Surreal is sitting on a picnic table in the dark in Baghdad with “I’m a Barbie Girl / In a Barbie world / Life is Plastic / It’s fantastic” blaring from a stereo while drinking a mango smoothie and hearing gunshots in the background.

Sorry no pictures for now; I will be getting information soon on what I can and cannot say and what I can and cannot take pictures of.  Once that’s cleared I will be more comfortable posting. 

I know where I’ll be working but not what I’ll be doing.  I’m living on a large piece of land that was formerly Saddam Hussein’s personal property.  Something about it used to be his hunting grounds?  Strange.  Very, very strange.  It’s all very strange. 

It was a very apprehensive 24 hours for me.  I didn’t want to go to sleep last night because I have this completely illogical thought process that tells me that if I go to sleep, tomorrow will come faster.  So I stayed up, packed, and went on the internet for several hours, returning to my tent at 1:30 to be back awake at 3:30 to get ready to go.

I had heard nothing but horrible things about the flight and how unsettling it is.  There was one point in it where the four of us sitting in a row next to each other all jumped to the same position as an infant practicing its startle reflex; we all, without realizing, linked arms with the person next to us to the amusement of the people across from us who apparently had no fear resulting from the fact that we were dropping out of the sky.  I’m not quite so brave, and I was glad that the people on either side of me had the same reaction.  After that, I started breathing and forcing myself to relax and the rest of the ride went much better.  I didn’t even throw up. 

We landed and it felt a few degrees cooler than Kuwait, but still, as I’ve mentioned before, anything higher than 90° makes me want to crawl in a deep freezer and nap until it’s back down to 70°.  We were met at the airport and spent a few hours getting our seabags (I have 3 seabags and a giant backpack and my body armor and my kevlar helmet - I still can’t understand how I can NOT have lost weight yet!) and getting into somewhere to eventually sleep for the night and then we headed to the dining facility (DFAC).  The heat made me not too hungry and that not too hungry feeling was added to by the fact that the meatloaf may very well have been made from camel, because that’s not how meatloaf is supposed to taste.  Cameloaf. 

From there, we got the nickel tour of the area; it was kind of odd driving through Baghdad - although we were in the “Green Zone”, on either side of the tall walls next to us was the city.  We saw some palaces, and a decimated tank, and it was all a little bit too much for my brain to handle so I fell asleep.  I woke up and we were sitting in front of a lake - who knew there were lakes in the desert? - and that ended up being where I will be working for the next 6 months, happily with the one person in the group that I went to training with that I became closest friends with.  We make a great team and I have the feeling the months will fly by with us laughing all the way through. 

For anyone who is wondering about an address, send me an email and I will send it along to you.  And for now?  I’m off to de-sand and de-stink myself once again and then it’s off to la-la land for a good night’s rest.

11. Sorry, Mom, but until you’ve lived in the desert, you just can’t tell me I can’t use Q-Tips.

SO…the rest of the story.  I’ll start with the pictures, since from there it gets long, boring and drawn out and only a handful of people will still be with my by that point.
In pictures…On our way out to the convoy range, I saw my first ever camels! Those little black dots on the horizon?  Those are the camels.

I was all excited to see that, but then we got even closer!  And closer, and closer, until they were right alongside us!

They look a little bit like dinosaurs, don’t they?

We got to the range, and waited and waited until finally, our chariots coming to pick us up:

We drove out to a more remote part of the base and the humvees were parked for the night.

For dinner?  MREs…Meals Ready to Eat.  Dinner in a bag.  A hot dinner in a bag.  Complete with the chemicals to mix to heat it up, and even a nifty bottle of tabasco sauce.

During dinner, some of the guys discovered a friendly! little critter!  just up! on the sand berm!  Look!  What they found!  Beware!  You might not want to!

We went to sleep - sleep well, after that! - in our tents, where we inflated the aforementioned 1/2″ thick (just wide enough to fit under me) air mattresses and inserted them into our mummy-shaped sleeping bags.  I am not a still sleeper; this entire contraption was painful to me:

The first night I slept very fitfully; the second night, I was doped up and didn’t have the capability to move without having been moved by a crane; the third night, I woke up with my mattress on top of me and the zipper underneath me and no way to get out.  So typical.

