JBB to COB Speicher - the TOA begins in earnest

"If everybody's thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking." - George
S. Patton, General, USA Exactly six days after arriving in Kuwait it was finally time to travel the last leg of the journey to COB Speicher. My little entourage was picked up from the DVQ around 0900 and driven to a place I am very familiar with - the Joint Base Balad Fixed-Wing Pax Terminal. In thirteen months of deployment between 2007-2008 I lost count on the number of times I flew through this place (and Catfish Air as well). Here I was again waiting on another flight. There were no false alarms on this one though. We were space-blocked on a C130 traveling to Speicher and then beyond. About an hour after we arrived we brought our dufflebags, rucksacks and other luggage out to be loaded on the 463L pallets. I waited until all the bags were arranged and then gently lowered my banjo case on top. The thing is too heavy and unwieldy to carry-on when you are also wearing your IBA (body armor), weapon, ammo, and ACH (helmet). Once bags were loaded we waited. Fortunately, it was only another hour before they were loading us on the buses and hauling us out to the waiting aircraft. On we went in a single file. I intentionally loitered in the rear so I could be the last person on. There's always more room on the cargo net seats in the rear. I was awarded with room enough for three people to spread out on.

Even in a prop-engine plane the trip from Balad to Speicher is very short. Wheels-up to wheels-down is thirty minutes or less. We taxied for a few and then once the pallets were off-loaded we filed off the aircraft. It was a "turn-n-burn" for the C130 and the engines continued to roar as another group of passengers waited to load. Buses were waiting to take us to the pax terminal, which is much smaller than the one at JBB. Our contact was waiting on us, as well as members of our ADVON. They had already been on the ground here for about eight days. They wisked us to our assigned billets. CSM and I had a "wet" CHU, which means we shared a full bathroom centrally located between our rooms. The only thing we did at this point was drop off our bags. From here we headed to the PX food court because we had missed lunch at the DFAC. Over a lunch of Subway sandwiches we talked with the ADVON about how our TOA (Transfer of Authority) was going with the battalion we were replacing. As expected, it was going well but not without some speed bumps.

Now I had also been to COB Speicher before. It was another place I had frequented during my previous deployment. Things were changing rapidly. Barely one-tenth of the personnel strength remains. The base is rapidly being turned back over to the Iraqis. Speicher, near Tikrit, was home of the Iraqi Air Force Academy and will resume that role soon. Where there used to be three DFACs there is now only one. Most of the permanent structure buildings have been handed back over. It has become a land of temporary buildings for the remainder of the stay. Hell, they even removed the Mount Rushmore diarama from the north DFAC (which is now the only one). I was disappointed to find it wasn't there, as I had fondly reported it to the folks back home on the previous deployment.

We started our TOA almost immediately. The previous battalion had accomplished great things. They were very cooperative to get us in the driver's seat. I was eager to be there too. The biggest challenge was being careful to look for ways to do things even better. It is very easy to simply assume that doing things exactly the way the folks previous had done them is the best way. That just wasn't good enough for us. We wanted to do things better. For now, we were in the right seat while they continued to drive for us. This is the tedious part of the TOA. We bided our time and waited for the arrival of the main body from Kuwait. There were dust storms to keep us company. They were very fierce.