July 2013

(I was scheduled to go on vacation with my wife to the Philippines only a few days after ISIS or Al-Qaida staged a massive coordinated attack on the Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons.)

And here I am watching the small electric shuttle buzz down the narrow path with a payload of Indians in the back as its little spinning light gives warning to the plethora of people from all over Asia traversing its path.  A little white girl laughs as she runs the wrong way on the moving sidewalk, trying to keep up with her smiling mother who pushes a stroller on the other side.  My yellow-fevered mind orders my eyes to track the small inbound targets as they pass– Korean, Filipina, Chinese.  I’m not the only white man in the waiting area for the 3:45 am to Manila, but I’m almost certainly the only one alone and with hair long past his shoulders.  A young woman tries peaking at me with head forward, but after I catch her a couple of times she finally looks away.  The attention is kind of nice, actually.  I rarely get any like I would want back home.

I’ve been here since . . . I don’t know, actually.  It’s been several hours and the lack of sleep –not only during this two-day trip from Taji, Iraq to Manila, Philippines but in the preceding two days– is certainly catching up with me.  Two nights ago I was playing my PS3 when a concussive wave shook my CHU.  I reflexively hit the small brown rug that fills the gap between my room’s TV and bed as boom after boom continued to shake my containerized housing unit and the contents therein.  I heard the sporadic popping of AK47s and machine guns somewhere.  Some of the booms sounded close, so I grabbed my phone and inched my way under my bed.  I figured it might provide slightly more protection and at any rate I felt somewhat more comforted.  I watched the ever-present ants and hard-backed desert-tan insects zig-zag around for awhile until there seemed to be a lull in the attack.

Outside, I discovered the majority of my workmates seeking shelter in the rows of narrow concrete bunkers beside our living area.  A few stood just outside the entrance watching as the Iraqis’ Russian-made helicopters circled the installation.  They mocked and called the one that kept his blinking red warning light on during combat “Rudolph”.  The next couple of hours passed in much the same way.  The explosions became less frequent and more distant as we joked about the seemingly odd behavior of the Iraqi pilots who seemed to use more flares than ammo.  Some of us were a little concerned when the heavily British and African contract security force made a perimeter around our living areas well within the base, but we were soon assured that it was all a part of protocol.

We were eventually allowed to return to our rooms, but the fighting continued sporadically until morning.  An explosion somewhere interrupted my quiet shower time that morning.  I never thought I sang so badly to get blown up over, but I could be biased.