We’ll just pretend the next day never happened, or the next day even, since I didn’t get pictures of either day, and we’ll just skip right ahead to today.  Up at 3:15, out at 3:45 with everything packed.  5, load the convoy and head out.  Some pictures prior to heading out.

Once the sun came up, we were out…riding through the desert…

Our day, thankfully, didn’t last that long - we were in just as the winds started picking up and boy, was I glad - I thought the sand was bad, but it was nothing until the wind started blowing.  This was a straight shot through the bus windows where we waited…for SIX HOURS…until we finally left back for “home”…wherever “home” is, anyway.

We left on Friday?  I think? for some training in the desert.  High intensity, live fire convoy training.  In the heat.  Our living conditions - a tent.  Unlike our tent on the base, there were no racks.  Just us and our sleeping bags and our “air mattress” (inflated, it’s about 1/2″ thick).  Oh yeah, and the rodents.

The instructor warned us not to have food in our tents, because food attract mice and mice attract snakes, and they’ve killed several cobras and vipers there and they wouldn’t want that to happen.  Uhhhh, yeah.  Imagine our delight in the morning when someone realized that her breakfast bar, which was sealed - nothing she did wrong on her part - head been eaten right through the foil/plastic wrapping.  Checking her backpack, she found a mouse in it.  UGH.  What a way to start things.

Remember just a few days ago when I posted about my dehydration issue?  Well, I was careful to keep drinking water.  I drank and drank, even when I didn’t want to.  I sweat and sweat, even though it was grossing me out and the more I sweat, the more the sand stuck to me like a fly on camel’s poo.  And trust me on that one; I saw them on it.  Despite my drinking plenty of water, the second day there, Saturday, we were out doing trial runs and I was running around, in the desert, when it was 127F/53C outside.  The heat finally got to me and I had to stop because I was starting to feel dizzy; by the time they got to me, a migraine had set in and came forth with the force of the 5-ton truck on our convoy.

We were finishing up by that point, anyway, and when we got back to our classroom, I could only sit with my head down which I’m sure didn’t make the instructor very happy, but I just couldn’t sit up.  One of the corpsmen (medics) that was in the class with me came over and tried to talk to me and it just kept getting worse every time someone said something.  For some reason, even though I’ve had migraines for what, 25 years? - every time I get one I don’t realize I have it until well into it.  I get headaches so often and in such varying degrees of pain that it’s hard to know when it’s a migraine and when it’s not.  However, I always have a point when I realize it, and it was in the classroom that I realized it and told him, and they decided to medevac me.

I think the worst part of all of this was the embarrassment of sitting there in the classroom with people annoyed at you because you’re not paying attention, or wondering why on earth you’re crying, or getting irritated because they have been asked to be quiet, or whatever.  I prefer to have my migraines in the quiet of my bathroom where no one, not even B or the kids, can see me.  Having one in the middle of a group of 25 other people was just as painful as the migraine itself.  Another big part of having my migraines is that I can’t talk.  To anyone.  Much less the 8 very nice people who came to see if I was OK.  I appreciated their concern, but at the time, the sound of their voice and the expectation of my response made me nauseous.

Fortunately, there were a couple of corpsmen there, a couple of which I’ve talked to a few times before, who were very good about things and got me out of there as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, getting me out of there meant getting me into a humvee and going off-roading to get to the nearest medical facility.  Even more unfortunately was that MRE that I had eaten not too much earlier, and eventually I couldn’t take the ride anymore and started throwing up.  In the cardboard box top that they gave me.  Which holds puke as well as a cup made of paper towels holds water.

Once I started throwing up, they started high tailing it - up until then, the driver was being very considerate because he could see how hard it was for me in the car.  But once I started throwing up, they weren’t sure if it was more serious than just a migraine (like from the heat, as well) so they put the pedal to the metal and we drove a whole lot faster the rest of the way.

