Has Been

My friend, Mark W. sent me a hard drive full of music early in my tour (strictly a backup of selections of his music collection to be stored with me in case of a catastrophic earthquake in California, you understand). It's larger than the hard drive on my laptop and way more than my iPod could ever store so I've been perusing it for new music.

Just before leaving on this trip, I loaded William Shatner's 2004 album, "Has Been." Everyone knows about his kitschy spoken word album from the 1970s, "The Transformed Man," which has such hits as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Tambourine Man."

"Has Been" was produced by Ben Folds who I believe wrote a majority of the songs. There are guest appearances from Aimee Mann, Lemon Jelly, and even Henry Rollins. I am here to tell you it is sheer, unadulterated genius. I love it.

The title track's music is set to a spaghetti western soundtrack riff, complete with mariachi-style trumpets and percussion that sounds like a horse's hoofs. Shatner's narration confronts three strangers who he thinks he heard call him a has been:

You talkin’ to me?
You talkin’ to me?
You callin’ me ... ‘Has Been’?

I've heard of you, the ready-made connecting with the ever ready
Yeah, 'Never Was' talkin’ about 'Still Trying'
I got it, 'Forever Bitter' gossiping about 'Never Say Die'

What are you afraid of? Failure? So am I
Has been implies failure, not so
Has been’s history
Has been ... was
Has been ... might again

I ended up listening to most of the album while making my daily walk between the billeting building and the conference building. Great stuff.

So Say We All

Present at the conference are a group of people I first met last March on my first visit (and TDY) here. Among them is my friend Francis, one of the smartest army officers I have met. Period. He is assigned to Afghanistan. This would be the last time, for the foreseeable future, to see each other given the impending end of tour in October.

Francis writes an occasional newsletter/missive, distributed exclusively via email, called “The Litany” which is bitingly funny if you 1) are in the military, and 2) know anything anything about military planning. Having only been a planner for the past year some of the dialog transcends my poor understanding but, given Francis’ excellent writing style, the gist is always clear.

Many of his colleagues have told him to turn it into a book. Already at twelve chapters, The Litany is well over one hundred single-spaced pages long. Reading it has taught me a bit about what is means to be a planner, what to avoid, how to compensate for bureaucratic inefficiencies, how to look at operations, how a well-written order should look, and how to stay sane. He usually ends each chapter with the phrase, "So say we all," which is homage to Battlestar Galactica. He also is a fellow blogger.

Thanks, brother. Stay safe.

As Sayliyah Again

So I’m back at Camp As Sayliyah. It’s much cooler (only between 100F-110F) and less humid than the last time I was here in August. Everything here -- the surroundings, the enlisted kids on four day passes, the Toyota mini-buses driven by Third Country Nationals -- is same as before. The familiarity is strangely comforting. I’m here with three other people from MNF-I, two of whom I met along the trip down here.

This time the trip wasn’t bad; it just happened to run overnight which made it extremely inconvenient. We left Baghdad at at 0030 on 22 September on a C-130 with not too many passengers and flew to the western airfield of Al Asad where we dropped off some passengers and then proceeded southeast to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Because there were so few passengers, I was able to lay down on the canvass like “seats” on the plane and actually fell asleep. I woke up some time later freezing my ass off as the cumulative effect of the plane’s air conditioning and altitude combined to make the cabin quite chilly. Lacking a blanket, I grabbed my body armor and laid it over me in a sort of ersatz, thirty pound blanket. I was able to get back to sleep. As I dozed off, I remembered my friend Lance’s Five Rules of Airlift:

1. Eat when you can
2. Sleep when you can
3. Piss when you can
4. Crap when you can
5. And always, always, always, bring a jacket

I had heeded the first four rules but failed utterly on the last one since I had wanted to travel light. Lesson learned.

We arrived at Al Udeid Air Base around 0430 on 22 Sep. By the time we met our ride and got to Camp As Sayliyah it was 0530. I grabbed an hour’s worth of sleep in my assigned shipping container, went to breakfast, and then rolled into the conference where I had to give one of the opening briefs. Fortunately, I remained coherent and the brief was well received.

