Not to say I told you so...

But here is what Uncle Skippy was saying a year ago about socialism.  And what industry did he pick to make his point?  I know, it was pretty obvious, but I like to preen a little from time to time.
.
Honestly, though, why did almost no one scream "socialism!" when the Bush administration socialized the banking system and so many are screaming it now when Obama's administration is taking on the long deferred task of addressing the healthcare system?
.
It's not a rhetorical question.  The answer is that Americans for better or worse, value their dollar more than they do the health of their fellow Americans.
.
For better or worse.

How I got to Baghdad (In country at last!)

Let's see. Where were we Dear Reader? Ah, yes, blissfully sliding off to sleep in a four-star hotel in a ten thousand year old city with dread behind and hope ahead.
.
Well, not quite. Sleep came in fits and starts, as it often does, when anticipating an early morning start and mulling over the bad, bad consequences of oversleeping. So I did not sleep well. Basically, I slept in 55 minute blocks as I rolled to look at the clock exactly on the hour every hour between two and seven a.m. How I managed to know when the top of the hour was coming in order to wake and check the clock, I have no idea. Ask a biologist, perhaps, or a sleep therapist. All I know is that it is annoying and frustrating and an almost helpless feeling to be caught in a sleep cycle like that. Knowing that you will need every ounce of energy for the road ahead, but terrified that you will miss your alarm and have to scramble to catch up with a day out of control from its very beginning.
.
My terror, of course, was completely unwarranted, but I did not know that at the time and so the fitful sleep continued.
.
The alarm worked and the front desk rang through with a cheerful, if slightly unintelligible, wakeup call and the day began. Having not slept well, I got ready painfully slowly and eventually rolled my bag into the all glass elevator too late for breakfast. It was probably just as well as my stomach had no idea what time it was or what meal was appropriate.
.
I checked out and once again found myself in a group of Americans as we waited for our black Mercedi to take us this time to a quasi-military airport for the next leg of the journey. Mine was among the first to arrive pretty much exactly at the 8 a.m. departure time that I had been told to prepare for. I slid in next to the driver and again had a nice chat on the ride. The drive looked as though he was African American and spoke English with only a whisper of an accent, but he was born in Amman and had never been to the U.S. Go figger.
.
We went through what appeared to be a Jordanian Army checkpoint and arrived at the airport. Airport was a kind appellation for the entrance way, security point, holding area, snack shop and duty free that made up this installation. He let me out and I overtipped again, still having made no change for the 20 dollar bills that I had (much less gotten local currency).
.
And the day of waiting began.
.
Our first point of waiting was the entrance way of the airport. I was near first there, and though there were clearly other Americans there, it was far from clear that I was in the right place for the rather specific flight that I was about to take. So I was nervous. After some time, much longer than I would have expected, others from the hotel began to arrive and so my dread that I was some how terribly mistaken in arriving at this place, which didn't yet look much like an airport, started to recede.
.
The chatter around me was interesting and though I thought perhaps I should strike up a conversation with someone, anyone, I wasn't much in the mood to talk. Those talking the loudest were those returning from their R&R (rest and recuperation) trips who recognized friends or acquaintances returning at the same time. They swapped stories of their travel and their families and laughed about the inconveniences of life at the Embassy or in Baghdad or, for some of them, on the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. I eavesdropped unabashedly--still hungry for information even after all the blogs I'd read, the message boards I'd scoured, and the orientation courses I'd taken. It was somewhat odd to be that curious, I thought, as in twenty-four hours I'd be in the middle of it myself, but still I craved more, hoping that the next nugget, the next sage word would assure me finally and completely that it was going to be okay after all.
.
Curiously, that sage word did not come.
.
After about forty-five minutes, a small group of spectacularly bored looking Jordanians showed up to usher us through the security check point. Shoes and belts off, the whole deal. We stood in line to check our bags (learning that they would be "palletized" which I did not even realize was a word) and get a sort of cross between a ticket and a door prize stub. Neither process inspired confidence in our eventual arrival (mine or my luggage) anywhere near our intended destination.
.
Anyway, we were through the checkpoint by about 9:15 and into the lounge for the next and much longer stretch of waiting. It soon became apparent that we were not the only flight leaving that morning. Women, children, and mostly sullen men began to filter into the waiting lounge as well. One man in particular, was pretty alarming, as his hair was wild, his clothes were unwashed and he kept referring furtively to a laptop that he kept guarded close to his body.
.
I learned, as we waited, that signs that say "No Smoking" in English apparently mean "Smoke Profusely, preferably two cigarettes at once if you can" in Arabic. Who knew? It is at times like these that you realize the downside of the ever-growing prohibition on indoor smoking in the United States. There was a time when Your Darn Skippy could spend the entire evening in a smoke filled bar and not really notice that the smoke was bad until waking the next morning having to hold his jeans at arm's length while depositing them in the laundry basket. That time is long gone. Now a single cigarette causes significant discomfort and being virtually surrounded by chain smokers ignoring the "No Smoking" signs did significant damage to my sinuses and awoke the migraine monster who had not been completely run off by the fitful night's sleep.
.
"I'm here" said the monster, "and I'm ready."
.
Thankfully, the plane for the smoking men and the women and children and the crazy computer guy came and they began to board. There were anxious moments as it appeared that crazy computer guy would dawdle too long fiddling with his computer and be left with us. But thankfully, the too patient air crew came back to get him and he too left.
.
And we waited. Now, understand that there was no flight time for this little trip to Baghdad, so the waiting took on a Kaufka-esque quality. We were passing time, but we had no idea how much. There were planes there, but were they the ones we were waiting for? I even saw C-130s land, but still we waited.
.
Finally, sometime after noon, they told us we were ready (I had been ready...) and hustled us out to a container outside of the lounge to be assigned body armor and helmets for the ride. And after some waiting in the hot sun, we were led across the tarmac to a waiting C-130. Unless you are a very important person, and YDS is not, and neither were the people I was traveling with, you board a C-130 from behind and with the engines running.
.

