About a month before I was deployed, I had a conversation with LTC Tony Ramage, who was our acting Chief of Medicine at Eisenhower Army Medical center at the time, and has been a good friend for many years. Tony went to Iraq a couple of years back, and spent some time at many of the bases, which means that he flew around quite a bit. During our discussion, he told me that one of the things that really took him by surprise when he got here was the way the planes land.
Turns out that the military aircraft do not perform the same slow, gradual landing that we are used to on commercial flights. Military pilots have more maneuverable planes/copters, and more reason to maneuver them, as there are often bad guys down below who would love to take a shot at a plane at is gets within range of whatever weapon they are using. So, the American pilots often disguise the fact that they are landing until the last possible moment, and then shoot downwards through the airspace very quickly to get past that “target” window as quickly as possible. If there are indeed bad guys below (their infrared markers can be detected by the instruments on the planes), evasive actions will be taken. I know a SGT here at Al Asad who was on a mission, and the plane he was in took evasive actions to include being completely upside down at one point. He said that there were soldiers in the plane who were literally screaming, thinking the plane had been hit.
Fortinately for me, on Wednesday, no such evasive maneuvers were needed, but the dive into and through tactical airspace was excitement enough. As the plane began to descend, we quickly veered to the left, which woke most of us up pretty quickly, and then I heard a loud 15-second cranking noise as the landing gear went down. I began to wonder why they would drop the landing gear at this point—seemed a little early in the game, as we were still at cruising altitude. But I didn’t have much time to think about it, because a second or two later it felt like we just dropped, straight down, kind of like that Terror Tower ride at Disney World. When this happened, I felt a whole lot of pressure on my backside, like someone was pushing me hard through the bottom of my cloth seat, and then my stomach flew up into my throat. It was a very funny feeling somewhere between freaking-out and the amusement park sensation of thrill (there’s a fine line, you know) except that this ride kept going and going. There’s a part in Bill and Ted where they fall into a “bottomless pit” and as they fall, they both start screaming. The screams go on and on, for half a minute or so, and then B&T both simultaneously stop, and one of them says to the other, sort of observationally: “This is a REALLY deep hole!” Then, they start screaming again.
After a few seconds of sheer drop, I suddenly noticed that I had this big, kid-on-a-rollercoaster grin on my face, and I started laughing out loud. Of course, I couldn’t hear myself, but as I exchanged looks with a few of my jumpseat companions, I noticed that a few of them were laughing or grinning, too. I looked around the cabin and noted that the passengers could be placed into one of three groups during the “free fall”:
- The laughers. As in “I may be going to hell in a bucket baby, but at least I’m enjoying the ride.”
- The bobble-heads. These guys were used to it and didn’t even wake up.
- The panic-attacks. There weren’t many of these, but a few soldiers/sailors/marines, probably newbies like me, looked like they were about to throw up, or maybe cry.
We came out of the freefall, and very quickly leveled out and touched down. Again, eternal taxiing, during which the back opening of the plane was opened, and the thought suddenly occurred to me “I am on Iraqi soil.” Very strange, indeed. All of the time we were in Kuwait, I would talk with my tentmates, and we would observe that, looking around us, it was easy just to imagine that were were on an Army base in Nevada somewhere, and not really in the middle-east. But at that moment, in that plane, on a runway in western Iraq, I knew that I was in a combat zone. It just felt different. I will not forget that feeling soon.
The plane was unloaded and every single person got off except for me and the Air Force crew. One of the crew members yelled above the din and told me that I could take one of the seat up toward the front of the plane, by which he meant, one of the comfortable seats, where I would not be terrorized by the oversized knee of an unnamed Marine. I moved to to a place where I could see out of the windows, as a group of very young-looking Marines came aboard the plane. I watched them get into the knee-to-crotch position and gave silent thanks for the privileges of rank and of being on board first.
The second leg of my flight was over much more quickly—about 15 minutes total—and the descent was not as dramatic or fun this time, partly because I knew what to expect, and partly because we simply didn’t get up as high this time around. When I touched down this time, I wondered what my home-away-from-home for six months would be like.
The doctor I am replacing at the Troop Medical Clinic (TMC) is MAJ Kep Davis, and he met me at the airport, along with our Non-Commissioned-Officer-In-Charge (the NCOIC, i.e. the upper-level enlisted soldier who runs the shop), SFC Langer. Kep and I talked for about an hour, so that he could brief me on Al Asad, the clinic, our living quarters, etc. Then he went to catch his plane, and SFC Langer and I threw my green duffles into the back of a white Mitsubishi pickup with flames on the side, and we started the slow ride towards the clinic.
