A desert compound, guarded by unicorns

For a brief moment in the life of the Arabian Desert, childhood dreams and hyperbole converged like sand and wind swirling into a pointless dust devil.  Upon landing in Kuwait, I was assigned to a base in the northern desert, literally down a dirt road and I could honestly say that I had my own desert compound guarded by mercenaries.  What kid wouldn't think that wasn't very badass sounding?  Of course, the mercenaries did not have sleeveless leather vests, battle-axes, or bandoliers of grenades.  They also did not ride stallions or shoot crossbows.  They mostly looked like the Target Loss Prevention Team, but with more guns.  Two months passed: rides out to remote bases, long runs in the rolling desert, drinking O'douls in the office, missing the boy and wife.

Work was hard (for some), but the DOD's drive to save money resulted in relocation to a Dickensian slum in the southern desert, where I now live separated from my neighbors by blankets in a concrete warren lit by desk lamps which I try to imagine run off whale-oil (to complete the Victorian analogy). 

When I first arrived at the new spot, there was a raging sandstorm, and the volume of hot sand in the air was only aggravated by the construction project upwind of our tents. 

"I wonder....," I thought out loud.  "They must be putting up more tents." 

"No," said a nearby Soldier unironically.  "They are removing the gravel from the desert." 

Apparently, the local government has leaned on the US Government to withdraw from certain areas and return those areas to their natural states.  This means that the US government is paying construction crews to pull rocks out of sand for months on end, which is funny because civilization-adjacent desert is covered in plastic bags.  In fact, I have a theory that the large monitor lizards living in the region live off plastic bags and candy wrappers.  But one must return the desert to its natural geologic state.  No rocks allowed. 

And that is deployment in a nutshell: pulling rocks out of sand and convincing oneself that it's important.