After months of waiting, I am finally here. I postponed it for the longest time, my trip to Baghdad, even after both the office chief and the deputy (and their predecessors) urged me to go. I told them to wait at least until my baby was born and then I could go splat or some lucky mortar might paint some Halliburton constructed compound with my intestines. Well, my son is born, alive and well, and I finally have to live up to my end of the deal, which is to take a C-130 military aircraft to Baghdad International Airport, or BIAP as they call it here. The title of this entry is very fitting, incidentally. If the C-130 doesn't fly (and it often doesn't), I will be stuck at home. The way I see it, this was my only chance to go to Iraq.

A nice surprise right off the bat - I was treated as a VIP (nice to have a good rapport with the ground chief!) and was allowed to take a seat in the cockpit. There were even some high ranking UN representatives and Embassy personnel flying with us - didn't see them in the cockpit, Hee hee haw. It is so much different watching a C-130 work from the inside. Now you don't see the engines running, you hear them. Instead of the customary earplugs, I elected to hear AC/DC, the Dropkick Murphys, and Robyn Hitchcock from my I-Pod full blast. Once we were in the air, it was just indescribable. None of this "I believe I can fly" soundtrack crap. Boy, now there's a song that should take its place right alongside "Deutschland ueber alles" and Kenny G.'s "Songbird", among other dubious classics in hell. At any rate, once the plane straightens out and you look dead straight ahead, you feel at peace with the world... even if there's a war on the ground, which was clearly the case here. Sneaking a peak downward, I saw nothing but miles and miles of sand, just this long white giant, again the quiet witness of a deadly war that has become commonplace in this supposed cradle of civilization. You really have to wonder what stories you could hear if mountains and rocks could talk. With all the blood spilled here, you have to wonder why the sand is still so light here.

It would be kinda boring being a rock or a hill in Greenland, I imagine.

Hill #1: Man, did you just see that?
Hill #2: Yup, another iceberg.
Hill #1: Guess what it's doing.
Hill #2: Uhhh, it's melting? Yeah, never saw that in my couple millennia of existence around here.

As we descended, the plane took this sharp left that almost made me pass out. I thought my balls had jumped through my throat and taken the place of the other balls flanking my nose. This was supposedly an old manoeuvre to avoid ground fire, rockets or even just small arms fire.

Finally, we reached our destination and were marched up to this shack, ordered to assemble in rows and listen to some contractor debrief us as to where we needed to go, where to get body armor, etc. Luckily I already knew a couple of folks from the Embassy, which made things easier for me. I was issued body armor (that shit is heavy!) and with four hours to spare before catching a chopper to where I needed to go, ended up at a series of shacks, all looking identical. Look at them as the airport's answer to Suburbia in the States. One is for the men's head, one for the ladies, one for the showers, one for the Internet (this one), etc. The compound here is much bigger than I thought. In fact, I wouldn't even know I was in Baghdad unless people told me.

Thus ends part one. Rather uneventful, I would say. But stay tuned.