It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

How many Christmas trees can one Battalion fit in a building? This is the hallway inside the hangar, where all the cool people work (I'm not bitter...just because they all have heated offices and I am rubbing my hands together over a space heater in my "office"). There are only two in the picture (there is a little one WAYYY at the end of the hall), but there is another one behind me that didn't get in the shot.

The last time we were here, they told us to pack up our stuff and wait for our convoy escorts to arrive. It was about this time 3 years ago, actually. I remember that everyone was very excited, and even though the trucks were a couple of days late, our spirits were still high. A couple of days became a couple of weeks and, with all of our equipment packed up, we didn't have phones or Internet to call our families on Christmas Day. I think that was the hardest part of the whole deployment for me, ya know, besides people trying to kill us all the time.

Last night was the Carrie Underwood concert. I didn't get to go, but my soldier did, and she had a good time. I guess the performers told the soldiers that they experienced their first "combat landing" coming into our FOB. Hee Hee. Combat landings are fun, especially watching people in the plane that have never been through one before. When an airplane lands in a combat zone, they fly the plane erratically so it is harder to shoot down. Lots of sudden dips and turns and if you didn't know better, you'd think the plane was about to crash. My first combat landing happened when I was a Private, coming to Iraq the first time. It was in one of those planes that only fit like 4 or 5 people in it (I came out a little while after the Battalion did, so I had to fly from Savannah to Iraq by myself...like I wasn't nervous enough!). I was sitting directly behind the pilot and could clearly see out the big front window. It took about an hour to fly from Kuwait to my FOB back then, and after 3 days of traveling across several times zones, I was exhausted. I remember waking up and feeling like my head was about to explode (you know how you sometimes need to pop your ears when you fly? I was sleeping, so they stayed "un-popped"). I looked out the front window of the plane and all I saw was the ground coming straight for us! They were tail-spinning the plane to get closer to the ground faster, so they wouldn't get shot down. It scared the hell out of me.