I recently got a write-up on the new Capitol Crowd blog. It's a pretty cool honor. This is a new blog, but it has a lot of potential for the Austin political wonkworld.
Thanks again to Annette in Rep. Chisum's office for the write-up.
http://capitolcrowd.blogspot.com/
Thursday, October 11, 2007
A Feeble Attack on Hope
Unless the media has done a dramatic reversal in the last few weeks, it probably still isn't telling you about all the good things going on in Iraq. Al Anbar province, which was once a hotbed of violence (remember Fallujah?) is now relatively quiet.
Even Baghdad is improving significantly, although it has a long way to go. We're just winding up the end of Ramadan, and it's been a lot better than it was last year. At that time, Iraq was still reeling from the bombing of the Samarra Golden Mosque, which inflamed passions - exactly what Al Qaeda wanted it to do.
Across the country, there have been widespread stories of tribes joining forces against Al Qaeda, and against the insurgency. Despite death threats, ordinary Iraqis are taking to the streets to battle insurgents as part of a kind of neighborhood crime watch (one can almost picture an Iraqi "McGruff the Crime Dog.").
As I returned to Baghdad earlier this month, the headline in the Stars and Stripes read, "Iraq death toll lowest in 14 months." Military casualties are down. Civilian casualties are down.
That isn't to say the war is won. Far from it. But it is a hugely positive trend that puts us in the best position we've been in for a couple of years.
But, of course, there are people who don't want that progress to continue, and no, I don't mean the Democrats. Last night, this group of folks decided to make a Ramadan statement - in my opinion, it was a desperate effort to get on CNN. As far as I know it, they didn't make the big splash they wanted, but they did make the AP:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gkx-3oYeFwuWKCusr2jrojs98w8wD8S6UIR80
For me, the news didn't come from any wire service, but in a more dramatic way. It came as I was sleeping in my trailer last night:
"Whump." A deep, indescribable sound. Not like the high-pitched, treble-like Hollywood explosions, which are all gas, flames and show. But a dark, bass-like, earthy sound, which you felt travelling both through the air and the ground simultaneously.
I woke up. I had earplugs in my ears, as it happened, since my neighbors had been playing their T.V. too loud at 3 p.m. when I had gone to sleep. I checked the clock. It was near 9 p.m.
"Whump, whump."
I sat up. In Baghdad, you hear explosions not all the time, but fairly frequently. They're not all bad, because sometimes it's our soldiers finding hidden weapons or IEDs and blowing them up in a controlled setting. Often, you never know, and go about your own business as blithely uncaring as a stroll through a field in Texas during dove season, when the neighbors are shooting shotguns off in every direction.
You know when they're close and when they aren't. These were not close close, but I could tell they were on base somewhere. Perhaps a half mile away, perhaps farther. Certainly, not as large and not as close as the one I heard on Sep. 11. Of course, I had heard that one passing over my tent, and could guess where it was coming from and going to. Here, I had no such idea. It could be aimed at a specific point, fired wildly in hope of a lucky shot, or it could be a creeping barrage that could move away from me or towards me.
"Whump..."
I groggily sat up. I switched my flashlight on by my bed and let it shine on the wall. Then, still half asleep, I reached under my bed for my body armor, and pulled it out. I put it on, then fell back on the bed, still dog-tired after a very long day. Then I grabbed my helmet and put that on.
And then, with a calm, unconcern which I guess I should find odd, but don't, I went back to sleep. Or at least rested there, knowing that wearing my body armor in my trailer - which is surrounded by concrete barriers - is about as safe as I could be.
I guess the bunkers nearby are safer, but in order to get to them, you have to cross open ground. That is not recommended during a barrage. The bunkers are meant for people who are out walking, biking, or going to the latrines, who just happen to be caught outside when an attack by indirect fire comes in suddenly.
So I stayed in my trailer. After only a couple of minutes, the barrage was over. I later found out that I had slept through the first five minutes of it, and only woke up after a few rounds came closer to my location. Not hearing an all-clear call on the loudspeakers - sometimes it can be hard inside a building - I waited for a few minutes, then took off my armor, rolled it off the bed, and went back to sleep.
Oddly enough, I experienced both of the attacks mentioned in the story above, and for the entire 18 days I was back in the U.S., nothing significant happened at Victory. The one from Sep. 11, I already wrote about in an earlier post. As for the news story, as far as I know, it's fairly accurate in the details.
To someone uninitiated, it sounds pretty hairy, perhaps, but that's not the way to look at it. We have a massive base here - larger than many small towns back home. The enemy hides in a metropolis that surrounds us on three sides and can hide anywhere. And yet, this is the best they can do? A sudden, cowardly strike, after which they certainly jumped into their bondo-colored 1978 Datsuns in a style reminiscent of the "Dukes of Hazzard" and high-tailed it before the Americans could come and introduce them to the martyric wonders of a Hellfire missle. The 300 Spartans, these are not.
Their attacks are only somewhat coordinated, and when it comes down to it, whether or not they're successful - and how successful - relies mostly on luck. As one civilian contractor put it to a female Air Force Sergeant rattled by the experience - "You could step out into the street and get hit by a General's car."
