Check Your Hubris at the Door: Masirah

An hour’s ferry ride from the small port of Shannah on the Eastern coast of Oman lies the island of Masirah. There isn’t much on the island except for a resort, a couple gas stations, and Royal Air Forces Oman (RAFO) Masirah Island Air Base (MIAB). The little air base is the site of a USAF storage site, staffed entirely by contractors. The contractors provided the reason that pulled me and other members of my small team of inspectors out to this remote island to check on the progress and performance of the contractors maintaining vital War Materiel at the behest of the USAF.

Getting there requires, in addition to the ferry ride, a five hour convoy through the Omani desert. This convoy is nothing like I had been lead to believe military convoys would be. The cursory training I received with other Air Force Academy Cadets in the mountains of Colorado had prepared me for convoys in a fictional country (Jacksganistan) based off of mid-surge Iraq, where every piece of garbage was a potential bomb, and every person was a potential triggerman, every military age male an attacker.

Convoys were supposed to have Humvees or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, fifty-caliber machine guns, belt-fed automatic grenade launchers, and a shit load of dudes with rifles.

But this was Oman, not Iraq, so our convoy consisted of two unarmored, unarmed Nissan Pathfinders, not unlike the Pathfinder my brothers and I drove through our high school days. The largest danger here was not from carefully planted and hidden bombs, but from the ubiquitous Toyota Landcruisers driven by the local populace in a manner that suggested a lack of care and drivers education training.

There was nothing exciting about these long drives to Masirah. The travel was made all the more frustrating in that it took over twelve hours of travelling each round trip to conduct a site audit that lasted for at most eight hours.

It was no matter. Someone higher than our small Detachment had chosen to preposition assets there, it was just our job to make sure they were being maintained in accordance with a massive, complex contract. A contract that often felt it was written by people with very little understanding of the reality on the ground.

I actually sort of enjoyed the trips to Masirah despite the frustration that accompanied it. Our launch off point for the drive was Oman’s capital city of Muscat, and we usually had a few hours in the city to enjoy ourselves. Plus MIAB itself sported some decent, if slightly musty smelling, facilities.

It was just that damn drive to and from the island. The area surrounding Muscat is filled with tall, treacherous looking mountains which are cool to look at, and there are multiple small villages and towns in the Wadis as we drive south out of Muscat. Within an hour or so that all changes. Endless stretches of flat, mottled brown landscape dotted with the occasional short tree or low brush replace the mountains. The villages become fewer and farther between and increasingly more desolate the further from Muscat and closer to Shannah port we drove.

Wind kicks dust across the road, similar to the way it blows snow across the road in Minnesota, except instead of freezing temperatures, the air is hot enough to be barely breathable.

Endless sand. And all I can think is “This is how my war goes.” Boring, repetitive.

To be fair, when I joined the Air Force, I didn’t expect to be kicking in doors with Army Rangers or conducting nighttime raids with the Marines. I did think I might be flying helicopters low over cities, dodging bullets and Rocket Propelled Grenades. Even when that dream met a bureaucratic end, I had picked a career field that I was assured would deploy early and often to trouble spots.

My first deployment brought me to Al Udeid Air Base outside of Doha, where my team and I accomplished tasks that we knew were vital to the coalition war effort against ISIS militants and other terror groups. The work was important, it was complex, and it was frustrating, but it wasn’t “exciting.”

When I returned home, I was faced with putting in my choices for my next assignment, almost all of which were to desk jobs in massive program offices across the United States. I abhorred the idea of being stuck in a cubicle farm, chugging away at slow paced contract modifications. So against the advice of people who knew better, I volunteered to go back to Al Udeid for a year under the auspices of using the assignment as leverage towards a graduate school selection.

That gamble paid off, but the job I volunteered for was no more exciting than anything else.

So my volunteering led me to this dusty stretch of road, surrounded by camels and decrepit towns. The driver of my vehicle is a survivor of the days in Iraq when road tripping there was sporty, to put it lightly. His stories were always told matter-of-factly. There was no embellishment or drama to them.

Some of the the stories are terrifying. Gun battles and explosions, both misses and hits on his old convoys.

Some of the stories are funny. A semi-truck carrying a front-end loader breaks down, so they drive the loader the last two miles of the convoy, with him bouncing along held to the door of the heavy equipment by his body armor while he provides “security” by hanging out the window with his rifle.

Maybe they are just funny to us, but I couldn’t help but think he’s happy to be making boring drives through this Omani desert, while I not so secretly wish I had experienced the drives he made in the Iraqi desert.

I left that assignment months ago, and landed myself comfortably at Naval Postgraduate School. I have only a faint idea where I will be after that. Will the Air Force see fit to send me to the cubicle farm like I worked so hard to avoid, or will I get sent off somewhere more austere and exciting?

Time and the Air Force will tell.