension between himself and the Fuels people, so he called a meeting in the Transportation office with all of the Americans.

“I’ve called you all together to clear the air. I sense that we’re having some difficulties with the way things are being run. If anyone has anything that they want to say to me, I’m interested in hearing it. There will be no reprisals or recriminations. You can say anything you want.” There was a long silence and then Rabbit broke it. “I think you’re an a__hole.” Maxx didn’t skip a beat. “I think you’re a flaming a__hole, but that’s neither here nor there. I want to know why you think it.” Maxx, Scalawag and Rabbit moved into the office for a more private discussion. When they emerged a half hour later, they were all smiling and talking as if some new ground had been broken in their relationship. It appeared to ease the high tension that had been crackling in the air.

Rabbit was a solitary animal who lived one of the quietest lives of anyone on the base. I don’t think he ever left the Fuel Dept. office, except to visit the Porta-John that was just outside, and the night shift was always quiet anyway. Very few people actually worked at night. Transportation was one of the exceptions, with trucks filling huge tanks on a regular basis all day and all night long. Rabbit’s fuel trucks kept the generators running and there were a lot of fuel tanks to be filled. Rabbit, just like his foreman, Scalawag, didn’t have a license to drive the fuel trucks and that fact was the original cause of the friction between Maxx and the Fuel department.

“Scalawag, what good is a Transportation foreman to me who can’t even drive a truck?” Scalawag sensed the frustration in Maxx’s voice. “When they made me foreman here there was no requirement to have a Class A CDL. I know about fuels, not driving trucks.” Maxx understood the stupidity of this company that was accustomed to hiring people without the slightest interest in whether or not they could actually perform the job that they were being hired for. All the company needed was a warm body whom they could place in the position so that the government paychecks would begin pouring into the coffers. Each new employee came with a training price tag of several thousand dollars and the company would gather a huge group of new employees at a secure location for training. The employees were held at a local hotel and transported to the training location each morning. The group was fed at the location to avoid having them leave or stand around outside the building. Nothing about the process was to attract attention. This was the world of operational security and secrecy in the face of an inconspicuous enemy. As each new group of employees was quietly shipped off to the Middle East, the company also sent an invoice to the government for their training. Scalawag and Rabbit were just bodies to fill positions. They knew about fuels, but they had no ability to do more than sit in their office and push the mountainous stack of government-generated papers from one corner of the desk to the other. “Those two are absolutely worthless to me,” I heard Maxx repeat on several different occasions, and Rabbit was keenly aware of his precarious position within the department. His only hope was to keep galloping and shifting his position ahead of the jackals until he could reach his secret hole.