Birthday is just a date

I didn't realise it was my 29th birthday until I wrote down the date in my journal. July 21, 2008 (onboard the Canadian navy ship, HMCS Calgary in the Gulf of Oman). The concept that this warship was chasing a suspicious dhow in a cat-and-mouse reality and the fact that a group of highly trained special forces were ready to board this dhow was enough reason to make me forget. I was embedded with the Canadian Navy to document their efforts in patrolling international waters.

As a reporter, I have grown accustomed to spending my birthdays with strangers or in some of the most obscure places. In 2005, I found myself stuck in the Sinai documenting the life of the Bedouins to the background of yet another terrorist attack on a Sharm Al Shaikh resort in Egypt.

On both occasions, I was eager to share with someone that it's my birthday, but found no proper opportunity. Once I realised that it was my birthday, I tried to think of the most obscure ways to inform some one on the ship. I engaged one of the sailors in a very odd conversation. The sailor was on duty watching the dhow with a telescopic lens. "So, when is your birthday?" I asked. If it wasn't for the tense chase going on in the background, the sailor would have laughed but he didn't. I asked hoping he would ask in return, but he didn't.

After an eight hour ordeal with the dhow, the captain decided to conduct a military exercise - as if this wasn't enough adrenaline. I proceeded to the outer deck thinking this would just be a show of firing the guns. I took a few pictures and went back down. Little did I know what would come next.

It turns out that the exercise involved, what seemed to me, like an intentional tactic of trying to tip the ship on its side by turning while going 30 knots.

Manoeuvring

I noticed that when chairs and plates were giving in to gravity and falling all over the place. I looked at one of the sailors and asked if this is normal. "They are testing out the ships manoeuvring skills," one of the sailors said while hanging on to the table as not to fall. I thought one manoeuvring exercise should prove the ship is capable, but the exercise would last much longer.

I bragged to the crew that I don't get sea sick, and in fact I don't recall ever getting sea sick on a boat. Having spent my honeymoon on a cruise, I had built some level of immunity to the ocean's rocking. So I thought. But this was no cruise.

Five minutes later, I found myself in the bathroom and I will spare you the rest of the details, but one. I was so shocked by how long this military exercise was lasting that I will never forget looking up towards the upper deck and saying in Arabic, "Enough, this is not war." I mustered enough strength to laugh.

By 6 p.m. I snuck into my 20-inch middle bunk, trying to convince myself that birthdays are overrated. It's just a date. I even tried to work how with the time difference of where I was born affects my actual birth date.

In the end, I wished myself a happy birthday and hoped the gravel pills would knock me out.