Flying Dutchman

GREEN ZONE, IRAQ -- I try to pinpoint when it was exactly, what word I had so eagerly uttered, that turned me into the Flying Dutchman of electronic journalism, a man without a sense of community, cursed to forgo family, friends, holidays, anniversaries for an endless voyage with an ambiguous purpose.

It's 3 a.m. and I have given up straining in the blackness of this night to hear the whumping rotors of the Marine UH-46 helicopter that's supposed to take me to Fallujah. In fact, I gave up an hour ago. Now I'm just working for some sleep. Initially I tried the tarmac, leaning against my backpack propped up against a concrete barrier. There was a hummingbird flash of peaceful dozing, but like all good things, it has come to an end.

Now, with a dirty green plastic poncho liner between me and some knotty pine planks, I find myself in the peculiar position of having freshly turned 42 while making my bed atop this picnic table in the Green Zone's Washington landing zone.

If life's progress is measured by your current place in the world, I should be concerned. Instead, I try to get comfortable.

By 5 a.m. we get word from some Marines waiting for a helicopter to Ramadi that all flights have been canceled. I am, for all practical purposes, stranded with 200 pounds of gear and no place to go. A civil affairs reservist from Cincinnati invites me to head over to the U.S. Embassy (housed in a series of Saddam's former palaces) where there is a gymnasium-sized tent filled with cheap Chinese-made tubular bed frames and foam mattresses. It's used by "transients" -- military, government, or reconstruction types waiting for flights, transfers or reassignments. It is a perfect Catholic concept of limbo; a place to wait for past sins to somehow be purged before moving on to a better place. For me, any non-solid surface to lie on is a better place and a fulfillment of my current and only birthday wish.

The reservist is a can-do Marine major, a personal injury attorney from Cincinnati about my age with a wife and three kids, a month into a seven-month deployment based at 1st Marine Division Headquarters Camp Blue Diamond in Ramadi. Without even asking if I need help, he grabs the handle of the rolling black Pelican case containing my video phone kit. Halfway there the wheels collapse under its weight, as they have before, and it becomes the equivalent of a horse plow, dragging a jagged chalk abrasion into the uneven concrete surfaces. He finally just picks it up and carries it, immediately surprised by the black hole like density of my television transmission machinery.
At the embassy's front gate I surrender my passport and receive a badge that allows me access but requires that I be escorted everywhere, including the bathroom. With a double-suicide bombing of the heavily fortified Green Zone earlier in the day that killed four Americans, the security concerns are fully justified.

While I lie on my bed in the transient tent, grateful for the gift of a few hours sleep, I use a few pre-REM moments to scroll through the years of my life, wondering how, at my age, I'm still playing one-man band, carrying the editorial burden of my profession as well as the far heavier technological one. I try to pinpoint when it was exactly, what word I had so eagerly uttered, that turned me into the Flying Dutchman of electronic journalism, a man without a sense of community, cursed to forgo family, friends, holidays, anniversaries for an endless voyage with an ambiguous purpose. The word I remember before falling asleep was "yes."

The next morning I learn my passport has been pulled by members of the embassy's security office who were upset that they were not told I was overnighting there. After my explanation they agree to let me stay until I can rebook a chopper out but ask me to leave my video camera and my passport with them. In return I get a new badge that allows me to move around by myself within a limited area, including the dining facility.

A friend in the public affairs office allows me to use a computer and phone to make the contacts necessary to get on the flight manifest for that evening. There are no promises, just instructions to be back at the landing zone at 1:30 a.m. for a possible standby slot.

I have a lot of time to kill, but I'm not supposed to be working while waiting for my flight. I ask my friend if I can sit by the large pool that is part of the sprawling compound. The public affairs director reluctantly agrees as long as I don't report -- including blog -- anything I might hear poolside. I promise to plug my ears if anything relevant is said.

I pull off my boots, zip off the legs of my "standard issue" quick-dry, lightweight, packable convertible pants (the safari vest for this millennium's foreign correspondent corps) and I sink into a vegetative state. While dozing, I think about how the hallways of the embassy seem like ant-farm tunnels, but instead of ants they are full of men with guns. There are khaki-clad Nepalese guards with boonie hats and military bureaucrats with pistols hanging like Christmas tree ornaments from complicated and impractical leather shoulder holsters. But the most striking are the private security contractors working for the State Department or companies doing business in

Iraq.

"They seem to come in two types," one Marine told me over coffee earlier, "the older guys that seem to live for the meals, and the guys that live for the workouts, the guys that are just in world-class shape."

The individuals in the second group are difficult to tell apart. They appear to be a regiment of modern uber-muscle men, groomed and dressed nearly identically: baseball hats with sunglasses perched on the visors, shaven heads or military short, American Chopper goatees, cargo pants with thigh holsters and, as one British military liaison said derisively, "the PX only carries Under Armour T-shirts in extra small." It's almost as if they were engineered for the job.

At the pool it's a bit more relaxed. A group of young Marines are taking turns doing tricks off the platform high dive. They are laughing and being silly like 18- and 19-years-olds should. From the pool deck, their staff sergeant watches them with fatherly eyes, gently encouraging them to push the envelope. They all laugh while one Marine walks on his hands to the edge of the platform but then backs off.

"I'm still working on it," he tells the staff sergeant. For a moment these young Marines are not at war in Iraq but at a backyard pool party, everything lost in liquid blue.

"We're having fun," the staff sergeant tells an acquaintance seated nearby. "What's that about?"

* * *

At 1:30 a.m. I'm back on the tarmac of LZ Washington. This time my helo arrives but mechanical problems scrub the flight to Fallujah. I wait another hour and catch one to Ramadi instead, thinking it will at least get me a little closer to my destination. In Ramadi, I spend the next two nights in another transient tent, waiting for flights and convoys that can't, it seems, fit me in.

When the air is still at dusk, I lie in my bunk with insurgent mortar rounds slicing through the sky, still wondering how I got here and how I'll eventually get out.

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