Safi Airways flight 4Q-52. Sept 28, 2010 at 20:00 GMT-Zulu — I’m airborne and en route to link up with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment (a.k.a. “one-eight,” the subject of our Knight News Challenge grant), in southern Afghanistan.
We’re at cruising altitude, somewhere between Hungary and Turkey, on a civilian flight into Kabul. The first leg of our trip, on Singapore Air between New York and Frankfurt, was fully packed. Frankfurt to Kabul is almost empty. Go figure. Apparently Afghanistan has yet to re-establish itself as a vacation destination for European tourists.
Battling Red Tape
Plan A was to travel from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to Afghanistan with one of the first waves of Marines from one-eight — but the battalion lost its first skirmish to red tape. Adjutant Lt. Hull, over at battalion HQ, waged a months-long campaign to clear me for travel on the chartered jets that the Marines use to reach Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan. I traveled to Camp Lejeune repeatedly as identification cards and travel orders were being processed.
Ultimately, I don’t fit into any of the Pentagon-approved categories for non-military passengers — I’m not a contractor or a detainee — and so I find myself standing by and watching as the first group of Marines push off from Camp Lejeune at 5 a.m. on one of the last days of August.
I drag my kit back to the civilian airport at Jacksonville, N.C. the next morning and head back home. I’m actually more than slightly relieved to have the departure postponed — I need every second I can get to scramble this operation up to half-baked status. We’re still a long way from cruising altitude.
Preparations
Over the next month, my place in New York takes on the appearance of a propeller-head survivalist compound. Piles of Kevlar flak jackets and bullet-proof ceramic rifle plates accumulate in the corners of my living room, with satellite phones, GPS navigators, and head mounted fiber-optic cameras spilling out across the floors. Stacks of portable hard drives are wedge between waterproof expedition packs, shockproof hard cases and Camo Bivy sacks.
Dubious looking men with shaved heads and laptops occupy all available couches, and a pervasive smell of spray paint and WD-40 fills the air, as gear gets modified, tricked out, and dialed down. Conversation is limited to Skype conference calls between cities across the planet as blueprints are drawn out for everything from website architecture and digital data management to water purifiers and solar power generators. Airline weight allowances and national regulations pertaining to body armor become subjects of almost obsessive concern. AmEx calls me several times a week to inquire about the “unusual activity” on my credit cards.
Occasionally my 3-year-old daughter wanders into the living room, puts on a ballistic helmet, and turns on the CD system, thus injecting Shakira and mil-spec interpretive dance into the mix.
Exactly one month after the original deploy date, the first two-man crew heads out for Afghanistan. We barely make our flight, dragging more than our combined body weight in baggage with us.
But the project is finally wheels up and mobile — and it now has a name and a website: Basetrack. (Here’s a recent blog post about colleague’s flight to Dubai.)
Everything else is TBD, but ready or not, here we come.
More soon from the other side.
