The Fix
It had been boredom that drove me to enlist in the first place, so it was to my deep chagrin to find myself, after eighteen months and eight thousand miles, in about the same shape.
When people think of Africa, they usually imagine jungles or savannas, but Kagnew was not like that. The station was up on the highlands of Eritrea, near the Red Sea. It was drily hot, and while the skies were gorgeous, the landscape was austere. One part of the base had four square miles of antennas. I only went out there a few times, but each visit was disquieting. It was a garden of space age technology amidst biblical barrenness. Although, strictly speaking, it was the space age that killed off Kagnew; they shut it down in the 1970s, when satellites took over.
There was a rec center for wholesome entertainment, or you could go into town for earthier pursuits. Once or twice I went down to the port to check out the old Italian shop that sold LPs, but it was a pain to get to. You had to go in convoy on account of the insurgents, and the port wasn’t anywhere worth going unless you had to. So I spent most of the time on base, which was set up like it would be stateside.
While the job and setting suggested adventure, the day-to-day was monotonous. I donned my headphones and plugged myself in, doffing and unplugging at the end of the shift. I was 22 and my shoulders were beginning to hunch.
One thing I was really good at was fixing equipment. I’d played with radios since I was a kid, and I got a reputation for correct diagnoses. Some of the gear we worked was ancient, some was cutting edge; either way it made for a lot of malfunctions. Without getting into technical details, I’ll say this: each device was like an infant. If it got fussy, there was usually not more than one thing wrong.
One day a guy asked me to come by his quarters to see if I could fix his turntable. It was a simple tonearm thing, and when I took care of that he offered me a beer. We’d just clinked cheers when I saw it on the sideboard.
“Where did you get that?” I said. It was a magnificent tape deck.
He told me the story. It turned out that if you signed up for language training, they’d not only pay you a stipend, but they’d give you, along with the lesson tapes, your very own Tandberg.
“There’s a catch, though,” he said. “It’s a big one. You have to pick something they don’t have language school for. Indonesian, Farsi, that kind of thing. You sign up for German, you’ll get class time.”
So I looked into it and sure enough, what he said was true. I selected Swahili. I figured it might get me closer to the lions and giraffes. The only wildlife around Kagnew was donkeys.
You have to understand, this was 1964. I just wanted out. So I didn’t think it was all that bad a deal when they sent me, along with the Tandberg, a different set of tapes.
I didn’t see much wildlife in Vietnam, either, but it was a hell of a lot less boring.
Peter Sipe's fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train and Guernica, and his op-eds in the Boston Herald and USA Today. He teaches 6th graders at a public middle school in Massachusetts. @passed_present