Stay and Die

When we arrived at the hotel, there was mass panic, as could have been expected. The tiny elevators in the hotel were already jammed, so I  ran up six flights of stairs to get to my room. The ex-military guys had packed a lot lighter than me and were already heading downstairs,  and I struggled with two overseas suitcases, a guitar, a stereo, and other miscellaneous items. It was every man for himself. As I was waiting for the tiny elevator, I was thinking, I didn’t sign on for this crap! In my naivete, I was thinking, I’m an American, how can you get away with doing this to me? Where’s my armed escort from IIAA?

I was the last person to get out of the hotel, and as I took a quick look around, I saw that the locals were in the street laughing and pointing at us. I was feeling pretty helpless and burning up with rage as I boarded the bus. As we rapidly pulled away from the hotel, I’m thinking, I’m in bad shape, but as I looked around the bus, I was the only civilian on the bus. The rest were Vietnam vets, and most had seen more in a few years there than I would ever see in a lifetime. It was no consolation to me that they were freaking out too. Joe shouted out,  “this is Bulls**t! This is worse than Vietnam, at least in Nam, I had a  gun!”

Once we were safely away from the hotel, we asked the BHI rep where we were going. He said we were being taken to a safe and secure compound on the edge of town called Villa 3. We pulled up to a large, walled-in compound right on the edge of the desert. The gates were opened by  Kurdish guards, and we pulled in and unloaded from the bus. Once we got inside, I saw that this place was quite large and had been built to house numerous people. It had a large living room and numerous bedrooms lined with single beds, a commercial-sized kitchen, and locker room-size showers. Once we got in and settled down to our new reality, we all moved into the living room area to see who was there.

Much to my amazement, there were people from multiple countries there: the UK, Philippines, etc. We all struck up a conversation so we could get to know one another. The gentlemen from the UK had just arrived and was going to be in charge of our commissary. He was an older man who had spent most of his life working on overseas contracts.  Realizing the somber mood that we were all in, he started singing  English folk songs and drinking songs, and he drank accordingly. It gave us a few laughs and lightened our spirits.