This place reminds me a lot of a college campus. Put in that context, and equated to Virginia Tech, if you spread out the VT casualties over an entire year, it is actually more dangerous than Victory. In that context, the wimpy, pathetic attempt at creating an End-of-Ramadan spectacular seems puny. Tragic as the death of two people and the wounding of others seems, put in the context of the larger mission, it will not derail the successes we are starting to see here.
But that's not the image the media wants to sell. They, like dogmatic adherents to some ancient cult of moon worship, refuse to see the objective reality in a clear, sober, scientific way. They want this to be Vietnam, even though the truth is, we'd have to stay in Iraq for the rest of my life and 30 years beyond it (at current casualty rates) and we still wouldn't catch up to that war.
The truth is, great things are going on here, and American troops continue to do their work every day despite the insurgency. Each day we are joined by more and more Iraqi Police, and while some of them may not live up to ideal standards, the majority - joined each day by volunteer groups of civilians - are fighting alongside us and making big contributions.
More and more Iraqis are starting to get a disease called Hope. It is a strange illness. The symptoms may ebb and flow, but given the right conditions, the germ will flourish. It can also be a highly contagious one, with potentially surprising results.
We've seen such hope before, and been disappointed. It sprang up in 2005 after the elections, only to be stripped away by one random act of violence in Samarra - an act of ill fortune, one might almost say, as it was totally in contrast to all of the trends. But those trends, while delayed, can returned cloaked with the mantle of inevitability if hope spreads far enough.
Already, we're seeing the seeds. Samarra was bombed again this year. The result? Practically nothing. Whereas fearful Iraqis in 2005 mistook Samarra for the beginnings of Civil War, we saw a different result this year. Realistic, righteously angry Iraqis today recognize such attacks for what they are: A desperate gamble by a group of child-murdering, head-chopping, evil thugs, who would sacrifice their own kind, spilling Arabic blood by the truckload - in order to prevent the spread of the one thing that can defeat them more than all the weapons of any army.
The spreading, benevolent virus of hope.
Even Baghdad is improving significantly, although it has a long way to go. We're just winding up the end of Ramadan, and it's been a lot better than it was last year. At that time, Iraq was still reeling from the bombing of the Samarra Golden Mosque, which inflamed passions - exactly what Al Qaeda wanted it to do.
Across the country, there have been widespread stories of tribes joining forces against Al Qaeda, and against the insurgency. Despite death threats, ordinary Iraqis are taking to the streets to battle insurgents as part of a kind of neighborhood crime watch (one can almost picture an Iraqi "McGruff the Crime Dog.").
As I returned to Baghdad earlier this month, the headline in the Stars and Stripes read, "Iraq death toll lowest in 14 months." Military casualties are down. Civilian casualties are down.
That isn't to say the war is won. Far from it. But it is a hugely positive trend that puts us in the best position we've been in for a couple of years.
But, of course, there are people who don't want that progress to continue, and no, I don't mean the Democrats. Last night, this group of folks decided to make a Ramadan statement - in my opinion, it was a desperate effort to get on CNN. As far as I know it, they didn't make the big splash they wanted, but they did make the AP:
Iraq: Attacks Kills 2 Soldiers
By KIM CURTIS – 1 hour ago
BAGHDAD (AP) —
Two members of the U.S.-led coalition force were killed and 40 others were
wounded in an attack at Camp Victory, a sprawling base near Baghdad's airport
that houses the headquarters of U.S. forces in Iraq, the military said
Thursday.
Those wounded in the rocket or mortar attack included two "third
country nationals," meaning they were neither American nor Iraqis. Most troops
stationed at Camp Victory are American but other coalition soldiers are based
there. No further details on the attack were immediately released.
Camp
Victory and other U.S. bases in Iraq have frequently come under fire, but
attacks with such a large number of casualties are rare.
On Sept. 11, one person was killed and 11 were wounded in a rocket attack. The U.S. military said a 240 mm rocket provided to Shiite extremists by Iran was used in that attack.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gkx-3oYeFwuWKCusr2jrojs98w8wD8S6UIR80
For me, the news didn't come from any wire service, but in a more dramatic way. It came as I was sleeping in my trailer last night:
"Whump." A deep, indescribable sound. Not like the high-pitched, treble-like Hollywood explosions, which are all gas, flames and show. But a dark, bass-like, earthy sound, which you felt travelling both through the air and the ground simultaneously.
I woke up. I had earplugs in my ears, as it happened, since my neighbors had been playing their T.V. too loud at 3 p.m. when I had gone to sleep. I checked the clock. It was near 9 p.m.
"Whump, whump."
I sat up. In Baghdad, you hear explosions not all the time, but fairly frequently. They're not all bad, because sometimes it's our soldiers finding hidden weapons or IEDs and blowing them up in a controlled setting. Often, you never know, and go about your own business as blithely uncaring as a stroll through a field in Texas during dove season, when the neighbors are shooting shotguns off in every direction.
