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.
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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.
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My terror, of course, was completely unwarranted, but I did not know that at the time and so the fitful sleep continued.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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And the day of waiting began.
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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.
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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.
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Curiously, that sage word did not come.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"I'm here" said the monster, "and I'm ready."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.