San Juan Bautista Marine Corps Lt. Col. Richard Johnson,
stationed in Kuwait, will be sending occasional dispatches
reflecting soldiers’ lives in the Middle East as America prepares
for a possible conflict. In this report, Johnson settles in to life
away from home.
I hate landing in a new place at night. It seems that the travel
agents the Marine Corps use have a special rule:
”
Don’t let them see how bad it is when they first land. If we
land at night, they’ll be too far away from the airport by dawn to
turn around and come back.
”
San Juan Bautista Marine Corps Lt. Col. Richard Johnson, stationed in Kuwait, will be sending occasional dispatches reflecting soldiers’ lives in the Middle East as America prepares for a possible conflict. In this report, Johnson settles in to life away from home.
I hate landing in a new place at night. It seems that the travel agents the Marine Corps use have a special rule: “Don’t let them see how bad it is when they first land. If we land at night, they’ll be too far away from the airport by dawn to turn around and come back.”
That’s the way it worked when I landed in Saudi Arabia 11 years ago, and it happened again this time. After flying for 24 hours from San Diego to Chicago to London, I finally landed in Kuwait at just after 7 a.m. So here I was, tired, disoriented, and not sure of how I was going to get to the military base that I was assigned to. What I wasn’t ready for was the airport; I felt like I was back in the U.S. when I cleared customs. Starbuck’s, Baskin Robbins, Kentucky Fried Chicken were all there, a demonstration of how much American culture has spread across the globe.
How the heck did I end up back in Kuwait? Just a few weeks prior, I was enjoying life in San Juan Bautista with my family and starting to think about what the kids would wear for Halloween.
Unfortunately, in today’s world, our military relies on its reserve forces more and more. I’ve been in the Marine Corps Reserve for more than 10 years after 10 years on active duty. Many of my friends had been called up in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist strikes against our country, so I figured my time would come soon. In fact, I had been told I’d most likely get called up about the first of November and go to Afghanistan.
So, when the phone rang on the last Friday in September, the last thing I expected to hear was a Marine saying, “Can you get to a secure phone?” I went to the Naval Postgraduate School and called him back. “We need you on Monday. You’re going to Kuwait.”
The rest of the weekend was a blur: clearing out my stuff from my office, telling my coworkers about my departure, and then the hardest part, telling my wife and kids. They’d known it was a possibility, but not so fast, not so soon. Leaving Monday morning on the flight from Monterey was a tough experience.
I spent about three weeks at Camp Pendleton in Southern California preparing for my new assignment. The headquarters I work for is the I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF), one of the headquarters elements that have been deployed to Kuwait for exercises. The operations officer needed a liaison officer to work with our higher command, the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC or see-flick). I was going to be the MEF’s representative, trying to help each headquarters work through the inevitable questions that would come up during exercises and planning. To make it more interesting, for a month, I was going to be the ONLY representative; the rest of the MEF was not going to deploy until November.
So, here I was, in Kuwait, tired and trying to figure out how to get to my final destination. Fortunately, I hooked up with another group going to the same destination who were renting vehicles, but there was the inevitable snag at customs. Because of recent terrorist acts here, new rules for self protection had been implemented. As a result, we waited about five hours until we could contact the base and have them bring an armed escort out to meet us.
Entering the base is very much like entering a prison. There were several checkpoints where armed guards made sure only authorized people have access to the base. I was very happy to finally get to the housing office, figuring I would check into my room and get some rest.
Another mistake. There wasn’t a room — or actually, I guess, there was. It was just larger than I expected and had in it about 200 other people, none of whom I knew. The base is in an old industrial warehouse complex and everything is inside these huge warehouses, including the housing. The person at the housing office just told me to go to one of those bays and find an open bed to sleep in. Since it was about 2 a.m. at this point and I hadn’t slept for about 29 hours, I didn’t argue. It wasn’t the most comfortable night I’ve ever spent, believe me.
Things started looking up the next morning. At breakfast, I ran into a friend from my college days over 20 years ago. That’s one of the great things about the Marine Corps — after a few years, when you go somewhere, you’re almost always going to meet someone you know. He’d been here for several months already as part of a different command and encouraged me to settle my gear into their housing. I spent most of the rest of the day finding my way around the base, introducing myself to the people I’d be working with, and trying to stay awake. By the end of the day, I was thoroughly exhausted. Jet lag is a nasty thing though; even though I went
to sleep about 8:00, after only 3 hours sleep in the past 48, I woke up at 2:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep. It took about two weeks for the 2:30 wakeup to finally fade.
The camp itself is, as I said, a converted warehouse complex. The Army has had a presence in Kuwait almost since the Gulf War ended, generally keeping a reinforced brigade here for about four months of training before rotating them home and replacing them with another brigade. Because of this arrangement, they’ve built up some infrastructure that makes life OK. They have a large dining facility that serves adequate food (but I don’t think they’ll be able to sell too many franchises back home). The post exchange (store) has a fair selection of clothing, reading material, electronics (DVDs are huge here), and even a food court (Subway, KFC, Baskin Robbins). A movie theater and library look pretty good, but I haven’t had an opportunity to go in there much due to work.
The best place on base is the gym; it is huge, open 24/7/365, and has everything from yoga to martial arts to weights to a boxing ring. Many people spend a lot of time at the gym just to beat the boredom. The infrastructure is nice to have, but due to the pace of work, I don’t get to take advantage of most of it. I have been able to watch some sports, mainly while I’ve been at the gym on the treadmill. It takes some getting used to when you’re watching Monday Night Football at 5 a.m.!
My quarters are a corner of a warehouse. This warehouse is much nicer than the one I spent the first night in. They have renovated the billeting spaces in their warehouse into several large rooms (each about 200′ x 200′). Only about 20 mid-grade officers are in the room I’m in, so we have our beds along the wall and a very large empty space in the middle of the room. The beds are, for the most part, separated by partitions (sort of like partitions in an office), so there’s some small sense of privacy. I’ve kept my area pretty simple — bed, chair (the kind that collapses down that you’d take camping), and a wall locker for my clothes. The only real “decorator” touch was taking some of those plastic milk crates and tying them together to make a place to hold socks, t-shirts, etc. Some of the guys who’ve been here for a while have really paid some attention to their surroundings; one officer has even built a “canopy” bed with curtains and everything. We have a TV in the area and occasionally I get to watch a few minutes before lights out at ten.
Life is simple here; get up at 4:30, work out, chow, work until about 9:00 at night, then try to read or watch TV for a few minutes, and then off to sleep. The “Groundhog Day” effect is very, very strong after almost two months of the same schedule, same people, same places. Fortunately, the work is challenging and fulfilling, so the time goes by pretty quickly. Still, all in all, I’d rather be able to come home at night to my family; hopefully that time will come soon.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or of the United States Marine Corps. The Marine Corps public affairs office reads Johnson’s reports before he sends them to The Pinnacle. Look for his occasional dispatches in The Pinnacle as America prepares for war.
