Oct Iraq Tour: DAY THREE
October 19, 2008
DAY THREE: Sunday October 19, 2008
At 7 am, with barely an hour of sleep in me, I wheel my overstuffed suitcase out to the lobby to meet the boys. We are driven the hour and a half to Ali Al Salem, the military airport in Kuwait. Here we finally meet Lt Colonel Scott Rainey, who is the reason I came on this trip in the first place.
“Who’s that pretty blond?” he shouts out, and I give him a big hug. I met Scott out at the music conference South by Southwest in Austin, Texas this year. He was on his way to be stationed in Iraq for a year, as the head of Armed Forces Entertainment. My manager Alex and I got such a good sense from him at the time that when he asked us to come out, I willingly agreed, mostly because he said he would leave his office and come with us on the whole tour. With a Colonel as my escort, I figured I stood a better change of averting disaster. Scott strikes me as an artist and intellectual. He’s thoughtful and sensitive, and a genuine teddy bear, although from some of the stories he’s told us I know he’s lead his soldiers through some crazy situations. I could trust him with my life. Scott’s got two masters degrees, and will begin work on his doctorate after this next deployment is over.
The band and I get outfitted with camouflaged body armor and helmets, which weighs about 40 pounds. We wait in the airport hanger for at least three hours, experiencing our first “hurry up and wait” military flight, where departure times are constantly changing. The room is full of troops waiting to be shipped to Iraq. “40 Year Old Virgin” plays on a flat screen. While we wait around in the hanger, two soldiers from the night before at Buehring introduce themselves to me and thank me for coming out to support the troops — Jason, a sweet man in glasses from Pensacola Florida, and Ron, the size of a linebacker also from the South, leaving for his fourth deployment. They are both candid and gracious, and I’m again reminded of how lucky I am to meet these soldiers face to face.
We are flying to Iraq in a C130, and Scott sweet-talks the pilots into letting me ride up front in the cockpit. The band crowds into the hold, which is stuffy and incredibly hot. They sit on red nylon mesh seats wearing their full body armor, with no windows. Meanwhile, I’m up front with an incredible view of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the mountains of Iran in the distance. We pass over a temple from 2,000 BC, and a herd of hundreds of camels running through the desert. The plane is from 1963, a real workhorse of the Air Force, with analog dials and instruments.
The pilots Andrew and Dave are cute and flirty, and give me a headset so I can hear them chat during the flight. (The ambient noise in a C130 is astoundingly loud. Normal conversation is impossible.) They laugh at my sarcastic comments. When they ask if this is my first time in Iraq, I say that I was here last year on vacation. We’re all quoting from the movie Airplane: “Surely you can’t be serious!” “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.” We discuss the homoeroticism in Top Gun.
Finally, we soar down through a dust cloud to land at Balad, a military Air Force base just north of Baghdad. It’s a combat landing, with a hard bank to one side, followed by a hard bank to the other side, finally spiraling into a short runway. I enjoy myself tremendously, watching as the pilots superbly navigate us down. Meanwhile in the back the band are feeling the stress of the landing far more, with no windows to see where they are. My manager Alex watches his water bottle crush in his hand from the pressure change, and his sinuses explode in a fire-y headache-y mess. Their only clue we’ve landed is the instantaneous smell of burning rubber when the tires hit the runway.
We ride a van through the base to our trailers, and get our first sight of the ubiquitous concrete T-Walls that provide a barrier against mortar attacks. Balad is nicknamed “Mortaritaville” because of all the incoming rockets it’s encountered. Outside our trailers are concrete bunkers, and we’re instructed to run into them if we hear a camp-wide siren ring out.
I shower and change into a gold sequined mini-dress, very Tina Turner circa 1969. The band wear black suits and white button-down shirts with skinny black ties, looking like the men in Reservoir Dogs.
Tonight we are playing in a large theater that Saddam built. Apparently he executed 21 of his disloyal officers onstage one night. It’s a creepy factoid to set off the show.
The band and I play poorly: we are disappointed with our performance and make too many mistakes. Endings are botched and general confusion ensues. Still, the audience has fun, and during “Blue Moon of Kentucky” a lovely boy named ET comes up and sings along at the top of his lungs. I’ve reintroduced an older song of mine, “Meridian,” into the set. It’s about my aunt and uncle out in California, who bought an old fixer-upper house on the Sacramento river and are more in love now than ever after years of marriage. The crowd of country boys loves the sentimentality of the song, which surprises me since it’s less of a rocker and more about the lyrics: “I see you and it’s like the day we met, sun is beating down with no regret… Loving you so long your face has changed, but when I look at you I love the same.”
After the show, we sit at a table to sign autographs and meet the long line of soldiers waiting to see us. Scott tells us that the camp was hit by 6 mortar attacks at the end of our performance, and the building is on lock-down so no one can leave. It’s a reminder of where we are, a surreal ending to a surreal show.
The meet-and-greet lasts for two and a half hours. I’ve promised all the soldiers in line that we will get to every last one of them. There is a shy girl named Sarah who just graduated from high school, here to drive ambulances for the medic teams. She looks terrified. One guy asks me to sign his chest. One wants a photo of him handcuffing me (I probably should have said no to that one!)
The band and I are incredibly moved when a young man named Anthony tells us he arrived at the show depressed but is leaving with his spirits lifted. We come to find out he is a sophisticated musician himself, playing the drums and keyboards. The revered American bass player Victor Wooten is his family friend, joining him for many a Thanksgiving.
It’s approaching 1 am by the end of the meet-and-greet, and I finally grab some dinner backstage with the guys — cookies, cold-cuts and salad. The guys dig into the greasiest buffalo wings I’ve ever seen. By this point, we have named this the “Fat and Sober” tour. Both Kuwait and Iraq are dry countries. When in Rome, no choice.
Back at the trailers, the band and I stay up late sitting at picnic tables, talking about the song arrangements and what went wrong. I realize it’s the first real time we’ve spent together as a band, since I was gone in Ireland for a radio tour during the lead-up to Iraq, and we’ve been on the move constantly since we started traveling together. It’s nice to finally bond and talk about how mind-blowing it is to be here. We recall our conversation with Colonel Jones in Kuwait, noting his surprisingly frank and informed view of Arabic Culture and society which gave us a big reassurance that many of our military are more sensitive to the political and cultural complications of this war than we initially thought.
Overhead F16′s buzz by. Tomorrow is another big day.
