The Trip In

He's been in Iraq for about 5 days now.

They were suppose to leave Washington at around noon on the fifth. The plane got delayed and they didn’t head to the airport until the next morning at 5am. They waited until 1PM when the airplane finally arrived. They boarded and left for Bangor, Maine. Upon arriving in Maine, the plane is refueled and they reboard the plane, wait an hour or so and are asked to leave the plane. The flight crew can’t fly, they are over the limit of hours in a day. They are taken to a hotel with what I was told are very nice rooms and stay the night. After breakfast in the morning they head back to the airport. The plane can’t leave until early afternoon, so it's lunch at the airport.

They finally leave the United States. THey arrive in Ireland with no problems and are out of their in about 45 minutes. Off to Kuwait.

When they arrive in Kuwait Jake is picked for baggage detail (unloading the bags from under the plane). It was in the mid-ninties and not a cloud in the sky. Bags are loaded onto a truck and soldiers onto a bus.

They arrive at Camp Buehring, a piece of desert in the middle of nowhere. Unload all the bags, it's hot and miserable. They throw their bags in a big tent, eat, and then get some sleep.

They are supposed to leave the next afternoon sometime. This gets pushed back until the following morning. They load up all the bags into the trucks and take another bus ride to an airbase in Kuwait. Unloaded all the bags, and then loaded them on to pallets for air transport.

They wait around a few more hours, and then load up the C-17 (big cargo jet) strap in and get ready for takeoff. They start up the engines and realize they are having problems with the elevators, so they unload and wait on the tarmac for about an hour and they decide that they can’t fix it. It's back on the busses and back into the base. That was the only C-17 going into Baghdad that day.

They wait around a few more hours. Finally get some news, they are taking 3 trips in a C-130. They unload all the cargo and reload it onto different pallets. Jake is at the end of the alphabet so he gets the last flight, at 2 in the morning. He had been awake for 24 hours now.

He lands in Iraq, wait around for in-processing, then unload the pallets and get on another set of busses to go to Baghdad. It's only a few miles. He gets to Camp Victory at 7AM unload the trucks and told to put their stuff away and go meet the people they are replacing.

They head into “work” and immediately start getting briefed. He gets to bed about 6PM and sleeps until 5AM the next morning.

He's getting into the regular schedule, working 12 hour shifts from 7am to 7pm.

It’s a 6 hour flight from Lewis to Bangor Maine, 6 hours to Ireland, 7 hours to Kuwait, and 2 hours to Iraq. It was a long trip.