Hunting Down Saddam by Robin Moore

Author:Robin Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

THE ACE IN THE HOLE

Homeward Bound: An Author’s Note

Russell Cummings and I didn’t have any arranged transport to the airport on the day we left Iraq in mid-November. In the early hours of the morning, we took a cab from the hotel with a driver well versed in negotiating an “ambush alley.” He was quite good and got us all there in one piece and ready for the next step: a charter flight from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan.

The Air Service Charter was late. It was mid-afternoon when we finally took off from Baghdad in the eighteen-seat Beech Twin. We went up the same way we had come down, in dizzying circles. We followed a “spiral staircase” that rose up from where we lifted off the airfield, and tried to crunch down in our seats as we ascended rapidly from the runway aiming for twenty thousand feet. I did not see any reason why we had to “wind our way up the cone” in this manner, as no shooting was actually going on. Nor had I personally seen any such shooting while in Iraq, although I had witnessed mortar attacks by pro-Saddam insurgents on FOB Ironhorse in Tikrit, and in other locales.

I approached the copilot with the idea of going straight out over the desert. He just laughed. “We wouldn’t get a hundred yards out without picking up a couple of these things,” he said as he showed me a couple of little brass fragments that I knew to be pieces of flak.

“Where did they come from?” I asked.

The copilot laughed. “The front of the airplane last week,” he replied. “We were lucky it didn’t cause any serious damage.”

So I sweated out the fifteen thousand feet—only another five thousand feet to go, I thought.

The air was so thin it almost made me believe there was none there at all. I breathed deeply, but took very little nourishment into my lungs. The combination of thin air and the difficulty I had absorbing enough oxygen made me feel as though I myself were flying without a seatbelt within the interior of the plane. My seventy-eight-year-old parkinsonian body rebelled at the weakness in my legs and arms as we straightened out and headed toward Amman. I wished I were wearing an oxygen mask.

A soldier walking down the aisle pointed directly ahead as the plane changed course heading out over the desert. You could see nothing on the ground—just sand and rock. We knew there were terrorists down there ready to shoot at us, and I rather expected to see flak bursts appearing outside the windows. It reminded me of a similar time, fifty-eight years ago, when I peered down from the front seat in the nose cone of a B-17 bomber, with two .50 caliber machine guns below my feet and nothing to aim at as we evaded the flak from the German gunners below.

As we flew I tried to study the desert below, all the time wondering if terrorists were trying to shoot at us.

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