The Last TDY

So I'm headed out on one last TDY to Qatar. I'll be out of pocket for the next day or so on travel. Expect another whiny post about why traveling in theater sucks so bad. Despite the advent of bad travel, it will be good to see the people on this trip; I've worked with them remotely since last January. A good bunch they are. I'll miss them when the tour ends here in less than thirty days.

Year Six, Part II

Last March, also while TDY to Qatar, I wrote about the completion of the fifth year of the war here in Iraq and the challenges ahead for year six. At the time, I had only vague inklings about just how personal it could become. As I tried to get back to Baghdad following that TDY, Shiite extremists -- members of Jaysh al Mahdi -- fired artillery rockets into the International Zone in protest of the Iraqi Army’s offensive against JAM elements in the southern Iraqi city of Basrah. After getting back to Baghdad International Airport (BIAP), I caught a helicopter to the International Zone. As we attempted to land near the embassy, I looked down and saw people running out of the passenger terminal and into bunkers. I looked out to the right and saw the impact of rocket near the banks of the Tigris River and accompanying plume of smoke. Just fifty feet from the ground, the helicopter pilot applied power and we veered away from the landing zone. We raced back to BIAP and waited for things to settle. Welcome to year six, not an auspicious start.

Since then, things thankfully have quieted down and, dare I say, improved. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), who every day grow more professional and capable, completed their security sweep of Basrah and performed similar operations in Sadr City (where most of those pesky rockets were fired from) and Amarah, another important JAM bastion near the Iranian border. Amongst the dwindling press coverage of Iraq, you can read about a current operation ISF is performing in the Diyala River Valley, north of Baghdad, to root out both Shi’a and Sunni insurgents.

The most troubling recent trend is Al Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) use of female suicide bombers. While we were away on this TDY, female suicide bombers struck three times targeting Shi’a pilgrims in the vicinity of the Shi’a holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. It’s a familiar AQI technique -- trying to foment sectarian violence -- only this time using female Sunni suicide bombers. As the press has reported, women in Iraq (or any Islamic country) are not typically subjected to searches by police due to religious taboo and thus can pass relatively unhindered through security checkpoints. AQI recruits Sunni destitute widows who, under Islamic practice are virtually persona non grata, with promises of money for their families. While the attacks this week were devastating, they are the mark of a desperate foe and it is certainly not a viable long term strategy. Nevertheless, it shows that things are far from over here even as they slowly improve.

As I write this, we are nearly half over with year six of this war.

On a more positive note, and while I’m writing about five year anniversaries, let me also say it’s my attractive wife’s and my fifth wedding anniversary today. When I think of what I was doing six years ago, it seems like I was in another world and another person. Of course, something similar might be said about my current position but there is light at the end of the tunnel: There are sixty-two days left in my tour in Iraq.

Arithmetic on the Frontier

A scrimmage in a Border Station

A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee Jezail
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride
Shot like a rabbit in a ride

No proposition Euclid wrote
No formulae the textbooks know
Will the turn the bullet from your coat
Or ward the Tulwar’s downward blow
Strike hard who cares -- shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man

“Arithmetic on the Frontier”
-- Rudyard Kipling, 1886

Today, while in a side bar meeting, I saw this verse written on a white board. No one in the room knew who wrote it and, despite a lot of other writing on other whiteboards, no one wanted to erase it. I scribbled it down in my notebook.

This excerpt from Kipling’s poem describing British casualties in their war with Afghanistan is clear: you’re never too smart to get killed by someone dumber, wielding a cheaper weapon than you. Kipling might as well have been describing Improvised Explosive Devices or suicide bombers.

Strike hard, then. Shoot straight. Good advice, Mr. Kipling.

(ETA: Thanks to my friend, Mark W. for providing the link to the full poem.)

Groundhog Day

The military has a word for daily routine: battle rhythm. In Baghdad, our shop works seven days a week, 0730-2200 (7:30 AM - 10 PM, if you’re a civilian) with a two exceptions: we come in at 0900 on Fridays (our nod to the Muslim holy day) and 1300 on Sundays (where we get a whole half day off). My only complaint is that assigned work hours are like hard drives: work, like data, expands, often unnecessarily, to fill the space available to it. As a result, I believe we are in the office longer than the work we’re actually doing calls for. The only advantage of our Draconian hours is that the days seem to fly by when we’re busy (which is most of time). Week days become meaningless; numerous times, I’ve tried calling my attractive wife at her office when it was a Saturday or Sunday. When you’re on our battle rhythm, weekends lose their meaning.

