Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(60)
Our plane touched down in Kuwait City late afternoon on June 17, and after going through customs we checked into our hotel to get some rest. The next morning the USO officials split us up into three groups. My group made a stop to visit folks at Camp Doha Army Base just outside the city, before heading to Camp Arifjan, the main military installation for all US branches of our military. After visiting with a group of troops there, we boarded several large, tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters, and the pilots flew us to Camp Udairi. The ramp of the helicopter was open in the back, and from the air I saw a huge sprawling tent city in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert. Someone said we were about fifteen miles from the Iraq border, and the camp could accommodate some fourteen thousand troops. Already the temperature soared. It might have been 110 degrees Fahrenheit outside, maybe more, although it was hard to tell. The air felt sticky, sandy, and as we touched down I squinted at the clouds of dust that rose off two man-made ridges of sand surrounding the camp. A string of barbed wire topped the ridges, and guard posts dotted the perimeter.
We all scrambled out of the helicopters. Generators hummed nearby, and a few helicopter rotors were still winding down, making it hard to hear. I smelled a whiff of plastic portable toilets, as a tan-colored US armored vehicle with a machine gun turret on top barreled down the road close to us. Saddam’s statue had been pulled down in Baghdad a few months before, and Saddam was on the run. I felt safe, but my eyes darted to and fro, keeping a sharp lookout for I don’t know what. We’re in a war zone, I reminded myself.
A USO representative motioned for us to follow him, and he led us to a big tent near the center of the camp. The tent had an entrance on each side. Generators worked overtime to pump in air-conditioning. We headed for one door, and at a door on the other side, a line of at least a thousand troops waited in the heat to get in. As we headed in, they started to applaud. The atmosphere inside crackled. Maybe another thousand uniformed troops already inside the tent broke into applause when we came into the tent. I took a deep breath. What have we done? They deserve the applause, not us. But wow! It was amazing. Even with a little air-conditioning, it was hot as hell in there. But nobody seemed to care. We lined up, and the troops lined up and quickly started to file past us.
We smiled and shook hands and posed for pictures, and everything happened quite quickly. The very first soldier I met said, “Hey, Lieutenant Dan, you got legs!” And then each one down the line just kept calling me Lieutenant Dan over and over. I realized they didn’t know my real name, so I went with it. I tried to look each person in the eye, tried to ask each soldier where he or she was from, tried to ask how things were going, but nothing I did felt very deep, because we had to keep the line moving; there were so many people to see.
Two hours later we needed to leave. The same USO representative herded us back toward the helicopters. As the helicopters began to take off, I looked off into the distance in the direction of Iraq and envisioned hundreds of our tanks rolling across the border a few months before. I looked out again across this vast tent city in the middle of nowhere. Soon, it would be renamed Camp Buehring in honor of Lieutenant Colonel Charles H. Buehring, who would be killed in the coming months. As the sun began to set and the base disappeared in the distance, I reflected on what had just happened. We’d seen nearly two thousand troops in two hours. I wondered, Did we actually do any good? The helicopters ferried us back to Camp Arifjan. It was night now, and after we landed and shook the cotton out of our ears, we headed back to the hotel for a night’s sleep. Tomorrow we would be getting up early to head up to Baghdad. As tired as I was, it was hard to sleep that night.
The next morning I grabbed a quick bite to eat, gathered with the rest of my group, and shuffled off to Arifjan where a big C-130 military transport plane waited for us. The heat beat down from the sun. Inside the C-130, two long lines of foldable seats faced each other from either side of the airplane. I found my seat and strapped myself in. Toward the back of the plane, I noticed pallets of equipment and supplies. We were all part of the cargo.
The man to my right wore a button on his shirt bearing a photo of two young men, one a New York City police officer, the other, a firefighter with the FDNY. We struck up a quiet conversation, and I learned he wasn’t an entertainer. The two young men were his sons, and both sons had died on 9/11. He was there because he wanted the troops overseas to know that America supported them. The man was maybe in his mid-sixties and spoke with a low rasp. Scars ran across his neck, and later I found out he’d survived throat cancer. The man carried a chunk of rock. Concrete maybe. He showed it to me, then passed it my direction so I could feel it too. I ran my hands over its rough surface. It felt like any old piece of rubble. Puzzled, I asked him what it was all about, why he was carrying all this extra weight.
He swallowed once, twice, then his eyes grew wet. He whispered, more hoarsely than before, “It’s a piece of the World Trade Center.”
A few hours later we landed at Saddam International Airport on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq. In early April 2003, this was the site of one of the fiercest battles of the war as the Iraqis fought hard to keep control of runways. It would soon be renamed Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). The temperature must have climbed to 120 by the time we arrived. The air felt thick—like the Mojave Desert on the hottest summer’s day. Security looked tight, and we were informed the airport was mostly safe (although a few months later a civilian airplane was struck by a Russian-made SA-14 missile shortly after takeoff). I longed for a bottle of water.