THURSDAY 12 APRIL 2018

Flight day! Finally getting out of this transient world of Ali Al Salem. The free time has been nice but we all had to remain on edge for a flight at any moment. We were stuck living out of a small backpack in this shitty tents and decrepit showers. It was nice to finally know we were leaving. After breakfast we headed down to the terminal where we checked in and got our bag/equipment sorted out. There was a couple of hours in a holding area before we hopped on a bus out to the flight line. As we were pulling up to the plane you could see this thick orange wall rapidly approaching. The flight crew runs up to the bus and yells out to get on that plane now! We wanted to beat this massive sandstorm. It wasn’t but a minute later that the storm hit us with such ferrocity that it knocked soldiers over. The sand was filling the plane as we boarded. It was tough to breathe and impossible to see. It was quite an experience. The wind from the storm shook the plane as we sat on the tarmac. The crew chief comes over the intercom and says that we are stuck on the tarmac until the storm clears. He was saying it should take about an hour. After about 2 hours of cooking inside of a plane the storm cleared and we got the green light. The flight was pretty uneventful, except for a couple soldiers throwing up. One interesting note about military flights is that there are no windows to orientate yourself with the outside world. All you have is the feedback the plane provides with turns and thrust.
The flight was short (about an hour or so). We landed at Al Asad around 1930. As we were unloading the plane some high speed looking motherfuckers were boarding. Using what I learned later is that these were probably Danish or Norwegian special forces. We then jammed into some buses and were brought over to these tents with chairs lined up on the left side. We got in and received a quick brief, loaded a magazine into our weapons, and then sprinted over to chow. The chow “hall” is this small drash tent setup behind a T-Wall compound. Being that it was dark and a new location it was a challenge just to find the door into the tent! The selection was very limited but I still stuck to the vegetarian diet. This is where I started to realize that it probably wasn’t going to be feasible to stay a strict vegetarian for the entirety of the deployment. After chow we stumbled our way across a rocky road to our living accommodations. Our bags were already unloaded from the plane and laid out on the ground. We got our rooming assignments and I got lucky by rooming with Sgt. Stewart. He is someone I have connected with since back stateside. I knew we were going to get along.
Our living situation was surprisingly not too bad. Besides a lot of dust/sand the rooms were not too shabby. We were assigned a CHU (Containerized Housing Unit) which is essentially a single wide trailer divided into thirds. We had two windows, one at the head of my bed and the second next to my wall locker. The room is about 10’ x 12’ and contained two single beds, two wall lockers, some shelves, and a table that had been left by the prior guests. We spent the next hour or more unpacking all of our gear and exploring our immediate area. Since it was night time, our exploring was very limited. We went to sleep around midnight.