The C-130's gate drops down to form a ramp that doesn't quite reach the ground, so there is a not insignificant step up (especially when wearing armor which people call PPE for personal protective equipment or BBA for battle (?) body armor, or if you really want to show that you are a geek, call it "battle rattle" when you aren't in the military). The beast is loud and you have to wear ear plugs while boarding and for the whole trip. It was brilliantly bright and hot in the Jordanian sun and dark inside of the C-130, so boarding through the hairdryer exhaust of the plane was intimidating to say the least.
.
The C-130 is a cargo plane. And today, this C-130's cargo was diplomats. There are no chairs, only sort of sling benches. And they don't face foward, they face to the side. And, as I found out soon enough, there are gaps in the benches just large enough to get sort of stuck in...
.
We settled in as they loaded the pallet with our luggage on behind us.  We struggled to figure out the seat belts and waited in anticipation in our hot, dark seats as the plane taxied. It's not all that unusual not to be able to see out of the plane that your are riding in, but it's still sort of comforting to know that someone in your row has that window seat and can have a look outside to see where you are. On a C-130, there is no such luxury. There are almost no windows in the cargo compartment and the ones that are there, you wouldn't be able to see much out of anyway. There's no clue regarding the end of the taxiing and the beginning of your takeoff.  There are no geographic points of reference to slake your curiosity.  There isn't anything to look at but each other and that's kind of rude, so there's really nothing to look at.
.
When you're sitting at a right angle to the direction a plane is travelling as it takes off, you slide over with the acceleration of the plane as it hurtles down the runway and as it climbs into the sky. As I slid over, I slid quite squarely into the gap between the sling benches and the fellow next to me slid over as well occupying the space I had been in. Now the funny part is that I didn't really realize that there weren't these ridiculous gaps under all of the seats, so I didn't think to ask for him to slide back over. He was promptly asleep anyway, so I was doomed to one buttock on the bench and one in the gap, setting my spine at an uncomfortable angle only exacerbated by the forty-five or so pounds of body armor. A recipe for my busted disc to act up, if ever there was one.
.
Once we were safely in the air, there was really nothing to do. I got out my iPod and replaced my earplugs with the noise reducing earbuds that I had and listened to music. For my eyes, it was too dark to read, but a woman across from me was studying a wedding magazine with great intent. It was a curious juxtaposition: her in her body armor and helmet, turning carefully through the pages of "Bride" magazine.
.
Time passed slowly, but it passed and after two hours (More? Less? I couldn't say for sure anymore.), we started our descent. The crew slammed the belly of the C-130 onto the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) and I was in Iraq.
.
Once again Dear Reader, the hour has grown late. This story has only one more chapter, I promise, but I cannot finish it tonight. Soon.

