Making the best of things

Sometimes, often times, we get stuck having to do things we'd rather not be doing. As cliche as it is, it usually pays to just bear with it and make the best of it, any way that you can. Currently, as a labor foreman, I am assigned to supervise foreign workers as they perform various tasks around the base. Soon, however, I will be supervising the pouring/finishing of concrete and the construction of reinforced office buildings.
Today, I had to escort two gentlemen whose job it was to empty 109 of the dumpsters throughout this beautiful, paradise of a camp. I sat in between them while riding around in the large garbage truck, supervising and providing security. Riding in between 2 full-grown men in a garbage truck with a raised, center floor board, is not comfortable. The driver was a 40-something Indian man with a mustache resembling that of a civil war colonel. The guy on my right was a 20-year-old guy from Nasiriyah, the city just outside the walls of our base (also where Jessica Lynch was captured during the initial invasion). Now, obviously, this was not a comfortable spot to be in. I was not happy. General Sherman (that's what I'll call him, as to not use his real name), as nice as he was and as much as I liked him, was not exactly emitting what I could call a "pleasant aroma". I understand this is a cultural difference (the lack of antiperspirants) and it was this understanding that prevented me from stopping by the base exchange to purchase a can of Right Guard as a gift for my new friend. The young Iraqi was a very nice guy, extremely hard working, and I had a lot of fun remembering the Arabic I learned from the kids around Abu Ghraib during my tour as a Marine...."shaku maku!" "Makushe!" "Ardenufsek!" He, likewise, seemed pretty happy to meet an American who was actually excited to be speaking his native language. We took turns on the radio stations- one hour of Freedom Radio, the military's top-40 station in Iraq, and "All Allah, All Day" radio (I actually have no idea if that's what his station's theme was, I just made that up because I couldn't understand a word of it). And, though I'm not supposed to be helping them with their work, I helped him hook the dumpster to the truck several times to try to make things go smoother. This helped him with his job, and also helped me fulfill a childhood dream of mine....I got to ride on the back of a garbage truck. If you are a man, and that wasn't a dream of yours as a child, then you were wrong. It should have been.
At one point, I asked the Iraqi what he had for dinner the night before.
"Cheese."
"Goat cheese?"
"Yes."
"Mmmm, goat cheese, sien!" (I was humoring him- "sien" means "good" in Arabic)
This reminded me of being a Marine at Al Taqaddum 4 years earlier, where I purchased an "American pizza" from one of the haji (our nickname for Iraqis) vendors on base. I ordered a supreme, which consisted of goat cheese on unleven bread, olives which still contained the pits (which I discovered too late), sliced hot dog, and a ketchup sauce. Delicious.