Hello Kuwait

We flew into Kuwait City in the heart of the night. We lost an entire day just by travel. The hours slipped away somewhere in the airflow between Baltimore and Germany, between Germany and Kuwait. Coming low into Kuwait, I watched the city lights. I have never seen ao many lights spread out across a city so flat, roads so evenly spaced. Flying in, I had expected to see a city half-lit, half-torn in jumbles of streetlights and mis-shapen buildings. Instead every light, every building looked as if placed by a ruler... a mathmatician's dream.


Lights in the American cities have always looked so scattered, bright yes, but uneven, which made the illumination look hasty and tossed like beads by children. But I guess when you have a land so flat as you have here in Kuwait, it's not too difficult to make at least the streetlights look orderly. The parking lots were a different story. Cars parks at jagged angles, following no lines or posted spaces. It looked like a city you might see in California... not here, halfway across the world in a place so close to war.

Stpping off the plane hit me with an even bigger surprise. Coming off, I braced myself for a cold gust laced with sand. Nothing. The air was so warm I thought I had forgotten to breathe. The time was one in the morning, and the temperature hanging in the seventies. It took me two or three more breaths before I realized the gust wasn't going to come. Warm, still air. Stale. Heavy. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like once the sun came up.


From the plane we boarded buses with Mercedes-Benz emblems on the front. We rode to the nearest forward operating base (FOB), received some briefs, rode to another FOB and relaxed for the day. The place is dusty. You can't walk anywhere without getting grits in your teeth. A rainstorm just hit us, though, and we'll see how it affects the dustbowl effect.

The food is good at least. They have little Kuwaiti men working the chow hall. They're dressed in white button-up shirts and hats that resemble 1930's icecream-man type. The chow is good, and most of the food items have arabic labels.

Walking into the porter-johns is always a surprise. The walls are ravaged by foul graffiti and nasty images. The thing that shames me the most about it is knowing that its fellow Soldiers who write that stuff. There's little concern within me to believe that this is a "holy" war.