WTP - Day 3

We boarded buses in the late afternoon on 14 Oct to go through the painful customs procedure. I went through this previously when I went on R&R leave last May. It was about the same level of pain this time too.

We went through the customs inspection process twice; first for our checked bags and then again for our carry ons. It was relatively smooth but took a long time (roughly three hours). After it was over, we were bused over to the DFAC for one last meal. Then back to the customs area for a brief wait.

At around 2100 we boarded a new set of buses and made the hour plus drive to Kuwait City International. We stayed on the military side of the airport and stayed briefly in a transient military passenger terminal. Around 0100 on the 15th we walked in single file along the tarmac and boarded a chartered Boeing 767 for the flight to Baltimore.

We are finally getting out of here.

I Hate SATO

So we were supposed to get our commercial airline itineraries yesterday at 1600. We dutifully showed up at the WTP building only to be told, "come back in an hour" as SATO -- the US Government Travel Agency -- was still working on them.

We showed up at 1700. There are significant "issues" with our itineraries we were told; the few that had been turned in were largely incorrect. Oh, and the SATO office is now closed for the day. WTF? About the only thing I did find out was that I was on the scheduled for the chartered flight that would fly from Kuwait to Baltimore. Some people were told they didn't make that and instead would be issued commercial air tickets to their ultimate destinations.

We checked back again at 1830 and were told someone at SATO promised all itineraries would be ready first thing in the morning. So we checked back this morning. Only ten out of roughly fifty were ready.

Somewhere, someone screwed up; those of in Iraq I know put in our travel requests between forty-five to fifty days ago. Why are our itineraries being worked on at the last minute when surely there will be a paucity of available seats on desired commercial flights leaving Baltimore? As a result of this oversight, it's very likely many of us will be stuck in Baltimore waiting for flights that leave next day.

For frak's sake. This is how redeploying service members are treated? No wonder they had us turn in our weapons on day one.

WTP - Day 2

The only major event for today was a three-hour seminar designed for us to talk about our collective experience during deployment. The session was led by a Navy chaplain. He was a amiable enough guy but one whose deployment assignment was to Kuwait so I felt that he was at a disadvantage talking to us about serving in a combat zone when he had not. He plodded through the PowerPoint slides and encouraged us to talk about our expectations and the reality we actually faced. I smiled and looked at my watch ... three ... two ... one: Initiate bitch session.

A female lieutenant wearing Naval Academy shorts was the first one to mention that the duties she performed in Afghanistan had nothing to do with 1) her Navy specialty and 2) the five months of specialty training she received before going over. This equivalent sentiment was echoed by more than 70% of the group. Yes, we were not technically "re-missioned" (i.e., tasked to do something completely out of our lane) but our collective experience sure pushed the boundaries. About the only persons who actually performed their expertise were Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) guys.

Everyone blamed the unwieldy, faceless Joint Manning Document (JMD) which stipulates which jobs exist, and which services are responsible for filling them, for both Iraq and Afghanistan. The JMD review cycle spans well over a year -- someone mentioned eighteen months -- which is one a half one-year tours for Individual Augmentees. The result? We are placing people in jobs that, in many cases, have been overtaken by events (OBE). All our kvetching echoed the same sentiment: "fix the frakin' JMD." Yeah, I'm sure the Pentagon and Joint Staff will get right on that.

Rather than being cathartic, the session just pissed me off. I thought I was here to decompress? The poor chaplain leading our session wasn't prepared to facilitate this type of discussion. I felt sorry for him but he soldiered on until we finished. I thanked him after it ended nonetheless. After all, he was doing the job he was sent here to do.

WTP - Day 1

We awoke early on 12 Oct to catch bus transportation from Gateway to Camp Arifjan, about a two hour’s drive away. We separated our issue-gear from our personal gear, loading the former onto a convoy of four buses and latter onto a cargo truck. The ride was uneventful; I slept for most of it.

