I mentioned that Jordan was hot. Jordan was a warm spring day compared to the blast furnace of the runway at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). The Airport is half civil airport and half military installation. Well, maybe three quarters military and one quarter civilian. That was true in the former regime as well, but there was a different military sharing the airport.
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We were marched away from the back of the C-130 (once again through the baking wash of the four turbo prop engines) and toward the passenger terminal on the military side. The wash is sort of amazing, powerful and frightening. Maybe you've walked across an airport tarmac to one of those puddle jumpers that everyone hates to fly from Scraton to Pittsburgh. Sometimes the engines are already revved up as you arrive, and they're sort of intimidating. Not because you think they could actually cause you harm, but because, hey, you've seen the Indiana Jones movies and what happened to that big German dude was no joke. Well imagine the engine on that puddle jumper roaring away, but ten times the size. And then multiply it by four. Add in the incredible heat of an August afternoon in Iraq and you might be approaching what we were walking though. The wind pushed us away from the engines rather than sucking us toward their whirling blades, but being out of control even stepping away from them was intimidating.
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Grabbing our bags from the pallet, we made our way through our first T-walls. Now, you don't know it yet, but T-wall is an incredibly descriptive term. Everyone is familiar with Jersey walls, those ubiquitous wedges of concrete that have saved countless lives of highway contstruction workers and chewed up billions of dollars worth of bumpers and tires of inattentive drivers. So T-walls are Texas walls, to be compared with Jersey walls with the knowledge that "everything is bigger in Texas." They are fifteen foot high Jersey walls that are used everywhere in Iraq. They are used as walls, for traffic control, and for shrapnel control. They are all over every U.S. installation in Iraq, including the Embassy compound. They were awesome on first seeing them but they are pedestrian, even vaguely annoying after a short period of time in country.
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Beyond the T-walls, we were guided to the small compound within a military base known as Sully. Sully is kind of a holding compound for transiting non-military folks in the middle of the huge military base at BIAP. We were waiting there for the "shuttle" for the final six or seven miles of our journey. The compound is surrounded, of course, by T-walls. There's a hard cover to protect against indirect fire (IDF, which is usually mortars and rockets), a bunch of trailers, and well, that's about it. There's a computer lounge trailer, a TV lounge trailer, an office trailer, a bathroom trailer with showers, and several sleeping trailers. After a briefing which basically said, you're here for a while, there isn't much to do, and dinner isn't for a few hours, we were left to our own devices.
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I said, "shuttle." That is scarely accurate, even with the quotation marks. The shuttle is known affectionately as "The Rhino." It is essentially a heavily armored recreational vehicle painted a color best described as rhinoceros grey. It is in that cross between the short bus and a tank that you make the initial trip from BIAP to the Embassy, unless, of course, you happen to be important enough to rate a helicopter or a Diplomatic Security convoy of your own. As I think I made clear before, I do not rate. When I arrived in Iraq, the Rhino only ran late in the night and at variable times to make it a hard target for terrorists and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). So we waited, again until that indeterminate time, when the Rhino would be ready for us and we would make the run down Route Irish through the red zone to the relative safety of the international zone and finally home onto the Embassy compound. That was the goal. But first, we waited.
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As I explored the 150 square yards that was my home for the immediate future, the migraine which had been lurking seized on the searing heat and bright sunlight and settled behind my left eye. It built through the feeling of pressure during our brief orientation and hammered right on through into full blown pain after less than forty five minutes or so in Iraq. Although I know it is impossible, the sensation was something like a rabid hamster alternately gnawing on my optic nerve and digging away at the back of my sphenoid sinus. It hurt. A lot.
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I could not get comfortable. I couldn't sit. I couldn't read or listen to music. I could sort of watch TV for a few minutes at a time, but had to get up every ten minutes or so to change the angle of the pressure inside of my head. Not that the pain went away, but it just changed a little and so provided some small measure of relief. Everyone was exhausted, and I could feel the thoughts of my compatriots every time I got up not so much to do anything but rather to change the angle of attack of the headache. "Where could he
possibly be going? Why can't he just fall into a stupor like the rest of us? Why does he keep moving around?" Sorry, everyone. You do what you have to do.
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After a couple of hours, several of us went over to the cafeteria (which in military parlance is a DFAC, short for dining facility) for dinner. It was fine, I suppose, but I mostly remember being slightly nauseous from the headache and though a cool drink was helpful, a big dinner was not what I was looking for. After dinner, there was
really nothing to do. The setting sun provided some relief from the heat and the temperature dipped into the low 100s. Brrrr. We were still about five hours away from the earliest time at which we might begin our trip from Sully compound to the Embassy. The Embassy which was only six or seven miles away. The Embassy that I had been travelling since Friday noon to get to (it was now early evening on Sunday). Six tantalizing miles away.