Here in Qatar on TDY it’s much the same only not as intense. Since most of the people attending conferences here are coming from commands in the US where they still have eight hour work days and weekends, our meetings usually wrap up between 1800 and 1900. You can see the consternation on their faces as early evening approaches. I chuckle. In Baghdad, dinner is more like lunch during the work day back in the World.

Everything here at Camp Asaliyah is the same as it was when I was last here in March: Stark, utilitarian, buildings, blinding sunlight, heat, bunches of enlisted kids on four day passes, Toyota mini-buses hauling them over the large expanse of the base from the living quarters to the DFAC and the PX. My ten minute walk from billeting to the building where my conference meets is exactly the same (only it’s hotter this time). After work ends, we grab dinner at the DFAC, walk back to billeting, change into civilian clothes and walk to the Top Off, a giant converted hangar housing three bars, a performance stage, pool tables, and Internet computers, where we can enjoy our sanctioned three beers a night. I’m drinking with roughly the same group of people from last March. I’m wearing the same one and a half sets of civilian clothes (two polo shirts, one pair of canvas pants) and listening to bad Karaoke wafting over the roofless walls of the pub from the performance stage. It’s like I never left (or arrived, depending on the point of view).

Among the many things I miss (my attractive wife and clever two year old son being chief among them), is simple daily variation. Or maybe it’s variety. Of course, routine has a quality all its own, especially if you want time to pass quickly.

More Travel!

Another conference! This time at Camp Asayliyah in Qatar which means more intra-theater travel using military air (MILAIR). The advantage is that Qatar is in the same time zone as Iraq. The disadvantage is that it’s still the desert and it’s hotter. I was here last March on a similar assignment. I’m headed down to this particular conference with two other colleagues. Last week, I spaced blocked (the MILAIR version of a reservation) the three of us on a flight leaving on the 6th of August. We showed up at the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) passenger terminal at the appointed hour only to find our flight was cancelled (not an auspicious start to the trip). We were especially disappointed because the flight we were supposed to go on was on a C-17 which is much nicer than a C-130. We grabbed great and caught the bus over to Stryker Stables to spend the night. More walking on rocks to and from the tent.

The next morning, we caught the bus back to BIAP and began the waiting game for the next available flight. Fortunately, we caught a flight leaving in the early evening, although it was on a C-130 (less room, less comfortable, and takes longer to fly to Qatar). We were called into boarding area but then inexplicably had to wait another hour. I asked what was going on and was informed we were waiting on some Army general who needed to catch the flight.

Eventually we boarded the plane by walking across the concrete ramp from the terminal. The shimmering heat of the early evening reflected off the ground as we walked toting our carry on packs and wearing body armor. Fortunately, the flight wasn’t crowded. Once aloft the cabin temperature dropped dramatically as the plane gained altitude and the air conditioned overcame the oppressive heat. Unfortunately, there is no middle setting and it quickly became genuinely cold. We made the best of our situation during the two and a half hour flight. Most people took off their body armor wore it in front like a blanket. As we descended, the temperature began to rise but with an added bonus: humidity. The cold air coming from the overhead air conditioning vents quickly misted as it collided with the increasingly warming air of the cabin.

When the plane stopped and the ramp opened up at roughly 2130 local time, we were assaulted by a wave of temperature and humidity such as the likes I have never experienced before. Worse than Florida in summer. Completely unbelievable. We walked, toting our gear, about 200 yards to the passenger terminal. All of us were dripping with sweat by the time we arrived five minutes later. I lamented my decision to bring only one uniform on this trip. I will be doing lots of laundry.

