Blood Lily Company - Afghanistan, year 1

XXVIII

- Once upon a time...

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, with a smile.
- Kris and I joined the Foreign Legion seven years ago, in January. We had just turned 18. In February of the following year, we were stationed in Abu Dhabi, we had trained in Sahara, French Guyana, Vietnam... Extreme cold was what was missing.

He took a little break.
- Well, as you can imagine, the two of us, natives of Iceland, knew about that. But not the others. So here we are in A400M planes, sitting very close to each other, our asses on the canvas seating and our eyes on our stuff in the middle, with earplugs to protect our hearing and three sweaters and four pairs of socks against the cold. Well, for the others. We only had two sweaters and two pairs of socks.

He chuckled.
- We had gotten a little too used to the heat. Anyway. We land in a true hole in the ground, in the middle of Nowhere, Siberia. North north north of Siberia. Not far from the Chukchi Sea. Further north, only water. To the east, only a little ground before the Bering Strait. The upside is that we wouldn't bother the natives. The downside was that we were really far from everything, housed in prefabs with generators that suffered from the cold, just like us.

He took a sip of his beer which must have started to warm up. It was weird to hear him talk about extreme cold when the weather was so nice here. I saw movement out of the corner of my eyes, but I stayed focused on him. His way of telling the story was... gripping. Barely started, his tale already fascinated me.
- The training was done with the Russian Army. Although the Franco-Russian friendship has been dead and buried – may it rest in peace – for so long now, the Legion is still welcome there. Its reputation... you know it.
- I do.
- It was a series of exercises like capture the flag, escort and whatnot. The idea wasn't to make us better soldiers – we weren't too bad, right? –, the idea was to get us hardened to extreme conditions. To give you an idea, it's a place where you can't pee outside in winter. If you need to take a leak and you're too far from the toilets, you just pee yourself, inside your clothes, and you're good for washing your clothes and yourself when you get home. We all smelled the same, when coming inside. Either way, you have so many layers between your dick and the outside that you never have time to take it out. Nor the will. Especially after the pictures the Russian instructor showed us of a poor sod who had forgotten. It was ugly.

I shivered. I had no way of knowing what it was like, so I couldn't help but imagine the worst. And my imagination is vivid.
- We were given special outfits to wear throughout our stay. For me, they had had a bit of trouble with the length of the legs and sleeves, mainly. So I had only one pair of long johns and one long-sleeves undershirt. I had to wash it at night and put it on top of the stove, hoping I wouldn't be awaken at night, having to go out without it.
- Why not put it on? Under your clothes, it would have been all right, eh? Like if you had sweated a little...
- Oh no, it wasn't the same. The material only absorbed sweat if it started perfectly dry. And wet underwear was certain death. I got a piece of the sergeant's mind because one morning I had put it on slightly damp. I was forbidden to go outside and my team lost points. I never did it again.

He drank some more beer.
- So, the only things that were ours were our boxers. The rest, special outfit: socks, long johns, undershirt, turtleneck sweater and thick sweater with a high collar. The material was almost purely synthetic, with a little merino wool in it. Kris and I were covered in a red rash, a sort of hives all over the body. Horrendous. Strangely, peeing oneself calmed the itching.

He shrugged.
- Then, we had very thick fleece underjacket and underpants, that would attached together with snaps to keep the snow out, just in case. On top of that, we had high-waisted goretex pants with suspenders. Fortunately, they threaded through loops on the underjacket and were hooked at the waist in the front and in the back. A parka in goretex and eiderdown, cinched at the waist, with reindeer fur in the hood and wolverine fur around it, because your breath doesn't freeze on it. Add to that a woolen full-face hood, silk liner gloves, skin gloves and fucking skin mittens, with the fur still inside and with a slit at the top of the palm so you can stick your fingers out if needed. All this, in white. Under the hood, we wore a woolen headband that kept our ears warm and the headphones in place. In the hood, in front of the mouth, the microphone. Finally, a pair of reindeer skin boots...