Inshallah is an Arabic word meaning “If God (Allah) wills it”. The phrase is used when Muslims refer to something happening in the future. They pepper their conversations with inshallah. For example, one of my Engineers may ask a contractor “When are you going to submit an updated construction schedule?” A typical response from a Muslim contractor would be “I will have the new schedule to you on Tuesday, inshallah.” This comes from an Islamic scripture that says “And never say of anything ‘I shall do such and such thing tomorrow’. Except if Allah wills it.” Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?
Now when Tuesday rolls around and the contractor did not submit a new schedule, I’ll ask him why he didn’t submit the schedule. He’ll reply “mashallah” which means “God has willed it”. Inshallah has become almost an escape clause for not doing something you were supposed to do. This has made it a very popular phrase with the soldiers here in Iraq.
I spent the last two nights sitting at the airfield trying to get a flight to COB Speicher in Tikrit. It was time for the semi-annual Engineer Conference. I was there for the last conference in October 2007. Check-in for flights is 1 hour prior to lift-off. I was scheduled for a 2330 flight on Tuesday night. When I checked in at 2230, I was told that the flight was on a weather delay. Everyone was instructed to stand-by and wait for updates. An hour later at 2330, the person working the desk announced that the delay was still on and to stand-by again. The same thing happened at 0030 and 0130. Finally at 0200, the flight was officially cancelled.
When your flight is cancelled, that’s it. You are not automatically booked on the next flight. You must request a new flight. The catch is that all flight requests must be submitted at least 72 hours prior to the flight. But you can sign up for stand-by at any time. So I went back at 2120 on Wednesday to wait on stand-by for a 2220 flight to Speicher. At check-in, I was told everything was on schedule. The board showed the flight consisted on 2 Blackhawks. Each Blackhawk will typically carry about 11 troops in addition to the crew. So that meant 22 seats. There were 11 people that had previously booked for the flight, so that left 11 seats for stand-by. I think there were about 25 of us waiting on stand-by. Normally, you would think that the first 11 on the list would be told to wait, and everyone else would be told to go home. But that’s not the case because sometimes they have the wrong aircraft on the list. If the flight shows up with a Chinook instead of a Blackhawk, then that means an extra 30 available seats on that one bird. So in true Army fashion, once again, we wait.
Well, at 2230, the desk officer announced the flight was again on weather delay. This happened again at 2330. But at 2355, he gave us the good news, “it’s on”. He got us all organized in our different lines, one for scheduled passengers and another for stand-by passengers, in order of priority. We gave him our ID cards so that he could scan them into the passenger tracking system. He was finalizing his instructions at about 0020 when another flight operations person came out to report that the flight was cancelled. The birds had left their initial location, ran in to some bad weather, and had to return to their starting point.
Why didn’t I go to the Engineer Conference in Speicher? Mashallah.
