The Plane Flight to Kuwait and Standing Around

(Almost nobody flies directly to Baghdad. It's a gradual process. Like in Vietnam, where you'd first go to Okinawa or Bangkok or somewhere, to get to Iraq you have to make several stops and get really tired first. I went from Okinawa to Osaka to Chicago to Tampa to Amsterdam to Kuwait, and then to Baghdad... and then finally to my new base. Kuwait is where most people fly in to Baghdad from. The following is similar to most people's story.)


The plane to Kuwait was a mix of contractors, wealthy Kuwaitis, oil workers’ kids, and military members on their way in or back from leave. For me it was like a gradual entrance into Arab culture, and seemed a little surreal. The “surreal” might have been from my final beer at the airport, though. I've been mixed in with people from all over the earth, but this was my first trip to the Middle East. Like many new experiences, nothing is really like you thought it was going to be. I've found that most people on our planet mix in with each other quite well. Two old Arab dudes in front of me were hysterical with laughter as they watched a British practical joke show on the overhead televisions. We laugh at the same things, we want the same things for our families, we all bleed red blood. We touched down in Kuwait City. The last thing I heard as I got off the plane was “importing alcohol here is illegal.” The airport was fairly clean, but partly under construction. We were instantly surrounded by the differences of our new world. Men in flowing robes. Women with heads in scarves. Young and westernized beautiful women with heads not in scarves. Haughty wealthy young Kuwaitis. Pakistani immigrant workers being ordered around like prisoners. Non-deodorant using bag handlers asking for money for their unsolicited baggage cart collecting. The airport had a Starbucks and some western restaurants, and though it was well past midnight, it was full of people waiting for friends and relatives while they sipped tea or ate . I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all, but we certainly drew a lot of attention with our oversized bags, military haircuts, and comparatively huge and muscular frames. I suppose we would have drew attention at any airport; but in Kuwait, with its history related to the U.S. military, and with the war still going on in the north, it almost felt like being some sort of celebrity--not anyone really famous, just maybe William Hung or something.

The Marine liaisons, a couple of sergeants, collected our ID cards and led us to some vans in the parking garage of the airport. It was dark and musty inside. The smell reminded me of walking out of airports in so much of the Third World, from Caracas to Beijing to Manila. The first thing that hits you is the smell of diesel exhaust. But here, the manner of dress was so different than the rest of the world. Even in China people mainly wear western-style clothing. But here I was surrounded by white robes and white headwear. Superficial, of course, but these are the things you notice first. We got onto the freeway for the 45-minute drive to Ali Al Salem, the air base that we were to leave from for Iraq. It was nearly 2 AM. We were all pretty surprised to hear that we were to report for check-in at 0430 for our military flight to Baghdad. I was pretty suspicious… it sounded way too efficient. Nothing in the military happens that smoothly. In the darkness, I couldn’t see much of the scenery from the freeway. We sped by the ordinary Kuwaitis’ apartment buildings, sand-colored cement buildings painted in amber by the freeway lights. The dimly lit minarets of mosques, marking centers of neighborhoods, lined the freeways like mile markers. The rest was all desert.

At the entrance to the base, our driver greeted the Kuwaiti guards, and we snaked our way through concrete barriers lined up to form roads in the wide dusty dirt. Far off blue runway lights blinked near the parked C-130's. We passed through a couple of checkpoints manned by young Army corporals, and finally parked at a row of metal buildings. It was 2:30 in the morning. We walked into one of the buildings (a small warehouse), and stopped at a desk in a section of cubicles. We were issued brand-new 9mm M9 pistols and 2 magazines of 15 rounds each. After signing for our weapons, we loaded our bags onto a few trailers pulled by golf cart-like transport vehicles called “gators.” We pulled into a section of the base’s “tent city,” and stopped at a tent that was used for transient billeting. The 16-man tents were brown on the outside, white on the inside, air conditioned, cement-floored, and hard wired for electricity. Not a bad setup, really. Metal bunk beds lined the tents. We shaved, and changed out of our civilian clothes. Later, wearing a uniform seven days a week in Iraq would become old hat; you wouldn't even think about it. But when you're passing from the warmth and security of the civilian world into a world of danger, picking up a weapon and changing into a uniform feels like you are superman changing into his super suit. It was nice to change out of our travel clothes and into cool and fresh cammies. At 0330, we departed for the waiting area for the plane flight. We staged our gear on a pallet next to a container box. And we began to wait. Twenty minutes later a busload of contractors—American defense contractors, Filipino workers, and other representatives from any of a thousand places. We realized they were our competition for the flight to Baghdad. This was the first hint that our flying north that day was far from a certainty. One of the flight organizers opened up the container box, brewed coffee, and began to collect passenger manifest information for the lined up contractors. We Marines stood at some nearby cement picnic tables, and talked easily, sipping coffee and telling stories about past deployments. No one could have known that a day or so before, none of us knew each other. But our Marine culture permeated us to the bone. We had the sort of sameness that made it extremely easy to talk and get along. I can only compare it to the way people like Filipinos easily congregate together in any foreign land. The culture we shared made bonding instant. It wasn’t long before we found that we all had mutual friends and acquaintances, or had served in some of the same units. The contractors stole glances at us and our weapons. Though some of them were returning to Iraq from vacation, and several were undoubtedly former military, many of them were probably in the Middle East for the first time. Our slung rifles, the pistols strapped to our legs, and our easy manner of conversation must have reminded them that they were really in a war zone now, and the things they had seen on television were now close at hand. Most of them talked quietly, almost nervously, among themselves. The sergeant came back and told us that we would be taken to the chow hall for breakfast, and when we returned we would “find out if we were flying.” By this time, I was certain we would not be headed to Baghdad that day.
After a welcome breakfast in a chow hall full of Air Force personnel that looked at us the way the contractors had, we arrived back at the container box just as the sun was coming up. After being told that we “might be going”, then “we probably are not going,” then “we are definitely going,” we were finally told, “you aren’t going.” It was nice to finally be certain about something, and being jerked around like that was the standard for most of us. We were much too tired, anyway, to be anxious about going north that day. We threw our gear into a van and returned to the transient tent we had changed in a few hours earlier. I laid my gear near a rack, and slept deeply for a couple of hours. At noon, I went to grab lunch with another officer, and then I sent some emails. I rearranged my gear in my bags for the tenth time, and relaxed for the rest of the day while I prepared to repeat the same drill the next morning.














Standing around in Kuwait waiting for a flight.