Gateway Again

We landed around 0800 at Ali as Selem Air Base in Kuwait. This was my third time here and by now the mechanics were familiar: we boarded waiting buses for a fifteen minute drive to US Army Central Gateway Operations (Gateway bears a disturbing resemblance to Mos Eisley Space Port from Star Wars minus the cantina, of course). We offloaded from the buses and scanned our ID cards at the inbound operations tent, recording our arrival. We checked in with the Kuwait Navy LNO’s office where a representative told us we were to arrange for a temporary tent, store our gear and hang tight for a two day wait before proceeding to Camp Arifjan for Warrior Transition Program. The down time is designed as part of the demobilization/redeployment process to “decompress.”

Miraculously, all my bags arrived on the luggage pallet which we broke down. I was assigned senior officer’s tent quarters along with several others in my group. We even were offered the services of a camp Gator vehicle, a type of ATV, to haul our heavy sea bags and suitcases to our tents. (Presumably, once one gets away from the high concentrations of general/flag officers and colonels in Baghdad, field grade rank actually begins to matter again.)

I checked out some linen, made by bed and promptly fell asleep. Yeah, decompression.