The time we had all been waiting for had finally arrived. I don’t know one person who was not ready to get out of Gulfport, Mississippi as most of us had been there for three months and some even longer. We were all ready to head out and start the mission at hand so we could work our way towards getting back home to our seemingly normal lives.
We were herded into the training hall for all of our final preparations. After signing out our M-16s and retrieving our 300-day supply of Malaria pills, we were locked down to the point that if you wanted to go outside to have a cigarette, you had to relinquish your military ID card to the Seabee standing door guard. You can never keep everyone together in one place at one time if you don’t have the darn door guard!
Finally, after sitting in the training hall watching old boring movies, the call came to mount up and move out. We all loaded onto big white school buses for our trip to the National Guard air station where our chariot awaited. It was a gigantic 767 jet plane chartered just for us by the U.S. Government. It was like something out of a movie or what you see on the news; 180 fighting Seabees taking one last look at their homeland before heading up the long ladder steps that led to the entrance of the aircraft.
We were greeted by smiling flight attendants ready and willing to make our flight as comfortable as possible. I found a window seat and settled in next to a young fellow Seabee I had seen around but never actually met. I promised I would not drool on him the first leg of the flight and he promised the same. Well, he didn’t promise he wouldn’t use my shoulder to prop up his overstuffed pillow on, so that is just what he did. Needless to say I did not get much sleep on the first leg of our journey.
It was a four and a half hour flight to Newfoundland, Canada! It was dark when we landed so I didn’t get to see much other than the terminal of the airport; we were let off of the plane while it was being refueled for the long haul to our next fuel stop. I thought for a moment I was back in 1981 with the bright orange leather puffy couch seating and drab paint job. Nonetheless it was fun to explore the gift shop and see the land that the great Newfoundland and Labrador retrievers were named after.
After raiding the gift shop for a fridge magnet and shot glass we boarded back onto our airplane for the flight over the Atlantic Ocean to Germany. I was excited because we were going to land during the day and I had a window seat. This would be my first trip to Europe even if it was just to a small air port. At least now I can say I had been to Germany. Lets just say that I was not very impressed. I expected green lush mountains and ancient castles but instead got flatlands, 95 degree temps and strange looks from the local police. I was told that if we had landed in the former West Germany I might have been able to see those other things. The terminal was hot due to lack of air conditioning and the gift shop reminded me that some countries are just behind the times. I was able to get a pretty flashy fridge magnet though. After spending a half hour roaming the terminal, emailing home and trying to figure out how to flush European toilets, we were back on the plane for our final leg to Kuwait.
We landed in Kuwait a few hours before dawn and all of us were really tired as it had been a very long journey. We unloaded our bags from the belly of the plane and reloaded them into waiting trucks, loaded ourselves onto buses and drove about an hour to the base that we would be staying at for a few days until our flight to Afghanistan. We had to travel with the bus curtains closed but I tried to sneak a peek when I could just to get a look at the city. To my surprise, what I could see of Kuwait City looked a lot like most American cities. As we got further out of town that changed a little bit but not much.
After arriving at the air base in Kuwait and retrieving our luggage, we got settled into our "cabins" as I call them; wooden structures with eight bunk beds each. We finally got to lay our tired, in-need-of-a-shower bodies down for a few hours before we needed to be up again for the arrival briefing. By that time we had seen the sun rise three times and set twice in a 24-hour period.
I fully expected Kuwait to be hot but I had no idea that it would feel the way it did. It had been unusually humid there and the temperatures reached 125 and up every day with winds that blew nothing but hellish hot air. It was equivalent to the feeling of a blow dryer being held to your skin on the highest temperature setting. It literally burned the skin. Even the short walk to the dining facility was challenging. All in all though it was a pretty decent base with a lot of amenities and the food was great. We spent about a week there awaiting our flight to Afghanistan and were able to have a little R&R which was very much needed. Next stop...Kandahar Afghanistan...
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