Travel Day

Well, this is it. My flight leaves in ~7 hours. The last thing I have to pack is the computer I'm typing on. My family is still asleep, so I'm trying to get this in before they wake up, so that I'm not losing time with them while I'm typing.

My itinerary looks like this: today I leave Kansas City to fly to Atlanta, GA, and then take a puddle jumper to Columbus, GA. From there I catch a bus to Ft. Benning, for a week at the CONUS Replacement Center (CONUS means Continental United States). I'll be there for a week doing training, checking over all of my paperwork, and drawing equipment. Next Friday, I'll (hopefully) catch a plane from Ft. Benning to either Ireland or Germany, and then onto Kuwait. After that, the time table gets chucked out the window.

From Kuwait, I need to fly on to Bagram Airforce Base, about an hour north of Kabul, my ultimate destination. In order to get to Bagram, I have to sign up for space on a tactical aircraft, either a C-17 or a C-130, depending what's on the runway when they call my name. However, since I'm a civilian, and an unimportant one at that, I'm low man on the totem pole for a slot. Role call for each plane is approximately every 8 hours. If I'm at role call and they call my name, great, I get to leave. If I'm there and they don't call my name, they'll tell me when to be there next. If I'm not there and they call my name, I get to start over again. Moral of the story: be there for every single one.

Of course, that's easier said than done. While in Kuwait, I can choose to sleep in the terminal, in what has been described to me as "big, nasty, black chairs" or get a bed. The beds are in transient tents, which thankfully are air conditioned, but still a tent. They are also about half a mile away from the terminal, and I'll be carrying about 150 lbs of gear. Oh, did I mention that Kuwait is a giant desert, and that it will be 130 degrees Fahrenheit outside? Yeah...fantastic.

The short version of Kuwait is that I could be there anywhere from 9 hours (my predecessor's time spent) to a week waiting for a flight, getting sleep only between the role calls for the plane.

Once I get get out of Kuwait to Bagram, I get to start a similar process, but with more travel options and more frequent flights. Hopefully this process will be a little less hairy, as by now I'm sure my brain will be short circuiting from lack of sleep and frustration with military/government procedures. If anything, I'll know I'm only one short flight, or a two hour convoy trip from my final destination, Camp Eggers, Kabul, Afghanistan.

*****

I had told my girls that I would take each of them out on a "Daddy Date" before I left, so that they could each have one on one time with me. My Wall Flower knew exactly what she wanted to do: "Penguin Park and Pizza Hut!" Little One quickly adopted that as her own plan, though she went for a little more sophistication in the choice of cuisine: "McDonalds!" Of course Wall Flower couldn't do something that someone else was going to do, so after some arguing with her sister, she changed her mind to a different local park, which was enough to end the conflict. Thankfully, that was the end of the copy cat syndrome.

Daughter Prime took a little more time to decide, introspective as she is. First she took a simple approach, deciding to just stay home and watch Star Wars with me. Her final decision was to go see a movie in theatres (How to Train Your Dragon) and play a video game on the computer with me (World of Warcraft - she's level 21).

I had feared that as my week of vacation before I left went on that each thing we did would actually FEEL like the last time, and that the week would feel more like a funeral than a goodbye. But it didn't turn out that way. All the girls were grateful for the individual attention, and though they've acknowledged that I'm going to be gone soon, they've been handling it remarkably well.

The last thing I made sure to do with them before I left was to make bed time the last couple of nights special. They have all sorts of little things they like me to do with them, and usually I make them only pick one or two, else bedtime become a Broadway production. But the last few nights, I did every thing they asked me to do. Bedtime stories and snuggles and lullabies and all sorts of other things. After they were asleep, I checked in on them before I went to bed myself. Sleeping soundly (one of them even snoring), I hoped that they would handle my deployment as well as they were handling my departure. I kissed their foreheads, joined my wife in bed, and tried to enjoy my last evening at home.

I think this is going to be harder than I thought.