I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [49]
On one of the flights on the tour, Deborah asked me to join her in the cockpit. (Now, there’s a hell of a word. Who came up with that one?) We were on one of those huge jumbo carrier planes that the United States keeps building even though we have too many of them already. So I went up there to sit with her. The view was astonishing, not just the expanse of rock and sand and desolation that is Afghanistan, but the display of all those dials, knobs, and switches the pilots have to contend with. It’s even more astonishing when, on the final approach, you overhear the two army pilots, who look to be about nine years old, arguing over which of the base’s two airstrips is the right one. Deborah and I were scared just a bit shitless. You do NOT want to be there for these kinds of decisions. She didn’t say anything, she just put her hand on my arm and dug her fingernails into me. It made me feel better, because the searing pain gave me something to distract me from what I wanted to do, which was to start screaming like a little girl.
To our growing anxiety, the pilots, as we got closer and closer and closer to the airfield, seemed completely unconcerned. Or maybe they were just fucking with us. As we were descending, the two of them finally agreed which airstrip to land on. Which was a good thing: you don’t want to be remembered as the guy who shit his pants while sitting next to the wife of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
We never made it to Baghdad that trip, and that pissed me off. You fly all the fuck way to Iraq, you want to see Baghdad. At this point it was all getting very blurry. We were doing our seventh show and it was only Wednesday. At the end of the show we were supposed to catch a flight to Baghdad. But when it was time to go, we were told that the weather was bad for flying. It had something to do with the wind and dust storms. As a result, we were going to have to miss Baghdad, where we were to stay at Saddam’s palace—or one of them, at any rate. It was a bit of a blow to all of us. I wanted to see how a completely insane ruler lived. We all had personal reasons we wanted to get there. (The next year, we did make it to Baghdad, and we stayed at the palace Saddam had built in honor of his daughter’s wedding. It was on a man-made lake, which Saddam had stocked with fish, because he liked to go fishing. There was a wall surrounding the palace that had been built to maintain privacy, and so that his subjects wouldn’t know that Saddam had siphoned off the water that the farmers needed for their farmland so that he could maintain his lake. For his OCCASIONAL amusement and recreation, Saddam left the local farmers with arid land to till. In the buildup to the war, this is the kind of information that we might have been told. It certainly would have helped in manipulating public opinion. I guess just saying he was a meanie was enough. Oh yeah, and those weapons of mass destruction.
Since we couldn’t get to Baghdad the first time, we had to stay at the base that night. Usually each of us had our own room. They were nothing fancy, but compared to the troops’ quarters, we were living large. It turned out that because of a lack of housing, all of the guys were going to have to stay together.
Armed with this happy news, I walked into the very confined space. The whole experience brought back images of summer camp—WHICH I HATED! My mind was too fried to cope. The place felt claustrophobic, and I never feel claustrophobic.
Up to that point I