From crating up the bombs and bullets, to shrink-wrapping the helicopters, to counting up the endless tiers of port-a-potties, the pullout of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, when it inevitably comes, will rank as the longest-planned withdrawal ever.

Despite the years of preparation, the Pentagon’s painstaking planners just as inevitably will be challenged by the unknowables of a country at war, the vagaries of politics, the harshness of terrain and climate.

“Coming out of any theater of operations is tough,” says retired Lt. Gen. Gus Pagonis. But packing to go home from that distant desert presents special problems, as simple as finding the water to wash down your grungy gear, says this man who oversaw the homecoming from the last desert war, in 1991.

Air Force Col. Jeffrey Mintzlaff, who will be deeply involved in this one as what he calls a “synchronizer” of troop flights home, said “a lot of variables” complicate the picture.

“Is it a permissive environment? Hostile? Non-hostile? How much actually comes back?” asked Mintzlaff, chief contingency planner for the U.S. Transportation Command.

Efforts by Democrats to schedule that homecoming, and to wrap it up by next spring, were stymied in the U.S. Senate last week. But political momentum is pushing Washington toward a significant Iraq pullout by 2009.

On the drawing board

Plans for withdrawal have been on the drawing boards since before the March 2003 U.S. invasion, when it was envisioned that 150,000 troops would be drawn down to 30,000 by that fall.

Similar numbers are on the boards today. In addition to 160,000 troops, however, the U.S. presence in Iraq has ballooned over four years to include more than 180,000 civilians employed under U.S. government contracts – at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 other foreigners and 118,000 Iraqis – and has spread to small “cities” on fortified bases across Iraq.

“The easiest thing is getting the troops out,” Pagonis said. “The biggest problem is going to be the equipment – all that ammo and equipment.”

The tough part

Many of the Air Force’s 514 C-130 transport planes, carrying 92 passengers each, and 150 C-17s, with 102 passengers, are expected to ferry withdrawing troops to Kuwait, to be picked up by chartered commercial jetliners for flights home, Mintzlaff said. Many U.S. civilians and other foreigners are expected to leave the same way.

Then comes the tough part, the Air Force colonel said: “Identifying disposition of all the equipment.”

Those “cities” – from al-Asad Air Base in the west, population 17,000, to the Anaconda base farther east, with 25,000 – hold more than the thousands of tanks, other armored vehicles, artillery pieces and Humvees assigned to combat units. They’re also home to airfields laden with high-tech gear, complexes of offices filled with computers, furniture and air conditioners, systems of generators and water plants, PXs full of merchandise, gyms packed with equipment, big prefab latrines and ranks of small portable toilets, even Burger Kings and Subway sandwich shops.

“What stays? What goes? And if it goes, where does it go?” Mintzlaff asked.

Oh, rats

When it goes, most will go by sea. But it won’t be a simple matter of tagging, packing and loading.

Ever since U.S. authorities found plague-infected rats in cargo returning from the Vietnam War, the decontamination process has been demanding: water blasting of equipment, treatment with insecticide and rodenticide, inspections, certifications.

“I can’t overemphasize how difficult it is to meet U.S. Agriculture Department standards,” said Pagonis, whose 22nd Support Command supplied, fueled, transported and finally sent home the half-million U.S. troops of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990-91.

Water, in that desert, is key. Pagonis tells the story of a young sergeant in 1991 who hit on a solution, deploying the Army’s “reverse osmosis” technology, which produces drinking water, to purify and recycle the waste water from washdowns.

The list of special needs and problems is long. Port areas must be “sterilized.” Helicopters must be shrink-wrapped for an otherwise corrosive sea journey. Huge amounts of hazardous munitions – 300,000 tons were shipped home in 1991 – must be safely handled.

Pagonis’s 6,000 “close-out” specialists took a mere eight months to empty the desert of its U.S. stockpile. Troops in 1991 flew out at a rate of 5,000 a day. In Vietnam, where the U.S. military handed over thousands of tons of weaponry and equipment to the South Vietnamese as it departed, the Army drew down its forces from 190,000 to under 33,000 over 12 months in 1971-72.

How long would an Iraq pullout take?

“Six months is what is talked about around here,” Mintzlaff said from Scott Air Force Base, Ill. Others estimate as few as four or as many as 18 months would be needed. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks of withdrawing one combat brigade per month, pointing to a two-year plan. But Pagonis said that “once a withdrawal is decided on, they will want to do it expeditiously,” whichever party is in charge in Washington.