Dust Devil

Day two of decompression at Gateway. I slept through breakfast courtesy of ear plugs and eyeshades. I think I slept for over ten hours. I grabbed coffee and a doughnut at the local Green Beans and the retired to the MWR Tent to watch TV but really play on the laptop. There is a reasonably priced wireless Internet service which I am using to post blog entries and do email on.

As I walked back to the tent, looked up and saw the tallest dust devil I have ever seen. It was easily 200-300 feet tall.

My God, it's full of stars

Back at Camp Victory, the night we left for BIAP, we had to stop at the Perfume Palace to pick up a driver who would return the borrowed truck after dropping us off at the passenger terminal. Joe rushed inside and I took to repacking our gear so someone could fit in the back seat. That only took a few minutes. When I finished, I noticed how dark it was. The palace sits astride one of several man-made lakes. The lake in this case is completely walled in and devoid of light towers. It was really dark. I looked up and saw stars, the kind you see only in, well, really dark skies. Above me, spanning many degrees of arc, was magnificent Orion. I hadn’t so much seen a constellation in Baghdad. I hadn’t seen this one, well, before leaving the US. And here he was, familiar from my youth, looking down on me. Perhaps a harbinger, pointing the way home.
Using a trick I learned as a child, I looked just askance at the three faint stars that make up his sword. While not directly looking at it, I could just make out the middle star, which really isn’t a star at all but spectacular nebula, the Orion Nebula, a cloud that would span the distance of many of our own solar systems, a giant stellar nursery where stars are being born.

As I continued looking around the sky I saw Canis Major, Orion’s faithful dog following just behind and to the left of Orion, the tight star cluster of the Pleiades, which are so young, the dinosaurs didn’t see them, and the familiar W shape of Cassiopeia. All familiar from my childhood, all now visible on my last night in Baghdad. Directly overhead, I noticed two brightly flashing strobes, not stars, but manmade anti-collision lights. A moment of confusion because there was no sound of an aircraft engine. As I looked more closely, I saw the dark outlines of a tethered aerostat floating silently above me like some bespoke German dirigible.

In addition to the dark, it was also preternaturally quiet. No helicopters, jets, or Prowler UAVs overhead. No whine of diesel engines from HUMVEEs or tracked vehicles. Just quiet and dark. Maybe even peaceful.

Presently, my revelry was interrupted by voices drawing near attached to two moving shadows: Joe and our driver. Time to go. See you soon, I whispered to the stars.

Gateway Again

We landed around 0800 at Ali as Selem Air Base in Kuwait. This was my third time here and by now the mechanics were familiar: we boarded waiting buses for a fifteen minute drive to US Army Central Gateway Operations (Gateway bears a disturbing resemblance to Mos Eisley Space Port from Star Wars minus the cantina, of course). We offloaded from the buses and scanned our ID cards at the inbound operations tent, recording our arrival. We checked in with the Kuwait Navy LNO’s office where a representative told us we were to arrange for a temporary tent, store our gear and hang tight for a two day wait before proceeding to Camp Arifjan for Warrior Transition Program. The down time is designed as part of the demobilization/redeployment process to “decompress.”

Miraculously, all my bags arrived on the luggage pallet which we broke down. I was assigned senior officer’s tent quarters along with several others in my group. We even were offered the services of a camp Gator vehicle, a type of ATV, to haul our heavy sea bags and suitcases to our tents. (Presumably, once one gets away from the high concentrations of general/flag officers and colonels in Baghdad, field grade rank actually begins to matter again.)

I checked out some linen, made by bed and promptly fell asleep. Yeah, decompression.

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..."

Route Irish

The MRAP convoy rolled westwards to Camp Victory along Route Irish, once dubbed, “the most dangerous road in Iraq.” Not so anymore; that distinction likely belongs to some other Main Supply Route up in northern Iraq, near Mosul.

On the various occasions I had to convoy between the International Zone and Camp Victory throughout my year-long tour, I noticed a subtle transition along Route Irish. Little by little it began to look less desolate, less deserted, more lived in. No more was that echoed than on this last transit. Once bleak concrete retaining walls now were brightly painted with geo-metric and middle-eastern designs. Actual billboards dotted the route here and there for cellular telephone services. Everywhere construction gangs worked on the median, clearing the open fields that a year ago were akin to no man’s land. Overhead highway spans were being repaired, heavy construction vehicles, Iraqi civilian traffic all along the route. I even saw a man on a bicycle.

Things looked better.

Leaving the International Zone

After a flurry of surprisingly frustrating packing-throwing-things-away-giving-things-away-sending-boxes-home I stood ready on 9 Oct to leave. I would take the midday Rhino convoy from the International Zone to Camp Victory. I was to be picked up by another Navy colleague who also was redeploying and who with I would spend the night with.

My co-workers were depressed and went out of their way to tell me so. I don’t know if that made me feel good or bad (a little of both). I too was a little melancholy. Looking back on photos from my early on in my deployment, none of the current crew were around. Still, they all seem amalgamated into a collective whole that I remember fondly. After a last lunch at the Palace DFAC (we ate outside) my teammates and I went to my CHU to get my bags. They consist of: two issue sea bags full of gear I will need to turn in when I get to Kuwait, a large DCU back pack (for my laptop and other miscellany) and a large rolling suitcase.

We walked the bags over to the North Ballroom of the Palace and waited around for the Rhino show-time in the early afternoon. I did some last minute emails and phone calls related to my current planning project. I looked at my watch and announced, “well, it’s about that time, gents.” We started gathering my bags. To my surprise, the army colonel who runs our Plans shop shouldered the heaviest sea bag. I said, “Sir, you don’t need to carry that,” but he said, “you carried our burden, now we’ll carry yours.”

As I made my way to the office door, my teammate, Al said in a booming voice heard throughout the ballroom, “Call it out! Commander, U.S. Navy, de-par-ting!” which is the custom when a senior officer leaves a ship in port.


As a group we walked the short distance from the north end of the Palace to the Rhino staging area. When we arrived everyone stood around chatting and laughing waiting for the Rhino convoy. We took one last picture as the convoy arrived and I shook everyone’s hand and saluted all.

Very bittersweet. From within armored confines of a new MRAP, we drove away.

On the road ...

Leaving the IZ today. More posts to come when I find Internet connectivity in Kuwait.