So, the trip home …
So, now that I’m finally back, in place, got a decent night’s sleep and burned everything I was wearing on the trip in (okay, not yet, but I have the lighter), I can perhaps manage a brief account of the process.
It actually went with decent smoothness, at least on my end, until the very last. We got out of Baghdad relatively quick, and - blessedly - transitioned through the base at Al Asad rather than the one at Kuwait. We’d managed to get out of there in just over a day, and the only real complication came when we were told we’d have to pack our body armor in the standard two-duffels-and-a-ruck … along with the first set of body armor that the Army replaced a year ago but never took back. Much cursing … but, you know, I made it work, because I’ve done this dance a few times already and I’d left some extra space and I knew some tricks, so it got done and we got on the plane and into the air.
(The airliner had one of those big screens that showed our position on a map and our projected flight course. My first question was, Why are we pointed toward Tehran? Fortunately, we turned and swung onto another heading shortly thereafter.)
A positive note was that this time, when we stopped at the airport in Shannon, Ireland, we were allowed a two-drink maximum at the Guiness pub in the terminal. Less positive, with several hundred of us waiting in line, it took me almost an hour to get my first drink. (But, oddly, not much over five minutes when I went back for my second.)
It was six hours to Ireland, and another six hours to the U.S. All good, right? No. At the last moment, weather made it impossible for the pilots to see runway at the Air Force base abutting/consolidated with Fort Dix, so they diverted to the airport at Baltimore. Then, because we were an unexpected international arrival, well before daybreak, we had to sit on the plane for another two hours till customs agents could arrive to check us in. Then sit at the Baltimore airport for another four hours till Fort Dix could send some buses for us. Then another four hours to ride the buses back to Dix.
The diversion threw us monstrously off schedule. We were assigned to barracks, picked up our baggage, turned in our weapons … and that was all we accomplished our first ‘day’ back. It was past 9PM before I got the opportunity to take my laptop to the dayroom and get on wi-fi to check on RemixRedux …
… but that’s a different post.