We arrived just before lunch and were welcomed by the members of the Navy Warrior Transition Program (WTP). After unloading our gear outside, we walked into a large hangar building to the sound of applause from the WTP staff. We lined up in front of tables with our issue-gear and body armor to turn it all in. While waiting in line, I had to break down my body armor into its individual parts: front, back, and side ceramic impact plates, side carrier pockets, shoulder protection, groin protector, neck protector, etc. I remembered assembling all of this a year ago back at Fort Jackson and how long it took. It was remarkably easy to take apart. The armor had been such a constant part of my life over the past year, lugging and wearing it as I had to, it was a little odd (maybe even disrespectful?) to disassemble it so quickly.

My turn came up and I placed the body armor parts on the table to watch them be checked off and disappear into storage bins. Next, I emptied two sea bags worth of other issue gear and similarly watched it be checked off and placed into bins: chemical suit (still in its bag), gas mask, entrenching tool, two canteens, pistol belt and holster, ruck sack, foul weather jacket, gortex outerwear, etc.

Next, I went over to the opposite side of the hangar to turn in my pistol. I disassembled it, cleaned it, and turned it in along with four magazines. It was inspected and placed in a box.

For the final stage, I took a post deployment health assessment survey on a laptop. Did I have any pressing health concerns? Yeah, how about inhaling a metric ton of dust while I was here?

When finished with all of this, my battle buddy, Paul (a Navy commander who went through Fort Jackson with me last year) and I raced to lunch at the DFAC before it ended at 1330. We talked over lunch and both agreed it felt odd to be free of all that gear.

A few hours later, we returned to the hangar to receive an admin brief. We were greeted by a female Navy captain who heads WTP. She congratulated us on successfully completing our Individual Augmentee assignments. She told us we were now part of an elite minority in the Navy: only 3% of the total Navy (reserve and active components) had performed the job we had. We should be proud.

She also said that over the next two days, we should be selfish. We would need to make time for ourselves because, she reminded us, there would be demands on our time the moment we returned to our families.

After working a year’s worth of 14-16 hour days six and a half days a week, I find it actually challenging to do nothing. Wasn’t there a meeting I had to go to? Some urgent email to answer? Some planning project that wasn’t finished? A brief to prepare?

I guess it really is finished. Maybe I should take a nap?

Dust Devil

Day two of decompression at Gateway. I slept through breakfast courtesy of ear plugs and eyeshades. I think I slept for over ten hours. I grabbed coffee and a doughnut at the local Green Beans and the retired to the MWR Tent to watch TV but really play on the laptop. There is a reasonably priced wireless Internet service which I am using to post blog entries and do email on.

As I walked back to the tent, looked up and saw the tallest dust devil I have ever seen. It was easily 200-300 feet tall.

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.

Convoy Exercise - Udairi Range

The next morning, we boarded our HUMVEEs at 0630 and continued our practice session. We ironed out problems not covered the previous day and, at 0900, rolled out from another simulated FOB onto the real range which featured role players, good guys, bad guys and pyrotechnics. It was great but, since it deals with real operational techniques, I won’t elaborate. However, we solved four of five technical problems (that is, we were blown up only once).

Camels!

During our CQC exercise, we saw our first camels. A herd appeared on the far berm which caused a temporary shut down of the range. Our instructor explained that Udairi was all open range and that indigenous camel and goat herders had right of passage here. We all gawked to see them; even far way they looked big.

In the late afternoon of the next day, our section boarded nine HUMVEEs and practiced maneuvering in a different part of the range. While stopped to review one of the convoy problems for tomorrow’s exercise we spotted another herd. We didn’t think much until all of a sudden, the camels were in our midsts. They are BIG. Compare them to our vehicles. Thankfully, none of them spit at us.

Udairi Range - Kuwait

The following day, we packed yet another sea bag for our two and a half day stay at the Udairi Range complex. We traveled for about forty minutes north into the desert. Udairi Range is vast, so large in fact, that is covers two thirds of Kuwait (this is the part that has neither cities nor oil). As a result, there is no fence, per se, just a series of sprawling training complexes. We were at one particular complex that simulates life at a typical Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Iraq. In fact, we were only eight miles from the border with Iraq.

FOB life is austere; there is no running water but there is generator-provided power. Buildings are the current descendants of semi-circular World War II Quonset huts and are (thankfully) air conditioned. Our classroom also functioned as our sleeping area. After our first afternoon, we stacked chairs in the corner and spread out sleeping bags, while keeping our sea bags outside. We also set a rotating watch for our gear. No one really slept well and we looked back nostalgically at our bunk bed equipped tents at Camp Virginia.

