I am flying again. After a couple of days at Fort Dix I am now on a plane bound for the sandbox. It’s been a rather interesting ride but first let’s bring you up to date on events in Fort Dix.
I rented a car at JFK airport. I met with three other guys from the unit and we drove to New Jersey. The ride back was uneventful but kind of fun. I’ve never been on the East Coast before. I’ve never had much interest in New York but I now realize that it would be fun to see New York once. In the short time I was driving through New York I saw some of the cityscapes that I’ve seen many times on TV and movies. It would be fun to see places like the Bronx, Staten Island, Coney Island, Flatbush and other places that up to now have only been names. Not sure how we’ll do that but it would be fun.
Everyone returned from a brief leave without incident which is probably fairly amazing. I surprised that at least one person did not manage to get into trouble or at least have problems. The first day back was uneventful, for the most part. My team was duty team so we did the cleaning and provided the duty driver. We all went to medical to get final validation of our medical readiness to wander around in a combat zone. Everyone settled in for what we expected to be at least a few days of mostly nothing to do while we waited for an airplane.
At 1600 on Monday the commander gathers everyone together. We leave on Wednesday night, start packing. We need to be packed, loaded and checked out of the barracks by Wednesday afternoon. Wow!
Well, we got all of that done. We arrived at the air terminal on Wednesday at the appointed time, ready to board and fly away. No airplane. I have no idea what happened but the aircraft finally arrived 4 hours late. We all got on and settled. For some reason we need to stop at JFK but it was suppose to be a brief stop. We arrived at JFK at about 0300. When people started waking up at around 0700 we were still sitting at the terminal at JFK. We were not permitted to get off the plane. I was awake for most of it. We finally left JFK about 0800. We made a brief stop on Frankfurt Hahn, Germany where we were allowed to get off the plane which felt wonderful at that point. We left Germany a bit ahead of schedule and we are not winging our way into place hot and sandy. We’ll arrive soon and the next phase of this adventure will begin. I already know that it will be quite hot when we arrive. Hopefully we’ll get a few days to acclimate and adjust to the time difference. If you’re reading this, they even have Internet access.