Smooth Flight (More or Less) Marks Reporter's Return to Iraq 1/15/2004
Tom Sawyer, ENR's information technology editor, covered the war in Iraq last March and April as a journalist embedded with the U.S. Army's Fifth Army Corps. He has returned to revisit the 130th Engineer Brigade as it prepares to rotate back to Germany and to report on the reconstruction effort.
We finally took off from Frankfurt at 6:50 p.m. (18:50just add 12 hours in the afternoon, I keep reminding myself) on a C-17 bound for Balad. Ten passengers sit on jump seats against the wall, five on my side and five maybe 25 feet away on the other side of a pile of cargo. I can see the tops of a couple of peoples heads.