You know when they're close and when they aren't. These were not close close, but I could tell they were on base somewhere. Perhaps a half mile away, perhaps farther. Certainly, not as large and not as close as the one I heard on Sep. 11. Of course, I had heard that one passing over my tent, and could guess where it was coming from and going to. Here, I had no such idea. It could be aimed at a specific point, fired wildly in hope of a lucky shot, or it could be a creeping barrage that could move away from me or towards me.
"Whump..."
I groggily sat up. I switched my flashlight on by my bed and let it shine on the wall. Then, still half asleep, I reached under my bed for my body armor, and pulled it out. I put it on, then fell back on the bed, still dog-tired after a very long day. Then I grabbed my helmet and put that on.
And then, with a calm, unconcern which I guess I should find odd, but don't, I went back to sleep. Or at least rested there, knowing that wearing my body armor in my trailer - which is surrounded by concrete barriers - is about as safe as I could be.
I guess the bunkers nearby are safer, but in order to get to them, you have to cross open ground. That is not recommended during a barrage. The bunkers are meant for people who are out walking, biking, or going to the latrines, who just happen to be caught outside when an attack by indirect fire comes in suddenly.
So I stayed in my trailer. After only a couple of minutes, the barrage was over. I later found out that I had slept through the first five minutes of it, and only woke up after a few rounds came closer to my location. Not hearing an all-clear call on the loudspeakers - sometimes it can be hard inside a building - I waited for a few minutes, then took off my armor, rolled it off the bed, and went back to sleep.
Oddly enough, I experienced both of the attacks mentioned in the story above, and for the entire 18 days I was back in the U.S., nothing significant happened at Victory. The one from Sep. 11, I already wrote about in an earlier post. As for the news story, as far as I know, it's fairly accurate in the details.
To someone uninitiated, it sounds pretty hairy, perhaps, but that's not the way to look at it. We have a massive base here - larger than many small towns back home. The enemy hides in a metropolis that surrounds us on three sides and can hide anywhere. And yet, this is the best they can do? A sudden, cowardly strike, after which they certainly jumped into their bondo-colored 1978 Datsuns in a style reminiscent of the "Dukes of Hazzard" and high-tailed it before the Americans could come and introduce them to the martyric wonders of a Hellfire missle. The 300 Spartans, these are not.
Their attacks are only somewhat coordinated, and when it comes down to it, whether or not they're successful - and how successful - relies mostly on luck. As one civilian contractor put it to a female Air Force Sergeant rattled by the experience - "You could step out into the street and get hit by a General's car."
This place reminds me a lot of a college campus. Put in that context, and equated to Virginia Tech, if you spread out the VT casualties over an entire year, it is actually more dangerous than Victory. In that context, the wimpy, pathetic attempt at creating an End-of-Ramadan spectacular seems puny. Tragic as the death of two people and the wounding of others seems, put in the context of the larger mission, it will not derail the successes we are starting to see here.
But that's not the image the media wants to sell. They, like dogmatic adherents to some ancient cult of moon worship, refuse to see the objective reality in a clear, sober, scientific way. They want this to be Vietnam, even though the truth is, we'd have to stay in Iraq for the rest of my life and 30 years beyond it (at current casualty rates) and we still wouldn't catch up to that war.
The truth is, great things are going on here, and American troops continue to do their work every day despite the insurgency. Each day we are joined by more and more Iraqi Police, and while some of them may not live up to ideal standards, the majority - joined each day by volunteer groups of civilians - are fighting alongside us and making big contributions.
More and more Iraqis are starting to get a disease called Hope. It is a strange illness. The symptoms may ebb and flow, but given the right conditions, the germ will flourish. It can also be a highly contagious one, with potentially surprising results.
We've seen such hope before, and been disappointed. It sprang up in 2005 after the elections, only to be stripped away by one random act of violence in Samarra - an act of ill fortune, one might almost say, as it was totally in contrast to all of the trends. But those trends, while delayed, can returned cloaked with the mantle of inevitability if hope spreads far enough.
Already, we're seeing the seeds. Samarra was bombed again this year. The result? Practically nothing. Whereas fearful Iraqis in 2005 mistook Samarra for the beginnings of Civil War, we saw a different result this year. Realistic, righteously angry Iraqis today recognize such attacks for what they are: A desperate gamble by a group of child-murdering, head-chopping, evil thugs, who would sacrifice their own kind, spilling Arabic blood by the truckload - in order to prevent the spread of the one thing that can defeat them more than all the weapons of any army.
The spreading, benevolent virus of hope.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Views of Victory, Part I
A Blackhawk Helicopter flies over a Palm Grove at Camp Victory.For today's post, I will include some of my photos of Camp Victory. Obviously, I can't photograph some stuff, like security points, special areas and the bastard son of Bigfoot and Elvis. But lots of other stuff is fair game.
A little word about Victory. Prior to the 2003 war, the area now comprising Camp Victory was a massive base area for the Ba'ath Party of Saddam Hussein, featuring palaces, private lakes, and all sorts of amenities. Some of those amenities were destroyed, some are neglected, and some we use. Most of our housing and dining facilities are portable buildings, but some, like the Recreation Center below, are old Baathist buildings that we have appropriated.
