All challenges big and small

When I was 18, I skipped my high school graduation and headed to Kuwait. It was 1991, the first Gulf War had just ended, and the country was in complete chaos. There was little to no electricity, aside from generator power. Rubble and unexploded ordnance were everywhere. Massive oil fires lit up the desert and dimmed the sky overhead. Everything had to be rebuilt, and fast. I was there to work on that reconstruction, part of an international effort to fix what war had broken. It was the first time I’d ever seen a truly massive engineering project with my own eyes. The challenge was one that had to be addressed on multiple fronts, simultaneously, to get an entire country back up and running. Everywhere you looked, there was something to do. I was mostly working with a labor crew to jump on quick fixes to things like windows and doors blown out in the fighting. But there were, of course, bigger jobs too. Most notably, there were those massive fires to put out. The Iraqi army had set hundreds of oil wells ablaze, the majority of which were still spewing soot and oil smoke into the air. On bad days, the sky would remain dark all day, and the air would burn your eyes and hurt your throat. It was so apocalyptic that none other than Carl Sagan warned of massive environmental consequences. If smoke from the oil fires reached the stratosphere, he predicted, the result could be akin to the 1815 explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, which triggered what’s known as “the year without a summer”; global temperatures dropped between 0.4 and 0.7 °C, and crops failed around the world. Fortunately, the plume from Kuwait never made it that high, and although temperatures did decline regionally, there was little effect on a planetary scale. As it turns out, predicting what will or won’t lower global temps is quite hard. (Reader, I am foreshadowing here.) Firefighters from companies with monikers like the Red Adair Company or Boots and Coots (as well as less colorfully named out