Bagram bound.

After about four days of theater in-processing in Kuwait, I was loaded onto a bus and driven to a very large joint Army-Air Force logistics base quite literally in the middle of nowhere, sandwiched between the vast sand dunes and a herd of wild camels.  The practice of good Operational Security (OPSEC) does not allow me to name the exact base or location, but needless to say, the base was crowded and dirty.  Trash tumbleweeds bounced end over end down the alleys and sheets of sand were drifting across the broken slabs of packed crushed stones and mortar that made up the few marked roads on the base.  People were hustling in all different directions carrying bags and body armor; some were headed to or from Iraq, others to Afghanistan, and others still to parts of Europe or on to the United States.  Flights from this airport are all military transport and cargo craft.  

There were probably more civilian contractors waiting for flights than military personnel; most of these are easily identifiable by the same ridiculous de facto uniform: tan, suede desert combat boots, rip-stop tan cargo pants, a dark polo shirt with all the buttons undone, and a company id badge swinging from there neck on a lanyard.  Additionally, almost all of them have a goatee and black polarized Oakley sunglasses.  If you can imagine a whole drone army made of carbon-copy replicons of this purely stereotypical, but also true-to-life, very accurate phenotype; that’s what’s running around in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, each making well north of $200k a year, fighting America’s wars on behalf of the US taxpayer’s wallet.  This is most likely why America is broke; but I digress…

The base in Kuwait was sprawling with military passengers and cargo traveling every which way.  Flights more often than not run late, or sometimes, not at all.  Flights are cancelled, re-routed, reprioritized or simply delayed for no other reason than the local national driving the bus to and from the tarmac to the terminal wants to stop and smoke a cigarette half way down the aircraft taxi-ramp.  As many travelers are denied their assumed seat on any number of flights, there are literally people who live in tents at the airport waiting, upwards of a week, for a flight with an available seat to take them to their next stop.  To accommodate these stranded travelers, a shanty town of hundreds of tents was erected by the Army; upwards of twelve strangers to a tent, underneath the parachute-cord braces that barely hold down the raggedy, wind torn, sand  and dust covered shelters.  I stood in awe watching one groan under the strain of a gust of wind.  In the back of my mind, I think I was secretly hoping for that Mary Poppins moment when the ground stakes would break off and the whole thing would be swept away to some magical Arab land of Oz.

My flight was cancelled.  I was facing the horror of being stuck in that place for an undermined amount of time, possibly sitting in this traveler’s purgatory/refugee camp for a few days.  As I was both cursing the Air Force and simultaneously trying to convince myself that spending a week there would only make a more resilient person in the long run, thankfully a new flight was added in the late evening and my name was on the flight manifest. 

Mashed into the body of a military cargo plane, lost in an amoeba of sand and mud colored uniforms, only broken by the occasional unbuttoned polo shirt clad contractor, we made the three and a half hour flight from the Kuwaiti desert to Bagram, Afghanistan.  The flight, as the crow flies, should only be a little over an hour, but Iran sits dead square in the flight path, and as they do not allow overflight of US military aircraft, the flight had to take a rather lengthy, circuitous route to its destination.  The wheels touched down to a hazy, cloudy night in the very early morning hours.  After getting my bags off a pallet in the receiving passenger terminal, my command sponsor met me and took me back to my quarters on a small, rather secluded part of the base.  Still partially on east coast time, partially on Kuwaiti time and in a strange new place, I found it nearly impossible for the remainder of that night-as well as the next day, and still the day following to fall asleep and stay there.  As it was still very dark in the mountains (Bagram sits in a small mountain valley in the Hindu Kush mountains in Parwan Provence, northeast Afghanistan at about six-thousand foot altitude, surrounded by snowcapped, towering mountains soaring to over twenty thousand feet),  I could see almost nothing-but hear and smell almost everything in a twisted, compensatory quid-pro-quo.  Strange screams of darkened combat aircraft taking off into the night from the flight line, smells of evergreen trees artfully blended with the waft of fermenting garbage, and the sounds of large diesel trucks crunching over loose gravel made the first nights long and the daylight hours longer still-trying to absorb all the instructions of my new bosses and learn enough of my job to stand on my own feet before my sponsor leaves for home and, all with a mild case of altitude sickness and sleep-deprived bloodshot eyes.