The American Spectator

At Large

Sleepless in Baghdad

By William Tucker on 3.12.07 @ 12:09AM

(Page 2 of 2)

My luggage has been lost by British Airways and I have sat around Kuwait for two days waiting for it to arrive. It contains my 40-pound body armor and I suspect it is sitting somewhere next to a conveyor waiting for someone not too lazy to pick it up. After two days I decide to push on without it. The Army provides me with another set of armor (they said before they wouldn't). I buy another set of clothes at the PX and head out on a 4 a.m. transport.

The army doesn't operate on 24-hour time for nothing. At all hours of the day and night there are companies standing in formation in front of the assembly hall waiting to be dispatched. Around 5 a.m. I accompany 40 camouflaged troops into the belly of an old C-130 transport and everyone promptly falls asleep. "Did you bring your earplugs?" the guy next to me asks. "You're going to need them." Fortunately, I did. When the propellers finally rev up half an hour later, the noise is deafening.

I had read almost everywhere that the drop into Baghdad International Airport is hair-raising -- like riding the Coney Island Cyclone for a mile down. This is to avoid anti-aircraft fire. As dawn breaks and a sliver of sky peeps through one porthole, I wait for the excitement to begin. We do a series of slow turns -- and suddenly we are on the ground. "They've developed a new approach," my neighbor explains. "It isn't quite as dangerous as it used to be."

Now it's hurry up and wait again. The Green Zone is only ten miles away but the first helicopter shuttle -- a British unit -- won't arrive until 1630 -- 4:30 in the afternoon. After that there's an American flight at 2030. The "Rhino" -- a 23-passenger heavily armed bus -- only makes one run a day, well after midnight. "They don't like to have to push through Baghdad traffic," says the transit officer. "Too many IEDs."

So it will be an all-day wait beneath a concrete pavilion, surrounded by sandbags and furnished with picnic tables and rows of seats that seem to have been salvaged from a movie theater. The temperature is a pleasant 70 degrees, however, and the air is fragrant. "You should try this when it's 135 degrees," says one veteran.

If the bad guys have started to lay off transports, it may be because they are now targeting helicopters. Word soon comes back that the Brits don't want to fly until after dark. There are rumors of Russia surface-to-ground missiles in the neighborhood. So it's dinner more reading and dinner at the mess hall.

When the choppers arrive at dusk, there are eight of us waiting, including an Italian journalist who has been in and out of Iraq since 2000. "I used to drive my car in from Jordan," he says. "You could go anywhere in Baghdad then -- and that was a year after the invasion. Things have gotten much worse the past two years."

We take off, skirt the airport and begin a long series of slow, twisting loops along the Tigris, never rising more than a few hundred feet in the air. A tethered gunner rocks back and forth between two machine guns at the open doors, always staying on the downward side. Even after we land, the crew is tense and anxious to get off the ground again.

A few hours later, when I email all this to my son who is a student in Chicago, he writes back:

"Yes, I saw in the paper the other day, after they shot down another American helicopter, one general commented, ' We are engaged with a thinking enemy.' It's too bad it took them four years to realize this."

Next: embedding with the 82nd Airborne.

William Tucker is a special correspondent for The American Spectator currently embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

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