The next day we woke at 0400, ate an MRE for breakfast (penne pasta in spicy sauce, for me), put our on IBA and marched in the pre-dawn darkness to a weapons range. Udairi is run by a contracting company whose staff consists of retired senior army enlisted personnel. My section’s instructor for the day was a retired army first sergeant (E-8) who saw action in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We shot a close quarters combat (CQC) course. While at Fort Jackson, we learned basic marksmanship with our pistols and rifles. CQC stresses fighting at much closer ranges, typically moving while firing. We each received sixty rounds of ammunition for the day (not that much but better than nothing).

Like many army activities, our drills were done via exercise commands, not unlike our PT exercises at Fort Jackson, shouted first by our instructor echoed back as a group. For example, the instructor would shout, “The Walk Stop Turn and Shoot!” Us: “The Walk Stop Turn and Shoot!” Him: “Fighter Stance!” Us: “Fighter Stance!” Him: “Ready!” Us: “Ready!” Then we would walk away from the targets, pause, look over our shoulder at the target, pivot 180 degrees, fire two shots at our targets, and pivot back the other direction. Accordingly we spent a lot of time on safely executing these firing drills as we were close together.

The afternoon was spent indoors with another, charismatic, instructor, Mr. Massey, another retired Army First Sergeant with a lot of combat experience, who prepared us for the culminating convoy exercise to be held the next day. He taught us about how convoys have adapted to the enemy’s tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), how our own TTPs changed in response, and how the enemy counter-responded. HUMVEEs today in Iraq are third generation, up-armored variants (M1114) which are very blast resistant to roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Our convoy course would run though simulated Iraqi towns and feature five check points where different problems, all drawn from real life operations, would be encountered.

In keeping with our training program’s focus of encouraging junior leadership, a female junior officer was designated as our section’s convoy commander. She quickly rose to the challenge and we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening mission planning. My assignment was easy; a passenger in vehicle three whose focus would be as a gun truck and traffic control. My responsibilities were too easy, as they say in army training: scan five meters out in the event of a vehicle stop and dismount and patrol out to twenty-five meters in the event of a prolonged stop.

Camp Buehring - Kuwait

After a few days of adjusting to the time difference we had our first real training evolution, HUMVEE Evacuation Training, held at nearby Camp Buehring. We boarded buses and traveled there in the afternoon. Since there were three sections of us and only two simulators, our section had to wait an hour and a half. Camp Buehring looked a lot like Camp Virginia only all the familiar components (port-o-lets, wet crappers, prefab buildings, etc.) were arranged differently only slightly reinforcing the concept we actually were, in fact, somewhere else. It did have a bigger BX/PX (Base Exchange) store. Informally rating a particular base or camp’s PX seems to be the yard stick of one’s relative level on the standard of living scale. In this case, Buehring rates higher than Virginia.

We reported back and took turns sitting in a HUMVEE simulator that pivoted along its central axis and that turned a full 180 degrees, simulating a vehicle that has completely flipped over. The regular passengers don’t have a problem, provided they are wearing their seat belts. It’s the vehicle’s gunner, who sits/stands in a turret who faces the most risk. He/She calls, “Rollover!” if the vehicle tips more than 25 degrees off axis and drops into the crew compartment. The rest of the passengers grab the gunner’s torso and legs accordingly during the rollover to keep them in place. We each got to perform the drill once. Although the simulator’s rate of turn was very slow it still managed to completely disorient us. Operating the HUMVEE’s doors upside and down and turned around was a lot more difficult than anyone thought. I hope this doesn’t happen to me. Still, the training was fun.

Camp Virginia - Purgatory

Speaking of shell shocked, I’ve noticed a peculiar phenomena intrinsic to Camp Virginia: it’s a sort of Purgatory. The Marine Corps and Army personnel are returning here from extended combat tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan (often of fifteen months or more). The Navy personnel are arriving here on their way to extended Individual Augmentee tours between six and thirteen months. Either way, our existence here at Camp Virginia lies between the paradise of back home and the hell of Iraq/Afghanistan/Horn of Africa. We’re all here awaiting some kind of fate -- either the joy of returning home or the hardened resolve of going to get a particular job done somewhere in-country.

