Monday was my last day with the CASEVAC guys (and girls, I should mention).  The plan was to spend the morning doing a few last interviews and then catch a helicopter flight back up to al Assad.  It was an overcast morning, and as it wore on the sky took on the red Martian hue that usually precedes a sandstorm.  Occasionally thunder clapped in the distance.  More importantly, as Josh pointed out, I wasn’t hearing the sound of helicopters.  Visibility at al Taqaddum was pretty rotten, and that usually means visibility at al Asad is even worse.

It started to rain.  It did not, fortunately, begin raining mud—one of the fun possibilities when a sandstorm comes through.  I spent the day sitting in one of the front offices writing a story, reading the paperbacks that seem to lie around by the hundreds all over every base out here, and playing videogames on the office Xbox.

It became apparent I wasn’t going to fly during the day.  The plan had been to drive me over to the JCOG (or maybe JCAG—whatever the mysterious acronym, it’s the military passenger terminal) and get me on a flight north.  Josh, the lieutenant who was my guide, decided to look into having me fly with someone from the squadron.  It turned out one of the pilots was leaving around 10 for a flight that would start with a trip to Baghdad and then continue to al Asad.  Perfect—instead of hanging out in a hangar wondering if I’d get on a chopper all I had to do was grab my stuff and walk out to one of the helicopters I’d been riding in for two days.

At ten o’clock the weather was fine, but elsewhere it was still too rotten for flying.  At midnight the same; at two a.m. the same.  The flight was canceled.  One of the perks of being where I was instead of being in the hangar:  I found out at midnight that if we didn’t leave by 2 am we weren’t leaving at all.  One of the guys I traveled with the next day, who’d been waiting for the same chopper, didn’t find out he wasn’t flying until 6 am.

The new plan was to send some email (including a story) and get some sleep on a cot in the back office.  That’s when I found out my RBGAN wasn’t working (again).  I’ll spare you the details, but it wasn’t working Monday night and still wasn’t working Tuesday morning.  So I traveled to al Asad to begin my infantry embed not knowing if I’d be able to keep in touch with the rest of the world.

Not to worry—there are internet cafes and phone banks on almost all bases, and if all else fails you can hop on a military PC to send emergency email from someone else’s .mil account.  Except that when I arrived at the base-within-a-base that houses RCT-7 I learned that they were in condition River City.

When a soldier or Marine in Iraq is killed or wounded the military has a procedure for confirming the details and notifying the family.  It tends to happen very quickly.  One of the concerns is making sure the family doesn’t find out (or get incorrect information) through the rumor mill.  So after a soldier or Marine is killed or wounded all of the base’s non-essential communication with the outside world is cut off.  Internet cafes and phone centers are closed; .mil accounts can only send email to addresses within the same domain; satellite phone use is prohibited.  For reasons mysterious to me and to the sergeant with whom I chatted about it last night, this communications black-out is called River City.  Maybe it’s because it can leave you up shit creek without a paddle?

Miraculously my RBGAN started working again last night.  I tinkered with it a bit, but I’m afraid it just started working again because it wanted to.  That means at some point, when it’s actually vital that I get online, it will stop working again because it wants to.  I’m going to have a chance today to do some real trouble-shooting and see if I can figure out what’s wrong.

Work-wise things are going pretty well.  I’m going to hold off on writing more about CASEVAC on the blog, because I have a couple papers interested in feature stories about that unit.  I have enough trouble writing about something once.  If no one ends up biting on the story I’ll publish it here.  And I’m sure there are a few off-color details that will be blog-worthy but not suitable for younger readers.

I may be traveling quite a bit for the next week or two.  Last night Capt. Alvarez, RCT-7’s PAO, gave me my bearings in front of a huge map of the area of operations.  It’s an expanse of desert the size of South Carolina, stretching from the Ramadi/Fallujah area west and north to the Jordanian and Syrian borders.  As I saw on the daytime chopper flight yesterday, most of that vast area is empty.  Huge sections of the map were notable only for the roads that run through them, carrying you from somewhere else to somewhere else.  I flew over Anbar’s roads yesterday.  A few were real modern highways, and I saw lonely Iraqi cars and American convoys on the move.  But some were small asphalt roads and others were just dirt tracks.  They looked like the kind of road where you die of thirst if you run out of gas.

In the very near future I may be taking some long drives with the US Marine Corps.  With any luck at all I’ll have the RBGAN up and running and will be able to keep you posted on one of the world’s least-coveted road trips.