When I was in Kuwait there was a big job site, a $2.6 million construction project. It was a massive place, there we’re a ton of Third Country Nationals (euphemism for broke-ass laborers who make a dollar a day, just to send it to their family back home), and they worked extended hours, so we had to have a ton of escorts to secure the area. We we’re there all the time.

For the first several weeks, one of the spots we routinely set up shop was on a large piece of metal that protruded from the ground. It was in a good spot; a back corner of the fence-line, away from the construction, in a good angle to see a lot of what was going on. Day in and day out we sat on this big piece of metal and watched these TCNs do their thing. They moved some bricks, took a siesta, bitched each other out, moved some more bricks, and the cycle continued. Sometimes the boredom got the best of us. We’d dance around if someone had a radio, or we’d kick stuff, or draw in the sand. Whatever the entertainment of the hour may be. Once we played a makeshift game of horseshoes; we threw rocks, instead of horseshoes, at the big piece of metal, instead of a pole. A few times we banged on it with sticks and rebar, to make a little percussion à la the Stomp musical group. It could get pretty brutal just sitting there in the sand for hours on end, day in and day out.

Time passed, we worked other sites, banged on other pieces of metal, and made up new games with rocks and sand. About two months after we had started working on that particular construction project, one of our guys who had never worked the site before notices the big piece of metal. We saw it and said, “There we go, a nice place to sit.” He saw it and said, “What the hell is that thing?” So he radioed it in. He asked around if anyone knew what the big chunk of metal was, and nobody could answer him. So they followed procedure and sent some Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) guys down to check it out.

Sure enough, the damn thing was a huge fucking bomb that had never gone off. It was just sitting there, ready to blow up. It was still live too; made a humongous explosion when EOD took it out. Needless to say everyone was pretty shocked… Wait, you mean that thing I was beating with a piece of rebar was a bomb? Yup. Like, the kind that blow up? Yeah. You mean that piece of metal that we jumped up and down on all of last week was a bomb? Yup. A real bomb? Yeah, a real bomb.

Son of a bitch. I don’t think any other group of 50-or-so people have ever been so simultaneously relieved to still have their legs as we all were that day. This moral should be pretty easy to figure out: Don’t beat on strange pieces of metal. They might blow you up.