Looking from Dodge City to the West. The concrete barriers protect the buildings from mortar fire, since most of the damage from mortars is from shrapnel blowing outwards.
A Street Scene. Note the red "Ogaf" sign (It says Ogaf below Stop). Not all streets are this deserted, but I don't like to take too many pictures of people. It makes them skittish.
Mural on concrete barriers. There are several common types of concrete barriers. Jersey Barriers are relatively low, and just keep cars out. These here are Texas Barriers, which are a little taller. These murals were painted by a medical unit, and feature the names of all the soldiers in that unit deployed over the last several years.
Mural on concrete barriers. There are several common types of concrete barriers. Jersey Barriers are relatively low, and just keep cars out. These here are Texas Barriers, which are a little taller. These murals were painted by a medical unit, and feature the names of all the soldiers in that unit deployed over the last several years. 
Palm Tree. For those who don't know.
Recreation Center.
Recreation Center front door. The sandbags are to protect the windows from shrapnel should a mortar round come by for a little recreation. Don't know where they drug the couch from. It was probably in one of Saddam's henchmen's batchelor pads.
Sign at Rec Center.
Detail from Rec. Center Ceiling.
Dome in Rec Center. The Building is slightly larger than the average American house, but the dome feature is cool. Not sure what this building was either.
Detail of Rec. Center Dome. The hole at the right used to look as nice as the jeweled-looking
window to the left.
A Look inside the Rec. Center.
Horseshoe Pits.
Not Sure What this was, but I thought the bas relief was kind of cool.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Two Worlds
I pause at work and rub my hands. Suddenly, I feel a sharp pain in my left middle finger. I look at it again. Oh yes, I think, after only a second’s pause. The source of the pain is well-known to me. Two weeks ago, I was clearing brush, when the spine of a yucca plant stuck straight through my working gloves, into my finger at the joint. It was painful at the time, but even after two weeks, it still hurts a little.
It’s strange now, this odd anger and resentment that I bear for a plant that is now weeks behind me and separated by an entire universe, it seems.
When I arrived in Baghdad on Sep. 11, I was eager to go, in the right mindset. Situational awareness, they call it, and it’s a critical tool for survival over here. Being aware of everything around you, constantly keeping one eye open for threats, one ear attuned to sounds. They say that the most dangerous times for a soldier over here are the first few weeks after he arrives and the last few weeks before he leaves – when he lets down his guard.
I had spent almost two months preparing myself, and felt I was as ready as I would ever be.
But hardly had I arrived when unforeseen circumstances brought me back to the U.S. For two weeks, I was thrown back into the civilian world. My mindset, my mission, all of that went out of the window. Suddenly, I learned, there are worse things than war.
On my second day of work, I got a simple message from the Red Cross. It stated, “Father very ill. Actually dying.”
A phone call confirmed the worst. Thus began a marathon journey for me back home, a hectic period of attending to crucial matters there, and an agonizingly-slow return trip back to Iraq.
Almost everything in military bureaucracy is inefficient. Fortunately, emergency leave – which I was taking – is the one exception. It’s like they wave a magic wand and every protocol and strip of red tape is banished. I got the news at 9:30 a.m. By 2 p.m. I was on a flight out of country. In between, I had to pack and store my gear, check in my weapons, and get to the airport.
Fortunately, my command gave me an enlisted soldier as a driver. Specialist E., who had picked me up at the airport the day before, drove me from point to point, and finally back to the airport. It wasn’t always easy. While I was checking on my flight inside the tent that serves as a terminal, a tow truck suddenly appeared out of nowhere to tow our vehicle – with all my gear in it. Suddenly, Specialist E. was running down the road, his M-16 in one hand, chasing after the purloining parasite. I jogged somewhat behind him, tired, beat down, and bitter.
Fortunately, the truck wasn’t taken far, and after about 20 minutes of haranguing the Air Force folks, he got the truck back. Air Force personnel in normal situations can very often be major jerks. But when they’re not only Air Force, but Air Force tow truck drivers, you can only imagine.
My gear rescued, I finished my check-in. The gear is necessary because you can’t fly in or out of Baghdad without body armor and a Kevlar helmet. After waiting in a VIP tent with an Army Colonel and a very fuzzy and loud FoxNews on the T.V., I heard my name called over the PA. I donned my protective gear, lifted my rucksack to my shoulders, and grabbed my small backpack.
Oddly enough, I was to fly out on a Japanese Air Force C-130. As I walked up to the baby-blue aircraft, I took a quick look at the big red meatball painted on the side. I kept thinking that somewhere, my great uncle, who fought the Japs in WWII, is twitching in his grave.
I must say that it was a much better flight out than the one I had going in a few days earlier. This time, there were only about seven or eight people on the plane. Besides the crew, there were only one or two Japanese, plus a few Europeans and Americans. I was the only military person aboard. So, with pretty much open seating, I grabbed a seat next to a gorgeous American woman with dark black hair and deep, almost oriental eyes…who nonetheless proceeded to completely ignore me. I guess dirty, smelly (after all, I had just chased a tow truck for a half mile) military people were just not her type.
