Into the Inferno
May 28, 2009.
Our crammed military charter jet dropped out of the inky-black sky and banked left over the northern Persian Gulf. I had been in seat 48B off and on for the past 24 hours or so. Over 300 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who’d been couped up inside couldn’t wait for the pilot to land the behemoth so we could just get out.
Out of my left side window I saw what looked like fires dotting the darkness, but I couldn’t tell where it was; there was no discernible break between sky and ground. My eyes struggled for the answer; I couldn’t find the horizon.
Once adjusted to this new, ephemeral ambience, I could see the faint reflections of light on something below. And then my eyes finally came into focus; we were still over the water. The flames came into stark focus: Offshore rigs were burning off excess gases as pillars of fire shot hundreds of feet into the air, an unearthly inferno below.
As we continued to descend, the city came into view, electric lights softly blinking and increasing in number. This was Kuwait City, a place we had liberated years before and that now paid us back by allowing us to shuttle tons of material, supplies, troops, civilians, and contractors through it to points unknown, all in support of the endless effort to offset what we had created by removing the murderous tyrant; the vacuum left in his wake had unleashed ancient, tribal forces that were now vying for power — power being the only thing that could bring these competing groups to heel.
Trying to control these primal, tribal grudges was a never-ending struggle. Somehow the tyrant was able to do it with terror; we were trying to do it with democracy. But democracy wasn’t working.
In this seemingly futile effort, we poured whatever we could into the forsaken land. This was the “surge.” Earlier combat operations, though brutal in cities like Ramadi and Fallujah, had eventually been successful. But in the power void created by those victories, the provisional Iraqi government didn’t possess and could not employ Saddam’s brutally effective methods of controlling the populace, and a powerful insurgency had exploded.
Transport after transport, jet after jet, flew directly into Al Asad in the western Iraqi desert and still more went through Kuwait and onto final destinations inside the area of responsibility. I was going through Kuwait and Ali al Salem Air Base.
After 7 hours in flight from Ramstein Air Force base in Germany, we touched down at Kuwait City International Airport and finally rolled to a stop. And sat there. For at least 45 minutes. Someone must have forgotten a jumbo jet with over 300 military personnel was landing at 0330, and we didn’t have any vehicles to transport us to wherever we were going first. So we sat in our seats. People were getting a little restless, to say the least.
This is how things worked if you were on a military flight; if you flew commercial, you’d taxi into the gate and make your way leisurely through the terminal and on to your destination, like a real person. But if you came in on a military flight, it was as if you were some alien or prisoner whose every movement had to be tightly authorized, supervised, controlled and monitored. You were literally funneled through a strange maze as if running some bureaucratic gauntlet, and the length of time this took depended solely on the whims of whoever happened to be on duty at the receiving nation’s customs, the guard shack between you and the world outside the airport, or whatever else passed for security forces on the ground.
Finally, there was some movement up in the front of the aircraft. People started to debark, but the process was torturously slow. “Let’s go people,” I said to myself, trying my best to remain patient. Again. It took forever, but I finally arrived at the door to walk down the mobile stairway. Leaving the air conditioned confines of the giant metal tube with wings, I was hit with the blast of desert air, as it must’ve been around 100 degrees, even in the middle of the Kuwaiti night. We were not going into the terminal.
The line moved toward four chartered Greyhound buses like a bunch of sleep-deprived robots, climbing slowly into them. I threw my two seabags into the storage area underneath my bus, found a seat at the front up near the driver, and flopped down. I looked at my watch. It read 0430.
Nobody sat down next to me; I had the row to myself. We waited. At least the bus’s air conditioner was blasting and protecting us from the summer night oven that enveloped our little motorized cocoon. I drifted off.
Moments later, I don’t know how long, the bus rumbled to life as the driver put the thing in gear and followed the buses in front of us. We drove slowly and methodically through a few checkpoints as we moved to the exit, I surmised. Finally, a guard lifted a gate and we passed outside the airport’s perimeter and onto what looked like a highway. The road was deserted at this hour, and as the driver accelerated and we moved deeper into the dark night into the hinterlands of Kuwait City, I fell back asleep.
When I awoke next, the sun was coming up somewhere. The black night had already transformed into a new desert morning, as dawn started to slowly creep across the muted, tan landscape. We were motoring down some interstate highway of sorts, a road so new it looked like it may have just been constructed, made completely of white concrete. We passed under an overpass bereft of vehicles. I looked left and right, scanning into the distance for landmarks, other vehicles, buildings, lights, anything; I saw nothing but sand, hills, dunes, and an occasional spit of twisted vegetation. All that existed was our convoy of buses, of which mine brought up the rear.
As the sun rose fully out of the horizon, I could finally see something; the unmistakable silhouette of a military base. We circled along a perimeter road until we came to a heavily fortified gate, where we once again sat for several minutes.
The guards waved us through, and we meandered our way overt to our parking area. It was 0630. This was our stop. I steadied myself for what I knew was going to be a very long day.
I had heard about this place; Ali al Salem Air Base. A way station. A holding point. An outpost in the middle of nowhere; a location you didn’t want to be for too long.
I walked off the bus to grab my gear. It had to already be well over 100 degrees, and it wasn’t even 7 a.m. yet. Yes, it was going to be a long day. It might be a long week. And at that instant I knew — if I didn’t get control of my initial impressions and thoughts — it might be a long summer.
To be continued.
Glen Hines is the author of three books that make up the Anthology Trilogy — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.
