Monday, July 28, 2008
The Rocks Were Soft
Johnny and I put on our battle rattle and walked to the porch, where we’d get a ride to the airport. Our driver, a really nice and helpful guy, had been doing this for five years. He knew all the players at each place where passengers needed to be. His vehicle was the cleanest one I’ve seen in Baghdad.
We got to the terminal, did a bit of negotiating to check in. Did we have official orders? I wanted to say, “No, we just thought we’d fly to an Iraqi air base just for the heck of it.” But I refrained. An hour of waiting in the terminal went by. A top sergeant came and told us we could wait in the terminal because it was cooler than outside. But finally, someone got us and walked us to a large gravel parking lot. We stood around awhile, sweating lightly in the 95-degree night. The IBA battle rattle wasn’t getting any lighter. The company of soldiers we were to tag along with weren’t kitted up. Some were on the ground, relaxing. I dropped my backpack and vest, parked my helmet on the butt of my rifle and lay down on the dusty gravel.
The rocks were soft.
My upper back was on the vest, which was tipped against my backpack. My lower back and the rest of me were on the gravel. I was surprised how comfortable one layer of 511 pants made the hard rocks. I did a quick mental scan of my dorsal area. Nothing felt out of place. Nothing sharp, nothing poked me. I covered my eyes with my long-sleeved arm and let my senses take over.
The ground was comfortable. The air was warm, but not uncomfortable. I smelled something faint, something like flowers. I thought about Iraq’s history a few millennia ago and imagined someone else smelling the same scent. Then I got to the other immediate senses. The breeze was soft, just enough to let me know the air wasn’t still. I heard a vehicle, maybe a pickup truck, drive along the road created by putting k-rails along the edge of the tarmac. The vehicle went further and I heard the constant growl of the generator that powered the single pole of lights where we were.
The lights were too bright to ignore, so I dug my boonie hat out and covered my face. I drifted off to someplace where generators hummed constantly, where breezes made you think of other times, where the lights of the civilian terminal glowed orange, contrasting with the white of the military airport lights. I went somewhere while my body rested on soft rocks.
And the rocks were still soft when Johnny nudged my foot. “Look there.” He pointed to a huge plane. It had parked about 100 yards from us. A ramp was full of orange-jumpsuited prisoners. A steady stream of these guys walked down the ramp and into one of four buses. Pretty soon our helicopters arrived, but the prisoner transfer wasn’t over. As I got into my seat in the helicopter, I saw white-jumpsuited prisoners going up into the plane. I couldn’t count, but I’d guess over 200 got off and 100 got on. Could have been more getting on, but I couldn’t watch because I was treading the tarmac with soldiers 1/3 my age onto our ride to Taji.
This job has a lot of drawbacks but I don’t think I could have paid enough to watch the lit-up ramp discharge humans surrounded by blackness. And then, watch the same plane take on more humans.
The crewman didn’t look old enough to shave. Yet he wore these night vision goggles, and he waved out the plane, presumably at his colleague on the other helicopter.
We lifted off, and climbed to maybe 100 feet, maybe a bit more. To me, it seemed we were skimming the treetops. But I guess we were several hundred feet up. I sat up near the pilot. I saw a hand from the left pilot’s seat play with a touchpad. Every time he did something, the helicopter did something. The lights of Baghdad got fewer, then they got more and more numerous, until they lit up the world below us. I saw a great concentric ring of lights, some white, some orange. This had to be the center of the city. Then they got fewer again. The lights never went away, like they would if we were in the country. Just as I looked at my watch to see how long we’d been flying, I felt a bump. We were here at Taji.
We left the helicopter, following the hand signals of a crewman. We filed out to the edge of the tarmac where we loaded our backpacks onto a truck. Then we walked to the compound where we were briefed. “Smoke only in the designated area. Don’t wake your roommates up- there are 34 to a barracks. The dining facility is there (he pointed and we looked) and the internet café is over there (ditto).” The two civilians (that included me) are in this dorm right here. And one female got a building all to herself.
