Posted By:
Howard Kaloogian
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My vacation adventure began in Florida, meeting people dressed in their traditional native uniforms: Mongolia, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Lithuania, Canada, Kuwait, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. A total of 61 different countries gathered, working together in one place.

But this doesn’t look like the EPCOT Center I remembered as a child: barbed wire, high concrete obstacles and guards with automatic weapons at the gates preventing entry.

This is CENTCOM, the nerve center for the war on terror. From this base in Tampa, the Army directs its forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s the first stop on a Truth Tour MoveAmericaForward.com has organized to allow the troops on the ground to tell their side of the war.

We are all impressed with the depth of understanding and the complexity of fighting a global war against a Virtual Caliphate when General Custer, director of intelligence there, briefs us with a presentation unclassified but normally reserved for congressmen.

Awaiting permission, I hope to post most of that briefing at MoveAmericaForward.com.

Dennis the hurricane is approaching so now its time to leave. From here we travel to Baghdad with six talk show hosts representing San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno, Atlanta, Washington DC, and the Internet radio network RighTalk.com. More were invited but didn’t find the time (this is my vacation) or money (the cost of this trip is paid for by each of the hosts attending along with major funding by Move America Forward – no taxpayer funding for this trip!), or perhaps inclination to go. Also two documentary producers and 9/11 family survivors join me for this 18 hour ride: Washington DC to Frankfurt to Kuwait City.

To enter Baghdad you become cargo boarding an available transport. Ours was a C-130J Hercules with four prop engines being flown by a Maryland Air Guard crew. With us buckled onto the red straps that serve as seats are 40 soldiers from various units, and a reporter from Wired Magazine. He served on the DNC staff and worked for Clinton/Gore ’92.

As we flew over Baghdad airport at 18,000 feet, the plane banked left circling tightly within the airspace of the runway itself. Then the engine sound changed dramatically until it was eerily quiet. Sitting next to me is Mark Flagg, a veteran Tomcat pilot who today flies for FedEx, his parents died on AA77, the flight that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. “Flight idle,” he yells, a maneuver designed to fool IR missiles by cooling the engines. It also causes the plane to drop like a rock.

Suddenly, flares are jettisoned from either side of the fuselage. Like the first shake of an earthquake you know what is happening and there isn’t much to do but sit and wait for whatever comes next. Bang! The ground comes up to meet us with a thud that would shatter the axle of a lesser beast, but this is the Hercules.

Turns out the liberal reporter bunks with us too. Somehow, the dessert atmosphere chilled in the tent.  But everyone at Camp Victory is smiling and we smile back. Getting here is an E-Ticket ride, yet the adventure has only now begun.