Hey Kuwait, Nobody Likes You

Flying into Kuwait, I was in awe of the oil fields that I had only seen on TV.  My sense of adventure kept my forehead glued to the plane window.

“Welcome to Kuwait,” Drew sarcastically said passing by as he slapped the smallpox vaccine scab on my shoulder.

            “What the fuck, man?  That was on my smallpox shit,” I whined.

            Drew turned to look at me, his eyebrows raised and then he turned away quickly.  I turned to see what he was looking at.  Yep, it was our squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Peterson.  He was just looking at me so I smiled, awkwardly nodded and turned back around and walked over to Drew.

            “Thanks a lot asshole.”

            “You’re the one that said it.”

            Kuwait was the final training spot for our unit in July 2006.  We would acclimatize while checking our equipment and making sure we were all on the same page for every situation we could think of.  You know what’s awesome about Kuwait?  Nothing.

            Stepping off the plane and onto the tarmac I thought, “This plane’s engines need to be turned off.”  There lies the problem.  The engines were off.  As I walked off the tarmac towards the buses it felt like an angry hairdryer was glued to my face.  I had a hard time opening my eyes with the heated wind and bright sun leaning on us at 120 degrees.  That’s quite extreme considering we left Fort Lewis, WA at about 55 degrees then Maine then Germany en route to “The Sandbox.”  We had to wait to get on the buses, so we gathered under some tan netting and hydrated.  I was in the shape of my life a couple days earlier, but with a slight hangover, jet lag and smallpox vaccine symptoms kicking my ass I had a hard time breathing in that climate.  I thought “There is no way I’m going to make it a year in this air and fight a war.”

            Our days were long, but simple.  We would get up around 3am to avoid the extreme heat while working out.  Then we’d eat, hydrate and go straight into training until about noon.  Then we’d hide in the tents where the temps were at a nice, cool 95 degrees.  Guys would clean weapons, do classes on scouting, play cards or sneak off to the port-o-john with porn to rub one out, which was gutsy because you could easily become a heat casualty doing that.

Fighting fatigue from that damn smallpox shot along with an unnecessary anthrax shot, we made it to our home for the next few weeks.  It was a tent that would house about 85 sweaty, nasty dudes who would often forget they were about to enter a war zone with each other.  Being away from home, no women, no booze and training we didn’t need was the perfect equation for short fuses to fly off the chain.  On top of all that, we slept six inches apart on cots.  Of course there were messy fellas that didn’t believe in personal hygiene or keeping their 6x2ft area organized.  Real hard, I know.

           

This is only a small portion of our tent. Lucky me got to be in the middle.

            We would rotate a two-man guard around the clock on the Strykers and do maintenance.  This was a particularly annoying task considering the trucks were parked about a half-mile away and the path to them was nothing but deep sand.  I remember carrying my MK 19 to the trucks one day.  It weighed 75 lbs and the only comfortable way to carry it was to front carry it.  That equals a great arm workout since the walk took 15 minutes thru the deep sand.  While pulling guard on the trucks at night we would stare off into the black abyss of night and wonder what was happening across the boarder to the north.  We went to the range just one day.  The range consisted of us driving 30 minutes to the middle of nowhere, passing a herd of camels and shooting at paper targets set up in front of some sand burms.  Life in Kuwait got boring real quick.  To top it off we were introduced to a Middle East tradition, the sandstorm.

            One day while bored out of our minds at the trucks, we tested the theory that if you wet a sock, put a bottle of water in it and then laid it in a shaded area that the bottle of water would significantly cool down.  It might have just been a trick on the mind, but it seemed to work.  Simple things like this made us look like a caveman grunting at the discovery of fire, “ugh, ugh!”  While we were laughing at our own simpleton ways I looked off into the distance as the wind kicked up.

            “The hell is that?” I asked.

            We all stood slowly and looked to the horizon.  It was some kind of haze moving in our direction.  Haze my ass.  It was a seven day sand storm.  Sandstorms are the most annoying things on the face of the planet.  Even more annoying than Jim Carey’s “most annoying noise in the world” routine in “Dumb and Dumber.”  You can’t hide from it.  It has a sustained wind like in a hurricane, but much weaker of course.  Winds would consistently stay in the 20-30 mph range.  Sand would cover everything and weapons cleaning become difficult.  When it finally settled, we rejoiced.

The tail end of a sandstorm in Kuwait my second tour.

            The days continued and seemed to get longer and longer.  People in leadership positions, such as Breastos, tried to come up with ways to keep the rest of us busy.  Instead of succeeding, he only infuriated us with “hip pocket training.”  It was a term used to tell a guy in my position to pull a class out of his ass to teach the rest of the guys.  We all knew the material, but we had to look busy in the presence of rank that was above Breastos so it didn’t look like his soldiers were getting lazy.  We also  got sent to the trucks to “disappear” for a little while.

At night the temperature in the tent would actually drop to what it was set at, a frigid 65 degrees.  Some guys would bring their cots outside to sleep.  It doesn’t seem bad, but when you’re used to 120 degrees outside and 95 degrees inside, that 30-50 degree drop will shock the body quite a bit.  It got agitating as the time grew near to push north.

We were initially told we were going to Anbar Province in western Iraq, a desolate region.  Our “torch party,” or soldiers that went early to start our transition with the unit currently in that area of operation had already arrived.  It didn’t take long before rumors started to fly about our unit not going to Anbar.  I would always find a reason to get into our higher command’s tent to listen to radios and look at maps in order to get an idea of where we were going.           

 We were about to move north and be a part of the surge of American troops in Iraq at the height of the war.  The rumors floating around were Baghdad.  Fuck yeah!  To the center of the shit.  We were told not to talk about it so of course “Joe” was at the phone booth telling his girlfriend how important he was and where he was going.  I heard of one soldier walking out of the phone trailer and immediately being escorted off by the geeks that monitor the phones.  What a dumb ass.

            Wanting to keep as much packed as we could to be ready to move at a moments notice, we froze our asses off in the tent.  Thankfully it was on the first night of sleeping without fart sacks or puss pads that we got the word.  Off we went to get on the C130 planes for Baghdad.  For once the rumors were spot on.  My adrenaline starts moving thru my body like the constant flowing lava on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano.  Here we go.  Fuck you, Kuwait.