AJC.com > Iraq coverage > Blog > Archives > 2005 > November > 21
Monday, November 21, 2005
Building an oasis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Convoy Support Center Scania, Iraq — Some people will go to great lengths to escape this place. Even if it means building a whole new environment around them.
Jeremy Redmon/AJC
Malcolm Lyde, a plumbing supervisor for KBR, built a fountain here in the shape of a guitar. “It’s a place to kind of get away and forget you are in a prison,” said Lyde, 55, a Vietnam veteran from Pitkin, La.
Off in a corner of this base, away from the Humvees and machine guns and beside a small group of date palms, water is trickling over rocks.
There is a fountain there in the shape of a guitar. Doves fly underneath the green camouflage netting suspended overhead and drink from the fountain’s edge.
Malcolm Lyde built this oasis. He is a plumbing supervisor for KBR, a U.S. military contractor that works at this major truck refueling and rest stop in central Iraq.
“It’s a place to kind of get away and forget you are in a prison,” said Lyde, 55, a Vietnam veteran from Pitkin, La.
Lyde said KBR told him he could build the fountain as long as he did it on his own time and didn’t use anything from the base that was considered valuable.
Lyde worked at night and in the early morning, hunting rocks with a flashlight. He found a long piece of metal in a scrap heap that he now uses as his spout. An old Humvee window props up the spout. And his wife mailed him a water pump and plastic lining to seal the fountain.
Lifelike alligator and turtle toys float in the water. Perched on top of the rocks are wooden signs with the names of KBR workers who have spent more than a year working at Scania.
It took Lyde two months to finish “Club Malcolm.” And now, he says, fellow KBR employees, truck drivers, soldiers and helicopter pilots wander over to his side of the base to investigate. Lyde said they are all welcome.
“It was something I knew I could do to give everyone a little peace and take their minds off where they were,” said Lyde, who retired as a plumbing shop supervisor at Fort Polk, La. “It gave me something to do.”
Lyde has been here for two years. He said he wants to be a “grandpa farmer.” The tax-free pay, he said, will help him build a pond and a barn and buy some farm animals for his 34 acres back home. He wants to entertain his four grandchildren there.
He thinks he’ll work here another two years. In the meantime, he is planning a bigger, more elaborate fountain for another spot on this base. Concrete bunkers will become waterfalls in this one, he said.
And there will be at least five times as much water.
“I want to get as much splash as possible,” Lyde said.
He has already started a new rock pile.
