Update

There's a perfectly good reason I haven't updated this site. Honest! Most of it hasto do with my being on R & R for the last 15 days. Of course I realize that I couldhave updated it then, but why? I'm on vacation! I can do it now though, I have plentyof time to kill and this needed done. I'm in Kuwait, waiting (no that's not a pun,but it should be) on a flight back to BAF. I'll get there one day. But that's anotherstory.In the spirit of attempting to keep this blog in chronological order, I'll start withthe beginning of R & R.My flight out of BAF was a C-130 bound for Kuwait where we would get on a charterflight to Germany and then Atlanta. About halfway, I had to pop my ears constantly. Ididn't think much of it at the time until a crewman came down from the cockpit andyelled that we needed to have our masks on. He continued stepping in between peopleuntil he got to the back of the plane. There were already maybe 20 masks or so totalhanging above us in little canvas bags and there were 60 some odd of us on there. Sothe crewman passed out enough from the back of the plane where I'm guessing the restwere stored. I opened up my canvas bag and found something that many of you fromScott would instantly recognize. It was a plastic bag to put over my head. I put iton and didn't suffocate but that's only thanks to the small cylinder of air attachedto it. Mine didn't seem to work so well because while mine went deflated some while Ibreathed, other folk's inflated like a hot air balloon and stayed that way! I found out later that it was a good thing mine did that. Apparentlythose folks felt the full pressure from the cylinder, while mine did a little less.It worked better after I took it off. There's no way a loudspeaker can be heard overthe engines in a C-130 so the crewman came back and passed a note around as to whathad happened. "Rapid decompression, diverting to Bahrain."We land and it's really really hot. And humid, I think that's the part I wasn'treally prepared for. We get off the plane and the Navy has a team of flight surgeanscheck all of us out for the bends. This is why we were diverted, Bahrain has the onlyhyperbaric chamber in the area and the bends are pretty serious. My only issue goingthrough there was the fact that I don't really like flying anyway. Dramamine is awonderful thing! We're told that it's a minimum 24 hours between when you endure rapid decompressionto when you can fly again. Besides, they had to check out the plane. So they put usup at this Naval base that's seems to resemble a resort more than a military post.Maybe I was too used to the lack of ammenities in Afghanistan, but the facilitieswere beautiful, and there was so much greenery! Bowling, clubs, movie theater, foodcourt, swimming pool, it was something! We spent a day and a half there, then we wentback to the air terminal where we waited untill our new plane came to pick us up.We get in the new plane, sit down and swelter. The plane sat with no power with us init in 100% humidity and plenty of heat for at least 45 minutes. They fire it up, allengines running. The ramp in back doesn't come up. The crewmen wrestle with it foranother several minutes, then they tell us to deplane. So we do. We hang out in theterminal for 20 minutes or so, then we get back on the plane. They fire it up again,the ramp still doesn't come up. This time, the crewmen raise it manually and lock itin place. It satisfies whoever clears the plane for take off and we spend an hour inflight and then we land in Kuwait. Finally. And then on to home, which is another story.