Jumping the TOC

"The mail service has been excellent out here, and in my opinion this is all that the
Air Force has accomplished during the war." - Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller

If you pull out a map of Iraq and study it, you'll find it easy to make sense of our retrograde. All of our forces are leaving to Kuwait. In order to make this happen, we're closing bases from north to south. Although COB Speicher hasn't closed yet, my Battalion's mission extends beyond the life expectancy of Speicher. With that in mind, we've been gradually shifting our HQ south to another of my old stomping grounds from previous deployments - Camp Liberty. CSM and I held out at Speicher until we could hang on no more. Everything was shutting down so rapidly that we had to finally pop smoke and jump the TOC. It was made all the more easy by the fact that my staff was already functioning from Camp Liberty. All we had to do was load up our equipment and vehicles on a convoy, pack up our personal gear, and jump on a helicopter south. The day we left was melancholy though. Speicher has become our home. It represents the foundation of everything we've accomplished up to this point of the deployment. The "comfort zone" of our daily routines was also coming to an end. For days leading up to our departure the HQ was becoming a barren row of empty buildings. We toiled on in our Command Group building even as furniture, office automation, signs, and all other evidence of our purpose got packed into a container for shipment. On the day we left our computers hummed through one last "breeze" with our Brigade down at Balad. Then even the laptops and phones came out. I managed to squeeze one last workout from the North MWR Gym. Then after showering and changing, I ate my final meal at the DFAC. From there we headed over to the pax terminal to await our late night Blackhawk ride to BIAP.

The pax terminal was unusually crowded. As expected, everyone was flying south. Fortunately, CSM and I were manifested so there would be no sweating over space available. Although our Blackhawks were packed full, both our baggage and our bodies managed to find a space. This inclued my banjo, which I clutched between my legs with great care. Once airborne we gained altitude to cooler air above. The scene below could have just as easily been anywhere in the U.S. But then we'd fly over the occasional convoy of route clearance engineers - their MRAPs and specialized equipment unmistakeably lit up in every direction as they searched the roads for IED's. In spite of the cool air of the altitude and the serene scene below, the flight was one of the most uncomfortable rides I'd ever experienced. Even the helicopter seemed intent on being troublesome. It would shudder and buck from time to time as though a rotor was out of balance. Fortunately, it remained flightworthy long enough to get us to BIAP safely. After about an hour of flying time we arrived, unloaded our baggage, and met up with my HHC Commander. He gave us a ride to our awaiting CHU's. Welcome to Camp Liberty! A place that was my part-time home during the surge has become my home again. It all looks the same. We will return to visit Speicher again from time-to-time because we still have a lot going on there. But from now on, the place we will call home will be Camp Liberty.

I would say a new chapter begins but, actually, this is just part of the bigger story. You can call jumping the TOC a subplot embedded in the plot.