When we got there, they gave me an IV with Phenergan, which makes me immensely tired, to stop me from throwing up. That was followed by a peanut butter shot of Toradol, which also makes me immensely tired, and another half bag of an IV.  They were pretty sure I wasn’t dehydrated but wanted to give me a little extra just in case.

I have been through this before; I told them that Toradol was what would work on me and I could have pretty much listed everything that would’ve happened 2 weeks ago since I’ve been through all the stuff with medical several times.  What I haven’t been through was the way out in the field.  The medicine works really well but as I said, it makes me immensely tired.  Coupled with the Phenergan, there was no hope for me to stay awake more than 3.7 seconds.  Except that the staff there apparently thought there was?  Because they kept waking me up to ask me questions, and I was aware enough to know that I sounded completely drunk, especially since they’d keep saying “Huh?” every time I answered them.  I guess me being doped up was a good time to discuss preventing future migraines.  And it was also a good time for them to do some neurological tests.  I also guess being drugged has no effect on the nervous system, because my eyes were going two different directions and I was falling asleep sitting up with them telling me to do things like pinch my fingers together, but I still passed.  And then I passed out.  And then I was up again, with them taking the IV line out of me and telling me to hold the gauze over it, and I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about and fell asleep again and found out the next morning that there was blood all over my hand from it.  Looking back, it was all quite comical.

They wouldn’t allow me to go out at all the following day, and that I was to sleep in.  It’s a good thing, too, because that medicine had me knocked out so hard that I didn’t know anyone ever got up until I woke up to someone walking in the classroom I was sleeping in to teach a class?  It took me 2 hours just to get up, brush my teeth, get dressed and put my stuff away, and another 2 or 3 hours before I started coming out of the fog I was in.  Fortunately, that day was not a very eventful day and I didn’t miss any crucial training.  I did some very hard work sitting in the air conditioning and reading my book, though.  I think once I broke a sweat when I couldn’t get two pages unstuck from the tootsie roll I’d gotten on it - the one thing I could stomach from the MREs anymore.

The last day - today - was our final run on the convoys and I was nervous about doing it and having a repeat of the Day of the Migraine, but fortunately, I had a great crew with me and it all went smoothly.  It was hot as hades but I got through it, and I didn’t miss enough to be held back and so with that, I’m officially done with my training and awaiting transportation.  I’m not sure the next time I’ll be able to write, but as soon as I can, I’m sure I’ll be back with more pictures and stories to tell.  Until then, behave yourself, everybody.  Runs with scissors is now officially Runs with M16.

1. There really are camel spiders.

2. Hedgehogs live in the desert?!

3. After 4 days of not washing, you can take out your hair from its bun and it will maintain its shape perfectly.

4. On that same note, using wet wipes to wash yourself after being without a shower for 4 days is like washing down a car that went off roading with a piece of kleenex.  But worse.

5. The scent of a port-a-potty in the desert is like no other scent in the world.

6. Humvees have no shocks.  And they’re held together by 4 bolts.  But damn if those 4 bolts won’t hold up through offroading through the desert!

7.  Army-issued sleeping bags were made for people that are under 5′ tall and as big around as my pinky finger.

8.  I can sleep through 25 people getting up, getting ready, packing, and setting up a classroom inches from my head.

9. If you only sweat on one square inch of your body, the sand will find it and plaster itself to you and only come off after washing yourself four times with a loofah.

10. Once you throw up an MRE, you can never eat another.  No matter what kind it is.

Yuck.  I had hoped that after successfully completing 2 weeks of training in the sweathole that is South Carolina, I would have been able to deal with the heat here.  As I found out today, I was wrong.