This manifests itself in the way people here carry themselves. We all walk, but mostly plod, through the shallow sand drifts on our way to and from the Dining Facility (DFAC) and the PX and the USO tent and the mini-mart. We’re constantly all walking somewhere but going nowhere. After all, we’re surrounded by, and in the middle of, nowhere. Everyone in my IA group desperately wants to be somewhere more real.

Camp Virginia Denizens

Camp Virginia is quite cosmopolitan; there are Coalition members here from Great Britain, Republic of Korea, Republic of Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Fiji Islands. Of these, the Fiji Islanders are most ubiquitous, especially at the DFAC (curiously, no one seems to know what they actually do). Inside the PX, there is a wall were previous visitors have left name tags and ID pictures. I even found a sticker from the Naval Air Station Fallon, NV Search and Rescue Squadron; I was assigned at NAS Fallon as a reservist for four years between 2000 and 2004.

The DFACs are staffed with Asian Indians and the local maintainers of the camp (truck drivers) appear to be Kuwaiti.

The Navy uses the camp primarily for incoming personnel while the Army and Marine Corps use it for outgoing personnel. That is, the Army and Marine Corps use this pace to decompress before going back home. The Navy uses it to prepare and give final training for its personnel coming into theater. There is a constant litany of moving armored HUMVEEs and Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) rumbling through camp. Their electronics and communications gear wreak havoc with the tenuous WiFi network which I am using to keep the blog up to date. Some of the Marines I’ve seen look like they’re ready go home. They don’t look shell shocked, just ready to leave. I wonder if I’ll look like that a year from now.

Camp Virginia Training

Here at Camp Virginia, we’ll conduct one more week’s worth of training before reporting to our respective commands in Iraq, Afghanistan or Djibouti. We’ll get more HUMVEE instruction, including how to egress a HUMVEE that has flipped over -- an unfortunately common occurrence in theater -- and another convoy exercise which will include live fire and role players (the two of course, are mutually exclusive). The convoy exercise, to be held later this week, will be held in a remote area called the Udairi range where we will sleep over two nights. Udairi has none of the palatial amenities that we enjoy at Camp Virginia, thus preserving the trend of encountering worse quarters at each subsequent stop on this deployment.

Yesterday, we kicked off with the time honored practice of filling out travel claims that covered the first part of our deployment. If one has been in the military for more than week, one already knows that this process hardly ever works the first time. Yet, we have been assured the finance people here take great pride in fixing pay problems and executing travel claims.

At present, I’m only $125 in the hole, which was the charge for my week’s stay at the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters (BOQ) at NMPS, San Diego, whose lavish indoor plumbing, cable television, large bed, and hard wire Internet access, are now but a halcyon memory.

Crappers

Just as my three weeks at Ft. Jackson made me appreciate the plight of the common infantry man, so my day-and-half at Camp Virginia made me appreciate the genius of indoor plumbing. The crappers here come in two varieties: the common port-o-potty, or, as my attractive wife refers to them, port-o-lets, and the more Gucci wet crappers which feature flushing urinals and toilets.

The wet crappers (there must be a better name for them) stand imposingly two to a unit and have a stairway leading up to them. This gives the illusion one is arriving at some important place (all too true, of course, depending on one’s current biological condition). Inside can be found a sink, urinal and toilet and copious air fresheners. Trucks arrive in the morning and fill up a water tank at the top of the wet crappers and, separately, to pump out the septic tanks.

When either the sink, toilet or urinal is operated, gravity fed water flushes the corresponding apparatus and feeds to a septic tank below. I’ve already learned it is advantageous to use the facilities in the morning hours when there is still water available for flushing. An informal survey last night showed that most of these units run dry later in the day, effectively demoting the wet crappers into clogged up versions of the port-o-lets.