Year Six

I have wanted to write a post about the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq but faced a conundrum: much smarter (and more passionate) writers and journalists have covered the subject online better than I could. Like many reading this blog, I spent most of those five years in the US, reading and watching news reports about the war. Five years ago, I had just started a new civilian job and wasn’t in a position to volunteer for service like I had following the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks. I remember picking up a newspaper in early April of 2003 showing a picture M1 Abrams tanks crossing into Baghdad and thinking about how little time it took the US Army to advance from Kuwait. Surely, the war is over, I thought -- a repeat of the 64 hour ground war during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. No one was thinking that a sophisticated and lethal insurgency was around the corner.

I couldn’t tell you much about those first five years than you already know, if you’ve been paying attention. However, I will be here for most of year six. So far, it’s been very educational living and working in the Green Zone. In many ways, I’m grateful to finally be off the side lines and in the game contributing in a manner that I hope is useful. As my time here in Qatar comes to close, I’ve seen lots of enlisted kids on R&R four-day passes and can only wonder what their daily routine is like in whatever part of Iraq they come from. My job doesn’t involve carrying an M4 and patrolling on foot; I deeply admire and respect all those whose job that involves.

On Easter Sunday, Shi’a insurgents attacked the Green Zone with rockets and mortars. I read the reports on the web and made phone calls back to Baghdad. Thankfully, no one in the Embassy was hurt. The insurgents were either expressing displeasure with Sadr Ceasefire or commemorating, in their way, the anniversary of Baghdad’s fall five years ago. And in another sad confluence, the five year anniversary coincided with the death toll reaching four thousand.

Nations pay for what they want in blood and treasure. We have spent plenty of both in the last five years. Most of year five saw the troop surge in full effect and now we are seeing the first optimistic results: reduced ethno-sectarian violence, rejection of Al Qaeda by many Sunnis in Iraq, Al Qaeda’s marginalization and near last stand in Mosul. But there is still a lot to be done: the Iraqi Government must continue to stand up and take charge of the country, deeply suspicious Shi’as, Sunni, and Kurds must learn to establish trust and work together. It seems daunting but there are plenty of people, in and out of uniform, working hard to make it happen: Year Six.

Hair Dryer

What do you get when you mix 110 degree F heat with a stiff north wind? It’s what’s called the “hair dryer.” For the last few days, a forceful north wind has been blowing during the day throughout the camp. My half-mile walking commute from billeting to the conference center is one big hair dryer. You can simulate this at home by turning on a hair dryer, setting to max heat, and putting it in front of your face.

VH-1e

OK, I’ll admit it: I’m not working my normal 14-hour day while down here. It’s more like nine or ten. Add the fact that I can get three draft beers a night after work and it feels like a freakin’ vacation. The large number of folks on R&R leave, dressed in civilian clothes almost makes me forget I’m stuck in the middle of the Qatari desert. Going back to Baghdad will suck.

Having marginally more time on my hands means I’m getting to watch a little more television, something I’m normally ambivalent about. But I’ve discovered VH-1 Europe which is pumped into the cable TV in my housing container. VH-1e plays a great set of music videos both old and new, wrapped around Turkish language Vodafone commercials and is blessedly devoid of anything resembling Reality TV programming. I forgot how compelling an all music video channel could be.

Last night, I watched ten Maroon 5 videos, part of VH-1e’s Top Ten series. I barely paid attention to this band on the radio but found they have a great set of songs that have been cleverly put to video. Here I thought the art of making a good music video had been lost. Not true. These guys have a great director who engagingly brings their songs to life. If I had a faster Internet connection, I’d buy some of their songs on iTunes.

Tonight, VH-1e was playing the Music Juke Box segment where people from throughout Europe submit playlists. If VH-1e likes the list, they play the videos and display the person’s name on the screen. A girl from Spain requested, “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco and “More Than This” by Roxy Music. A US soldier from Afghanistan requested “Ace of Spades” by Motorhead and “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. Thrown into the mix was “Love Plus One” by Haircut 100 and “Some Day We’ll Know” by New Radicals (never heard of them but I love the song and the video).

Watching all this made me realize I’m painfully non-aware of new music. Helping me out, my sister recently sent me CDs of Katie Melua, Sara Bareilles, Colbie Caillat, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, all of which I really liked.

