Iraq!

Well I finally arrived in Iraq. That's about as specific as I can be because honestly I don't even know what day of the week it is or what the date is without looking it up online on my blog or somewhere else. Weekends have no meaning here (not that they did back home either, when I worked on crew) so it's hard to keep track of days.

In Qatar we got about 30 minutes notice that our flight was coming in, so we rushed to pack and track down everyone, as there are no cell phones or other way of communicating easily. After finally finding everyone and getting checked out of our tent we barely made it to the terminal in time to... wait. It's commonly heard about the military that there is a lot of "hurry up and wait", and it is 100% true. We rushed over there and then waited probably 20 minutes to go to the next stage of the process where we got our gear (Helmet, individual body armor, etc), then went back to the terminal and... waited. Then we got our weapons out of the armory and... waited. Then we emigrated from the country, went to the gate... and waited.

Finally the plane came and we got formed up in a little formation and walked out to it. We rode on a C-130 which is by far the worst plane in the history of the world, at least for passengers. I will never again complain about cramped quarters on a commercial flight or even a sitting next to a screaming baby on a flight. We sat on basically cargo nets, squished together as tight as possible with our helmet, carry-on bags and body armor on. It's a super loud plane (props, not jets), we all had to wear ear plugs so our ears wouldn't be ringing for days afterwards. All together we spent hours and hours of time traveling. That's a lot of hurry-up-and-waiting.



Here are some pictures of when we first got on the plane and were still excited about it and thought it was cool. That lasted about 5 minutes. If I took a picture at the end of the flight you'd see a bunch of really unhappy, tired, cranky, annoyed people. It was fun at the beginning though, I felt like I was about to jump out the back of the plane like in the movies.






Sorry the video is really dark, but it was dark in the plane. That's me waving at the end.

After the flight from hell we finally arrived in Iraq in the middle of the night, and boy was it nice to arrive in this barren desert, war-torn, hostile country of Iraq! Compared to that plane anyway... We did some in-processing, met our supervisors, went to eat at the dining facility, then came to our rooms and went to bed.

I have to go for now, have training all day today. Hopefully tonight I can talk more about the base and my room and what's been going on. I don't have a lot of pictures of the base yet as I've just kind of been getting familiar with things, but I'll get some up eventually.