"This is your captain speaking...please fasten your seat belts as we are hitting a few bumps." My eyes focused and for a moment I had no idea what was going on. It was dark on the plane and another movie was playing. I looked at my watch and realized I must have been out for a good 3 hours. I looked out the window and the clouds were gone! I looked down and I could tell I was on the edge of a sea. I could see a very large city that lit up the edge of the water. Small towns and streetlights must have lit the coast for hundreds of miles. It hit me that I had no clue where in the heck I was and I tried to hard to figure it from the air. Without a map it was useless. (Now that I've looked at a map I can tell it was either Istanbul or Samsun in Turkey on the southern edge of the Black Sea). We flew along the coast and it sure lived up to it's name. You could see all of the tankers and large boats bobbing around in the large black mass. The pilot turned south and we were headed over land.
It was hard to make anything out. There were small towns here and there with a couple lights on and there was snow reflecting off the surface. At this point of the long trip, even though I was surrounded by other soldiers, I felt very alone and lost in some weird foreign land. I was the furthest out of my comfort zone than I have ever been. Getting frustrated that I couldn't recognize or even speculate what cities I was flying over, I closed my eyes and tried to catch a few more Z's. I woke up and I could tell that not too much time had passed. I looked out the window and instead of small towns and a few lights I saw something very odd. It was an amazing sight, a pitch black landscape dotted with bright orange lights. It almost hurt to look at the lights, they were so bright. I would see one, then two, then dozens. It felt like I was flying over a huge black birthday cake. After a few minutes of pondering, it hit me that those were oil refineries. That was a very good indicator that we were definitely in the Middle East and getting close to our destination.
We started our decent to Kuwait City, local time was about 1915. I was trying to wrap my brain around the time change. At that point It had felt like I had been traveling for 24 straight hours since we took off from ATL around that time the night before, but I had actually only been traveling for 16. The plane was making all sorts of odd maneuvers. We would drop a few thousand feet, then we would bank left, then right, then left again, drop another thousand feet, speed up, and then down again. After that we must have been at about 5,000 feet and we just stayed there for a good 20 minutes.
I couldn't help but notice odd shapes on the ground in lights. It looked like squares, rectangles, triangles, and other random polygons. They were spread across the desert so it sort of looked like a mis-shaped checkerboard. There would be large groups of the lighted shapes clustered around a very bright light. I felt like I was landing on another planet. (It took a week of being here to finally figure out what those were).
The plane landed and the process of getting everybody off had started. All of the VIPs (High ranking officers) leave first and are brought immediately to their final destination. The rest of us filed out of the plane and onto a convoy of buses sitting on the tarmac right next to the plane. It was planned and orchestrated with military-like precision...obviously, and before I knew it we were convoying to our in-processing station. They let us take a pit stop in a controlled, heavily guarded, military area to use the port-a-potties and get some bottled water. The air was very polluted and I had the taste of exhaust in my mouth, being that close to the airport didn't help much. We quickly left our "oasis" and headed off to in-process.
It was hard to make anything out. There were small towns here and there with a couple lights on and there was snow reflecting off the surface. At this point of the long trip, even though I was surrounded by other soldiers, I felt very alone and lost in some weird foreign land. I was the furthest out of my comfort zone than I have ever been. Getting frustrated that I couldn't recognize or even speculate what cities I was flying over, I closed my eyes and tried to catch a few more Z's. I woke up and I could tell that not too much time had passed. I looked out the window and instead of small towns and a few lights I saw something very odd. It was an amazing sight, a pitch black landscape dotted with bright orange lights. It almost hurt to look at the lights, they were so bright. I would see one, then two, then dozens. It felt like I was flying over a huge black birthday cake. After a few minutes of pondering, it hit me that those were oil refineries. That was a very good indicator that we were definitely in the Middle East and getting close to our destination.
We started our decent to Kuwait City, local time was about 1915. I was trying to wrap my brain around the time change. At that point It had felt like I had been traveling for 24 straight hours since we took off from ATL around that time the night before, but I had actually only been traveling for 16. The plane was making all sorts of odd maneuvers. We would drop a few thousand feet, then we would bank left, then right, then left again, drop another thousand feet, speed up, and then down again. After that we must have been at about 5,000 feet and we just stayed there for a good 20 minutes.
I couldn't help but notice odd shapes on the ground in lights. It looked like squares, rectangles, triangles, and other random polygons. They were spread across the desert so it sort of looked like a mis-shaped checkerboard. There would be large groups of the lighted shapes clustered around a very bright light. I felt like I was landing on another planet. (It took a week of being here to finally figure out what those were).
The plane landed and the process of getting everybody off had started. All of the VIPs (High ranking officers) leave first and are brought immediately to their final destination. The rest of us filed out of the plane and onto a convoy of buses sitting on the tarmac right next to the plane. It was planned and orchestrated with military-like precision...obviously, and before I knew it we were convoying to our in-processing station. They let us take a pit stop in a controlled, heavily guarded, military area to use the port-a-potties and get some bottled water. The air was very polluted and I had the taste of exhaust in my mouth, being that close to the airport didn't help much. We quickly left our "oasis" and headed off to in-process.
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