The Retreat

Initially the adjustment to this deployment has been a bit difficult for me. Everything about the station in Tikrit is very different from my last deployment to Baghdad, for better or for worse. I loved the assignment is Baghdad because it was very urban. The Victory Base Complex, made up of multiple smaller bases was international and bustling, the hub of military affairs in Iraq. The base contains a number of Saddam's beautiful palaces and the artifical lakes and canals provided for an unusual reprieve from the desert landscape.

The Red Cross office in Baghdad was also it's own entity. We had our own trailer with canteen space for a flat screen t.v. with a viewing area and a library, we had several phones available to servicemembers and an internet cafe. My evening shift was always the busiest in terms of emergency communications messages to relay and people trafficing the canteen.

Tikrit is very much a remote, country base that has a small town ambiance. Our office and miniature canteen are located in the MWR (Morale, Wellness and Recreation) Building which is also shared with nearly a dozen more offices. We only offer 2 DSN phones and do not have a lot of service to offer, plus the space is seriously limited (12x12 ft). I guess the best way to describe it is that there's no sense of ownership of the space. We are one of many in a communal building and with the MWR upstairs the basically over all the morale needs you could want. There are also almost never any "incomings" which for my own personal safety is a benefit, but they made the deployment in Baghdad feel more real.

It's not necessarily that I'm unhappy, it's more that for a girl that was raised in Chicago and DC I'm used to a fast-paced enviornment with bustle and action. Tikrit feels like a country retreat.

Luck of the Irish

Iraq! So good to be back in the dusty barreness. By the luck of the Irish we arrived in Tikrit on Tuesday (yesterday) after a rather tumultous trip from Ft. Benning, GA.

Our flight departed Ft Benning on Friday afternoon a few hours earlier than the last time I left for the Middle East. My spirits were high as the first 6.5 hour flight, the 6 hour layover in Ireland and the second 6 hour flight passed by painlessly. I should have known that nothing involving Iraq and the military can be so seemless.


When we arrived in Kuwait City on Saturday night, we took the familiar blackout convoy to Ali Al Salem base where it was confirmed than our team was NOT manifested for a flight to Tikrit. Lovely. As we watched the teams around us depart for their respected stations (Baghdad, Balad, Bagram & Kuwait) we became passengers traveling on the dreaded Space A list. Essentially this is like flying standby in the commercial world, but unlike United, American & Delta, in the military world people who are mission essential or who out-rank you bump you off the list for standby spots. To top it off, it rained off and on the entire night and our ridiculously heavy duffel bags were piled up outside and we were to exhausted to schlep them inside!


So there was a flight out that Sunday morning at 0500 which we waited up for all night to find out we didn't qualify for a standby seat. We then had to wait another hour and a half to make the accountability roll call before we could head to billeting and receive bunks in a tent for our impending wait at Ali Al Salem. If you recall from the last deployment, there are 16 people in a tent with no pillows or bedding, you have to perpetually guard your belongings from theft and the lights are on 24/7. I slept on the airplane pillow I snagged from the flight and my poncho liner which spreads out like a blanket. I then took every piece of cloth I owned, T-shirt, towels, sweatshirt and strung them up around the bunk (thank heavens bottom) to cave out the light.


I slept amazingly from 7:30am to 3pm, got up, showered and the team went to dinner at 5:00pm. We then headed back to the terminal tent for another roll call and discovered we had a shot at getting on a flight at 3:00am. So I slept from 9:00pm to 1:30am and was back at the terminal at 2:30am. They announce there are 15 standby seats available. Hallelujah! We check out of our tents, drag our duffels back to the terminal to wait for the flight briefing at 4:00am. At that time we palatized our bags (assembled them to be loaded on the plane) and went back for our last briefing at 5:30am. 5:30 rolls around...."Ladies and gentleman there's been a change of plans. The flight to Al Sahara has been scratched." :-(


Alas. Back to billeting. Back to the tent. Back to sleep. Later that evening we went to chow again and showed up at 8:30pm for the accountability roll call. At that point we learned that the team currently in Tikrit was able to space block us (reserve us) a flight for the next morning! Wahoo! The flight wasn't until 9:30am and the prospect of a good chunk of sleep was exciting for all, but sure enough, I was wide awake at 4:30am, my body's sleep schedule too messed up to understand I could get more than a few hours.


We got off easily enough on our flight and to top it all off, we ended up sharing the fly with the USO's celebrity tour guests, a contingent of WWF and WWE wrestlers! Greg "The Hammer" Valentine, Jimmy "Mouth of the South" Hart, Brian Knobbs and then two female wrestlers SoCal Val and Traci Brooks flitted around taking pictures and cracking jokes. It was hilarious to watch them travel with us on a C-130, a totally legit military flight. The Hammer looked too stoned to know he was in a war zone, the girls periodically reapplied their lip gloss and Brian Knobbs kept raising his eyebrows and winking at me. All and all a great way to cap off the crazy last 4 days.


