"Wolves will eat your ass"

BALAD AIR BASE, IRAQ - Remember when you were a kid and you thought it would be awesome to stay up all night? Yeah, well kids are dumb. It sucks.

I'm finally back in Iraq after staying up for 40 straight hours getting from Germany to Kuwait to Balad. By the end of the journey I felt a little bit like the delusional insomniac in Fight Club.

I think I'm slipping into borderline narcolepsy with all of this lack of sleep. Sleeping anywhere is not a problem. I've nodded off in my body armor, in metal folding chairs, on Blackhawk helicopters, in armored vehicles bouncing down bomb-plagued roads.

One of the British Royal Marines who taught my how-not-to-die-in-a-war-zone class was right when he said, in talking about what to do if your shackled naked in a dungeon after being kidnapped, "If you're tired enough, no matter what your situation, you will sleep."

But now I'm rested and, with luck, I will be on a helicopter back to Baqouba, where insurgents just blew up a car bomb to greet me.

As if I needed it, I had a strange reminder on my flight to Kuwait that I am, indeed, in the Middle East. My original seat was next to a Muslim woman wearing a hijab. A flight attendant asked if I would switch seats with a woman so that the Muslim woman would not have to sit next to a man. I agreed, but I've got to wonder how well that works when a flight is packed to the gills.

During my recent travels, I felt a twinge of homesickness when I heard the following conversation on a bus in Kuwait. This was from an ill-informed contractor trying to impress his seatmate with stories about what a badass he had been while working in Alaska:

"Wolves will eat your ass. You keep shooting and they will keep coming at you until you run out of bullets." Uh, yeah, you mean like when you were fighting off that snarling pack of wolves on the North Slope? I kept my mouth shut, but it was difficult.

He followed up by summing up how to survive in the scary wilds of the West: "The only thing you got going for you is your brain." Despite that, the contractor is still alive.