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There's a sort of insanity inspired by waiting so long so close to your ultimate destination. One colleague here has said "Six years later and we can't take a cab from the airport to the Embassy. We have lost this war." I don't agree; there are plenty of countries where the Regional Security Officer won't let you take a cab to the airport: Colombia, Venezuela, Haiti, etc. But I get the point. And it sets a tone for your tour in Iraq. Everything is hard here. Getting from the airport to the Embassy can be really, really hard. And that is frustrating. Especially so when you already been travelling for thirty-six or so hours.
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All of the cots in the sleeping room were long since spoken for by sleeping bodies, so I tried occasionally to watch TV. The big chairs were comfortable, when you could snag one, but I was not. So I would have to give up my comfy chair from time to time to move around, and most of the time found it re-occupied by the time I returned. Even through my headache, Undercover Brother made me smile but time passed incredibly slowly. Master and Commander with its pretentiousness (intended or otherwise) did not make me smile.
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Sometime after midnight, they rounded us up again and moved us to a different place on the compound, perhaps half a mile away. The Rhino Station is a low plywood building surrounded by, what else? T-walls. There is a front porch and a little yard with gravel six inches deep. With the darkness and finally cooling degrees (down to 90!) my headache began to ease its grip.
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It was here, at the Rhino Station, that I realized fully that we were in a war zone, even now. In my imagination, you could have plopped this station down at some staging area in the Mekong Delta thirty years ago and you would have had the exact same vibe. Well, there were way more civilians here than there would have been there and civilians are a stupid lot in an environment like that. We don't stand in line well. We have too much luggage. We wander off and need instructions repeated. But as a unit of soldiers flooded into the Station groggy from their own odessy into Iraq, it was very clear that we were not in just any hardship post. We were in a war zone.
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We were "manifested" onto the Rhinos and thankfully, I had all the right ID to get my name on the list and then ... what else? We waited. The wait was shorter this time and after a chuckle about a couple of DHS agents who had slept through the call to move from Sully to the Rhino Station and a longer than comfortable moment of panic when I could not find my backpack (it was on my back) the Rhinos arrived. We threw our bags in a container (really, one of those big shipping containers) and climbed, hopefully, onto the Rhino that was headed to the Embassy. After some confusion about who was on which Rhino headed exactly where in the international zone which would have been hilarious at noon but was completely unentertaining at three in the morning, our little convoy started to roll.
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Now I was wide awake again. I peered out the window into the dark, trying to get a glimpse of the country that I would be serving in for the next year. Other than the checkpoints we went through, it was dark. There wasn't much to see. Electricity is kind of scarce here (for a ton of reasons) and who knows if there are really a lot of buildings along that road anyway. I certainly didn't. Still I strained my eyes into the darkness, trying to remember my anti-IED training. Looking for signs that a pile of trash by the road might conceal our doom. More than once I pushed to the bottom of my conciousness thoughts of what it might be like if there was an explosion, if the reinforced glass came shattering inward, and the Rhino lurched to the side as the drivers were blown apart. I was scared.
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Was there really good reason to be? Who's to say? The attacks on Route Irish are few and far between these days, but they do still happen. It was my first night there and my mind was exhausted from the day(s) that had led me to that point. I had said good bye to Patrick only a little more than 48 hours before, but it seemed as though that might have been another father saying good bye to another son. I was in a different world. On a different planet. Worried, over-worried probably, but still with good reason, that something really bad might happen to me before I found my new bed in my new home.
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But, of course, it didn't. The ride was relatively short, and completely uneventful. We went through one more checkpoint, this one with American faces manning it, and we were in the International Zone, in the Green Zone. We were, well, home. We took off our helmets, and I for one, began to breathe again.
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The huge bus made a sweeping right turn into a controlled access center that has been repeated at the walls of fifty Embassy's around the world. Peruvian guards came on and checked our IDs and we were through. Slightly dizzy from exhaustion, I climbed out of the rhino and got my first look at the Embassy compound. It looked then (and still looks now to me) like nothing other than a residential community college in the American southwest. With a wall around it. I grabbed my suitcase, which now seemed to weigh 130 pounds rather than the 65 that it really was, and lined up to get my key to my apartment.
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I was last in line, and this time, not on the list. They had no key for me. After a moment of searching around, they discovered that they were expecting me the next night. By then, everyone else had stumbled off to their rooms and I was left to find SDA (Staff Diplomatic Apartment) 6-307 on my own. At that time, the SDA's had no signs on the outside (or inside for that matter) to tell you which was which. I knew the place where I got my key was SDA 1, but that was all I knew, so I guessed. And guessed badly.
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I figured out eventually that I was in the wrong building by examining, of all things, the fire alarm system. I guessed again and guessed wrong. One more guess put me in a third wrong building. Finally, I pulled my suitcase, my carry on luggage, and my armored, exhausted body into the correct building and found the right room. My scratching around with the key woke my roommate, a good friend and work colleague from home, who welcomed me to Iraq with a sleepy smile. I left unpacking for the next day and collapsed onto my bed, pausing only long enough to take out my dried out contact lenses. It was ten after four in the morning on Monday. I had traveled for about 56 hours. I was here.
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I would wake up the next day in Baghdad.
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YDS
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