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The military is an honorable institution that is plagued by bureaucracy, statism and the mentally lazy. On my way home for two weeks R&R (rest & relaxation) I am suddenly reduced from being a talented, mentally stable master technician to the status of lowly herd animal.
It begins with a helicopter trip from LZ Washington to BIAP. You may be asking what that means. I did the first time someone mentioned the departure and destination points. LZ Washington is landing zone Washington, the premiere departure and ingress point for those who have business in the International (aka Green) Zone, located in the heart of Baghdad. BIAP is, of course, Baghdad International Airport, which is currently less of a traditional international airport and more of a giant military hub. There are two ways to leave the Green Zone, by road or by air. Air is the faster, less inconvenient and less dangerous of the two, statistically speaking. So LZ Washington to BIAP via Catfish Air is how I started my R&R.
When you depart LZ Washington for BIAP you make a combat takeoff and zoom low over Baghdad. The trip is amazing. There are plenty of signs that there is strife taking place below. I saw at least two Iraqi police caravans winding their way through the giant maze that is Baghdad, sirens blazing and flashers flashing. More interesting to me though, were the signs of building taking place. We passed over slum areas, but we also passed over a myriad of construction projects. Many of these were private residences, some of them opulent. I saw lots of commerce taking place below me, lots of bustling activity and people carrying out their daily lives. No sign of the media’s wished for civil war were evident from the air. I’m sure things look different from street level, and that bad people are still moving about plotting evil, but they certainly aren’t choking the lifeblood of the city of Baghdad – the heart of Iraq. I saw no signs of an eminent myocardial infarction.
For some reason, nameless bureaucrats somewhere have decided that the likelihood of my abusing the responsibility of having weapons is vastly magnified when I am placed into any type of flying vessel. Before you can go on leave you must surrender all your weapons and spend seemingly interminable hours of unarmed waiting in various areas around BIAP. Once you are actually at BIAP and only hours from departure, you’ll find yourself in the midst of milling crowds of mildly irritable or completely indifferent but also disarmed military personnel from all branches as well as lots of seemingly randomly placed civilians.
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The BIAP waiting area is a small covered cement field with picnic tables surrounded by a huge field of what appear to be stream worn rocks. The one cardinal rule of the BIAP waiting pen is stay away from the rocks. The bureaucrats who run the place are obsessed with not allowing people to lie on or sleep on the rocks. Every five minutes, an announcer reminds everyone not to lie on the rocks, sleep on the rocks, or enjoy the rocks in any way.