Certified, but ready?

Five crazy days in Strasbourg, Va.,... and now it's over. We learned everything from first aid to how to react if abducted by gunmen to how to play English drinking games (the latter not an official part of the course).

I've spent this evening in at the Dulles Airport Marriott hotel re-hashing the week and trying to let it all soak in. I definitely feel like I need some time to de-compress.

The course wasn't physically intense, and it probably would have been just plain fascinating and fun if it wasn't for the fact that I knew I actually would be going to a place where the dangers -- riots, ambushes, IEDs, mines, checkpoints -- all exist. It was unsettling, of course, but also a good thing: I'm glad to have it all thrown in my face, to some extent, rather than to go to Iraq ignorant of its realities.

Some preconceptions I held were shattered. For example, in my mind I saw myself playing soccer with the local kids in a international pick-up game. That idea was thrown out the window. That won't be happening. Too much of a security risk.

But I also feel much more prepared: The first aid training was pretty intense -- we got a lot of classroom instruction follow by drills where we would either individually or as a group react to situations where several people are injured with chest wounds, arteries severed, impaled object, lost limbs, etc. The instructors were the casualties, and they role-played pretty well. It was actually pretty fun.

Last night the instructors -- five tattoo-happy ex-military Brits -- led the seven of us students in a series of English drinking games as we hung out at the Ramada Inn bar (my drinking was one beer... a contrast the instructors). I discovered my untapped talent: The ability to move a penny from my forehead to my mouth using just facial muscles. Impressed?

I'll be flying out of DC tomorrow back to Fresno. This week will take some time to mull over, and it prompted a good number of conversations with some of the other students who are also going to Iraq about whether we really want to do this. But I feel that after a deep breath and a little rest, I'll still feel up for it.

Another day on the farm

Note: Don't read this post if you may go through hazardous environment training at some point in the future. It contains spoilers.

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I had barely recovered from jet lag when I was abducted by masked gunmen.

We were driving to our training course area on a Virginia farm when our car stopped. Men wearing ski masks and camaflouge jackets came running down the embankment brandishing AK-47s and handguns. We were ordered out of the car, our heads were covered with sacks, and we were led off to a grassy area. There they took my wallet and cell phone.

The whole deal was pretty realistic. But it wasn't real, of course. Just part of the training. Definitely the most memorable part so far.

After the abduction, we were eventually let go. The whole thing was videotaped and we watched it later in the day during a debriefing of sorts. We also learned a few good tips on what to do if you are taken hostage, such as not fighting back unless you think you can actually escape.

So far I'm on day two of the five-day training. There's five British instructors, and seven students -- four Americans, a Londoner, an Australian, and a Canadian. I think by the end of the week I'll be speaking with a proper English accent.

The group of students is a fun crew. Two are Washington Post reporters, one of whom will be in Iraq at the same time I will. It's nice to know I'll see a familiar face once I get there. Others are training for stints in Afghanistan or other hostile areas.

The training so far has been fun, but also sobering. It's forced me to face the reality of what goes on in Iraq and the risks it entails -- though I'm glad to go through this now rather than be ignorant of it.

Chillin' in the Ramada

I spent today re-familiarizing myself with the stellar metro subway system in our nation's capital. I visited my college friend and former Whitworthian editor Aimee Goodwin for lunch and checked out her office at the Express, a side publication of the Washington Post. Her office also has a rec room. She beat me in ping pong.

Later I wandered the streets of the capital like a lost tourist and found the hotel next to Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue where I did my internship with States News Service four years ago. I saw it as a pilgrimage, of sorts, to revisit my first real journalism experience. It was kind of dissapointing. The guy who ran the news service was arrested on tax evasion charges, and I knew the place had folded... so I wondered what happened to the office. Sure enough, it was completely abandoned and had construction material scattered around.

In the evening, I and three other people going through the hazardous environment training this week were picked up at Reagan National Airport and shuttled by two tatooed military types to Stasbourg, Va., where we were put up at the Ramada Inn. There will be seven of us in all; I'll meet the other three tomorrow morning. So far I'm the only American, though the other British and Australian chaps and gals I've met are friendly. We ate at a hole-in-the wall Chinese restraunt tonight. My fortune was something about me being a loser for thinking I would find "salvation in a cookie." I guess they have a point.

Cobra II update: no progress.

Glad to have a few friends

Wow, it's great to hear all the encouragement from everyone via email and blog comments. It's definitely cool to know there will be some folks keeping me in mind while I'm hitting the streets (or, more likely, hanging out in a hotel trying to stay cool).

I made the many-hours flight from Fresno to Las Vegas to DC this morning. It was my first time in Vegas and despite the opportunity to win half a mil on the airport slot machine, I passed.

Tomorrow I'll meet an old college friend for lunch and then get picked up at Dulles Airport and whisked away to training in Woodstock, Va., which is about 90 miles west of DC. Apparantly there I will learn how to not be kidnapped, or if I am, how to escape. They told me to bring my hiking boots, so I'm guessing there'll be some role-playing going on. But besides that, not sure what I'll be going through for the next week.

Cobra II update: I'm on page 168 (got some good plane reading in).

No, I'm not fluent in Arabic

They gave me two months to prepare.

When I signed up for a tour de journalism in Iraq, I thought my name would be put on a lengthy list of wanna-be war correspondents that gets filed away and referenced when qualified reporters started to run dry. Instead, they told me to sign up for training ASAP because I was going to Baghdad in August. That was late May. Now I've got six weeks left.

If you asked me earlier this year how someone becomes a war correspondent for a newspaper chain that includes some of the country's largest newspapers, I would tell you that you'd probably have to sign up for a job as a reporter working for an English-language newspaper working in a remote part of the world. Then maybe do some free-lancing for an American paper and hopefully work your way into a lower-rung reporting job at a second-tier bureau. From there, hope for the best.

But apparently that's not the way it works.

No, instead, they take anyone willing and able. Especially after McClatchy Newspapers sold off the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, where a bunch of reporters were going through Journalism in Baghdad Bootcamp. McClatchy, which owns the Fresno Bee, was suddenly left with a shortage of legit war journalists. So here I am with an opportunity I never saw coming. Unlike the bullets, hopefully.

To say I feel underqualified is an understatement. More like unqualified. But people keep on reassuring me that "I'll do great." As in, I won't end up on a grainy Al-Jazeera video? Other people tell me "Congratulations" when they hear I'm heading to Iraq. I'm storing up all those kudos in a little mental box and plan to unleash them in full force the moment I touch down in Europe on the return flight. That's when congratulations will hopefully be in order.

So with all that off my chest, I'm sincerely thankful for the encouragement, and I know people only mean the best. After all, what do you say to someone who out of his own free will signed up for six weeks in the heart of Baghdad? "Just keep your head down"? Actually, a lot of people have said that, too. That and "What do your parents think?" ... My answer: They think they regret dropping me as a child.

So wish me luck. Pray for me. Let me know what you think of my first blog ever. In the meantime, I'm hashing my way through 602 pages of Cobra II, a fascinating and in-depth inside story on the build-up to the war and its execution. I'm on page 131.

Tomorrow I head to Woodstock, VA for five days of training. Not sure what to expect. Apparently they train you for what to do if you become a hostage. I'll have Internet access at the hotel I'll be staying at and will be posting regularly. If I mysteriously stop posting, that means one of two things: 1) I got lazy, or 2) the terrorists have won.