F
lying in a C-17 is one of those lifetime check boxes that guys like me have. I’ve seen them overhead when I’ve been at Fort Lewis. At McChord Air Force Base, the flight line is full of them, looking like gigantic, droop-winged insects with a penchant for too much southern home cooking.
There is something about them that is just compelling. Perhaps it is the symbol of intercontinental power that they represent. One C-17, fully loaded can take off in Washington State and deliver enough cargo to keep a small town on the far side of the earth fed, clothed and amused for months.
When word came down earlier today that I had successfully negotiated the standby list and had a seat on a C-17 going from Kuwait to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, my eagerness and excitement made it hard for me to grab my gear and get down to the embarkation point. My hands were shaking and I couldn't stop grinning. It was the same foolish-but-I-don't care feeling I got after my first high school goodnight kiss. When I came home, ear to ear grin on my face, weaving as I walked with trembling hands, my mother accused me of being on drugs.
The stuff I'm carrying into theater weighs just over a hundred pounds. Body armor and helmet account for about twenty-five or thirty. My duffel that houses my tripod and other gear tipped the stateside scale at thirty. A multicam assault pack (why is army luggage camo? Are they trying to lose your stuff?) carries thirty pounds of camera and computer gear. My bulging camera bag makes up the difference.
I had practiced carrying this much weight in the coast range before I left. Now, in the blast furnace Kuwait heat, I struggled to carry everything without looking too much like a walking civilian yard sale. I joined ranks with about a hundred marines, navy, coast guard, air force and army personnel awaiting their ride back to Afghanistan. Some were traveling into theater for the first time. Others were coming back from their mid-tour leaves. The diversity of uniforms amazed me. The marines wore the funky new tan multi-cam that looks so hip in the PX back at Fort Hood. The army wore ACU's and blended as much into the brown Kuwait landscape as Oliver Stone would at a young Republican convention. The coasties wore old school chocolate chips, while the air force types had this groovy uniform that looked like the pedigreed offspring of Vietnam tiger stripes and digital ACU's. As I stood there in my off-the rack, look-like-a-veteran-photo-journalist attire, I realized a central truth to rolling with the American military: there is tacticool and tactitard, and I am always going to be a tactitard.
I accepted this realization as we were told to front load our bags and get our body armor on. All around me, the military personal executed those orders swiftly with a lot of grace despite all the weight shifting going on. In seconds, there they stood, IBA's on, helmets snapped on heads looking totally tacticool in their Oakleys and Wiley X’s.
I tried to shift my backpack to my chest and the delicate balance that was me under a hundred pounds of crap suddenly exploded. Camera bag fell. While bending down to get it, the front loaded pack yanked my back in new and interesting directions, sending jolts of pain through my spine. Helmet fell next. Finally, in desperation I dumped everything in a big photo journalist geek pile and decided to start completely over.
Now what? All the servicemen around me were now watching this civilian spectacle. I had to get it together fast. I grabbed my body armor. Get that on first, John, and everything after will be easy!—or so I told myself. I've worn IBA’s before. I actually have one of my own. It flew to Afghanistan without me last month along with the only two pairs of boots I own. I kept telling people I was on a trans-continental luggage recovery operation. At least my stuff was well protected by the IBA’s Sappi plates. No rocket shrapnel for my socks.
Anyway, my IBA opens up and you put it on just like any other vest. The loaner IBA the kindly Indian supply guys gave me the night before in Kuwait, in return for a promise to out their photo on the front page of USA Today, worked the same way.
Well, surrounded by the tacticool, I lost my composure. I grabbed the IBA and tried to pull it over my head like a twenty-five pound Christmas sweater. I got it about half way on before I got stuck, arms pinned to my side and chest, crown of my head turtling from the neck hole. I tried wiggling to shake it the rest of the way down. No joy. I looked like I was trying to dance to my daughter’s pre-teen techno crap and suddenly began to seizure.
