On the road...

Time to play a little catch-up...

Background: Every individual augmentee has the opportunity for a four-day pass to Qatar during their tour (if their tour is less than a year - if a year or more, they get 15 days leave plus two passes to Qatar). Well, it's very early in my tour yet, but the timing worked out best for me to go now based on other activities/schedules in the office.

My latest adventure started on Sunday with a convoy to Bagram. Bagram is the same base I flew into from Kuwait, so I had been there before, but only briefly. This time I was "lucky" enough to have to stay overnight waiting for my flight to Qatar. Transient lodging is a large tent with cots and nothing provided. The showers/heads are about a five minute walk away - not that big of a deal unless it's dark and cold! Here's what the tent looks like:



Somewhere in all of that stuff I tried to sleep. Unfortunately, the tent is located next to the busiest street on the base - and the traffic seems to get heavier at night. And of course you can't get too far away from the air strip on an air base, so we also were able to hear flight ops all night long. Finally, just for a little icing on the cake, about half of the tent woke up at 0300, presumably to catch their own flight. I'm sure they tried to be quiet, but there's no way that many people can move around a tent, pack up, and leave quietly. :) So fair to say I didn't get much sleep that night...

Bagram does have a lot of facilities that we don't - like a USO. In fact, it's the only base in Afghanistan that has a USO. You might have seen coverage of it leading up to the Super Bowl - it's named in honor of Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals football player who gave up his career in the NFL to enlist in the Army Rangers. After he was killed by friendly fire, several organizations (including the Cardinals) got together to fund/renovate the USO in his honor.

Lucky for those of us stuck waiting for flights, they have a decent movie selection. One of Pat Tillman's jerseys hangs over the TV used for movies, so it's displayed very prominently.


Bagram also has a very large dining facility and several places to get internet access, so that was all useful in killing time until the flight left. I took this picture on my way into the terminal after roll call.


Inside the terminal is a very cool mural - unfortunately, we got to stare at this for about four hours after our flight was delayed (not that they ever TOLD us it would be late!).


That's all the pictures I have from Bagram. Once we finally got on our flight, it was six hours of fun sitting in jump seats much closer to your neighbor than you would have liked. We arrived after 2200 local (1.5 hour time difference here), then had to get through customs, get escorted to the base, go through a briefing and the requisite admin stuff, draw linen, and collapse into our racks - at about 0300. Needless to say, I slept in this morning. :)

The R&R program here seems very well organized and the staff is terrific. Next post hopefully I'll have some pictures of Qatar to show you!