As most of us suspected all along.

Finally the truth is revealed!  What could we expect of those Devil worshippers eight miles away?

Carry your crucifix at night Tar Heel fans.  Other ACC fans should watch out too, but you have the luxury of distance.

Fascinating who Amazon.com thinks I am

Dear Amazon.com customer, As someone who has shown an interest in non-stick cookware, you might like to know about nylon cooking utensils that will keep your non-stick surface in good shape.

Someday, I aspire to get one of these little lovenotes from Amazon.com about ninja equipment, or jet packs, or at least something not completely nerdy.

Sigh.

How I got to Baghdad (cont.)

I'll back up a bit.  I know, Dear Roomate, I hear you scream "Get on with it!" but Dear Reader is a kinder, gentler audience and I want to paint the full picture.

Although the flight to Heathrow was uneventful, that is not to say that it was restful, or even particularly pleasant.  Your Darn Skippy is not a small man and was larger at his time of departure than he has been for quite some time (larger than he is now, seven weeks on, truth be told).  Economy class seats are not kind to my frame.  The knees and my low back are the special targets for physical discomfort inflicted by long periods in a cramped and uncomfortable chair.  But thankfully, there are no tales of equally huge people sitting next to me, no snoring, and for this leg of the trip at least, no real issues of crying babies.  In fact, I had an aisle seat, and so could control my own access to my seat and to the restroom and had a relatively small British woman sitting next to me who slept much of the flight.  Compared to the possibilities, not unpleasant.

I watched Star Trek (YDS rates it "Fun! but not a classic") and part of Taken (forgettable) and one other movie that escapes me at the moment (apparently even more forgettable).  I read and listened to music.  I even dozed a bit, but I do not generally sleep on airplanes, an unfortunate shortcoming of mine.  So on arriving at Heathrow, while not the horrible place of my imagination, I was still quite tired and disoriented getting there in the morning of the next day (August 15 for those of you scoring at home).

The lounges were all quite bright and loud and commercially oriented, so even though the seats might have otherwise been very suitable for a nap, the ambiance was not.  I eventually ate, not so much because I was hungry (I wasn't) but because I figured I need to keep my strength up for another long flight.  This time from London to Amman.  The layover was not all that long, under five hours, so my memories of Heathrow are not horrific, just ordinary.

Boarding for the plane to Amman was less auspicious.  There was a large contingent of families with small children and as I boarded, I worried that this flight would not be as tranquil as my transatlantic journey.  The odds seemed to favor some, if not all, of those small children crying at one time or another.

Now understand, Dear Reader, lest you think that I am an intolerant baby hater that YDS made serveral transatlantic flights with Skippy Jr. when Skippy Jr. was quite young.  Virtually all of them were disastrous including the last one.  That memorable flight featured just the two of us traveling together. The highlight was YDS nearly having a nervous breakdown saved only by the providence of a flight attendant willing to let Skippy Jr. sit in the galley with the rest of the attendants for a while so that his father could close his eyes for just a few minutes before they popped out of his head.  Therefore, part of me is quite compassionate when it comes to parents traveling with small children.

That part of me, however, must battle stiffly with the increasingly grumpy middle aged man in me, who would like to have a peaceful flight and isthattoomuchtoask, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD???  Pun intended, but not appreciated by YDS while in that situation.  So across the aisle and one row behind was a Middle Eastern man traveling with three small children without any apparent adult female assistance.  And quite predictably, his babe in arms cried.  Not so predictably, however, the baby cried for approximately four hours out of the five hour and fifteen minute flight.  This baby was not the only one crying on the flight, but certainly took honors for the most persistant wailer.

I tried to offer the poor man with the babe in arms sympathetic looks on a frequent basis, as I truly was sympathetic, but those glances became more and more infrequent as the grumpy middle aged man battled against the compassionate parent who had walked a mile in those very uncomfortable shoes.  Time passed, of course, but slowly and the five plus hours between London and Amman seemed much longer than the seven plus between DC and London.

It was deep in the night of August the Fifteenth when we arrived in Amman.  My first landing in the Middle East; my second trip to Asia.  I was tired, somewhat hungry, definitely thirsty, and nursing a vague headache that lurked at the base of my skull, but threatened to jump behind my eye with the full force of a migraine at any moment.  And to be honest, I was a little scared.  I'd like to say I was only nervous, but that wouldn't be true to my real emotion on setting down in the Middle East for the first time.

