3AM

Its three in the morning and this flight seems to go on forever. We have been all across Iraq and back moving people from place to place. Who are they all and what is waiting for them at their destination. We have picked up a full load of pax and two full bags of gas. The pax are crunched into the seats like sardines in a can, one civilian was so big that I had to crowd surf across several people's laps and use leverage and a strategically placed knee to get his belt around him. Thats what you do though, whatever needs doing to get the pax and cargo to somewhere else. We are rolling at an easy 110 Kts and since it is night time, we like to keep it up around five hundred feet. No reason to ride the roller coaster tonight.

I notice a shooting star blaze across the sky, maybe the thirtieth one that I have seen so far tonight. The night vision goggles amplify them, and all the stars until you can see more than Carl Sagan ever dreamed were out there. It would be beautiful under different circumstances, amateur stargazers would give their left neighbor to have a pair of these goggles for just one clear night. There are so many things that you can see with them, and so many things that you can't see with them. Each oil refinery has huge burnoff flames that are pretty bright to the normal eye, but they give off so much IR light that they illuminate the undersides of the clouds. You can see a reflection, like a single slice of rainbow hanging above each flame even though they are well on the other side of the horizon. This makes it seem like there are floating markers, like video game icons, pointing out the locations of each refinery. Police lights stand out for miles as well, the blue doesn't show up but the red flashes are very attention grabbing. At times, the haze makes it so all you can see are lights. It is very surreal to see each candle in a farmhouse casting flicks of light across the sand but not to see the horizon. It makes every point of light seem like it is floating in the vacuum of space. A great three dimensional purgatory that holds thousands of green dots, like lightning bugs drifting past my window.

The air has become so much a part of my life. Riding to work everyday on a motorcycle sensitized me to those little temperature changes when you pass under a grove of shady trees. The gunner's window is very similar. The air is gets warmer and cooler at different levels, you can almost instinctively know your altitude from the feel of the air. You can start to look at layers of atmosphere like solid objects, as real as the kevlar under my feet. Everything about the air is important and so evident when you ride it. The sheet of wind at the edge of the window sounds different when you speed up, it tears around the rivets instead of streaming around them. The gun wistles or whooshes when it is turned just so. The smells of hot engines, oil refineries and jet fumes mix with the odors of each passenger; the clean smelling lady from the state department who is clutching at an oversized purse as if it will keep her warm, the mud and boots smell of the three riflemen who probably have forgotten what soap looks like, the smell of the gatorade bottle turned spittoon sitting next to the right side pilot, the smell of my own dusty fireproof jacket and the pop-tart crumbs that are all that remain from my in-flight 'meal'. 

The crew is jabbering on about the shrimp. Our chow hall, which everyone calls the 'soup kitchen' is really a half round tent with folding tables and green plastic bins full of cheap and easy food. Tonight one of the bins had soggy fried shrimp; maybe that is how they make it in Indonesia. Tony says that the Red Lobster coconut fried shrimps are the best. Chris and Dave both retort the claim saying that the only way to make shrimp is however it is made in the backwater towns that they each are from. The debate rages on, each of the seafood connesieurs have to be in tune with the others because there are no visual clues for when they are joking or upset. It is a strange feeling when you talk at the man sitting next to you but you both are looking outside instead of the other. We cross an imaginary line and need to call the next ground unit to tell them we are passing through. The shrimp converstation trades effortlessly to some pilot gibberish that isn't entirely unlike english. The ground guy parrays our verbal assault and reprises with a rapid fire tech-speak of his own. The moment his finger releases the transmit button Tony is already defending his franchise fried shrimps again.

Its already been a long night and we still won't land for who knows how long. This is the job, doing what needs to be done. The good news is I think there is another pop-tart around here somewhere.