4/10/2007
1800 Local Time - Well, I've been meaning to write in this thing for a couple of weeks now and am finally getting around to it. What's sad, is we live in such a technical age now, that it is almost foreign to write in cursive when I began this. A lot of things have happened since I've began my third journey to this hellhole called Iraq. I'll start at the beginning. After leaving my family at the airport I realized I forgot to leave my jacket. Even though I've had that jacket (Black w/ white stripes down the arms) for about 8 years and it is my favorite jacket...I tossed it in the garbage because I had no room for it.
The night started off pretty good, we bought some whiskey and mixed it w/ our sodas. You just never know when your last drink will be, fortunately, that wasn't our last drink.
The plane was a MILAIR flight, which just means, it's all coach. Luckily, I had three seats to myself and asked Sims if he wanted to sit in one since he was crushed between two girls.
Pretty uneventful flight but there was some turbulence. Ever since that day Amy, Sean and I came from England on that terrible flight w/ terrible turbulence, I have been very nervous whenever we encounter turbulence. Once we got to Germany, we played the wait game and finally boarded (the same plane) about 2 hours after we got there. I have yet to see more then an airport in Germany.
1810 Local - After Germany, we stopped in Cyprus I think. Not much to say about that since we weren't allowed off the plane and headed to Al Udeid Air base in Qatar. After going through the part I hate most, getting all of our gear and carrying it everywhere, we finally were brought to Camp As Sayliyah. If anyone every says there were "deployed" to this place, you must point and laugh at them. You were allowed 3 beers a night (if the computers went down it would be much more). They also wore civilian clothes on the weekends (if they even worked), massage parlor, Chilis, swimming pool and hot tub on base. The base was a joke, and doesn't even need to be there. It's a resort, and a waste of money. It is so funny how a lowly enlisted man can see so many areas where we could save money. It was here though, we would have our last beers before we really deployed. Fortunately, the computers went down the last night we were there.
I did get to go to Doha while in Qatar, that's where I got the camel bone boxes I sent to Amy, for her and my Mom. The city was in stages of construction but I could tell they were really trying and some day, might even be a very large metropolis area.
After staying in Qatar for about a week, it was time to take a military aircraft to Baghdad. Three hour flight is not something you want to do, but it had to be done. Once there, we went through the whole loading our gear and carrying it everywhere so we could be transported from the airport (BIAP) to Camp Victory.
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