The First Day

So there I was, Kuwait City, no shit, true story. First though, let me back up. The Flight was long; I would be surprised if anyone reading this has ever been on such a long flight. It could have been worse; we had a chartered flight which means it was like a normal commercial flight, except we stayed with the same aircraft for the entire journey. There were flight attendants and as I recall decent food. I volunteered for the baggage detail because I was promised a seat in first class for the long ass flight. Turned out they gave the seats to some officers, even though they specifically said that wouldn’t happen; I still got a seat in business class so it wasn’t a complete loss. So we finally land in Kuwait, it’s hat enough as is, but then you have to add in the fact that we are on a tarmac so that adds 10 to 15 degrees, and then being on baggage detail makes it feel like another5 or so degrees. The bags had to go into a con-ex (it’s the big metal container you see on ships, trains, and trucks) and that means people had to be inside moving and stacking the bags and I was one of those people. The thing was like a damn oven, it just didn’t seem right to be sweating that much for as dry as it was but I found myself soaked quickly. Now generally the military is big on staying hydrated, people dying of heat stroke is frowned upon; so I figured there would be water somewhere and when I ask for some there is none around. So if I weren’t approaching a point of passing out I would have been more pissed off than I was but I was more concerned with staying conscious. Finally some water shows up from somewhere and I guzzle down a quart or so. If you know anything about being extremely dehydrated, you know that drinking real fast is not always the best plan, instead of trying to keep myself from passing out I was now trying to keep myself from puking all that life saving water onto the tarmac. Needless to say I survived that series of events and made it onto the bus to be taken to Camp Doha. I’m still dehydrated and I get a seat in the back of the bus, before we even get to the highway we are stopped for who knows why for about 30 minutes. Once again I find that other than bottles that someone else has already drank out of there isn’t any water available, but luckfully the A/C is working alright. We finally get on the road and, once we are out toward the middle of nowhere, the driver pulls over and gets out, next thing the bus is starting to fill with smoke. Everyone evacuates the bus, but they all leave there belongings, so there I am hanging out on the bus passing gear out the door. Turns out the bus wasn’t on fire (that much) but we have to squeeze onto the one and only other bus that pulled over with us. At this point I am feeling a little better and am seeing the humor of it all even though there are very few around me that had even had such a full experience as I. So I started in with the exaggerated story of my first day “in the shit”. Some people saw the humor in it others I think were either ignoring me or just lost in their thoughts of what there may be to come. My efforts to get a flight up to Baghdad where the unit I was joining was stationed proved almost as ridiculous as my first few hours in country, but that is another story.