I was contacted this past week by two news agencies that wanted to interview me about my week of trumpet gigs in Baghdad. The front end went smoothly with NECN, and it looks like I'll be fielding questions from Mike Nikita with a split screen production, he from a remote location and myself being broadcast from the Boston Globe newsroom. I'm not sure why they do it that way but they do. There was also an outreach from WBUR, Boston's NPR station, but that thing tanked like New Coke and Ishtar combined.

My trip to Baghdad continues to pique interest it seems. I embark upon a bit of a media blitz beginning tomorrow. I have an NPR interview tomorrow, not sure with whom, but we are recording it at WBUR’s studio, and trying to put together a feed from Baghdad with Major Pacheco. Pacheco is the singer for Groove Alliance, the band I went to Baghdad with.

You may not yet have heard of EFPs, but you will. By now, most everyone knows that IED stands for “improvised explosive device,” and that it can be anything from a crude nail bomb to a bundle of dynamite sticks, to a couple of dud artillery shells wired to blow from a cell phone ping. EFP stands for “explosively formed projectile”, and its utterance is not welcome in the barracks.

The Paris to JFK leg was unpleasant, mostly because my frame of mind was poor. It had been a brave gesture the night before to take up the cudgels and hoist the party flag on the last night of tour, but it is well established that absent ideal sleeping conditions (darkness, silence, concubine), I don’t sleep well.

On the last night of the Groove Alliance Deadly Force Tour, Baghdad 2007, we had just been treated to a French seven course meal at the Hotel Royal in Amman, and the four subs and the female vocalist thought it a fine idea to prowl the hotel and huff Cuban cigars, drink some complimentary wine that had been given each of us at the front desk, and make a dull racket laughing and talking in cavernous, empty marble lobbies until 3 AM. The wakeup call was at 4:30 and so began 30 hours of traveling.

Journal entry 1/17/07. Today we visited Sadaam’s old parade site. You’ve seen pictures of it, two huge statues of a hand holding a sword on either side of a wide paved road with the swords’ tips meeting in the center about 50 feet high. There is an identical pair of crossed swords at the opposite end of the concourse, and a reviewing stand in the center where Sadaam would stand and wave, and discharge rounds from a rifle or sidearm.

Journal entry, 11:00, 1/19/07. It’s Friday, about to become Saturday and our work here is done. We are manifest to deploy back to Camp Striker. Our last journey in Iraq will be a twelve-mile trek in a Rhino down Route Irish, formerly the most dangerous road in Baghdad. The road has since been brought under firm control.

I didn’t need to have set my alarm yesterday morning. I was awakened by a loud announcement pealing from a series of speaker towers located all across the International Zone; “Incoming! Incoming!”

After the travails of flying from Manchester, New Hampshire, to Paris, to Amman, Jordan, followed by two consecutive cancelled flights from Amman to Baghdad, it was a joy to finally do what we came here to do.

Thursday, 1/19: I am sitting in JFK International in New York, having successfully completed the first leg of the journey, a forty minute flight aboard a prop plane that flew on time out of Manchester Airport. It was a smooth, turbulence-free flight whose propellors I swear were assisted in their duties of human elevation by the spirits and anticipation of their human cargo, a ten-piece show band bound for a week of dates in Baghdad, Iraq.