The Middle East, in my hopelessly American mind, was a land of conflict, a land of strife, of suicide bombers and religious intolerance.  A place of violence and hatred, where the clumsy overtures of American diplomacy (not to mention the clumsier attempts at covert influence) only serve to muddy already troubled waters.  OK, I'll give you the Camp David Accords, but what have we done for us lately?

But my rational mind won out as I gathered my bags.  This was Jordan.  Jordan is okay; it's not all that dangerous here, right?  That hard won confidence shattered quickly as I passed the first bank of drivers with their placards welcoming tired travelers and promising an experienced hand (and an Arabic tongue) in clearing immigration and customs.  There was no placard reading "SKIPPY." 

"That's okay," I told myself, "He's probably on the other side of immigration."  But that voice was small and not confident.  I felt a little better to find that there were other Americans headed to Baghdad whose drivers were apparently similarly missing.  We conspired as to how to find alternative arrangements as we stood in line for immigration and hoped collectively that our drivers were waiting on the other side.  The immigration officer typed for a moment in his computer, studied my state of the art passport, stamped it and waved me through.  I forgot entirely the Arabic word for "thank you" (shakrun, by the way) and so mumbled my gratitude in English and pushed through the gate, hoping against hope that my driver was waiting on the other side.

He was.  As were drivers for every American headed to Baghdad through Amman on that flight (probably a dozen of us).  We made our way out to black Mercedes (Mercedeses?) in pairs, driver and diplomat, and slipped out of the airport and onto the highway into Amman.  My driver was exceedingly pleasant and friendly.  We chatted about his family and mine.  About how long he'd been driving and how long I'd been a diplomat.  We traded stories of our sons.  I breathed easier and tried to take in as much of Jordan as I could at night and along a highway, which was not a lot, but some. 

It's hilly, and people like to hang out by campfires along the side of the highway.  That's mostly what I got.  We arrived at my hotel, in a line with all the other Mercedi and I was whisked inside the 1980s splendor of the Hotel Kempinski.  I overtipped my driver and soon I was in a very nice and comfortable room.

I took an overlong and overhot shower (flooding the bathroom in the process) and slipped between crisp, clean, luxurious sheets of my king sized bed and wondered sleepily if they were Egyptian cotton.  (ba dump bump).  My head spun slightly as my soul unwound from the travel and the excitement and I sunk into the pillows under my head finally relaxing the muscles in my neck.

The second day of travel had concluded and so has this installment of the blog entry.  More to come ...

How I got to Baghdad

In the other, more mundane sense of the phrase, but venturing into a country like Iraq can scarcely be described as mundane, so I figure it makes an interesting post. And perhaps I'll hold the attention of my roomate better, who upon reading my last post initially could not remember whether he had read it or not. And when realizing that he had, said "Oh yeah, it was really long and I was reading and reading and you hadn't even got to the airport yet." Perhaps he is not really my audience... But for you Dear Reader, I'll soldier on.

How was the trip to Baghdad? In a word, long. And the length of it makes sense, given that I started my day in the veritable cradle of the longest enduring representative democracy, Williamsburg, Virginia, and ended it in the cradle of civilization itself, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria, the fertile Crescent.

I woke the day of my departure in the same room that I spent my formative years (although the Farrah Fawcett poster is long since down from the wall, and Farrah herself is sadly now departed from this earth). I roused in the first floor cubby that was my bedroom from the time I was seven until I turned eighteen and fled the comfortable nest to the wild wonders of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I spent the morning with Skippy Jr. and packed a few last minute things, before climbing into the car at about 2pm on Friday, August the 14th with my parents and Skippy Jr. as well.

We drove north. First on I64, then 295 around Richmond, and then I95 North, the two hundred yard wide strip of hell that runs from Richmond, Virginia to Washington, DC. (Actually the highway runs from Miami, Florida to the Canadian border near Houghton, Maine, but you will have a hard time convincing me that there is any stretch of it more hellish than that 45 or so miles between Fredericksburg and the Mixing Bowl. (For my non-East Coast dear readers have a gander at this and be glad you live far away.)

