Silly

I need to write more, to post more. For all I know what I'm writing is for me and me alone - a soliloquy to a ghost audience. Yet I feel driven to continue with what, already a year ago, was a collection of events transpiring between the members of a new concept team and which today has become a fractal group of individuals each with their own stories and only two of whom speak of it. This idea was my own, to document the deployment of a team send to an American military withdrawal in Iraq. For that reason as well as others, I am compelled to finish this objective and inform. Inform, you reader, even if you are only the voice inside my head...

When L-Word and I traveled to Al Asad, our hopeful final objective in the year of deployment, we had to stop in Balad first. Not for any purpose, just so that as usual our supervisors could keep us under their thumbs. Business as usual in the Army: it is what it is.

We arrived in the afternoon, and hoped to catch an evening flight to Al Asad (which I'll short title, a concept used so often in the Army, as AA). Not that Balad is a bad place; quite the opposite as it is laiden with pools, fast food, movie theaters, and cute Air Force girls. But we wanted to arrive somewhere. Anywhere.

After getting to Balad, L-Word and I split up - I went off in search of College, who had been moved to Balad, and L-Word went to look for our flight arrangements. Seeing College was good, we laughed and joked and cried about how College, myself, and a mutual friend named PowerPoint were the only sane people in Balad. It was true. Meanwhile, L-Word was told that Balad, run by the Air Force and a major air hub for movement around Iraq, had no communication with AA which was run by the Marines and was also a major air hub. L-Word had a flight number, an estimated time of arrival, and a destination. But to the Air Force, the flight did not exist. It didn't come from AA, and it most certainly didn't land at Balad.

Hours later, L-Word gave up trying to understand, trying to call between the two bases and trying to get either one to realize how dumb this situation was. So we retreated from the airport in Balad and went back to our temporary living. Me, I went and sat with College and PowerPoint and drank crappy vodka smuggled into Iraq.

The next day L-Word jumped on phones, calling for flights and I went to the gym. An hour later we had a time, 0100 that evening. The day was spent uneventfully; gripping and grinning to make a good show with people who really mean nothing to me, but with whom such things are necessary. That evening we arrived 4 hours early for reasons unknown, and made a formidable pile of bags, body armor, and people. L-Word and I were accompanied by two interpreters: The New Yorker, and Two-Toned. Two-Toned was new as of the day prior, she got off of the very plane we boarded in Speicher in a huge travel mix-up. She walked off, we walked on, and no one realized because we hadn't ever met. The New Yorker could have been a Sopranos extra: wife beater tucked into shorts with socks and sandals and big orange tinted aviators. I looked for, but never saw, the obligatory gold chain. So the four of us waited in the airport for some notification of a flight or a role call or anything. Nothing happened. At all.

At around 0300, after locating a sandwich shop and eating a few times, we walked away, all of our gear in hand, to try again later.

The next day I went back to social hour with College and PowerPoint, and heard in the afternoon from L-Word that we would be flying the following afternoon. The next morning I went and walked to the pool - the company containing College and PowerPoint was having a pool party. I arrived to find I was not allowed entrance in boots nor with a weapon.

On my return to the battalion compound I was ambushed by Major A-Hole. Riding a bicycle with what looked to be a child's helmet, he blindsided me and demanded to know why I was not at the pool. I pointed out the uniform standards and also that we had an early evening flight away. Major A-Hole laughed and told me it was canceled, and ordered myself and L-Word to the pool. I found L-Word, conveyed the directive, and went to the "party".

It was, after all, the only rational thing to do anymore. Follow the demands of a bicycle riding madman who forced upon us a party atmosphere in the middle of the day rather than allow us to travel away from Balad to complete our mission in Iraq. Silly, I know. But it has always been this way.