The Trip Home Part II

Almost three weeks have passed since I returned from Iraq and I still haven't finished telling the tale of my trip back. As you can imagine, catching up on being away for two months, not to mention changing jobs and careers, has taken up what would other be prime blogging time. Even as bloggable material has never been better.

Ah well, when I started this thing I promised myself that I would not let it make me feel guilty about not writing. My other writing tasks (professional work, op-eds, a book proposal, etc.) already do enough of that and I don't want this to become another concern in the back of my mind. Nevertheless, when I have something to say in this space, I'll say it.

So, about the trip home... Kuwait is basically worse than Iraq if you don't count the security risk. It's a few degrees hotter, a few grains sandier, and just generally more austere. My billet was the upper bunk -- with no sheets -- of a super-air-conditioned tent that sleeps 16. There are hundreds of these tents sprawling across the desert at Ali Al Salem Airbase. Actually, "sprawl" is the wrong term, because it would not be possible to lay them out in a more orderly grid.

Beside the rows of tents are trailers containing showers and bathrooms, segregated by sex. Behind all the trailers are the MWR facilities (two gyms, a basketball court, a beach volleyball court, two recreation rooms with multiple movie/video game consoles) and outdoor "mall." The latter is pretty impressive, housing not only a McDonald's, KFC, and Green Beans Coffee, but a jewelry store, Middle Eastern bazaar, laundry/dry cleaner, and a couple of other establishments I'm forgetting. All the comforts of home, more or less. Then beside that complex is the DFAC. Standard fare there, just like Baghdad.

After passing out on my bunk (and somehow not freezing to death), I awoke in time to make the 0900 stand-by manifest for the R&R flight. They found me a seat! Which meant I had exactly four hours to PT, eat, re-pack my gear, and show up in the "big tent" to begin the travel process to Atlanta. All this I did, and began reading Randy Barnett's Restoring the Lost Constitution.

The remaining process was drawn-out but fairly painless. Scanning out my CAC card, unpacking and re-packing both my duffels (security check), sitting down to read and watch a movie on the big-screen TV in a "departure lounge," and then making the final formation of my "army career," as the chaplain wished us godspeed and we boarded a series of buses that would take us to Kuwait International Airport (about 75 minutes away).

We boarded a "World Airlines" jet, which seemed to have the same interior design and features as the ATA plane I came in on, and were wheels up in no time. After a brief layover in Leipzig (my first time in the former East Germany), we uneventfully arrived in Atlanta airport.