I got my fingers through the arm holes, which only locked my elbows against the sides of the IBA. I was pinned in place. My glasses fell off. I thrashed around and only succeeded in crushing my nose against the front Sappi plate. I might as well have been in one of Houdini's straight jackets.
Finally, an E-6 took pity on me and said, "you just need to open it, Sir." He emphasized the sir in that unique and special way NCO’s do that convey far more than one word ever can. I think what he really wanted to say was “dumbfuck” but was too polite. Anyway, he reached over and pulled apart the Velco that connects the front of the vest. My nose sprang back into shape, and the IBA slipped on perfectly. I stood there and savored a moment of self-pity. Full on tactitard, Simple Jack with a camera and a loaner IBA.
I staggered aboard our bus and we drove to the flight line. There the C-17, ramp down, awaited us. The ground crew slid puzzle-piece like modular seat sections into the cavernous cargo hold in final preparation for us. It reminded me of watching my son Eddie build new and exotic aircraft with his Lego collection. A moment later, we dismounted from the bus and walked in two columns on either side of a sweeping yellow line.
We approached the rear of the C17. The tail said "Charleston" and I assumed the aircraft hailed from the land of the Civil War's first shot. Here I was being carried into a combat zone by the South Carolina volunteers. To a history buff, that seemed pretty damn cool. We reached the ramp and I looked up in amazement at the enormity of the aircraft. It is huge; my jaw dropped and I gawked like a tourist at the Taj Mahal.
The line behind me grew impatient. I stepped aboard and followed the others in front of me deep into the cargo bay. The pre fab seat modules were locked in place in the center of the bay. This was not United Airlines. Some of these seats looked liked ill-trained sheep dogs had chewed on them while their owners were away. Stuffing was coming out of the seats and torn cloth fluttered wind.
I grabbed a seat along the starboard fuselage. This row faces inward and is composed of tiny metal and canvas butt mounts. I sat down and strapped in. The bay soon filled up. The crew busied themselves with the final pre-flight checklist. Then, we were off and rolling down the taxiway. Not to be too much of a homer, but the moment we started to move, a fierce thrill scrolled through me.
The pilots lined us up on the runway and punched the throttle. The huge bird gained speed, the nose rotated and we clawed skyward. I could not stop grinning. Eventually, we leveled out and sped east for Afghanistan. Being old and possessing a bladder roughly the size of a postage stamp, I unbuckled and walked forward for the latrine. This actually took some grace, and I was grateful for my ballroom dance background. With the plane fairly full, the soldiers on the starboard bulkhead stretched their legs into the aisle and started to snooze or watch movies on their IPods. Negotiating their boots and shins as the C-17 bobbed along at four hundred knots left me doing a jerky two-step as I worked my way forward. Alas, I may have crushed more than one set of toes and kicked a calf or two by accident.
I finally reached the metal latrine door. It was vacant; good thing as it is the only one in the cargo hold and really didn’t want to annoy or wake up anymore soldiers without at least having the opportunity to accomplish my mission. I opened the door and tried to step inside.
What happened next I write as a public service. Let your humble writer be your cautionary tale. First mistake: I failed to recognize that when the C-17 was constructed, the designers were not thinking airliner. They were thinking naval vessel with wings. Thus, the door to the latrine was not really a door in the 737 sense. This was a hatch. And hatches do not have doors that run flush to the deck of the aircraft. Yes, there was small metal rim, maybe four inches high, that I needed to step over to get inside. Well, I wasn’t looking down when I opened the hatch door and did not see this hazard. Instead, I tripped and found myself falling face-first right into the open toilet. The last user had been kind enough to leave the seat and lid up, which meant I was about to go for a chemical and oh-my-God bath.
Strength training saved me from that fate. All summer long, I’ve been lifting weights and doing push ups. I’ve been taught the proper push-up stance and form, and have been admonished many times that I need to practice muscle control on the way down, not just on the way up. That way, I will know how to fall should an emergency ever arise. Well, Code Red, Sparky!
