Fall of 2006, northeastern Iraq

By Artis Henderson

In Arabic, they are called sawafi.

They are the sudden, tempestuous sandstorms that rise up from the desert floor and choke out the daylight with their suffocating wall of red earth. My husband, Chief Warrant Officer Miles Henderson, ran two races against the ferocious desert storms during his deployment to Iraq in the fall of 2006.

The first was a victory. Miles was an Apache pilot by trade and a Texan by birth (”By the grace of God,” he would say in his Panhandle drawl with a good-natured grin on his face). Fiercely competitive and unfailingly polite, he rarely lost but never flaunted a victory.

He was built thin and wiry, a natural runner, and took every free moment to let off steam with a run around camp. Stationed 200 miles outside of Baghdad, his unit was based in the sandy northeast region of Iraq. It was a mud bath during the rainy season and a gritty whirlwind in the dry summer months. Even a jog became an adventure in his corner of that turbulent country.

One especially hot afternoon, after an early-morning flight and before a visit to the chow hall, Miles embarked on his usual run. He would tell me the story later, laughing breathlessly into the phone, and I would hear the smile in his voice across the thousands of miles between us.

The run started well, he told me. It was a 3-mile jaunt along the pieced-together barracks that the soldiers aptly dubbed shanties. Entering the final stretch, he noticed another runner jogging to the living quarters ahead of him. The man looked back over his shoulder toward Miles and stepped up his pace, increasing to a full sprint. Miles’ inner competitive beast flared, and he put on an extra burst of speed to catch the impromptu competitor.

“He looked back with this scared look in his eyes,” Miles said, laughing. “And, I thought, ‘I’m gonna nail this guy.’”

Another 20 yards, and Miles was closing in. As the distance between them grew smaller, Miles said the man looked back twice more, each time with a worried expression.

Miles laughed to himself during the race - and to me, on the other end of the receiver, as he related the string of thoughts running through his endorphin-charged brain. This man does not know who he is up against! Miles Henderson is a cougar!

The closer the two runners got to the barracks, Miles told me, the more people gathered to watch them come in. “It was like Chariots of Fire!” he said, excitedly, humming the theme song from the movie.

“I put on an extra burst of speed, and bam! I surged past him at the finish.”

As Miles pulled ahead, he ran down the line of waiting admirers, slapping high fives and receiving congratulatory pats on the back. Ever the polite competitor, he turned to shake hands with the second-place runner and stopped in his tracks.

“Babe, it was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he whispered. “A wall of sand.”

A sandstorm had come up during the last leg of his run, and the people from Miles’ unit had come outside to see the tempest move in. In the distance, they had spied Miles and the other runner, heading to camp at a breakneck pace.

“I thought they were all out there to see me,” Miles laughed, and I could hear him shake his head. “But they thought I was running for my life.”

The soldiers had a few seconds of open-mouthed wonder before the fury of the storm overtook the camp, obliterating the sun and pushing red dust into every crevice. Miles and his crew hustled inside as the first abrasive blast shook their hovel.

“It was great,” he said, with contagious enthusiasm. “I outran a sandstorm!”

When the second race came, in the dark predawn hours of early November, it wasn’t Miles that telephoned to relay the details. Two soldiers in dress uniform, faces I did not know, each composed in a mask of tearless sympathy, came to tell me the news.

Miles’ helicopter had crashed outside of Balad, killing both pilots. My knees buckled, and I felt my soul drain out of me, like liquid mercury, disappearing into the ether of my now-intangible existence.

Months later, I would remember nothing from those first excruciating hours, save the word on the soldiers’ lips when I asked how, how this could have happened: weather.

I would think back to that storm, to the dark, livid wall of sand that had risen up and extinguished the light of the desert.

Artis Henderson lives and writes in southwest Florida. She is working on her first major piece, a collection of stories from Iraq War widows.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, October 29th, 2007 | Email This Post

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