Live from CENSORED it's CLASSIFIED
Special Guest Post from the land of ex-dinosaurs. So the ride over was exciting. Okay, not really. It was actually quite boring. We left Cherry Point on an MD-11 from World Airlines (they are a contracted airline that the Air Force uses to move people to places they'd rather not be...like here)and went to lovely Bangor, Maine where we stopped for about an hour. All the smokers FLOCKED to the cordoned off, glassed in smoking section. In about 2 seconds it looked like that scene from Flash Gordon (w/ Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless!) when he was being gassed. The air went from stale stinky smoke to white billowing clouds. You couldn't see across the thing. It was pretty funny to me, of course at that point I was feeling pretty low so almost anything to cheer me up was being laughed at. Anyway-if you get the chance to go to Bangor-don't.
From there we went to Shannon Ireland on the same plane. It was my first time there. Pretty country from what I saw...which wasn't much. I was in the middle row in the very front section. Don't get any crazy ideas of comfort-It wasn't first class, no, far, far from it. This whole plane was set up Cattle Car style. 300+ of us crammed in. Mmmmmm elbow to elbow for a 16 hour journey! They did feed us though. Every leg there was chow in some form or another. So after a quick stop, a 37 dollar call home (I am not making this up. 37 dollars-ask the wife. It's on the credit card bill) and some really snarky looks from the unwashed, European masses we herded back on the plane for the last leg to Kuwait. We arrived at about 8:30pm Kuwaiti time (which is noon EST) to a heat I haven't felt-ever. It was almost 9pm and it was still in the 100s. The sun had been down for an hour and a half, people.
After a long bus ride through and over Kuwait finest roads I arrived at a temporary camp fro the lucky ones "heading north". Stayed there for a while then finally, despite the air force's best efforts made it to where I am now.
Odd tidbit-the plane I flew on was a National Guard C-130. The California National Guard. From Channel Islands Airbase. AKA Point Mugu...I know! Weird, huh.
So now my life revolves around a routine schedule of meetings & paperwork. My only respite is chow. It's lunch time before I know it and then my day picks up speed from there. I try to leave here by 10pm. I figure with lunch and dinner breaks included my day from getting up to going to sleep is about 16 hours. Not too horrible, really. Could be worse, I could be living in a damn hole in the ground. At least we have AC.
On the very long list of things you can't bring here, pork was RIGHT up near the top, just below porn and alcohol. We have bacon with breakfast everyday. You can take the porn. We'll fight you for the beer, but NOBODY takes bacon away from Americans, nobody! I figure with our porky feet in the door, we can start slipping the locals some beers, maybe shit will relax a little. That's what's wrong. That's why they're so angry. NO BEER!
With that, I'm out like the slow kid in dodgeball. It's bed time and it's 99 degrees.
Love you all,
Brandon
I remember reading an article in The Nation about the difficulties Hugo Chavez was having when he won the contry's presidency a few years back. The whole transition of governmental powers was set up poorly and his administration was running out of crap all the time. All their oil was being exported to pay for social programs, so no gas for the masses. Some minister of "something or other" basically stated that with all of the problems they were having and the unrest it was causing, he felt that they were really only in fear of the losing the government to revolution when they finally ran out of beer. I really does make the world go round.
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