Five Days in Space

I spoke with a lot of people while waiting at LSA/Ali Al Salem for five days and I think I’ve come to an understanding of how Mil.Air “works.” People like me, who are not attached to a squad or who are coming back from R&R are on space available (standby). The planes go to various places taking troops, supplies, and equipment and if there’s room for passengers, we hop on. I got to the terminal at a really bad time since horrendous sandstorms in Kuwait had prevented flights for leaving for four days. Then the sand moved north and the same storms prevented flights from landing in Iraq for four days.

We all wait at the terminal where the flight destinations are shown on a screen along with the projected number of available seats and a call time. Everyone waiting for any flight must show up for accountability roll call at 0630 and 2030 every day. If you do not answer “here” every day at those two times then your name is taken off of the list. If you want to go to a certain location then you show up at the terminal for the roll call for that destination. It’s possible that if it’s indicated that 13 seats are available, there may be none and if it’s indicated that there are 0 seats available, it may change to 20. It’s also common that when you show up to roll call, there’s an announcement that they are still working on logistics and you may have to wait another 60 minutes to see if you can get on a plane. That’s why I slept in the terminal for the better part of five days; show up at 1900 to get a seat for 2030 accountability. The flight board is supposed to change at 2030, but sometimes they announce it won’t be until 2200 so I wait until 2200 and then find out there’s a roll call for a flight to Basra at 2315. At 2315 they announce that they won’t know if there are seats available until 0030, so I wait until 0030 to find out there’s no seats left on that flight, but there’s a roll call for another flight to Basra with 13 spaces at 0230. They call 16 names at 0230 since 3 people did not answer up. (I’m number 18 on the list.) They ask us to wait 50 minutes to see if there are any more names to be called. I wait two hours and then check, and they tell me they didn’t make any announcement because there were no more spaces. By now it’s almost 0500 so I hang around for 0630 accountability. After answering “here” at 0700 (it takes awhile to call 1,500 names) my day of sleeping on large chairs with 80 of my best friends starts again. I’m past caring if I snore, drool, if my shoes are on the furniture or my mouth hangs open.

Some of us did take the bus to the tarmac for one flight. After we waited for 30 minutes they told us the sand storms in Iraq were bad so they took us back to a holding tent where we waited, sweltering, with no ventilation. After two hours we heard the “good news” that our flight had been cancelled. I was put back on the list, but since I was on the manifest for the cancelled flight I had to go back to start and get my order papers approved.

Once I heard them call 30 names for a flight. After standing in line for 10 minutes thinking that they were finally going to get out, they announced “never mind.” That flight did not have space available. One group got on a flight to Baghdad and couldn’t land because the weather was so bad so they had to come back and start over.

Our transportation was a C-130, the huge propeller “workhorse.” We waited onboard for 20 minutes before we could taxi, sitting on side-benches, baking in the desert, wearing 35-pound flak jackets and helmets. I could feel sweat rolling down my back, sides and front, my hair was drenched all the way through (not just on my neck) and my face was dripping.

After waiting the better part of 5 days for a flight, the trip, including taxi, flying, landing and arriving at the terminal was 50 minutes; the distance we traveled was less than 100 miles; I COULD HAVE FREAKIN’ WALKED!

-0o0-

The morning of the day I arrived at LSA the Subway restaurant burned down. We had to close the USO the next day so that they could remove the Subway. They lifted it by crane (over our building) and then drove it away. I'm sure by now the new Subway has been up and running for days.