Falling head first into an airborne toilet in front of a hundred and thirty men and women in our country’s uniform was not my first choice for making an impression. At the last second, I got my arms out, palms flat and caught myself with bare inches to spare. Nose hovering directly over the open bowl, I sucked wind. Truth be told, that was wind I should not have sucked. Chemically, with a hint of ammonia. I almost passed out. At last, I tucked my feet in over the hatch rim and closeted myself away for a couple of minutes, composure totally blown. I’d just managed to make getting on the plane look suave and professional.
Eventually, I found the courage to go back to my seat and sit down. Helmet in my lap, I considered my options and decided to try and doze. I started to drift when the crew dimmed the lights. I opened my eyes and saw they’d shut off the overhead brights in favor of these forest green lights embedded in the port and starboard walls. The entire cargo bay glowed like Oz’s Emerald City. It looked pretty cool, actually. I noticed that there were red lights mounted next to the green ones. Then I started thinking, “Wow, you hang a disco ball from the H-Vac system overhead and you could have a pretty awesome dance club in here.” My mind ran with that, and I imagined some civilian entrepreneur running his own ultra-exclusive aerial club out the back of a war-surplus C-17 someday. I looked around, and in my mind’s eye I saw everyone aboard rocking hard to Paralyzer as the disco light spun and the lights pulsed from emerald to crimson. All you’d need would be a few palate-sized modular Pergo floors and a bar at the ramp. The place would make bank.
Ok, I blame anoxia for that last paragraph.
Somewhere over Afghanistan, I awoke from a shallow nap. The crew prepared to land at our destination and began to maneuver to do so. Here the C-17 really surprised me. For its size, it is amazingly agile. Several times the pilots rolled left or right, then banked quickly to gain a new heading. Other times, we pitched into a sharp dive then pulled up a few seconds later. It was glorious, teeth-rattling fun. When we touched down on the runway, it came as a complete surprise. It didn’t seem like we had been flying straight long enough to be on our final approach.
We rolled to a halt and my stomach fluttered. I’d been waiting five years for this moment. At last, thanks to the tireless efforts of a lot of very good people, I was here in theater. I grabbed my gear, clocked the poor guy next to my with my camera bag, apologized profusely, then stepped into the aisle. A motor whined. The ramp dropped, revealing the flight line and a chilly Afghan night. We began to debark. I approached the ramp, tripped and smashed my face into the back plate of another soldier’s body armor. “Sorry about that.” So much for dramatics. I regained my composure just in time.
The darkness was broken by portable lights set up at intervals along the flight line. Between them, ground crewmen hustled this way and that. A forklift drove by, a plume of dust following in its wake. The dust looked like mist to me at first as it wafted through the pools of incandescent light and reflected almost white.
Then I saw them. Off to our left sat a row of CH-47 Chinook helicopters, their rotors sagging toward the ground and giving them a manic-depressed-bumblebee sort of look. My first view of Afghanistan, and I came face to face with the helicopters I would be riding aboard for the next couple of months. Another thrill sizzled up my spine. Tactitard or not, I’d finally made it. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, I’ll be with the men and women of the Oregon and Washington National Guard who fly those odd-looking birds. I’ll be writing about them and the experiences they have out here on the edge of nowhere, fighting an enemy who knows no mercy or remorse. Not sure what lies ahead, but as I stepped off that massive C-17 and walked past the slumbering Chinooks, I knew I would not be anywhere else right now. Klutz or not, the one thing I can bring out here for the men and women doing so much for our nation—and the world—is my heart and writing talent. They’ve got all of both. In the weeks ahead, I’ll be sharing their stories here.
Stumbling off into the dust-filled Afghan night, hundred pounds of gear strapped to my middle aged frame, I wondered what lies ahead for them, and me. My fate is in their capable hands. I grabbed my assault pack’s straps, gave them a pull to reduce the weight on my back, if just a little, and walked into the terminal, a grin unable to leave my face.
