BAGHDAD -- Never again will I complain about the inconvenience and discomfort of airports and civilian airline travel delays. You won’t either if make your way from Kuwait to Baghdad in July during a war.
Military planes leave Kuwait every couple of hours for Baghdad International Airport (or BIAP, pronounced BIE-op). The United States Army’s media liaison in Kuwait dropped me off at the airfield so I could take a flight “up.”
I waited twelve hours in a metal folding chair in a room full of soldiers who, for obvious reasons, had priority over me for available seats.
At least I had a meal. On the other side of the base a McDonalds and Pizza Hut were tucked inside trailers supplied by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR). KBR seems to have built almost everything here that the military uses as housing and storage. Out of plywood, plastic, and sheet metal they construct instant aesthetically brutal outposts of America, which somehow look and feel specifically like outposts of Texas.
I ordered a pizza from a Pakistani employee at the Pizza Hut trailer and paid with American dollars. They don’t use coins on the base. They don’t even have coins on the base. If your food costs, say, $5.75 and you pay with six dollars, you’ll get a small round cardboard disk or chit that says “25 cent gift certificate” on it as change.
All night I waited for a flight and was bumped again and again by soldiers on their way to places like War Eagle, Victory, and Fallujah. Finally I got on a manifest and gathered around a gruff barking sergeant with everyone else.
Good stuff. Why is it that 5 years into this thing, we still can't get first hand reporting like this from the MSM?
Not surprising since a great deal of these outposts were built right here in Texas. The company that built them was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time and sadly has since filed.
American military bases like redneck villages? There's something oddly fascinating about it.
At Tallil, the trailers we lived in arrived right before the Alabama Army National Guard. I didn't take it personally...
His post about peace on Baghdad seems a bit out of sync with CENTCOM
I like reports from Totten and Yon. Nothing like going there yourself, unless it's having a reliable witness go there for you.
We're living in a fool's paradise in the west. We think if we leave them alone, they'll leave us alone. But they won't, and deep down we know it--although we deny it vociferously. No, 9/11 was just a foretaste of what's gonna happen if we do what Obama or Hill want us to do.
Baghdad today, like it is now, will seem like paradise for future Parisians, Londoners, New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Chicagoans if we let our wishful thinking trump our hard-ass realism.
Cities will burn, and I don't mean cities in Iraq, Lebanon, or Pakistan.
Michael, just be glad you're not an Iraqi trying to "visit" Jordan! Check this out:
http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/07/iraq_report.php
Bring your "busman's friend". ;)
So a bit to hot for you there Mike ?
Perhaps you might write a story on what it is like for Iraqis to live there with ONE hour of electricity per day ?
"but the country as a whole is defined by heat, not war, at least in the summer"
perhaps the US should have surged 30,000 extra air conditioners instead of combat troops. whatever were we thinking?