Waiting for Space A

Waiting to travel Space Available (“Space A”) involves registering at the Passenger Terminal at BIAP. They record where you want to go, your personal details, print out a sheet of paper and hand it to you. As flights get ready to leave, the pax terminal people (all Air Force enlisted types) announce a Space A roll call. You hand the attendant your sheet, which lists the date and time you registered. The attendant arranges them chronologically. The person who registered first, regardless of rank, gets de facto priority on whatever seats are available. Depending on the destination, time between roll calls can be as little as a couple of hours or as much as eight.

The pax terminal offers stainless steel chairs, a wall refrigerator filled with water and several flat screen TVs playing a random assortment of movies. When I arrived last November, the immediate area surrounding the terminal was uneven ground strewn with rocks. Ever adaptive, waiting personnel found nooks and crannies to rest on. When I was here in March, the entire area was closed off and I saw engineers were busy leveling the ground and pouring large concrete slaps. Now, the entire area was neatly covered in concrete (see photo). The only downside was that the concrete slabs reflected the Iraqi summer sunlight making the area mostly inhospitable. Add twenty-foot concrete T-Walls and it gives it a vaguely Stonehenge-ish feeling. Waiting soldiers now rested either inside concrete bunkers which offered shade or inside the now more crowded terminal.

Nearby the terminal is an air conditioned trailer with two Navy enlisted LNOs. They share the trailer with United Nations and Department of State LNOs who coordinate flights for their respective people to and from Iraq. I actually found the trailer last March when I flew out to the last conference I attended in Qatar. The trailer offers a relatively secure place to stash luggage and sit in while waiting for a flight.

While waiting inside I met four other Navy people (two enlisted petty officers, one chief petty officer and one officer, a former enlisted man and now a commissioned limited duty officer). All four were redeploying home after year-long tours. I listened to their stories about their deployment. Two two enlisted were interrogators, and the chief and lieutenant were master-at-arms men, Navy police. While the interrogators actually performed their duties under assignment with army units, the two master-at-arms men explained they were supposed to train Iraqi police but ended up performing non training duties.

It’s a typical story I hear from Navy personnel: their orders say one thing and they end up doing something substantially different. When I was at Fort Jackson we were told to report back if we were “re-missioned” once we got to Iraq. However, the definition of “re-missioning” is somewhat slippery. For example, if you are a master-at-arms and are assigned to a joint unit whose purpose is to train Iraqi police but you are not specifically doing training you are not re-missioned. However, if you are a Navy lawyer and are told you need to run convoy duties full time that’s re-missioning.

The experience of the two master-at-arms men obviously left a bad taste in their mouths. They clearly were experienced and professional (both of them had nearly twenty years experience) yet neither of them really applied their trade craft while in Iraq.

The two petty officers had been at BIAP for four days waiting for their flight. They spent the first night outside sleeping on picnic tables before they found the Navy LNO trailer. Normally, Navy personnel need to request a flight home from Navy Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) forty-five days before their orders expire. Unfortunately, these two petty officers were assigned to a remote army unit and didn’t get the word. As a result, they had to wait for a Space A flight just to get home. They did say they had informed their first sergeant (E-8), the senior army enlisted non-commissioned officer in their chain of command, thirty days before the end of their orders but he had not done anything about it. They told me that when it became clear he had not done anything, the army unit’s command sergeant major (E-9), the most senior non-commissioned officer in their unit, appropriately “counseled” the first sergeant -- a procedure that involved having the first sergeant stand at attention and be yelled at for a period of time. It didn’t improve the two petty officers’ situation but it did make them feel a little better.