I know keep a notebook handy when VH-1e’s on to jot down the names of new music. Good stuff, old and new. Now if only VH-1 back in the states would re-adopt this format...

For my wife

The nicest thing my wife said about me was something I overheard in our backyard. We have a shared back yard and pool that is part of our town house association. Just before I deployed, we were out there with our young son and neighbors, Zenia and Pavel, married Russian émigrés who came to this country nearly twenty years ago. My wife asked Zenia how long they had been married and she answered twenty-two years. (They are roughly the same age as my wife and I but have two teenage children.). My wife exclaimed, “Wow, I wish I could have been married to Rico for that long!”

Later on, I asked her what she meant by that. She said simply she wished she could already have that time with me (we both married later in life). I was humbled, to say the least. After all, I have plenty of faults: I have a terrible short term memory and always have problems remembering the Next Thing We Are Supposed To Do, and I often finish her sentences much to her displeasure.

Being a single mom is tough, especially working full time. No matter how tough my current assignments, I only have to look out for myself. The next meal is as easy as walking to the nearest DFAC. My wife comes home to day care pickup, feeding our son, cooking dinner, bathing our son, putting him to sleep, and then enjoying some time of her own before going to sleep.

Last night, I worked late on a presentation I would be giving today. As I made the nearly ten minute walk back to billeting, I had my iPod set on random. The song “Comfortable” by John Mayer came on. I had purchased the song as part of an album but had never really listened to it critically. Although it’s a sad song about a break up and pining for love lost, one set of lines made me smile:

I loved your
Gray sweat pants
No makeup
So perfect

Sweetie, I miss you and those gray sweatpants on Sunday mornings…

Communication

Military organizations, like most bureaucracies, have several common traits: 1) left unchecked, they grow over time, and 2) they fiercely protect their perceived turf. I’m here for a series of meetings that involve two sections of my headquarters. Let’s call them Apples and Oranges. I work for Oranges and I’m here with three other people from Apples. At the worker bee level, we all get along famously and are here to help each other with what we need to get done. Yet, our superiors see it differently.

Case in point: last week, Apples had the lead for the meetings. One guy from Apples, let’s call him Ed, nightly sent an email to both the chiefs of Apples and Oranges updating all on our progress down here. One night, I volunteered to write the email for Ed, sent it to him and told him to change the pronouns to appear he wrote it. Ed liked my summary, added a few notes of his own, and sent it to both the chiefs of Apples and Oranges. The next morning, the head of Apples wrote to a colonel and asked why “that guy from Oranges” wrote the update? He thought Apples was in the lead? The colonel then dutifully emailed one of my Apple co-workers and told him that they needed updates on Project Fruit Juice (which is the project we are all working on).

This week, I’m here by myself; the guys from Apples returned back to Baghdad. Let’s call the organization sponsoring these series of meetings the Fruit Stand and my headquarters the Tree (apples and oranges grow on trees). This week the Fruit Stand announced it wants to follow a certain course of action. I know this course is anathema to the Tree and let members of the Fruit Stand know. Understandably, the Fruit Stand was upset. I called back to the Tree and they said, “no way.” Clearly, the Fruit Stand and the Tree need to get together and decide. In the meantime, “that guy from Oranges” is stuck towing the party line. Can’t we all just talk about it...

Transformers

Quite coincidentally, I watched Michael Bay’s “Transformers” while on the trip to Al Udeid Air Force Base. If you’ve seen the movie, then you know it opens at a “forward operating base” in Qatar and is the scene of a giant robot attack. Al Udeid looks nothing like the FOB in the movie (for one thing, I didn’t see any F-117 Nighthawks parked openly on the runway). Still, I thought watching the opening scene on the C-17 and then landing there was a cool coincidence.

I was surprised I liked the movie; this despite the fact that 1) most of Michael Bay’s oeuvres are so cheesy and over the top that I can hardly sit through them, and 2) that the movie pays overt homage to the Air Force. Transformers was still an exception; it brought a surprisingly human, and at times, funny, story to life with a cast dominated by CGI robots. With respect to being funny, at one point a kid with a video camera running towards the smoldering impact site of one of the Autobots cries, “This is a hundred times cooler than Armageddon!” The smokingly hot Meagan Fox, who plays the girl with a troubled past who is a master car mechanic, doesn’t hurt the movie (at all).