I did somewhat adapt to the heat here; at least it doesn’t hurt the way it did the first day.  But I neglected to follow the old adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  Yesterday was a very laid-back day - I started out with a 2.25 mile run (not so laid-back, I know) at 6:30, and then at 8:30 I went back to sleep.  I slept until 12:30, then wandered from air conditioned tent to air conditioned tent.  And as long as I was in the air conditioning and comfortable, I forgot to keep drinking the fluids that I needed to keep up with.  So come today, when we had to muster together at 9:30am and it was already 110°F/43°C, the heat got to me.  I was annoyed at the time that someone called me out and made me sit down and then insisted on driving me over, but apparently I was looking even worse than I felt. 

A few IV bags later and they let me go; I’m just hoping all goes well over the next few days.  These last few days were for acclimating to the environment here, and now today we leave for some intense convoy training - with all of our gear on.  I’m hoping that I can hang in there so we can be done and leave for our ultimate destinations where I will most likely be working in air conditioning and not having to go on convoys.  I hope.

WOW! what a place to spend your birthday… one you will never forget.

Woohoo desert dessert birthday… I would have sent a Strip-o-Gram but,

I don’t have your new address. I love love love you!

BTW… who’s the man on the bus…? Here’s my guess…

Jerry garcia, don’t ya think?

We had to leave very, very early to catch our flight to Kuwait - packed and in the lobby with all of our stuff, ready to board the bus at 4am. The night before was quite restless; most people that I knew didn’t get to sleep until midnight, if not later, just to wake up at 3. Just too many things on everyone’s minds. This was it. There was no turning back from here.

Maybe it was the tiredness; maybe it was because everyone was thinking about everything, but the flight into Kuwait was almost completely silent. Not everyone was sleeping, but everyone was so quiet. It was the first time in the 2 weeks since I’d left home that it’d been that quiet without it being nighttime.

We flew through a beautiful sunrise:

And before we knew it, we were flying over the desert.

The desert is very brown, in case you didn’t know. I was very disoriented at first; we flew over clouds at the beginning of the flight and then they started breaking up into wispy clouds, and in between was light brown. I couldn’t tell if it was just dirty air, or sand. I was told it was sand. It didn’t take long to get to where there were no clouds at all; the landscape was dotted with what I’m assuming were cactuses?, and for some of the time we were over the Persian Gulf. It is a little bit strange to see the desert surrounding a body of water. When we started descending, I could start to make out towns - but they were very unusual looking towns. Maybe it was all the brown, but they sure didn’t look like any town I’d ever seen before.

It looks like a little tiny model town.

We landed and deplaned and the first thing we did was to get to eat since we hadn’t eaten breakfast and there was no water on the airplane. Who sends a group of people into the desert with no food or water? Fortunately, getting to the galley was very fast and there was plenty of food to choose from. When I came out, I was greeted by the golden arches:

Next, to billeting to get our tents. Home sweet home, for a few days, anyway. Oh, and those garbage cans? They’ll melt the skin on your hands if you have to open them.

Tent city - rows and rows and rows and rows and rows of these tents:

Our tent. The tube on top is our AC; as I’ve posted before, when it’s 120 outside, the AC cools it down to a frosty 88. This was right after we got in; no one had settled in yet. The floors are concrete which does help to make it a little less warm, but the problem is the sand is EVERYWHERE so you don’t ever want to take off your shoes or sandals. Even after sweeping, there’s a layer of sand everywhere. And when you do sweep, it brings all that sand dust up and you can taste it in your mouth. There are drifts of sand next to my bed (I’m in that bottom bed right there on the left). The boxes are water - there is bottled water e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. Any major tent you go into has glass cases filled with water. I can honestly say that there will never be reason for me to be dehydrated here! We have camelbaks which you can see on the end of my bed, the tan thing with the tube hanging off the side of the bed. You wear it everywhere and can drink 24/7. I only drink 22/7, because I’m really getting annoyed with having to walk 5 trailers down to go pee at 3:30am.

And the last thing for now is the USO. It’s still being finished but it’s so nice. It’s dim, it’s quiet, it’s got a ton of things to do, and it is ALL DECORATED IN IKEA. Talk about a morale booster.

So who do you think the driver is? I say John Lennon but apparently I’m the only one. It seems Jesus is riding this bus. Huh.