Camp Virginia - Kuwait

We previously were advised to prepare for an eight-hour evolution after landing before we could sleep. We arrived at 2330 local on 2 NOV, effectively losing a day in transit. I, along with thirty-nine others, volunteered to be baggage handlers. I don’t know what I was thinking as, one, I am not that burly an individual, and two, I was still suffering from acute tendonitis in my right forearm. Along with three others, I climbed up the conveyor belt into the belly of plane where we were greeted by a sheer wall of green sea-bags. Every third one or so was filled with heavy IBA. As we cleared more and more bags, we established a daisy chain where, to my horror, I found heavy sea-bags being hefted at me. I’m happy to report I was not knocked over.

After unloading sea-bags and weapons, which were in locked cases, into a awaiting trucks, we boarded air conditioned buses and drove for an hour to Camp Virginia, a staging camp for personnel coming into and out of theater. Our first real views of Kuwait came from behind curtained windows on the buses. Not much to see at night of course.

After arriving at Camp Virginia, we gave awaiting personnel our ID cards which were electronically swiped into bar code readers officially recording our arrival. Later, we learned that our Boots on Ground (BOG) counters started the date of our arrival -- 2 NOV. Only 349 to go.

Next, we unloaded weapons and sea-bags onto the sandy area in front of our twelve-man transient tents. Under less than ideal lighting conditions, I eventually reclaimed my three sea-bags and one rolling suitcase. Originally, I thought the rolling suitcase was a good idea since it had wheels. I round said wheels were useless in sand.

We piled into our air-conditioned tents and found more bunk beds and a few lockers. Since my bunk was nearest the door, I just set my bags nearby. After some perfunctory unpacking, we walked in darkness to the Dining Facility (DFAC) for breakfast at 0630. After a surprisingly good meal, I walked back, in emerging daylight to the tent to sleep.

Flying to Kuwait

The next evening, 1 NOV, we said goodbye to our drill sergeants and McCrady Training Center and boarded buses to Columbia Airport where a chartered MD-11 waited. We had a final good bye from the Task Force Marshall Company A commander, an aged Army Captain with bushy eyebrows, gray hair and a distinct Southern Carolina accent who quoted from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

Farewell! And whether we shall meet again, I know not.
Therefore, our everlasting farewell take:
For ever, and for ever, farewell!
If we do meet again, then we shall smile;
If not, ‘tis true this parting was well made.

We loaded our four to five sea-bags plus personal luggage into the plane and took off at 2245 local. Our itinerary took us to Bangor, ME for refueling. We arrived nearly at 0200 local and were met by Troop Greeters from the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post. They were lined up, six or seven deep, and shook everyone’s hands as we deplaned. Most were Vietnam vets but there were also some were graying World War Two vets who, to a person, greeted us using army ranks (after all, not many planes arrive solely carrying Navy personnel). Although we were tired from just a few hours sleep, it was very touching indeed to see these vets who clearly cared deeply about what we were headed out to do.

We were ushered into a large waiting area which had open restaurants, coffee shops, and souvenir stands, all for our plane. I chatted for a time, with a Troop Greeter about local resident/philanthropist Stephen King; the Troop Greeter wore a black baseball cap that featured an LED flashing American flag. As I’m not a Stephen King fan, per se, the flashing flag served to keep me focused and awake. He was nice enough guy who, I’m sure, had better things to do than hang out at the Bangor Airport at two thirty in the morning.

After about an hour plus layover, we re-boarded and flew across the Atlantic to Leipzig, Germany. I managed to sleep through two in-flight movies but caught the hot meals. We landed some six hours layers in a light drizzle. My only other time in eastern Germany was in 1991 when I drove with my college roommate, Victor, in a rented Fiat Tipo from Paris to Prague. Sadly, all we saw on this visit was a special Leipzig/Halle airport lounge that caters to transient troops. It also featured a souvenir shop and beer, which we were not allowed, of course, to partake with.

After another hour, we once again re-boarded and flew another six hours to Kuwait. We enjoyed two more hot meals and two more movies (Live Free or Die Hard and Blades of Glory). As we got closer to landing, I noticed lights in the darkness below, my first view of Kuwait. Upon closer examination, I saw they were not lights at all but licks of flame coming from oil wells, natural gas burn off. These were same wells infamously torched by Saddam Hussein’s army as they retreated from Kuwait in 1991.