Entry #2

On 25 July, reveille called us out of bed at 0200. We gathered our belongings, cleared the barracks and mustered. With everyone accounted for (including weapons), we boarded buses at Fort Jackson and headed for the airport in Columbia, SC.

Upon our arrival at the TARMAC, we found several Vet organizations waiting for us. They treated us to pastries, coffee and goodie bags. This was a nice gesture, and very much appreciated since our flight was delayed given that the aircraft had to offload some fuel in order to lift from the runway which had been shortened as a result of some unannounced construction. This resulted in a change to our flight plan which would have taken us directly from Columbia to Leipzig, Germany.

We ended up going to JFK Airport in New York, where we spent a couple of hours as the plane refueled and changed crew. By the way, this was a commercial flight, which made it kind of strange since everyone carried their weapons onboard. Guns and rifles at our feet, and I can’t think of any one who did not have at least one knife on their person…

We landed in Leipzig before 0200 hours local time: Nothing much to report since we just got off to stretch our legs and back on the plane. I heard that the Germans have a different word for everything, but I only saw a couple of them who were busy doing, ah, German things. ;-)

Our plane made a rough landing in Kuwait, our intermediate destination. It was 1000 hours local time and the heat was there to greet us with a cozy 124 degrees Fahrenheit. One could only imagine stepping into a convection oven. If I felt my eyeballs were going to melt, I had nothing to worry about since the winds were kicking up enough sand to coagulate the goop in my eye sockets. Even though I had been in 140 degree Persian Gulf temperatures back in the 90s, I guess I have been spoiled over the last few years, and I had not come to grips with the fact that it was only going to get hotter. And it did.

As we arrived at our high security camp in the early afternoon, the temperature had risen to 138. It made me wish we were back in South Carolina 95 degree temperatures. We were promptly assigned tents and ushered to mandatory briefs which reiterated hydration, hydration, hydration.

We come to Kuwait to acclimate to the region and to reach the pinnacle of our training phase, the Udairi Range. It is literally in the middle of nowhere. It’s hotter than any other place I’ve heard of, and it’s, well, even hotter than a sauna at max temp. We donned our body armor and Kevlar helmets, boarded the busses and headed to the infamous Udairi Range. Once there, we unloaded our gear, ate some yummy MREs (not so yummy), and hit the sack to get a bit of shut eye before our 0400 wake up call. This was not a bad time for reveille since my internal clock was messed up and I had only been able to get to sleep between 2300 and 0200 hours (3 hours of sleep at night).

I got up before the others and just enjoyed the early morning warmth. I would like to say that the air is pure in this forsaken place, but it is polluted with a very fine dust that makes the atmosphere seem as if veiled by a dirty fog. The sun often looks like the moon as it tries to penetrate the dirt that forgets its place is on the ground. Anyway, soon everyone was up and we had MREs for breakfast. It seems to me that all the MREs taste the same, even if they are labeled and made to look different. I realize that I have had too much of the good things back home. But this sure gives me an appreciation for our regular grunts who have to live on this stuff and in these conditions for days or even weeks.

By 0500 we were in our body armor and getting our first briefs, which were shortly followed by dry drills on close quarter maneuvers. Once the instructors felt we were ready to run with life ammo, we lined up on the range, locked and loaded our weapons. Then the fun began: Walk, stop, look, shoot; walk, stop, look, turn, shoot; run, stop, look, shoot, so on and so forth… Of course, no amount of shooting fun can reach its climax if one does not get on his knees to pick up all the brass. I believe that took us until noon.

The afternoon was spent in briefs covering the latest convoy procedures, and then we picked up our HUMVEEs to practice our newly acquired knowledge on convoy ops. And so, we rode our vehicles through small village setups, practiced identifying improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and the actions to execute in such cases (I can’t go into the details). As the sun set, we returned to our tents and ate more MREs.

On our last day in Udairi, we rose, ate MREs, donned our body armor, and loaded onto the HUMVEEs for our final convoy ops test. I was the gunner. That is the guy who gets to ride on top. It looks cool in the movies, but it is not so cool when one has to do it for real. It gets hot up there; one gets banged up when going up and down burrows; the face must be covered to avoid the dirt caking the face; and the gunner is the one most exposed to the hazards of IEDs or rollovers. Well, long story short, we got high ratings on the execution of our convoys ops.

The temperature was reported at 153 degree Fahrenheit as we were boarding the transports that would take us from Udairi Range back to base camp. It felt way hotter that Africa hot, but several of us could not believe that such a temperature was possible. Hence, we asked the chief for verification. He humored us and came back with a precise reading: 153.3 degrees. Ouch! (According to Wikipedia, the highest recorded temperature is 136, but I do not believe Wikipedia has made it to the Udairi Range). When I get back home, if I can’t seem to recall certain events, remember your name or even mine, this should explain many things in advance…

I expect to be in Baghdad tomorrow (3 August).

Oh, please do not try any of the stuff above at home.

Cheers and please go grab a cold one on my behalf. ;-)