Gateway

Ah, Kuwait: land of sand, diesel generators spaced twenty meters apart, port-o-lets, and tents. I found myself the next day at Camp Ali al Salem in Kuwait. Like Camp Virginia, this is a sprawling, multi-purpose base. Gateway is the area of the camp dedicated to processing people coming in and going out of theater, either on leave or redeployment back home. I got here via a crowded flight on a venerable Air Force C-130 Hercules. We were packed in like sardines. Coincidentally, I spent the flight sitting next to my friend Vinny, a civilian friend of mine who works law enforcement and who was in Iraq for a 120 day temporary assignment. Vinny was redeploying home. We had ran into the each other at the BIAP passenger terminal. As we like to say, it’s a medium-sized country.

Upon landing at Ali al Salem, we boarded a bus for a fifteen minute ride to Gateway. Vinny, along with other civilians, got off before us to be processed separately. I bid him good bye and good luck. The rest of us got off just down the road and filed into a processing tent. We gave them our signed leave forms, which they stamped and made copies of. We also requested commercial airline tickets to our respective final leave destinations. The entire group, some 350 of us, would fly on a chartered plane to Atlanta. Roughly half the group would leave at Atlanta to catch commercial flights to their final destinations on the eastern portion of the country. The rest of us would fly onto Dallas where we would catch commercial flights to points west. Since I was headed back to the Bay Area, I would be flying to Dallas.

After processing, we were assigned tents to sleep in as we wouldn’t be leaving until the following day. Before leaving the tent, I was appointed Flight Commander, which is a military term for “cat herder” for the 350 of us flying back to the U.S. This meant I was would be responsible for the “military discipline and good order” for the group as we made our way from Gateway to Kuwait International Airport (KCIA) and then onto to Atlanta and Dallas.

I walked around the camp and found it a lot like Camp Virginia, where I spent nearly week processing into theater six months ago. There were the ubiquitous noisy power generators, a sizable Dining Facility (DFAC), a McDonalds, Barber Shop, Base Exchange, plus other sundry shops, and two Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) tents which featured TVs, videos games, and Internet terminals. I went to bed early figuring I would need the rest for the journey to come.