D+1: En Route

THIRTY-SOME THOUSAND FEET IN THE AIR -- It was a seven-and-a-half hour flight from West Fort Hood to Shannon, Ireland. The flight was fairly miserable. I tried to sleep as much as I could. Vaguely remember some movie called Ghost Town playing. Greg Kinnear gets run over by a bus, and is walking around NYC as a ghost, trying to sabotage his newly widowed-wife’s attempt to move on with a new man. Or something like that.

We ended up with a four-hour layover in Ireland. There were soldiers all over the terminal, with as many civilians roaming about. We grabbed food, stared longingly at the bottles of liquor in the duty-free shop, ogled pretty girls in civilian clothes, surfed the net, called our wives, or slept.

Re-boarded the plane at approximately 1300 Ireland time. Flew the next seven hours to Kuwait. Local time in Kuwait City was 2300 hours, 5 JAN 09. I remember thinking to myself, Well, the airport in Kuwait looks like every other airport in the world. There was nothing out-of-the-ordinary. A disarming start to a year of combat.

Days without beer: 2

Shannon, Ireland.