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Stuck
outside of Baghdad with the Fallujah blues again
Gordon,
Camp Fallujah, Dec. 6, 1:20 p.m.
We
arrived back here last night after what could only
be termed a hard-luck weekend.
We
left Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, home of the
coalition air forces headquarters in the Middle
East, on Friday, hoping to get here by helicopter
within a couple days. We were eager to get back to
the Marine Expeditionary Force because the Marines'
area of operations includes some of the toughest
regions in Iraq, even after the recapture of
Fallujah.
But
through a series of unfortunate events &emdash; I
won't bore you with the details, other than to say
they don't make me look too smart &emdash; my
laptop and some of our other electronic equipment
ended up on the losing end of a confrontation with
a Ford Explorer. While not quite fatal to our
efforts here, losing that equipment meant things
instantly got a lot harder &emdash; not to mention
the fact that I was responsible for the destruction
of a few thousand dollars' worth of my employer's
property.
So,
as we sat waiting for a helicopter ride from Camp
Victory, near Baghdad, to Camp Fallujah, I sat in
the cold contemplating the depressing facts.
Appropriately, one of the helicopters set to take
us here had a maintenance problem, so a flight
scheduled to leave around midnight was still
sitting on the ramp, and we were still shivering in
the winter chill at 3:30 a.m.
Then
a funny thing happened. I stumbled into a
conversation with someone who not only provided a
valuable reminder that the military is made up of
all sorts of folks, but told a story that made it
truly difficult to be depressed about anything.
We
had met him a few days before, an Air Force captain
with an interesting military background &emdash;
prior enlisted service, a couple of breaks in
service, studied at lots of interesting schools and
interesting assignments. He and Lloyd shared
stories of spots in Jordan and Egypt they both had
visited, comparing notes on local dishes and
reviews of cut-rate lodgings.
Saturday
night, as we awaited the helicopter flight that was
not to be, he strolled up, pack on his shoulder,
hoping to board the same flight, aiming for a camp
near Ramadi. In between updates on the maintenance
situation, we struck up a conversation on the edge
of the darkened helicopter landing pad unlike any
I've ever had with someone in uniform. I won't
share his name &emdash; we weren't ever in
notebook-out, on-the-record mode, and besides, he's
an intelligence officer, and those folks tend to
shy away from that sort of attention.
He
told stories &emdash; and he was a fine
story-teller &emdash; about his job in a Manhattan
art gallery, and of the joy of placing his own
watercolors in a gallery for the first time, with
an art dealer in Texas. He smiled broadly while
describing his hopes of landing a spot as an Air
Force Academy instructor after his deployment here.
And he told, with just the proper degree of drama,
of a flight in the days before the 2003 invasion of
Iraq, when the reconnaissance plane he was aboard
was briefly chased by an Iraqi MiG fighter.
Mostly
he talked about his children: his young son's
wrestling matches with their giant dog, and the
story of their daughter's adoption &emdash; one
that would get you laughed out of town if you
pitched it to a network movie-of-the week producer.
Military
men and women &emdash; men in particular, perhaps
&emdash; fit into a pretty narrow band of public
perception. English-degree-holding,
watercolor-painting intel officers don't really fit
anywhere in that band. It was a valuable reminder
that there are all sorts of fascinating people
here.
By
4 a.m., when we gave up on the night's flight and
headed back to the base's temporary lodging tents,
I still didn't have a laptop, and I wasn't sure how
we were going to tackle that problem. Somehow,
though, I was a lot less depressed than I should
have been. Amazing the difference one enlightening
conversation can make.
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