We've been in Tikrit about a day and a half now and it's extremely different than Baghdad...night and day, but I'll save that for my next entry. Thanks for reading!

Debacles

Just a short note to say that after a very uneventful trip to Kuwait, I am now stuck at a military base just outside of Kuwait City until further notice due to a series of debacles. I am safe and well, but am living in a tent with no bedding where there are 16 other bunks, the lights are on 24/7, I am in dire staights for clean clothes living out of duffel bags and we are in the midst of sand storms.

Such is the nature of the assignment (and truth be told I am perfectly content minus the Jumangi sized mosquitos) but we have no timeline on when we might be heading to Iraq!

More to come...

A New Beginning: The Breeze at Ft Benning

Hello! 

Thank you for stopping by to check out my blog and read about my travels. I am about to begin my second tour to Iraq as an Assistant Station Manager for the American Red Cross. I will be stationed in Tikrit for this assignment from mid March 2009 to the end of July 2009.

When I began blogging about my first deployment I sort of breezed over the week spent at Ft Benning in preparation for deployment overseas. This time I wanted to start my adventure from where it begins at the Conus Replacement Center (CRC) Ft Benning, GA. Although I am not going to go into too much detail about the week spent at the CRC, suffice it to say that my experience the second time around could not have been more different than the first, and I say that with a smile of relief on my face.

In part, I know the ease of this past week came from knowing what to expect and how to cope, but I cannot discount the cool, calm, collected attitudes of the team leaders on this deployment. Their patience, self assurance, and go with the flow mentality has made what was a hell week my first deployment, a cinch this second time around. The days at Ft Benning can be long and tiresome, filled with hours of paperwork, vaccines, computer based training and a lot of "hurry up to wait" but here we are nearly done and the week was a breeze.

If this week at Ft Benning is any indication of how my coming deployment will be I am more than ready for it to start!!!

Where the Ocean Meets the Sky

Greetings from Stockton, IL population 2000 not including the cows!

I arrived safely in the U.S. on Sunday morning and still in one piece to my parents home on Monday night. I have to confess I will never again complain about TSA or traveling commercially again. Traveling home from Iraq was hands down the most physically and psychologically exhausting experiences of my life!

First off, I mentioned that my shift had been rearranged and I was now starting work 4 hours earlier. This was extremely unfortunate for me because much as I tried to force myself to bed earlier, I just could not fall asleep. My body couldn't understand why were were doing to sleep during the "day" so I went into this marathon of traveling already sleep deprived. Last Wednesday after 3 hours of sleep we met at 7:00am to pick up our three 70lb duffel bags from our rooms, ran some necessary errands and then convened at the Red Cross office until it was time to leave for the airport. We made the airport run in two shifts because we couldn't fit all 12 duffels in the car. I ended up passed out on the canteen couch while most of this was going on, but around 11:30 my team leader roused me and said we were off to the airport.

I should emphasize that for security reasons the military is frustratingly vague regarding your departure time and flights are always "subject to change."  For this flight I believe we left around 4:30pm after waiting about 4.5 hours. We were in our body armor and Kevlar helmet which is always an enlightening experience (okay, more like encumbering-the flack vest weighs 35 lbs and the helmet is so heavy you have to fight to keep you head straight).

We flew in a C-130 to Kuwait which was sort of fun. Once in Kuwait we were bussed in a black out convoy to Ali-Al Salem military base. From there we checked in, made sure we were on the manifest for our flight back to the States on Saturday and then we checked into billeting and hauled our insanely heavy duffels to our tent. This was another highlight of the extravaganza home. They issue you one bunk in a dusty 16 person tent. I should clarify that Al Al Salem is fondly called "Tent City" because it is a transient camp. The mattress is rubber and you are issued no bedding: no sheets, no pillow, no blankets! So all of us pulled out anything we had to compose a make-shift bed. To top it all off, the lights are supposed to be on 24/7 so travelers arriving during the night can claim their bunk.

It's safe to say that combined Thursday and Friday nights I got maybe 5 hours of poor sleep. I was really starting to shut down psychologically because the experience was so exhausting and overwhelming it was the only way I could make it through.  All day Friday we sort of futzed around and waited for the other Red Cross teams to arrive. Friday night 4 of the 5 teams had dinner together for the first time since we departed Ft Benning on the Fourth of July.

I was up at 0430 on Saturday morning, showered and hauling my duffels to the customs folks by 0530.  There was a flight briefing at 0700 and it turns out that we were redeploying with a unit from Ft Dicks which pretty much filled the plane to capacity, After several hours of waiting we were eventually called in groups to take our duffels through Navy customs and I have to tell you this was nightmarish. Not only was it hot and I was a zombie, but you are forced to haul your duffels through a line that takes almost an hour and then you are made to dump out the duffels you so meticulously packed in front of a customs officer you sifts through everything including your underwear to make sure you are not smuggling knives or guns or war trophies back to the U.S. This was such a demoralizing process and after he's gone through your stuff, you load all your gear and equipment and personal belongings into giant plastic bins and repack your duffels rapido.

