A Year In The Sandbox

We left Ft Bragg on the 30th of October around lunchtime.  We flew on a chartered Ryan Air 767 which was a pretty nice plane.  There were 3 teams traveling together, so almost 250 folks.  The first leg of the flight was about 4 hours or so, from NC to Goose Bay Canada.  We stopped there to refuel and we were able to get off the plane for a few minutes.  There was no passenger terminal there so we just walked around outside.  Pretty memorable for my first trip to Canada…
We were on the ground there for about an hour, then we took off for Keflavik Iceland.  It took about 4 hours to get there too and it was pretty late when we got there, I don’t remember exactly what time.  They kept the shops in the terminal open late for us so there was a little more to do there than there was in Canada.  I bought some chocolate and licorice there at one of the shops.  There were two different kinds of black licorice, both looked the same except for some different words and different colors on the bags.  I bought one of each and one turned out to be regular licorice which was really good.  The other was filled with some kind of white stuff and wasn’t so good.  The chocolate was awesome though.
After we left Iceland we headed for Budapest Hungary.  Another 4 hours or so in the air and we landed in Budapest in the early morning.  The airport there was much bigger than in Iceland.  When we landed they told us that we would be staying on the plane while it refueled and then taking off right away.  Five minutes later they came back and told us that we’d be getting off the plane and going to a hotel for 12 hours because the next stop, Manas Kyrgizstan, was over capacity and couldn’t take in anymore people.  So we hung out in the terminal for 30 minutes or so until some chartered buses showed up to take us to our hotel.  It was a 30 or 45 minute bus ride to the hotel that gave us a pretty good tour of the city.  It was really beautiful there and I’d love to get back there for a few days as a tourist.  We finally pulled up to a hotel and were really surprised when we got off the bus and discovered we were at the Budapest Hilton.  Almost everybody had their own room too, only 10 or so people had to share rooms.  They fed us 3 meals while we were there and it beat the hell out of airplane food.  We weren’t allowed to leave the hotel, but the hotel was on a hill that offered a great view of the city.
That night we headed back to the airport to fly to Manas.  We got to Manas sometime early on the 1st and had a quick inprocessing brief then they showed us to our tents.  The females and company grade officers got to stay in hard billets with 2 or 4 to a room and a bathroom for the hall.  Everybody else stayed in a huge tent full of bunk beds and had to walk to the community bathroom.  After using porta-potties at Ft Bragg for 3 months this wasn’t such a bad deal.  Since we got to Manas on the 1st due to the delay in Budapest we missed out on a month of tax-free pay and hostile fire pay.  It was probably a wash for the government since they paid for the Hilton though.
Manas is a transient hub for people entering and leaving Afghanistan.  I don’t know about folks headed in and out of Iraq, they may stop there too.  We ended up spending 3 or 4 days at Manas, and it was boring.  There’s not much to do there but eat and sleep, so we did plenty of both.  Finaly we got word that we were leaving and we loaded onto a C-17 for the flight to Bagram.
We got to Bagram on the morning of the 5th, another inprocessing brief and then we loaded a bus for the transient area.  It was another large tent only with cots instead of bunk beds.  We had some IED refresher training and a little training on the electronic counter-measures, some more briefings and then late on the 6th we piled onto a C-130 headed for Jalalabad.
We landed at FOB Fenty late at night on the 6th and were put in to another huge tent full of cots.  The area with the tents was across the runway from the area with the chowhall and everything.  To get there you had to walk across the runway and they had walk/don’t walk signs there to let you know if an aircraft was taking off or landing.   I thought it was funny.  We were only there for that night, then early the next morning we convoyed over to our new home for the next nine months, FOB Finley-Shields.