Mandatory Fun

"It was like walking onto the surface of the moon," Graham Elwood says of his first experience walking off of a C-17 in Afghanistan. His experience was not unlike many of our own first times deploying to a far-off edge of the world. We take a long, long C-17 (or god help you, C-130) ride for seemingly endless hours. There are no windows. The plane is packed. Forget about an in-flight movie or looking out the window. And when you walk off, it's invariably the middle of the night and you and the hundred or so people you're with walk off the flightline in a single file. From there, who knows? There's a good chance the "hurry up and wait" has just begun. For civilians visiting war zones for the first time, it's no different – except they have no idea how to speak the acronym language. "They said 'When your bird hits the LZ, find your POC, they'll take you to the MWR tent then you can go to the DFAC,'" he jokes. "It's like... what are you saying to me right now, man?" Elwood is a Los Angeles-based comedian with ap