We flew along the Tigris on the way down (see picture, actually it won't let me, so never mind) and landed at what looked like the only populated area for miles and miles, there is nothing out here and for good reason. We touched down and pretty much pulled off the side of the road (as far as large aircraft go) As in Scotland I immediately remembered the smell when we stepped off the plane, this time it was like football practice in early September when it was really hot, and there was no grass on the field, and you were face down in a ton of dirt with eight sweaty dudes on top of you. I don’t know why they call it the sand box, I haven’t seen a grain of sand yet, its more like dirty gold bond powder with rocks mixed in here and there. (side note on this: I have come to a fork, this stuff gets everywhere and there is no way to defeat it, I can either drive myself crazy trying to clean, or just act like I’m backpacking or in highschool and not care about me or my stuff having a light powder coat of dirt) I also don’t see how anything could live here, plant or animal. I have however seen a few birds around a water pit, and a hole I believe to be dug by a lizard. There are a few “trees” planted along some of the roads that used to be watered, but they are fading pretty dang fast.

This is definitely an Army base and we stand out like sore thumbs in our flight suits and blue PT gear. I heard the population of the base varies from 5 to 10 thousand at any given time, so they have awesome gymS and awesome chow hallS, which serve much better food than I would ever fix and in much larger quantities, you combine these two with an abundance of down time until we get operations set up and I’m gonna see how much weight I can gain in two months. That’s right I said two months, its like a long vacation. We talked to a helo pirate who was here for 15 months, and is now back for 12 (at least that is what they tell him, I wouldn’t be surprised if they extended him longer). My room is nice, it’s a 3 room modular long house on blocks, with two to a room, so my crew has a unit. We have internet and AC with a modular bath house down the way. I have more than everything I could want and anything I don’t have I could get at one of the bases’ BXs. Everything is staffed by TCNs (third country nationals) they can come over and work for $25 a day room and board paid with no vacations. Once they choose to leave they can’t come back. They are all very friendly (speaking extremely basic English) but smile constantly and do whatever they can to help.

Yesterday we toured the base adopting the Army mentality that if you see it, and it doesn’t look like anyone else is using it, you can take it. We’re fixing our place up quite nicely, we’re bored boy scouts looking for screws and pallets.

This morning we started cleaning and setting up what will be our operations HQ in an underground bunker, again very stereotypical of what you would think an Iraqi military station would look like. Also stereotypical of Iraqi AF hangers, they each have a single large patched up hole in the top, precisely put there by some of my brethren in 2003. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be flying for awhile, and as you can tell from the length of this blog we have lots of down time… I have lots of pics to put up tomorrow.