But yes, there are cheesy, slow-motion shots of Air Force pilots slowly getting into A-10 Warthogs (or, Thunderbolt IIs, if you’re a purist) and F-22 Raptors. There is even some kind of Air Force special forces team that heroically escapes the the forward operating base after the attack by the evil Decepticons and manages to perform mechanical forensics on a piece of one of the robots while flying in a C-17. At one point, one of those Air Force special commandos says, “We can’t make a stand without the Air Force!” Clearly, Michael Bay’s production company cut some deal for Air Force participation that effectively turns the movie into a recruiting commercial.

Still, I enjoyed the movie mostly because I found myself actually caring for the plight of the Autobots. I can see why some critics called it “ one of the best movie you haven’t seen of 2007.”

Fox

Central Command (CENTCOM) is one of several combatant commands (COCOMs), headed by a four star general or admiral. As of last week, CENTCOM’s commander was Admiral William “Fox” Fallon. His appointment less than a year ago was somewhat controversial as CENTCOM traditionally was headed by Army generals. Previously, Fallon commanded Pacific Command (PACOM) whose chief areas of focus are China and North Korea. Not long after arriving we received word that Admiral Fallon announced his resignation. CENTCOM Forward Headquarters immediately was abuzz with speculation as to who would replace Fallon. A particularly funny Air Force officer co-worker of mine jokingly said to me and several other Navy officers, “Guess who just lost a COCOM, bitches?”

Joking aside, the relationship between the commanders of CENTCOM and Multi-National Force Iraq (MFN-I) largely is considered to be strained. CENTCOM technically is MNF-I’s higher headquarters. That is, General David Petraeus technically worked for Admiral Fallon. Yet, Petraeus, as head of MNF-I, enjoyed unparalleled access to both the president and secretary of defense, in effect, largely marginalizing Fallon. It was also highly rumored that the two did not get along. Shortly after Fallon’s resignation, many articles ruminated that he was, in fact, fired by the secretary of defense, for his very public dissension to the idea of war with Iran. General officers, especially those who command COCOMs, are expected not to make public statements which disagree with statements by the president or secretary of defense. They are expected to provide private, candid advice to civilian leadership, emphasis on private. Journalists who lean towards the left were quick to speculate that Fallon was fired because he fundamentally and very publicly opposed the idea of going to war with Iran. Those on the right opined that Fallon resigned in protest of being marginalized by Petraeus. In my opinion, the truth lies somewhere between those two extremes.

Secretary of Defense Gates announced that Fallon’s replacement won’t be named until mid-spring. In the meantime, three-star army Lieutenant General Dempsey, CENTCOM’s deputy commander, will take the helm. Most military observers agree that Petraeus is a leading contender for Fallon’s replacement. While this makes logical sense, many people want to keep Petraeus exactly where he is as commanding general of MNF-I. He is largely credited with changing the focus of the war in Iraq to counterinsurgency and is architect of last year’s “surge” of five additional brigade combat teams (BCTs). After all, why would anyone want to fix something that’s not broken?

Camp As Sayliyah - Week One

Camp As Sayliyah is located in the proverbial middle of nowhere of the Qatari desert about an hour’s drive southwest of Doha. In my eyes, its chief advantage is that it’s not Baghdad.

Qatar is a small oil and gas-rich country, consisting of a peninsula shaped like a thumb jutting north from the larger peninsular land mass consisting chiefly of Saudi Arabia. Doha, its capital, is also its only chief city. Most Americans pronounce Qatar as “Kah-TAR” although the correct, Arabic pronunciation sounds more like “GHA-tar” with a guttural “gh” and soft “t”. The Brits, who also have a military presence here, pronounce it more like “KHAH-tar.”

Camp As Sayliyah, according to open sources, is a large logistical base for CENTCOM. There are many large vehicle maintenance yards servicing HUMVEEs, tracked vehicles and large trucks. The denizens of the base consist of a few permanent party in uniform attached to CENTCOM and ARCENT, many third country nationals (TCNs), mostly East Indian, who work in the maintenance yards, and a fair amount of service members walking around in civilian clothes who are here on four-day passes from either Iraq or the Horn of Africa.

