Not Quite Home, Sweet Home

I'm back at Rustamiyah, and while this isn't home, it is as welcome as any place other than home could be. After the trip back, I'm almost ready to give the Army credit for having a shrewd and conniving plan: make the trip miserable so that even a miserable place seems like an improvement. If that is the Army's plan, they executed it nearly perfectly. But the perfect execution assures that it was not the Army's plan, but just another in a series of poorly planned logistical nightmares. I recount...

I left BWI on Delta. They bumped me and the other two R&R returnees up to first class. So far, so good. I arrived at Atlanta at about 10:00, and went off in search of my flight back to Kuwait. The logical place to look, so I thought, was in the the international terminal. I had no information on when the flight was, so I walked quickly to get there. When I got to the international terminal, the kindly old gentleman under the information banner told me that, no, my international flight to Kuwait had a check-in in the USO which was in the food court outside the security check-in. That was my second guess - food court = international terminal in someone's mind. So off I tromped, all the while wondering exactly what they could do to me if I did miss my flight - send me to Iraq? That caused me to stop my fretting, slight though it was, since they would just be glad that I was coming back. When I finally did get to the USO, I found out that I had an eight hour wait until my plane left. Not to fear, the Army had conveniently scheduled at least two musters in between. At least the volunteers at the USO were kind and the chairs were soft. As we lined up and walked to the plane, the USO volunteers got the crowd to clap which was cheesy but better than throwing rotten fruit. Guess that's why the R&R hubs are in Dallas and Atlanta instead of San Francisco and Seattle.

The flight back to Kuwait was a little window into the world of socialized air travel. We boarded the plane at 1815 and taxied around the runways for 2 1/2 hours. There were plenty of other planes taking off (all planes which had the paying customers on board), but by the time we reached the front of the queue we had burned so much gas that we had to go back to the gate and refuel. Jim, has that ever happened to you? I didn't think so. Alas, there was no one to listen to our complaints because the plane was chartered by people who were not riding on it. There is a huge difference between passengers and customers, with the latter getting service and the former getting "service." The flight attendants did give us each a cup of water while refueling so that we would not have any heat stroke cases before we reached the desert. Once we finally got airborne, the flight was fine thanks in no small part to Unisom. They did serve us food, timed to coincide with dozing off, but I will not complain about calories freely offered.

When we got to Kuwait I was pleasantly surprised by how decent 95F feels without humidity. It was the middle of the night, but I was expecting 100F+ so 95F was a reprieve. Kuwait was the typical Army rigamarole complete with several meaningless formations a day and a final muster time at least two hours before the buses came to pick us up. When we finally boarded the C-130, all went smoothly until we had been in the air for 20 minutes. I guess that's when Air Force pilots do their pre-flight inspections because they found a broken piece of equipment that made us turn around and land. Our group commander was given the option of letting us off the plane while they fixed this problem or letting us off in groups of five to use the potty. Of course, he when faced with a decision, the proper choice is always the most painful and least logical, so he chose to keep us on board which ended up being too much even for soldiers. When the murmuring turned to weapon cocking, he asked for a show of hands of people who wanted to get off the plane, and it was unanimous that he had chosen poorly. I'm glad we did because it took over an hour to fix whatever it was that was broken, and the back of a C-130 is no place to spend such a significant portion of you life.

I was at the airport in Baghdad for less than 24 hours before I finally got a flight to Rusty. I was tickled pink over this since some people had been stuck there for five days. The soldier in charge of helicopter flights took me and the other two going to Rusty out to our helos and did everything but buckle us in. When we landed at Taji (which in addition to having a different name than Rusty is also in a different location), I said that no, this was not my stop. The flight crew disagreed as this was the last stop of the night. So I spent the night on a bench next to the Taji heli-pad with one of the two soldiers traveling with me. I do not know what happened to the third since I have not seen him since he boarded the helo at Baghdad Airport. This heli-pad is a 24 hour operation with unpadded wooden benches which means that my time was not wasted: I now can give solid advice to a) stay in school so you don't become homeless and have to sleep on benches, and b) do not buy property near a heli-pad. I managed to stay awake for my flight from Taji to Rusty the next day and was genuinely impressed by how pretty some parts of Iraq are and how squalid other are. When I got to Rusty, I was tired (due to stupid muster times, jet-lag, and trying to sleep on the bench next to the heli-pad). I managed to stay awake until 1500, but was starting to be less aware than even I normally am, so I went to sleep. I woke up this morning at 0600, and was glad to see that I was in my little room which is right in the middle of the park bench - own bed spectrum of places to sleep. I don't think I would have been nearly as thankful had it not been for the park bench experience. Anyway, I am all in one piece and will soon be close enough to the end to start counting days.