She wore a blue floor-mat looking thing that seems to have passed for body armor for whichever cheapo contractor company she works for. It had two pouches – front and back – for the armor plating which was supposed to stop rifle rounds. But as she sat down on her seat, she pulled open the flap and pulled out not armor plating, but a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine. Then she grabbed her little hand-held fan and cooled herself down.
Damn contractors, I thought.
She even appeared loathe to wear her dinky blue helmet until the crew chief of the airplane came back and told her to do so in broken English.
“Must be wearing the equipments,” he said. Or something like that.
Whereas I had flown into Kuwait on a charter jet, which landed at a Kuwaiti Air Force Base, I flew out in civilian clothes through the Kuwait City International Airport. The airport itself is very nice – built to western standards. Or maybe 1970s western standards, because travelers are allowed to smoke throughout the terminal. I had thought Frankfurt was bad, but at least there, they have to stand next to machines which suck the smoke out of the air. In Kuwait, they stand everywhere – old Arab men in their “man-dresses” and younger Arab kids in what passes for hip-hop clothing. The smoke was everywhere. It was like standing inside George Burns’ lung.
Overall, Kuwait is very nice and modern. It’s always been a rich country – that’s why Saddam wanted it so badly in 1990. You would think that there would be a lot of damage from the Iraqi occupation and the Gulf War, but that isn’t the case. Almost everything that was damaged has been rebuilt. Oddly enough, the most visible signs of the war are at bases housing U.S. troops, such as airbases where U.S. aircraft sit next to concrete fighter hangars with massive holes blown through their roofs. The Iraqi fighter planes we bombed in 1991 are long gone, but the hangars are still there – some sort of patched, others unchanged.
All the Kuwaitis drive new cars. On the highways, you rarely see vehicles over 10 years old. This is partly because Kuwaitis are rich, and partly because the Iraqi Army stole just about all the cars they could get their hands on before retreating. In contrast to the desert where I had spent most of my time in the country, Kuwait City is a nice city of shopping malls and clean buildings. Kind of like Phoenix – with mosques.
The flight out of Kuwait to Frankfurt – and the next leg to Dallas – were on Lufthansa, which for me was a special treat, as I am perfectly fluent in German. Or at least I used to be. I’ve slipped a little. I drove the stewardesses nuts, I’m sure, by hitting them with a torrent of talk, trying to get in a little practice. I made a few mistakes – I used Abhangigkeit (dependence) instead of Gelegenheit (opportunity), but I recovered quickly.
I bought the latest novel by a writer I’d never heard of on the Frankfurt Airport, seeing me reading it, the stewardess was eager to talk about it. The writer, Frank Schaetzing, is apparently the best-selling author in Germany, sort of the Tom Clancy of Schnitzelland. Since I hadn’t been back in 9 years, I’d never heard of him, but the stewardess had read several of his books, and raved about him. The story, oddly enough, starts off in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and follows a Hamburg-based female private detective tracking down a former mercenary from the Gulf War who is tracking down and killing the fellow mercenaries who betrayed him and left him for dead. It’s pretty good so far, and only once did I have to ask the stewardess to translate a word. I had guessed from context that it was some kind of box or bag, and her translation was “treasure chest.”
Being home in Texas, back in the civilian world, was strange. At first, it didn’t hit me, because I was so caught up with dealing with my father’s passing. But as I got ready to return, I realized sharply the difference in the two worlds I was transiting through.
For two months, I had been surrounded by people who know exactly what their mission is, and do it without questioning. Discipline, respect, dignity and pride abounded.
Suddenly, I was back in airports and restaurants with the undisciplined, the unmotivated, the disrespectful. Naturally, it was a bit of a culture shock.
To the limited extent I was able to visit with friends, that too was great, but there were too many friends, and too little time. So much of my time back home was spent helping my mother out at the farm or tending to urgent personal business. Add to that the fact that my cell phone – with my entire address book – was sitting in the bottom of a duffle bag in a shipping container in a Baghdad parking lot, and I was woefully out-of-touch.
Before I knew it, my short leave was over, and I was once again Iraq-bound.
The trip back was eventful. The flight to Kuwait was fairly easy, but things got messy after that. The Army picked us at the airport and put us on a couple of busses to a Kuwaiti Air Force Base. En route, my bus blew a tire.
Rather than stand there on the side of a highway in Kuwait, they transferred us all to the second bus – along with our gear. The rest of the ride was cramped, but I was ready to keep moving.
Movement, however, was not what the Army had in mind. Instead, I got another lesson – as if I needed one – into the crucial meaning of the Army term “Hurry Up and Wait.”
1:15 a.m. Arrive at Ali Al Salem Air Force Base. I was hoping to check in for the night, but then I was told to prepare to fly out as soon as a flight was available. Rushing over to get my body armor out of the storage facility, I was geared up and ready to go when they gave me the news about the flight:
3 a.m. No space available on first flight.
“Come back at 4,” the Air Force guy said.
I sat on what appeared to be recycled airport terminal furniture inside a tent that was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Outside, it was about 40 degrees Celsius.
4 a.m. No space available.
“Report back here at 6:30.”
