It's 10 p.m. and 90 degrees in Kuwait, and Ernest Phillip of the Yukon-Kuskokwim village of Chefornak is thinking about home, where it's 11 hours earlier and about 35 degrees cooler.
Specifically, he's thinking about food.
Phillip is with the Alaska Army National Guard and he's calling from Camp Virginia, where he said the food is OK.
"It's not home food," he said, "but it's all right."
But military food isn't what Phillip is thinking about. He's thinking about the food he can't wait to eat when he comes home in about three months.
"Fish," he said. "Dried fish. Dried moose meat. Dried caribou meat. Especially my wife's cooking.
"The first thing I want to do is start teaching my kids to go out moose hunting, what my parents taught me and my grandparents taught me, and pass down the knowledge to them."
Phillip is talking live on KYUK radio in Bethel, which is practicing public-service radio at its very best.
About 250 guardsman from Western Alaska are working security for coalition forces in Kuwait, and some are away from their villages for the first time. Once a month, KYUK interviews some of them.
By conventional standards, the hourlong shows aren't great radio. There's a lot of dead air, many questions must be repeated, and sometimes the guardsmen are expansive only after prodding.
But in a corner of the world where an absent husband or father can have an impact on an entire village, there's a real sweetness to the dispatches.
From Phillip: "I'd like to say hi to everybody in Akiachak, especially my wife, and happy early birthday to my son. He's gonna be 2. He's been looking for his dad for the past three months now."
From Simon Black of Hooper Bay: "I miss bird soup."
From Tommy Phillip Jr. of Kongiganak: "I noticed that I was hardly sick here. I hardly caught a cold while I was here."
Sometimes they speak Yup'ik. Listeners are invited to call. During pauses when the phone in Kuwait passes from one soldier to another, program host Kristie Harrison gives the phone number for a family assistance program at the Bethel armory.
Longtime KYUK producer Mike Martz, who came to Alaska as a teacher in 1973, has made it his mission to document the guardsmen's experience. He's followed the troops since the end of 2005, when word first came that citizen soldiers from the Bush would be deployed for a year.
"A friend mentioned that one of his wife's relatives from a nearby village was very concerned -- 'How am I gonna get stove oil? How am I gonna fish? How am I gonna do this and do that?' It was a big thing," he said, "and I thought it probably was something worth doing something on. So I started recording what they were doing."
Martz filmed live-fire training in Anchorage. He attended a fiddle dance honoring departing soldiers in Kwethluk. He covered a big family-support meeting in Bethel. He interviewed a nephew from Chevak preparing to deploy. He took a boat to Kwethluk the day troops mobilized and filmed a Black Hawk helicopter picking up soldiers. He joined the soldiers in hot-weather training at Mississippi's Camp Shelby.
And finally, he spent 16 days early this summer embedded in Kuwait, where the Alaskans provide security for enormous convoys carrying the ingredients of war -- water, fuel, toilet paper, computers, weapons, ammunition, generators, Humvees.
Along the way, Martz developed an understanding of what it means to be a wartime soldier. Even though he remains uncertain whether this is a war the United States should be fighting, he appreciates what the soldiers are doing.
"I was interviewing guys as they were changing shifts one night and they were telling me what they do," Martz said. "One of them said, 'Every day's like a Monday. It's the same thing over and over every day.' They're doing this rather tedious but important job because of a decision made in 2003. They're just a little cog in this big wheel.
"I didn't really get a sense of people feeling it was a waste of time, that it's not worth it, that they oppose the war. I did get a feeling from a number of them that they really wanted to be a part of this historical event."
Most of them, he said, didn't have much at all to say about the war, at least not to a reporter.
The word "war" wasn't uttered once during this week's KYUK show. Most of the talk was about how hot it is, how they play poker, video games and basketball in their free time, and how much they miss their families and villages.
At the end of the hour, Harrison, the host, thanked the men and offered a bit of encouragement.
"Your families are really doing good here," she said. "They're really holding on well."
"We're doin' the same," Ernest Phillip said. "Holdin' on."
In a war where nothing seems to change, maybe that's the most we can expect.
Beth Bragg's opinion column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is bbragg@adn.com.
