Wearing the Black Flag

Previously:
Fathers Day
Circulation
The Boo Radleys

Wearing the Black Flag

A sight for west coast night owls tonight:

You've heard of a blue moon, but how about a red one?

Early Tuesday - if you've got insomnia or the inclination to be awake about 3:37 a.m. - you should be able to see a coppery red hue on a shaded moon.

One of the greatest lunar eclipses in years will begin just a few hours after midnight, and the West Coast will have one of the best seats in the global house.
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Early Tuesday, the moon will gradually darken as the Earth's shadow falls upon it, but it won't appear completely black, said Andrew Fraknoi, chairman of the astronomy program at Foothill College. Light bent through the Earth's atmosphere will give the orb a dull brown or reddish glow. The exact color is determined by how dirty the atmosphere is - whether volcanoes have recently erupted and how much cloud cover, storm activity and human pollution there is, Fraknoi said.
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"This will be a magical eclipse out your way," said Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The view on the East Coast, he said, won't be nearly as spectacular, and only observers to the west of the Rocky Mountains will be treated to the entire event. The show won't be visible at all from Europe, Africa or western Asia.

But oddly enough, I saw a red moon on my last tour here.

The moon was eclipsed over Baghdad in the pre-dawn hours this morning. Just prior to setting the disk was completely in shadow, an awesome sight low above the horizon. We knew it would happen, of course, absolutely inevitable and completely predictable, astronomy having come a long way from the earliest days... here in the cradle of civilization.

That full moon marks the mid-point of Ramadan. For all the talk of violence and pre-election attacks the month has been relatively quiet. Certainly not without incident, but nothing like the worst that so many expected. We're half way through the month, so there's another way to look at the situation: there are still a few weeks to go.

Of course, it wasn't 2004 in the Muslim world. Their years are not our years, and their calendar is a lunar calendar, so the months don't match our months, either. They begin with the first appearance of the new moon in the sky, so once the current full moon wanes and vanishes then returns, a new month will begin in Iraq. That month will be Ramadan, and it will commence at approximately the same time that General Petraeus delivers his report to Washington.

More about that later. For now...

...back to our on-going narrative...

Flashback:

There is a near-permanent quality to the air in Iraq - though perhaps lack of quality is a better description.
Smoke from factories, smoke from battles, smoke from the burning of crops...

Exhaust from vehicles, many new, many more some years from professional repair...

...all mix with the dust and sand lifted up from the ground by the winds, or the passing of those same vehicles, or the tread of a million feet, to form a near-permanent haze that obscures the view of things at distances at which they should be plainly seen. Outlines blur and colors vanish and everything takes the hue of the desert until somewhere in the all-too-near horizon the earth merges with the sky at a point undeterminable to the human eye.

That's on most days...

On others the real dust rolls through, and visibility is limited to hundreds of feet - or even tens. If you've been following the story I've woven throughout this ongoing ramble, you might suspect that it's a story of one of those days.

You would be right.

And one fine night I sat in a passenger terminal and waited for my flight home. Said passenger terminal would have had the average American swearing to never fly again - a tent with a wooden floor and benches - but also with the ever-present big-screen TV along one wall (once again the obscene amenities rear their ugly little heads).

And eventually the official word came down: all flights cancelled. The dust from Syria had spread wide enough and far enough and with enough intensity to lower visibility to the point where routine aircraft operation would be hazardous beyond the point of acceptable risk. I would remain away from my home away from home for at least 24 more hours.

I had a place to sleep, and nothing to do. And I wondered for a moment about the guy who was supposed to go on emergency leave, who had taken my seat on my original ride, and who's flight was cancelled as well. I'd never met him - or her - but I know that there are many reasons for emergency leave to be approved in time of war.

None of them are good.

There is an ever-present quality to the breeze on a hot day in Iraq. If you've ever stepped too close to a large fire, to that point where you feel uncomfortable and instinctively taken that small step back to your comfort zone you know what I'm talking about. It's the sort of heat that produces an immediate sweat, and then evaporates it just as fast.

In Iraq, as opposed to near a fire, that small step back gains you nothing.

And then the sun sets, but the heat persists.

I stepped out into the night. The heat was there waiting, and darkness near complete. No lights illuminated this desert outpost, and silence was broken only by the ever-present hum of generators in the distance, a background noise at any camp and one you scarcely hear until they stop and the roaring silence announces that something's wrong. But that was not tonight's problem. Tonight, above, the dust had blotted out the stars.

And that would only be part of the problem.

I wandered into the TOC, because it was nearby, and because I could, and because I was tired of watching the news and wanted to see what was going on in the war. I hoped the answer was "not much".

I was wrong.

Some time earlier that day, somewhere far to the west, the heat of the sun warmed the desert sands. Spots became like small furnaces, and where the heat was greatest the air began to rise and air pressure began to fall, then air from near locations began to move to those hot spots, and twist and turn and dance along the way, lifting dust and sand as it passed and dragging it along with it as it joined the upward currents, taking some of the ground to become part of the sky.

Had you been standing on the Iraq/Syria border at that moment and glanced upward, you'd have seen the vanguard of an invasion of a sort. Dust and sand lifted by heat and wind, high enough to be driven rapidly eastward by even stronger winds aloft. Viewed from below it would appear as an endless brown cloud blocking out the sun. Viewed via satellite from above it would resemble a smoke cloud, fanning out into a wide plume as it blew down wind from a single point of origin.

A few hours later, had you been an American Gi on the way out the gate you could have glanced upwards and seen the leading edge of the dust cloud that had progressed so many miles from the Syrian desert that day. Gravity was working its magic on the cloud by then, and even though near weightless the particles were falling back towards the ground.

But your focus would be everywhere and elsewhere - you wouldn't have time to let your gaze linger too long. And once the sun had set you probably wouldn't even notice as one by one the stars winked out behind an ever moving curtain of gently falling dust and sand.

The skies were quiet when the call came into the TOC: urgent medevac requested.

The story continues here.