I am writing this week's email from Al Udeid Air Field in Qatar. I wrote an email to my family talking about what the process for leaving the country was like so I am going to include that below and then take up the story where I left off. Enjoy. . . . .
Let me spin you a yarn about what it is like to try and get out of Afghanistan. You may want to watch the show "Not Without My Daughter" for reference material! The military is enormous and has more employees than any other agency in the world. They do a lot of things well but coordination of things other than tactical missions is not one of them. The primary reason for this is that they put someone in charge of something and by the time they get good at it they move on to something else. The systems they have in place are anything but seamless and lots of things fall through the cracks. That being said let me walk you through the process as I have experienced it . . .
Step 1: Receive an email telling you to report to a meeting at 1800 hours an some particular day.
Step2: Attend said meeting. During this meeting you are told whether or not you have been 'hard frag'd' which means your name appears on the flight manifest. If your name shows up then you are told to come back 4 hours later at 2200 to find out when you go on lock down, they literally lock you in a room until the flight leaves. Usually starts about 3 hours before the flight is scheduled to take off. The first time I went to this meeting my name did not appear on the list and so I was told to come back the next day (today) at 1800 and try again.
Step 3: Get 'frag'd'. So the next day I showed up and my name was on the list and I was told to come back at 2200 to get flight information. The conference room where these meetings take place has no A/C and it is over 90 degrees in there. At 2200 we waited for about ten minutes in the sweltering heat just to have the person come in and tell us that they needed us to come back in a half hour. 30 minutes later we all came back and after sitting in there for another 10 minutes they came in and said come back in an hour. Finally an hour later we had our information. I have been told to report with my bags at the terminal at 1115 local time tomorrow. That probably means that I will be flying out of here by 3pm (1500). That being said they cancelled two flights that were suppose to leave earlier today for one reason or another so nothing is guaranteed . . . ever!
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I was able to make it to my last church meeting in Afghanistan and say goodbye to some of the friends that I had made there. I packed up all of my belongings and the stuff I was issued like my hazmat gear and bullet proof vest and helmet. One of my bags weighed over 80 pounds. I threw away my sheets and extra pillows and waited for the bus to pick me and the 5 other hospital staff that were slotted to leave that day up. The bus showed up and a small crew loaded our bags and we jumped on and started to roll. The hospital commander came out and stopped the bus so that he could shake each of our hands and thank us for what we had done. When he got off he joined about thirty people that lined the street and they all saluted as we pulled away. It was a pretty stirring moment.
The bus took us to the PAX terminal where we moved our bags into a temporary holding tent and then waited for the terminal staff to approve us for flight. Approval came through about fifteen minutes later and we had to take our bags to customs so that they could be scanned and searched. All together there were to be 142 people on our flight with a total of 450 bags to be scanned. This process was as tedious as it sounds and took until 3pm. After our bags were scanned and searched we went on lockdown in one of the terminal waiting rooms. We sat there for 40 minutes and then made our way on foot out to the tarmac. They then had us form up in six columns. Once formed up we walked on the flight line for about a quarter mile to where our C-17 was waiting for us. We were put on the plane one column at a time. On a C-17 not all seats are created equal. There are seats along both sides of the aircraft and then seats in the middle. The middle seats are incredibly uncomfortable and cramped with zero leg room for anyone over 5 feet tall. I was blessed to get the very last side seat on the plane which had ample leg room. I felt a momentary pang of guilt when one of the surgeons who is 6'5" walked past me to his seat in the middle but then it went away. It is incredibly loud on the plane so ear plugs were passed around. We took off and flew the 3.5 hours to Qatar. We arrived at about 7:30pm. From there we got on buses that took us to the Qatari airport where we immigrated into the country. Our bags were searched and then we started the in-processing procedures. After three hours of in-processing I had filled out all of my paperwork and returned my Hazmat gear, cold weather gear and body armor. Once that was done we boarded another bus with my considerably lighter bags. We drove onto Al Udeid Air Field and spent another two hours in-processing the base getting our 'room' assignments and being issued linen. When all that was done we went to our barracks which are just huge buildings with wall to wall bunk beds. We made our beds and headed out to get some food. While searching for sustenance we ran into a group of our cohorts that had left the day before and they showed us around. Al Udeid or 'The Deid' is not a dry base like Bagram was and so each person is allowed three adult beverages per day. People knowing that I am LDS sought to stake claim to my three drinks but I told them that I wasn't willing to part with them as I had signed an agreement as part of the in-processing deal that said I wouldn't do what they wanted me to. For the most part they understood, sort of.
In the dark Qatar looked a lot like Bagram in that it was dry with sparse vegetation. However this morning when I woke up and went outside at 6am the sun was already so bright it hurt your eyes to even open them. You couldn't squint enough to make it bearable. Compared to Qatar, Bagram is like the Garden of Eden. There is no vegetation except where the A/C units drip condensation outside of each building where a small patch of nasty looking desert weeds spring up. The ground is cover with white gravel and sand. It has gotten up to 116 degrees here in the last week. There is a swimming pool but the heat is so oppressive that most people just sit under these huge pavilions. Qatar is totally safe with zero threat of rocket or mortar attack. If you die here it is likely going to be from dehydration or heat stroke. That being said it is good to have made this preliminary step toward going home. For us Al Udeid is a staging area where we await transport to Germany and then home. You never really know how long you will be here so you just try to make the best of it while you are here. Since I have been on nights I am awake during the night time which makes it much more bearable and will facilitate my transition back to San Antonio time. I will be home by Mother's Day for sure which also happens to be my oldest son's birthday.
That should bring you all up to speed on what is going on in my life. My last email should be written from my own home! Thanks for everything.