The Rest and Relaxation Program makes being stuck here for two and half weeks most worthwhile. There are two big Morale, Welfare, Recreation (MWR) facilities here. The first is The Top Off, which is built inside a large, air-conditioned hangar. The front end consists of a three bars. The middle section is a large stage for musical acts and the rear section has phone banks and Internet computers along with a small Green Beans stand, and a movie lounge. Anyone posted here is entitled to three beers a night in one of the three bars.

On the evening of 9 March we went to the Top Off and I enjoyed my first beer since 31 October when we had our farewell dinner in Columbia, SC. While the Japanese have their Tea Ceremony, I relish the act of sitting in a comfy chair with one or more friends and sipping a beer. I felt refreshed, ready to start my series of meetings here.

Travel

The good news: I was selected to attend a three-week series of meetings at Central Command’s Forward Headquarters (CFH) in Qatar. This means getting out of Baghdad and Iraq for new sites and experiences. The bad news: getting to and from Qatar means using in-theater travel “at no cost to the government.” Imagine the worst day at any major US airport (delays, changing schedules, cancelled flights, disinterested personnel at check-in desks) and magnify it tenfold. Getting to theater with my group of other Navy augmentees last November went smoothly enough due largely to the fact that large groups of human cargo have some actual priority. Small groups or individuals who wish get from point A to point B have very little. After all, this is a war of logistics and military airlift is the primary means of getting Important Gear to where it belongs. When possible, Humans are stuffed in between cargo on uncomfortable seats on military transport aircraft.

Because flights and priorities change so much, reserving space on a flight can’t be done until one or two days before leaving. I was traveling with a group of three other officers who I work with on a specific project but who are not co-workers. I made a reservation, or in military parlance, a space-block, on a flight leaving in two days out of Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). Next, I had to make arrangements to get our party from the International Zone to BIAP. There were two ways to get there; one is via the Rhino Runner, the armored bus convoy that makes several trips per day and the other Catfish Air, a space available helicopter service. Fortunately, a flight was available that met our schedule. This saved us the trouble of having to take a bus to BIAP after being dropped off by the Rhino.

On 8 March, the four of us made the short walk to LZ Washington from the Embassy and caught the Space A helicopter to BIAP. It was short flight, only about ten minutes. From BIAP, we walked two hangars over to the Air Mobility Command (AMC) building and found out there was space available on earlier flight than the one we were originally manifested on. Even better, the earlier flight would be on a jet-powered C-17 instead of a prop-driven C-130 which meant a shorter flight.

Even though the flight left earlier, we still had a six hour lay over. We stashed our body armor and bags in a Navy trailer and walked over to the DFAC near the air terminal. Every DFAC has its own particular rules and procedures however they all are a variation of washing (or sanitizing) your hands, showing some kind of ID, and getting food. Back in Baghdad, our DFAC is guarded by contracted security from Triple Canopy and are all Peruvians. At BIAP, it was a different security contractor and they all appeared to be African, maybe Ugandan. We had lunch and then walked over to the PX area which consisted of several trailers, one for the actual PX and several more serving fast food. A set of tables and benches sheltered by tent overhang gave us a place to lounge as we waited for our flight.

Towards evening, we walked back to the terminal, re-manifested, and boarded a C-17. This is a relatively modern medium sized air lift plane flown by the Air Force. The central cargo area was dominated by two very large, wheeled electrical generators. The four of us, along with five other Air Force officers, sat along the aircraft fuselage wall in fold down seats. The flight was pleasant; the temperature in the cabin was blessedly normal (not always the case on flights like these) but was quite noisy (everyone travels with ear protection).

We landed in Al Udeid Air Force Base, in Qatar, two hours later, cleared a perfunctory customs area maned by a sleepy Qatari official and boarded a SUV for transport to Camp As Sayliyah. The trip out here wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it would be. Of course, there's always getting back...

As Sayliyah, Qatar

I am currently at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar. I'm here for a temporary assignment. I've been away from the computer but promise to have a new post up soon. Thanks for your patience.