Leaving Camp Victory

When the convoy arrived at the Al Faw Palace at Camp Victory, I was met by my Navy colleague, Joe, a lieutenant, junior grade. It was Joe’s last day in the office and he would be redeploying with me. We drove over to a different palace he worked in, the so-called “Perfume Palace,” the site of a former brothel run by Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay. We checked in with the Navy element by phone to confirm our show-time for tomorrow’s flight: 1030. Too easy.

We left the palace to grab dinner at their DFAC and then I went back to the trailer he shared with several other people, most of whom already had deployed. I took a sinfully long hot shower in the nearby shower trailer and then watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Cut free from the IZ, I all of sudden felt immensely tired. I was thinking of actually going to sleep when Joe came back to the trailer and said, “I have bad news.”

Not hearing him correctly, I said, “Tell me the good news first.” He looked at me quizzically. He explained that, while at a final meeting, the Navy element tried to reach him by phone that our flight had changed or may have been cancelled altogether. The spottily written message handed to him by a co-worker who had since departed the office suggested our new show-time was now 0215, roughly in five hours time. I got dressed and we walked back to his desk at the Perfume Palace where we tried to call the Navy element. No one was available and no one picked up there published cell phone. We called the BIAP passenger terminal who confirmed there was a show time for a flight to Ali as Salem at that time but that we would need to know the Unit Line Number (ULN) in order to get on the flight. Of course we didn’t have that and it wasn’t specified on the written message.

We decided to drive over to BIAP to talk to them in person. Normally, this takes around ten to fifteen minutes but, as bad luck would have it, we encountered the mother of all truck convoys driving along the exact route we needed to take to BIAP. It took the better part of forty minutes.

At the passenger terminal -- a place I knew all too well from previous inter-theater travel -- an enlisted air force terminal representative said several other navy personnel had wandered in saying they were redeploying like us and that they were to show up at 0215. One of the navy personnel said he was told a representative from the Navy element would be present to give us the ULN. Fine, we thought; let’s just show at 0215.

By now, it was nearly 2330. We hoped back in Joe’s borrowed truck and made our way back to his home in Camp Slayer. Once again, we encountered an impossibly huge, slow moving truck convoy -- part of the immense logistical effort that keeps Camp Victory running. It took us an hour and change to get back. We arrived back at Joe’s CHU at nearly 0030. We decided to try and leave as early as possible given the bad traffic karma. Joe hurriedly finished his own packing, we reloaded the truck with our bags and set off for the palace to find someone who could drive the truck back after dropping us off. We left the palace at 0130.

Predictably, we hit yet another frakin' convoy on the way back to BIAP. It took nearly forty minutes but we arrived just in time. As we finished unloading our baggage train to an area near the Navy LNO trailer, we spotted a navy lieutenant commander in the darkness with a clipboard -- the sign of knowledge and authority at the terminal. He told us our ULN and told us to check in at the terminal. We did so and everything seemed to start flowing smoothly from there. We immediately palletized our luggage and then were told to come back at 0445 for the gate call. Hurry up and wait.

I went into the Navy LNO trailer, where I previously spent the night just before taking leave last May. I found a hgh-backed chair and caught at least an hour of sleep.

We left Iraq, on time, in the pre-dawn twilight at 0630. As Luke Skywalker mused a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, "I'm never coming back to this planet again..."