However, the highway gods were kind (other fools had sacrificed their days to the concrete totems) and we were not held up by traffic on our way to Dulles Airport.  We stopped for a final dinner for YDS in Reston.  More specifically at an upscale chain restaurant in Reston Town Center, that remarkable testament to planned urban sprawl.  And typically for an American family the choice of cuisine was ethnic, Italian to be exact, and as good as you might expect from that type of restaurant in that type of place.

But I must admit that I scarely remember tasting the food as my thoughts were elsewhere.  I felt strangely and prematurely detached from my son as I watched him squirm in his chair and flirt shamelessly with the waitresses.  His outward motion relected my inner disquiet and it was clear to any willing to read the signs that we shared the same conflict.

Dinner ended and when a stroll of the pedestrian mall did not yeild a toy store, much to Skippy Jr.'s dismay, we climbed back into the car for the final seven miles to Dulles.

No one would confuse Dulles International Airport with a country cottage surrounded by a white picket fence, but never has the hideous testament to modern architecture looked so foreboding.  Dulles is one of my least favorite airports -- it is cold, confusing, and hard to get around in -- and pulling up to the building to leave for Iraq did not enhance its standing in my estimation.  But pull in we did, and after a squabble regarding whether to park in the valet parking without consulting the valet (thankfully, we did not), we were out of the car and headed for the check in counters.

Skippy Jr. waited with me patiently, strangely so, as traveler after traveler moved to the almost fully automated kiosks and began their journeys to more pleasant, but perhaps less interesting destinations.  My turn came and then I had my boarding pass, and my bag was checked (only three pounds overweight).  And then it was time.  I kissed my son and hugged him.  I told him how proud I was of him, for who he was and who he was growing to be.  I promised that I would be home soon and told him of the great time we would have when I was back.  Thinking of it now, it feels as though I was shouting those platitudes into a windstorm.  As though the force of the event ripped the words from my mouth as soon as I could form them and swept them away so that I could not be sure that they reached my son's ears to comfort him.

And he did so well, he was so strong, until I began to stop waving and to walk around the corner to the security check point.  It was then that he began to cry.  It was then that the moment was too much for him, too hard for him to think of three months apart.  I waved again and came back for one final hug and probably told him some further meaningless encouragement, but ultimately, he was crying and was going to continue to cry.

That awful fact was confirmed by a message on my cell phone once I made it though security.  It was a new call and had just come in moments before from my parents' cell phone.  It was Skippy Jr. still crying and sad and wanting to say goodbye one more time.  I returned the call immediately but my parents had switched the phone off.

So there I stood, with my shoes untied and my belt undone, staring at the phone in my hand and cursing my parents near paranoic compulsion with turning off the cell phone and realizing the full force of the fact that I had agreed not only for myself but for my sweet seven year old son, that I would spend a full year in a war zone far removed from my family and from the one person I love more than anyone or anything in the whole world.  That was the choice I had made.

Off to a grand start, wouldn't you say, Dear Reader?

Hoping against hope that my trip had reached an early nadir, I tied my shoes, buckled my belt and headed for the gate.  I was there far too early and so had only time to kill as I waited for the first leg of my odessey, an overnight flight to London's Heathrow to take off.  I read, I listened to music, I tried to write (unsuccessfully).  The highlight was watching the author of Iraqi Chicken (another fine blog) and her husband breeze by on their way to first class seating for the seven hour flight.  The Chicken's husband's comment was something like "What are you earning it for if not to spend?"  An admirable thought, but I was nowhere near that blithe at that particular moment.

The flight was unremarkable and forgettable.  Nowhere near as long as the transcontinental, trans-Pacific marathon I endured in May, but long enough in its own right.  A fair part of the trip was spent in numb dread of Heathrow.  Having never heard a single good word spoken about the place, I was prepared for something of a cross between the Ministry of Information in Terry Guillam's Brazil and a 1984 style government building.

I was not prepared for it to be somewhat pleasant.  I was annoyed by the absolute refusal of airport authorities to post the departure gate until one hour before the plane was due to arrive but found plenty of open and airy (if noisy) lounges to wait and people watch in.  I read again, and listened to music and debated having something to eat ultimately settling on a fast food sandwich that didn't taste completely like cardboard.

Finally, the gate was assigned and it was time for the next leg of YDS's journey up the river:  from London to Amman, Jordan.

This post has gotten really long, so I'll say ... to be continued.