In Another Life I Was Either a Contractor on the Panama Canal, or Killed by Luke Skywalker

For the past three or so months, I've been reading "The Path Between the Seas" by David McCullough on and off. It's a chronicle of the building of the Panama Canal from early surveys of the Central American Isthmus, to completing the canal just before WWI. It was a solid read, and McCullough is probably my favorite non-fiction author.

One of the last chapters of the book entitled "Life and Times" was about what life was like for all of the workers living in the American "Canal Zone" during the final ten or so years of construction. I had no idea, when I started reading this book, that I'd feel any sort of kinship with the workers who built the canal.

The canal zone was sort of a weird hybrid of American territory/military outpost/private enterprise. It had its own laws, health services, stores, etc. The outline laid out in my demographics of kaf a couple of posts ago, probably strongly resemble the demographics of the canal zone.

The inflated salaries for educated/skilled westerners in the canal zone and the relative poverty in which the unskilled, imported labor force from various Caribbean islands in the canal zone lived closely resembled the differences between westerners and TCNs (Third Country Nationals) from places like Sri Lanka, India, Nepal here at KAF.

As I read further into the chapter I steadily grew more and more amazed at the similarities that continued to appear. The continuous construction/activity, the relatively frequent employer-dispensed home-leave schedules, the availability of a wide variety of religious services in canal-zone provided chapels (although I didn't read anything about Jewish services in the canal zone, now that would truly blow my mind). There was even a line that spoke of the lower prices of goods available at the commissaries in the zone compared to back in the States. At that I thought to myself, well that's exactly like our PX stores, and then the sentence went on to explain that the commissaries of the zone would go on to become the model for the modern military Post Exchange store! Wow!

A future embodiment of McCullough may be tempted to write the story of Kandahar Airfield. Life seems to be the same story repeated and told in different ways - and not just in non-fiction, and not just in books...

Not to try to make any profound statements about the current military force working hard in Afghanistan, but if life were an analogy for Star Wars, I'd be currently living in the Death Star as an administrator for the Storm Trooper Education Center. One of the thousands of nameless innocents Luke Skywalker killed with his Proton Torpedoes... never forget.