The movie on the T.V. in the tent was “Back to the Future.” Then they played “I, Robot.” Now, it’s “Transformers.” I had to go outside and sweat in the heat just to avoid the murderous assault on my good taste.
And so it went. For the next day and a half, they kept stringing me along, mostly in spans of four hours or less – precluding almost entirely the idea of sleep. Each time, I was led to believe that it was only a matter of time before I’d be on a flight. Finally, I got some inside info that the next flight was booked and I skipped one of the roll calls. At the next one, I learned nothing had changed, but it allowed me to put together a space of five hours to sleep.
As I’ve learned on so many occasions, you need to catch sleep whenever you can. Sometimes you can’t. At Ali Al Salem, there is a constant rotation of people going in and out. Living in transient tents, you close your eyes only to have a new batch of people enter your tent, open up every zipper or Velcro thing they have, and talk loudly about how the Army, Navy and Air Force are screwing them (the Marines screw people too, but Marines simply say, “Thank you, Marine Corps for screwing my life up. Please, sir, beat me again!”).
Actually the best sleep I ever got during the whole 40 hour ordeal was a 1-hour stint, lying on the dusty, hard concrete on the flight line of a Kuwaiti Air Force base, leaned up against my backpack. Somehow, that one hour rejuvenated me more than four or five hours on a lumpy, sand- and sweat-smelling mattress at another Kuwaiti Air Force base.
Finally, I arrived in Baghdad, touching down at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) in the early morning. Stepping out the back of the C-130, the brutally-hot wash from the propellers burning me, hiking fast across the tarmac in my body armor and Kevlar helmet, with a pair of Blackhawk Helicopters streaking across the sky above, I thought how strange and surreal it was. Here I was, at the same place I had stood just over a month ago. Arriving into a war zone amid imposing signs of American power and control.
But between then and now stood a great chasm, a great void. I had been through some tough times, and I’d been through some simple, quiet, thoughtful moments. I had stood on the farm back home, looking up at the heavens, contemplating the crystal-clear, star-filled sky of Southwest Texas, and thinking back to the dreary, pollution-filled skies of Baghdad. I had walked in the depth of night from my workshop on the farm to the house, and had thought back to the bleak, pitch-black walk from my sandbag-lined tent to the showers back in Iraq.
Now, having returned, my perception of the surreal continued. As I returned to work, I rubbed my hands and felt the sharp pain in my finger. A painful, true reminder that yes, this had really happened. That yes, I had transited between these two worlds of mine. That these two lives that I’ve been living are not separate from each other – one a dream and one a reality – but in fact were separate threads of one ongoing existence. That in one exists James Aalan Bernsen, the guitar player, or consultant, or…farm worker, and in the other exists LTJG Bernsen, the Naval officer who’s never even been on a ship, but trudges around every day in this dusty, smelly place.
I get this feeling every day. How strange and odd it is that the two worlds should go on simultaneously, not the one waiting in stasis until I return to it, but moving on without me, as if my presence were entirely unnecessary.
I got it just yesterday, as I walked across the base, looking for an internet café so I could email my sister to ask her to check my mail. As I’m trudging through the sand and busted concrete, I hear the sounds of a gun battle in the distance – off to the East, towards downtown. I pick up my ears and judge it to be two to three miles. And then I put it out of my mind to concentrate on the greater worry: Is AT&T still charging me for my cell phone that I cancelled?
Both worlds do go on, I guess, though right now I have to live in this one, and keep my focus, keep my discipline – keep my situational awareness. Doing my job in this world, ultimately, is what will earn me a right to go back to the other one.
It’s strange now, this odd anger and resentment that I bear for a plant that is now weeks behind me and separated by an entire universe, it seems.
When I arrived in Baghdad on Sep. 11, I was eager to go, in the right mindset. Situational awareness, they call it, and it’s a critical tool for survival over here. Being aware of everything around you, constantly keeping one eye open for threats, one ear attuned to sounds. They say that the most dangerous times for a soldier over here are the first few weeks after he arrives and the last few weeks before he leaves – when he lets down his guard.
I had spent almost two months preparing myself, and felt I was as ready as I would ever be.
But hardly had I arrived when unforeseen circumstances brought me back to the U.S. For two weeks, I was thrown back into the civilian world. My mindset, my mission, all of that went out of the window. Suddenly, I learned, there are worse things than war.
On my second day of work, I got a simple message from the Red Cross. It stated, “Father very ill. Actually dying.”
A phone call confirmed the worst. Thus began a marathon journey for me back home, a hectic period of attending to crucial matters there, and an agonizingly-slow return trip back to Iraq.
Almost everything in military bureaucracy is inefficient. Fortunately, emergency leave – which I was taking – is the one exception. It’s like they wave a magic wand and every protocol and strip of red tape is banished. I got the news at 9:30 a.m. By 2 p.m. I was on a flight out of country. In between, I had to pack and store my gear, check in my weapons, and get to the airport.
Fortunately, my command gave me an enlisted soldier as a driver. Specialist E., who had picked me up at the airport the day before, drove me from point to point, and finally back to the airport. It wasn’t always easy. While I was checking on my flight inside the tent that serves as a terminal, a tow truck suddenly appeared out of nowhere to tow our vehicle – with all my gear in it. Suddenly, Specialist E. was running down the road, his M-16 in one hand, chasing after the purloining parasite. I jogged somewhat behind him, tired, beat down, and bitter.
