A Battlefield Tourist

Destination: Baghdad

Sep 10 at 5:05am by David Tate

We checked out around 1500 and headed off to the airport where we needed to catch a 1700 flight to Baghdad.  For me, it would be a new experience as most of my time covering the war has been spent in Afghanistan.  For Roggio, though, this stuff was old hat… except this first stage, which was new to Bill as well.

On previous trips, Roggio said, he was subjected to what he describes as a grueling experience:  A trip out to the desert to Ali Al Salem Airbase, which he calls a “cattle processing station”.  Apparently beyond that, there’s a lot of waiting, with a lot of troops, contractors and some journos, all vying for spots on Air Force cargo planes that continually ferry people over to Baghdad and back.  I’ve been through the process before in Afghanistan:  You sign up and wait, always at the mercy of the weather, space and essential needs.  The longest I’ve waited is three days, which is an eternity when waiting on a couch or whatever is available to sit on.  This time would be different.  This time we were going to take Gryphon Air:  A private American company that runs a couple of flights a week to Baghdad and Sulaymaniya in the Kurdish north.   Although the flight doesn’t show up on the board, it does exist, and for us, it was on time.  Finally… something on time.

Altogether there was 14 of us, all appeared American, most appeared to be contractors, including two women.  Flight time was estimated to be an hour and a half or so with darkness quickly approaching.  Once on the plane, it was quickly in the air and over the Persian Gulf before turning northwest toward Baghdad.

Before long, I started seeing cities, just like any other country I’d flown over.  It actually struck me because it looked as though it was business as usual.  I was excited to fly over Iraq in one sense.  I thought to myself that I may see an explosion or the tracer fire of an ongoing battle or something.  I looked and looked.  Then all of a sudden as we approached Baghdad, I saw a whole chunk of the city go dark.  Within a few minutes, it happened again to another chunk of lights.  A few minutes after that, an even bigger chunk went black, leaving the illusion of normalcy broken.  As I continued watching the black void, slowly, one-by-one, lights started to appear as people far below began firing up generators.  Before long, what I know is hundreds of thousands of homes below, are now only represented by singular lights that reminded me of a cloudy summer sky.  Reality was setting in and now the fear of being shot down by some insurgent missile became real.  The plane banked several times to the right; sharply like a corkscrew as the lights in the plane went out.  Standard procedure for large flying targets in an area like this, but it was a trip this pilot had made many times before and we safely made it to the ground.