Sorry ladies and gents, but a busy day here has finally dropped me off in bed to stay at 11:17 PM, and I don’t have the energy to write tonight, but tomorrow is saturday, so my clinic finishes at twelve. That means, that, barring unforeseen events, you’ll get a big entry (maybe even two of them) tomorrow, probably waiting for you when you wake up. For those who can’t handle the suspense, I’ll give you this spoiler: I survive the landing. (Both of them, actually.)

Also, one other thing I am now able to tell you, is that I am on Al Asad Marine Airbase, a very large base not even known to exist during the First Gulf War, but found by the Aussies (and quickly overtaken) early in 2003. It remained hidden for so long, because it is in a mountainous section of western Iraq, tucked into an inlet now called the “bowl.” I’ll have some pix up for you soon. Al Asad is unique in that it rains, hails, and even snows here on occasion, and, unlike Kuwait, there are palm and date trees here. The base itself looks like a huge industrial area, but the landscape here has a certain kind of sparse, spooky vibe to it, especially at sunset. More on all of that later. I also have an explanation as to why the helicopters were going crazy last night, but I have to make sure I’m allowed to share that with you.

In the meantime, I need to send out a huge “thanks” to Juliette, Becky, Caroline, and Christian Tompkins and to Molly Rupard, and Michael Anundsen, all nieces and nephews of mine, who have contributed to this blog. I love hearing from you guys, and I hope you’ll keep contributing. Becky T: I’ll try to call your house soon. Christian, thanks for the tunes! And Melissa, thanks to you for your unending prayers in my behalf. As mentioned before, they are clearly working.

Catch you later; there’s a whole lot to tell you peeps, just gotta find the time to git er done.

After a night which was more a series of naps rather than actual sleep (I am sure that I never quite hit R.E.M.), I decided to permanently get up around 0530, so that I’d have plenty of time to get my bags together, get some breakfast, and make it to the terminal for “showtime.” The gator came at precisely 0730 for my bags, and I was off to catch my plane.

Or so I thought. Turns out that my 0800 “showtime” was only mildly related to the time the plane actually left the ground. Because there is a lot of demand for space-available (space-A) flights, the Army designates a “showtime” (better yet “show time”), or a time by which, if we do not show up and check in, we are NOT getting on the flight. When the flight leaves after that is anyone’s guess.

There were a goodly number of people trying to make it onto my flight, many of them trying to get to another military post which was an optional stop on the way to mine. These servicemen, most of them Navy, seemed to be pretty high-speed—sort of the Navy equivalent of Army special forces. They seemed to have a specific mission to fill, and had a good number of supplies and weapons/ammo which they carried with them. Because they were stopping at another base, I was concerned about my bags getting lost in the shuffle, and ending up somewhere other than my AYUIB. I have learned not to take anything for granted when travelling with the military. I went out to watch them loading the bags onto the pallet, and stopped them when they tried to throw my bags in with the rest. The foreman listened to my concerns intently, and then held my bags out and placed them separate from the rest of the bags, eventually putting them on top of but separate from the other palletized bags. This was nice, because it enabled me to keep an eye on them. On military planes, there is no separation between the “passenger” section and the “baggage section.” We are all in one big open area, the people in jump seats at the front of the plane, the bags strapped down to a pallet just behind the seats.

After checking in and getting my bags squared away, it was about 0900. They announced that we would be boarding a bus at 0930 or earlier, and that the flight would leave at 1130, possibly earlier, possibly later. I sat down to write a blog entry for upload later when I’d have internet access, but about the time I got myself plugged in and situated, they called us for the bus. All of us were to be in “defensive posture” (meaning that we would have weapons/ammo at the ready, like my bus ride last night) and wearing our flak jackets with the 7 pound metal inserts in both front and back of the kevlar jackets. As you can imagine, this is a bulky thing to wear, but you get used to it after a while. We crammed onto the bus, me carrying my Lardache bag full of electronics and other items which I did not trust to the duffle-tossers.

As we got to the plane, they reminded us (as they had many times previously) to remove our soft caps or anything else that might fly into a turbine and temporarily down a plane. Then we were single-filed up a ramp on the back of the plane, and into “jump seats.” These are actually fold-up benches (rather than individual seats), with a mesh back, which sort-of hangs from the ceiling. They line the plane parallel to its length, so that the passengers are facing the sides of the plane, rather than the front (like in a commercial jet). The seat belts are very close together, and there are four rows of these, which are very close together, so that the passengers on a crowded flight end up face-to-face with each other, almost literally. Because there is not much room in the aisle, the opposite seats alternate, so that our knees interlock. This is the dreaded “knee-to-crotch” position, which can make things very interesting if the pilot has to make some evasive maneuvers. Of course, the guy sitting across from me was like a 7 foot tall marine, so I had one eye on his knee the whole flight, ready to bounce out of my seat at a moment’s notice as the situation warranted. Our proximity to each other caused our metal body armour to bounce off of each other quite a bit, but it also created a bit of that personal space that we Americans crave so much; even if we were squished against each other onto the jump seats, at least there were two thick sheets of metal between us. We were given earplugs, again necessary as there are no real amenities on the plane, and no barrier except a thin plate of metal between passengers and engines, landing gear, etc. Just prior to take-off, an airman in a jump suit said the following: “There is a latrine on the plane, if you have to use it, but please don’t. For any females on the plane, let us know and we’ll get a bucket for you.” A few of us newbies looked at each other in the “Is he serious?” mode, but none of the “regulars” were laughing.

The plane taxied for an eternity, then took off with very little fanfare. Within moments of getting airborne, all of the hard-charging Navy dudes were asleep, their heads hanging awkwardly over their body armor, like those bobble-head dolls. I was tired, but wanted to experience the ride, so I removed my kevlar helmet, slapped on my Bose headphones (noise-cancelling types, which work beautifully) and put on some music.

The next 45 minutes were mostly uneventful, with a few turns here and there, followed by a reshifting of the knees, and me keeping my eye on one particular knee with some trepidation each time it moved. The flak jacket was starting to get to me, and I could tell that others were feeling the same way, shifting around, even in their sleep, to ease the strain on their backs. I was considering standing up for a bit, which would have helped, but which also would have placed me in peril of the dreaded marine knee, and would have probably woken up a few of my nearby jumpmates. So, I decided to just wait it out, shifting from cheek to cheek every so often to move the pressure around.  Then, we started to descend.