Fortunately, the truck wasn’t taken far, and after about 20 minutes of haranguing the Air Force folks, he got the truck back. Air Force personnel in normal situations can very often be major jerks. But when they’re not only Air Force, but Air Force tow truck drivers, you can only imagine.
My gear rescued, I finished my check-in. The gear is necessary because you can’t fly in or out of Baghdad without body armor and a Kevlar helmet. After waiting in a VIP tent with an Army Colonel and a very fuzzy and loud FoxNews on the T.V., I heard my name called over the PA. I donned my protective gear, lifted my rucksack to my shoulders, and grabbed my small backpack.
Oddly enough, I was to fly out on a Japanese Air Force C-130. As I walked up to the baby-blue aircraft, I took a quick look at the big red meatball painted on the side. I kept thinking that somewhere, my great uncle, who fought the Japs in WWII, is twitching in his grave.
I must say that it was a much better flight out than the one I had going in a few days earlier. This time, there were only about seven or eight people on the plane. Besides the crew, there were only one or two Japanese, plus a few Europeans and Americans. I was the only military person aboard. So, with pretty much open seating, I grabbed a seat next to a gorgeous American woman with dark black hair and deep, almost oriental eyes…who nonetheless proceeded to completely ignore me. I guess dirty, smelly (after all, I had just chased a tow truck for a half mile) military people were just not her type.
She wore a blue floor-mat looking thing that seems to have passed for body armor for whichever cheapo contractor company she works for. It had two pouches – front and back – for the armor plating which was supposed to stop rifle rounds. But as she sat down on her seat, she pulled open the flap and pulled out not armor plating, but a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine. Then she grabbed her little hand-held fan and cooled herself down.
Damn contractors, I thought.
She even appeared loathe to wear her dinky blue helmet until the crew chief of the airplane came back and told her to do so in broken English.
“Must be wearing the equipments,” he said. Or something like that.
Whereas I had flown into Kuwait on a charter jet, which landed at a Kuwaiti Air Force Base, I flew out in civilian clothes through the Kuwait City International Airport. The airport itself is very nice – built to western standards. Or maybe 1970s western standards, because travelers are allowed to smoke throughout the terminal. I had thought Frankfurt was bad, but at least there, they have to stand next to machines which suck the smoke out of the air. In Kuwait, they stand everywhere – old Arab men in their “man-dresses” and younger Arab kids in what passes for hip-hop clothing. The smoke was everywhere. It was like standing inside George Burns’ lung.
Overall, Kuwait is very nice and modern. It’s always been a rich country – that’s why Saddam wanted it so badly in 1990. You would think that there would be a lot of damage from the Iraqi occupation and the Gulf War, but that isn’t the case. Almost everything that was damaged has been rebuilt. Oddly enough, the most visible signs of the war are at bases housing U.S. troops, such as airbases where U.S. aircraft sit next to concrete fighter hangars with massive holes blown through their roofs. The Iraqi fighter planes we bombed in 1991 are long gone, but the hangars are still there – some sort of patched, others unchanged.
All the Kuwaitis drive new cars. On the highways, you rarely see vehicles over 10 years old. This is partly because Kuwaitis are rich, and partly because the Iraqi Army stole just about all the cars they could get their hands on before retreating. In contrast to the desert where I had spent most of my time in the country, Kuwait City is a nice city of shopping malls and clean buildings. Kind of like Phoenix – with mosques.
The flight out of Kuwait to Frankfurt – and the next leg to Dallas – were on Lufthansa, which for me was a special treat, as I am perfectly fluent in German. Or at least I used to be. I’ve slipped a little. I drove the stewardesses nuts, I’m sure, by hitting them with a torrent of talk, trying to get in a little practice. I made a few mistakes – I used Abhangigkeit (dependence) instead of Gelegenheit (opportunity), but I recovered quickly.
I bought the latest novel by a writer I’d never heard of on the Frankfurt Airport, seeing me reading it, the stewardess was eager to talk about it. The writer, Frank Schaetzing, is apparently the best-selling author in Germany, sort of the Tom Clancy of Schnitzelland. Since I hadn’t been back in 9 years, I’d never heard of him, but the stewardess had read several of his books, and raved about him. The story, oddly enough, starts off in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and follows a Hamburg-based female private detective tracking down a former mercenary from the Gulf War who is tracking down and killing the fellow mercenaries who betrayed him and left him for dead. It’s pretty good so far, and only once did I have to ask the stewardess to translate a word. I had guessed from context that it was some kind of box or bag, and her translation was “treasure chest.”
Being home in Texas, back in the civilian world, was strange. At first, it didn’t hit me, because I was so caught up with dealing with my father’s passing. But as I got ready to return, I realized sharply the difference in the two worlds I was transiting through.
For two months, I had been surrounded by people who know exactly what their mission is, and do it without questioning. Discipline, respect, dignity and pride abounded.
