Getting To Iraq: Germany to Kuwait

I left for Iraq on the night of Thursday June 12th after more than a month of delays, rescheduling and denials of requests to get on earlier planes. I’ve been the Rear-Detachment (Rear-D) Prosecuting attorney at Vilseck, Germany since August ‘o7 when the main body Regiment 2nd Styker Cavalry Regiment (2SCR) left for Iraq for 15 months. Since I had just transferred to this unit from my previous assignment in the Netherlands, I was assigned Rear-D because I got there right when they left and hadn’t trained with them.

Being Rear-D is NOT fun as a prosecutor for several reasons, not least of which is having to clean up all the criminal actions left behind when the unit deploys. Since the training leading up to a deployment lasts for months, there are tons of courts-martials left behind, so when I first arrived in Germany, it was very difficult. Granted, my last couple of months was relatively easy, so I’m not complaining. Either way, when one of the three attorneys assigned to the 3500-4000 strong regiment found out he had to leave mid-tour to attend the grad class, I jumped at the opportunity to fill in the spot, and it was quickly decided that I would cover down the remaining months of the tour instead of deploying with a different unit in November ‘o8 for 15 months. 5-6 months with my unit instead of 15 months with a new unit sounds good to me.

There were 64 of us scheduled to fly this month to meet the Regiment already in Iraq. You are not told what day will be the fly day, only a 4-5 day window. This makes planning a little difficult, but since the 12th was the last day of the window, at least we were prepared to go. My good friend, Ebru, picked me up at my apartment so I could leave my vehicle under its covered parking place and not in the open fields of parked Joe’s cars. Yes, Uncle Sam continues to pay for all of these apartments and living spaces while the Soldiers are downrange, though since I’m an Officer, I’m one of the few that have a nice place off-post (about 30 minutes away.)

I dropped my bags off, grabbed a final meal (mexican) and then we met at the gym for what they call the Manifest. This is where you show them your dog tags, orders to go downrange (word for war zone) and your ID cards. At this point, you say goodbye to the families, they lock the gym doors and you hear the final words from the base Commander, in my case LTC Rickard. We then boarded a terrible 5-6 hour bus that left Vilseck at 11:30 pm. I tried to sleep as much as I could before arriving at Ramstein Air Force Base, where we would leave from the next day. Here are some pictures of the hanger where we waited for the next 10 hours.








As you can see, it’s not exactly the United Business lounge. We were the first group here, so 10 hours from now, this hanger was packed with Soldiers. By the way, if you ever want to support some troops without sending them anything directly, donate to the non-profit United Sevice Organization (http://www.uso.org/whoweare/). They provided all the Soldiers with free food, drinks, new paperback books covering just about every genre, and offered free phones to call home and computers to use. Appearently, they do this all over the world.

From Ramstein, we actually took a 4 hour commercial flight into Kuwait City. There were Soldiers from 8 different units besides ours heading to all sorts of places on the plane, but it was commercial with terrible food and movies nevertheless. I met up with Henry, one of my buddies from the Netherlands who was also deploying that day, though he was just beginning a 15 month deployment. Bush and Gates ended the 15 month deployments and returned them to 12 months a few months ago, however, that starts 3 months from now so Henry, pictured later with me, got screwed and has to go for 15 months. I believe his unit is the last with this distinction.

Here's Henry and I only 30 minutes after landing in Kuwait. It's about 10:30pm, over 95 degrees and blowing sand all over the place.

When the plane touched down in Kuwait City past 10:00pm, it was still over 95 degrees F, and this was following a couple cloudy days. One Soldier immediately fell to the ground with a seizure and was flown back, tying the record for shortest deployment in Army history, in fact, since he didn’t make it to the first check point in Kuwait and run his ID card, he may not have been considered deployed, so he might not receive combat status. You only need one day for the entire month to be considered combat/hazardous duty and thus receive all the benefits and have all pay and allowances tax free.

At 1am we then convoyed our 6 buses of Soldiers plus Kuwait and US military escorts, 2.5 hours to the large staging base in Kuwait where most soldiers go for 4-10 days before going into a war zone. This helps get us acclimated to the weather and culture, and the soldiers train a little bit as well. Of course the seizure guy put us 2 hours off schedule which caused the Kuwait security escorts to leave us, and our particular bus driver to get a little sleepy evidenced by him driving completely off the road at one point waking us all up.

By the time we got all of our bags and had our briefs, it was past 4am and we had been travelling for over 30 hours. It was light out when we reached our temporary ‘tent’ and believe it or not, for some odd reason I’m actually the ranking Officer for this group of 64 (the main body was already deployed and there were no higher Officers on this month’s flight) so I get mixed reviews: on one hand, many of the lowest ranked enlisted go out of their way for me and on the other hand the mid-range enlisted and senior enlisted know I’m a JAG and thus know I’m more clueless in the real army ways than those poor privates who kiss my ass.

Knowing this, I try to earn their respect doing things I normally wouldn’t do, like set up our living space while they were getting the bags sorted. Here’s a picture of me doing that and one of that same area 10 hours later.

We chose to keep all 64 of us in the same tent to maintain our unit integrity. When we get to Iraq I think Officers share 2 to a hutch or smaller area.

I crashed for a few hours and when I awoke, I went outside and explored. It was well over 100 degrees and it looks pretty much like Tatooine from Stars Wars.
Of course, with the heat and sun’s position, I thought it was close to noon. It was not, it was 7:30am!




Our tents from the outside.

Finally, here are two pictures of my living space in Kuwiat during the 6 days I was there. That cot was not very comfortable!







In the next installment, I'll show pics of what was available to us in Kuwait, and why the weather sucks there.



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