Once this was over we proceeded through security to another part of the base where we were held in lockdown with almost no information on our flight. By this time I was so tired that I felt ill and like I said, I just had to shut everything off and go through the motions to make do. We entered lockdown around 1:00pm and sometime around 5:00pm were were in formation and on another blackout convoy to some undisclosed airport location. The ride to the ariport was almost 2 hours and I mercifully passed out. Then we were boarding the plane and I was thanking heaven I got an aisle seat. The first flight was about 5.5 hours and I was awake for most of it. Then we had an hour and a half layover in Germany and then another 9 hour flight of which I mostly slept. We landed at McGuire Air Force Base at 4:00am and dropped off the Ft Dicks bunch and had another 1.5 hour layover and FINALLY we had a two hour flight to Ft Benning and arrived somewhere mid-morning. The suffering wasn't over yet!

We disembarked and headed to the airport hanger where an Army band greeted us and then there was a no-nonsense ceremony welcoming us back. However, we then proceeded to fill out more paperwork and we were bussed to CIF, the facility that distributed all our military gear. Thus began another 3 hour nightmare where we were made to unpack our duffels again and this time stand in line to turn in the 100lbs of military gear we received. This was a painstaking process not only because there were 130 of us, but also because if you didn't turn something in or is the worker marked your form wrong, you are made to pay for the gear! I made it out of there around 1:00pm and took the bus back to the Conus Replacement Center at Ft. benning. I was issued billeting in the barracks (this time with bedding!) and thankfully snagged a bottom bunk. 

By this time I was on my 10,000th wind and I couldn't sleep so I took a blissful shower (after 3 days of disgustingness) and played on the internet until it was time for dinner when my friend an dI decided to head to the bowling alley for drinks and dinner. Although the prospect of having a drink after 4.5 months of abstinence was exciting, we ended up practically falling asleep at the bar and thus were back in bed by 9:00pm.

The next morning we were up and packing. There was a briefing at 11:00am where we were given our individual flight itineraries home. We then boarded a coach bus and were shuttled to the Atlanta Airport where my flight left at 4:50pm. Mom met me at O'Hare when my flight arrived at 6:30pm and I back home by 10:00 that evening!

Sorry for the lengthy entry, but since you've traveled this adventure with me I felt I owed it to you to do the ending justice. I know I've said this many times, but thank you for everything for sharing this experience with me. Knowing you were there, even in spirit, made the lonely and dark times so much more bearable. Thank you also for your courage in supporting me. It's not east to stand by as someone you care about puts themselves in danger, but you had the strength to stand by and raise me up.  

Until Tikrit....

Redeploying Part II

I mentioned earlier that we did the medical portion of the redeployment process. This morning, at 0930 (which is almost exactly in the middle of my "night") we completed the second part to this process, essentially a lecture on what you can expect when you redeploy. And again, just as with the almost flippancy of the medical requirements, we breezed through a slide show in less than a half an hour on the following: breakdown of marriages, how to get to know your spouse and kids again, the warning signs of suicide, do not rape, do not drink excessively and make sure you file your taxes. It was the oddest smattering of information on topics which are incredibly profound and seriously affect so many of the servicemembers, but it's done in such a desensitized fashion.

I guess just as I relay news every night of deaths, illnesses, assaults, suicides and disasters with the practiced efficiency of a mortician, so does the military out process it's soldiers with the same mechanized expediency. 

I confess that I am passionately starting to miss the 100 degree weather. It's now raining every few days and it's almost like the terrain here just doesn't know what to do with water.  There are giant standing puddles that have this greenish film on them (probably from the oil-rich earth- have I mentioned that oil seeps up from the ground here? It's why we spread gravel on the earth).  It's still pleasant during the day, but at night it's getting quite chilly, to the point that I am wearing long pants, sweat shirts and the walk to and from the latrine is not fun. 

Here's a classic story for you--last night I got off of work, went to the chow hall with the plan to bring my food back to my room, eat, and then head to the gym. Well, as I am walking from the car to my CHU in the blackness I happen to step into one of those filmy pools of filth and I found myself ankle deep in muck. So balancing my dinner, I haul my caked feet back to my room, peel off my shoes and socks, and in sandals, trudge to the latrine. I then have to thoroughly douse my shoes in hot water to clean them of the crude so now the gym is out because my shoes are drenched.

I walk back to my room, take a hanger and start finagling with the air conditioner to rig my shoes so that they hang and absorb the air pressure. Then, because I am cold and because I think hot air will dry them faster I switch the unit from AC to heat. Well after several seconds there is a pungent burning smell and I casually think it's just from the unit transitioning from AC to heat. 10 seconds later my smoke detector starts screeching it's batteries out!!! So I starting tossing photos off my night stands, mount one on top of the other and balance on them until I can reach the smoke detector and silence it's screaming.  So I ended up trapped, shoeless, in my burnt-smelling room listening to my smoke detector chirp every 45 seconds until it tired out. Now that's a rocking Saturday night ;-)