Suddenly, I was back in airports and restaurants with the undisciplined, the unmotivated, the disrespectful. Naturally, it was a bit of a culture shock.
To the limited extent I was able to visit with friends, that too was great, but there were too many friends, and too little time. So much of my time back home was spent helping my mother out at the farm or tending to urgent personal business. Add to that the fact that my cell phone – with my entire address book – was sitting in the bottom of a duffle bag in a shipping container in a Baghdad parking lot, and I was woefully out-of-touch.
Before I knew it, my short leave was over, and I was once again Iraq-bound.
The trip back was eventful. The flight to Kuwait was fairly easy, but things got messy after that. The Army picked us at the airport and put us on a couple of busses to a Kuwaiti Air Force Base. En route, my bus blew a tire.
Rather than stand there on the side of a highway in Kuwait, they transferred us all to the second bus – along with our gear. The rest of the ride was cramped, but I was ready to keep moving.
Movement, however, was not what the Army had in mind. Instead, I got another lesson – as if I needed one – into the crucial meaning of the Army term “Hurry Up and Wait.”
1:15 a.m. Arrive at Ali Al Salem Air Force Base. I was hoping to check in for the night, but then I was told to prepare to fly out as soon as a flight was available. Rushing over to get my body armor out of the storage facility, I was geared up and ready to go when they gave me the news about the flight:
3 a.m. No space available on first flight.
“Come back at 4,” the Air Force guy said.
I sat on what appeared to be recycled airport terminal furniture inside a tent that was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Outside, it was about 40 degrees Celsius.
4 a.m. No space available.
“Report back here at 6:30.”
The movie on the T.V. in the tent was “Back to the Future.” Then they played “I, Robot.” Now, it’s “Transformers.” I had to go outside and sweat in the heat just to avoid the murderous assault on my good taste.
And so it went. For the next day and a half, they kept stringing me along, mostly in spans of four hours or less – precluding almost entirely the idea of sleep. Each time, I was led to believe that it was only a matter of time before I’d be on a flight. Finally, I got some inside info that the next flight was booked and I skipped one of the roll calls. At the next one, I learned nothing had changed, but it allowed me to put together a space of five hours to sleep.
As I’ve learned on so many occasions, you need to catch sleep whenever you can. Sometimes you can’t. At Ali Al Salem, there is a constant rotation of people going in and out. Living in transient tents, you close your eyes only to have a new batch of people enter your tent, open up every zipper or Velcro thing they have, and talk loudly about how the Army, Navy and Air Force are screwing them (the Marines screw people too, but Marines simply say, “Thank you, Marine Corps for screwing my life up. Please, sir, beat me again!”).
Actually the best sleep I ever got during the whole 40 hour ordeal was a 1-hour stint, lying on the dusty, hard concrete on the flight line of a Kuwaiti Air Force base, leaned up against my backpack. Somehow, that one hour rejuvenated me more than four or five hours on a lumpy, sand- and sweat-smelling mattress at another Kuwaiti Air Force base.
Finally, I arrived in Baghdad, touching down at BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) in the early morning. Stepping out the back of the C-130, the brutally-hot wash from the propellers burning me, hiking fast across the tarmac in my body armor and Kevlar helmet, with a pair of Blackhawk Helicopters streaking across the sky above, I thought how strange and surreal it was. Here I was, at the same place I had stood just over a month ago. Arriving into a war zone amid imposing signs of American power and control.
But between then and now stood a great chasm, a great void. I had been through some tough times, and I’d been through some simple, quiet, thoughtful moments. I had stood on the farm back home, looking up at the heavens, contemplating the crystal-clear, star-filled sky of Southwest Texas, and thinking back to the dreary, pollution-filled skies of Baghdad. I had walked in the depth of night from my workshop on the farm to the house, and had thought back to the bleak, pitch-black walk from my sandbag-lined tent to the showers back in Iraq.
Now, having returned, my perception of the surreal continued. As I returned to work, I rubbed my hands and felt the sharp pain in my finger. A painful, true reminder that yes, this had really happened. That yes, I had transited between these two worlds of mine. That these two lives that I’ve been living are not separate from each other – one a dream and one a reality – but in fact were separate threads of one ongoing existence. That in one exists James Aalan Bernsen, the guitar player, or consultant, or…farm worker, and in the other exists LTJG Bernsen, the Naval officer who’s never even been on a ship, but trudges around every day in this dusty, smelly place.
I get this feeling every day. How strange and odd it is that the two worlds should go on simultaneously, not the one waiting in stasis until I return to it, but moving on without me, as if my presence were entirely unnecessary.
I got it just yesterday, as I walked across the base, looking for an internet café so I could email my sister to ask her to check my mail. As I’m trudging through the sand and busted concrete, I hear the sounds of a gun battle in the distance – off to the East, towards downtown. I pick up my ears and judge it to be two to three miles. And then I put it out of my mind to concentrate on the greater worry: Is AT&T still charging me for my cell phone that I cancelled?
Both worlds do go on, I guess, though right now I have to live in this one, and keep my focus, keep my discipline – keep my situational awareness. Doing my job in this world, ultimately, is what will earn me a right to go back to the other one.
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