Baghdad International Airport
The first time I landed in Baghdad, it was a shock. Not simply because I had never been to war, but because I had spent so much time in the Middle East by 2008, that I thought I knew what to expect; I had backpacked through Syria and Yemen so I thought I’d seen it all. My life had been threatened more times than I could remember, so I thought I was ready for war.
I wasn’t ready at all, but I thought I was.
I deployed to Iraq as a civilian anthropologist tasked with helping the Marine Corps in Fallujah develop better relationships with local leaders. Although I was fortunate to participate in numerous engagements that led to more secure communities, the eventual toll it took on me changed the course of my life. I was looking for an adventure and I got a lot more.
In this section of my book, I write about what it was like to arrive at BIAP and begin a phase of my life that still searches for closure.
Our chartered airliner full of Soldiers and civilians landed at Baghdad International Airport, BIAP, in the middle of the night in March 2008. We had barely come to a halt on the runway when the airplane lit up with energy. A soldier stormed onto the plane and started yelling,
“Let’s go people. It’s late and I want to go to bed. Everyone up and out. Let’s move.”
Another soldier gave us our marching orders once we tumbled our way onto the tarmac,
“You will form a single file line and you will follow me. You will not wait for your bags. You will not wait for your buddy. You will not form a gaggle. You will form a single file line and you will follow me.”
I felt like I was in a bad 90s bootcamp movie.
When I finally got my bearings, I could feel the heat and see the sand, but it didn’t feel like the Middle East. People were scurrying around wearing US Army uniforms yelling in various dialects of English and I didn’t see any Arabic scrawled across the terminal or women wearing traditional Islamic garb. This was not the Middle East I had come to know.
Our soldier-guides marched us off the tarmac and into an outdoor holding area drenched in floodlights where forklifts eventually delivered our supplies and luggage. As soon as the forklift backed into the darkness, there was a mad dash as passengers gathered their sea bags and identified the rest of their team.
My team leader was a Major in the Army who had gone to West Point and gotten a master’s degree in logistics from MIT. He considered his proudest accomplishment becoming an Army Ranger, but he was a smart hippy from LA who joined the Army to work his body as hard as he worked his mind. Our senior military member was Sergeant Major Bill Nast and he had been in the Army for 25 years. For the past years he took various Reservist jobs around the country to avoid retirement for as long as possible.
We also had two translators, Ali Munir, a US Soldier who was Egyptian and Khadija, an Iraqi-American civilian. Ali had joined the Army as an 09L, “oh-nine-lima”, a special program that recruited native speakers of Arabic for the War on Terror. Like all foreign nationals, Ali would get his American citizenship in return for his service during combat. Khadija was a 50-something Iraqi housewife from Detroit who was as afraid of going to Iraq as the rest of us were.
Once we had all of our belongings, Sergeant Major Nast herded us to the office of one of his old Army buddies and secured us housing for the night and transportation to Fallujah in the morning.
When we woke up the next morning, Nast herded us out to the same holding area where we collected our baggage the night before and pushed us into a mini-fleet of Humvees. The convoy from Baghdad to Fallujah was a bumpy and slow 3-hour ride that was full of supposed roadside bombs that all turned out to be dead animals or discarded boxes of rotten vegetables.