Flying Standby On Air Baqubah: Sun, Sand, Fleas

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 2, 2007; A16

FORWARD OPERATING BASE WARHORSE, Iraq -- On Tuesday afternoon, the sky above Baqubah changed from its usual blue to the ominous sepia of Western movies, Dust Bowl photographs and, yes, Iraqi sandstorms.

This development did not bode well for my departure from Forward Operating Base Warhorse, a U.S. military encampment north of Baghdad, where I was visiting soldiers. But I had a reserved seat on a Chinook helicopter, and at 9:30 p.m. I reported to the airport lounge -- a gravel lot with one wooden bench -- to wait for my flight to Baghdad. I had a relatively clear view of the moon. How sandy could it be?

It turns out that pilots who don't want to crash also don't want to fly through sand, so we were on "weather hold." Not canceled and not subjected to some defined delay, just on hold. In this purgatory, I tried to amuse myself. This was difficult. The waiting area apparently was prime habitat for the notorious Iraqi sand flea. I'm not sure they were sand fleas. I never saw them. I just felt their tiny bites again and again and again, in places both public and private. In between swats I would look up, see the moon and remark to a fellow traveler, "How sandy could it be?"

The hours passed. At midnight I peeled off in search of food. Say what you will about the inhumanity of 15-month tours and denying soldiers beer in a desert, there is one indisputable example of military kindness: "midnight chow." After a hamburger, fries and banana milk, I felt renewed. The moon looked good. I counted a couple of stars. But the hold still held firm. Around 3 a.m. we got the word: all flights canceled.

After a long but unsatisfying sleep on a cot inside a tent, I woke up about 11 a.m. to consider my options. There were few. One of the quirks of U.S. military air travel in Iraq is that if your flight is canceled, the fact that you had a seat on Tuesday means nothing on Wednesday. It usually takes 48 hours to arrange a new reservation, or you fly "Space-A," as in available. Or rather unavailable, especially if you are waiting on a small base with limited flights along with a few dozen soldiers who missed their chance to leave the night before. Reporters, somewhere above luggage and below detained insurgents on the priority list, have to wait until all soldiers and others of importance get a standby seat. I had to try, so I had a day to kill.

I forgot to mention it was hot. Somewhere north of 110 degrees hot. A scorching, sweltering, fist-of-God hot that along with the dust and seemingly long distances to anything I might want to visit -- dining hall, Green Bean coffee shop -- made me not want to visit anything. Boredom prevailed. I walked to a warehouse the soldiers call the "Haji shop." For $20, I bought eight bootlegged DVDs from an Iraqi-run outfit that sells shaky copies of Hollywood movies, available at the same time, or even before, they appear on U.S. screens.

It was about this time that my fortunes melded with those of a real Hollywood producer, whose new movie, "Afghan Knights," was available for two bucks at the shop. He gave me his card: Paradox Pictures, Brandon K. Hogan, producer. On the back it read: "This is not a dream."

Hogan was in Iraq to make a documentary about the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade's helicopter pilots. We met up Wednesday at the gravel lot after dark. The moon was brilliant, and there was no weather hold. I was heavily coated in bug spray. Our only worry was whether there would be free seats. Around midnight, a wonderful thwapping sound heralded our potential deliverance. The soldier monitoring air traffic walked onto the landing pad, conferred with the helicopter pilots and came back with this: The weather might be fine here, but it was bad in Baghdad. No flights tonight.

Thursday morning, my colleague in Baghdad had to postpone his flight out of the country because I hadn't returned, and I woke up wearing the same sweat-encrusted clothes I'd worn the past three days. Hogan and I fantasized about dressing up as Iraqis and taking a taxi through the war zone, or commandeering a surveillance blimp and floating south. The increasingly concerned public affairs folks on base said we would need to wait five days if we wanted to ride with a convoy of prisoners.

I called my mom. Hogan called some pilots.

By midmorning he had arranged for his friends in the Air Cavalry to make a special mission to FOB Warhorse. We got to the gravel lot at noon, an hour and a half early. It had somehow gotten hotter. I poured a bottle of water on my head and crawled under the bench. Hogan listened to a surveillance drone pass overhead. "Everything sounds like a helicopter," he said.

When the two Black Hawks arrived, our gravel lot felt like a desert island, and we were the bearded castaways waving ecstatically at the rescue ship. They flew us to the Green Zone, with one stop along the way. I hitched a ride with another reporter to The Post's bureau in Baghdad. Just after 7 p.m., with a thick red pelt of bites and clothes that could stand on their own, I was home. In 46 hours, I had traveled 37 miles. Walking would have been faster.