From Kuwait City to Baghdad

Iraq correspondent s.d. liddick's first impressions of his new environs

Editor’s note: s.d. liddick, a nationally acclaimed investigative reporter and regular contributor to San Diego Magazine, has gone international. He arrived in Kuwait November 2, where he’s imbedded with U.S. forces at Camp Ripper on Al Asad Airbase, an hour (by helicopter) west of Fallujah in Iraq. Not surprisingly, liddick is already angling to get to the Iraqi border with Syria, the site of the U.S. Special Operations’ recent cross-border raid. His blogs from Operation Iraqi Freedom will appear regularly on this site.

 

Day One

Ali Al Salem airbase is a 45-minute drive from the international airport in Kuwait City. The public relations staff sergeant entrusted with my care — a product of the Army Reserves who has about as much familiarity with a keyboard as I do with an automatic rifle — is from a small town north of Little Rock. He is as country as country gets, with a southern twang, lively wit and direct access to the rich pool of colloquialisms given to natives born south of the Mason-Dixon line. His partner is a brawny African-American who is just as green in matters of press relations (he’s an Army combat photographer by training).

Sergeant Little Rock is dressed in American sweat-suit casual when he picks me up at the airport. With his spiky blonde hair and thin stature, he could pass for a cousin of Slim Shady. He waits till we get to the waiting SUV — manned by Mr. Photog — to re-holster his handgun (“They don’t like us dressing in our uniforms in the airport,” he tells me). The duo is screamingly American — as different in aspect (creamy white skin vs. deep chocolate, rail-thin vs. nose-tackle beefy, Southern drawl vs. college-level Standard American English) as they are similar in culture.

The modern highway, not unlike any Interstate in the U.S., is surrounded by dark, open desert. On the drive, a strange hybrid of ancient Arabic string picking and cymbal clashing, combined with modern rap-like chanting, spills out of the Ford’s speakers. Little Rock and Photog say nothing. We make good time, weaving in and out of cars and pushing the vehicle past 140 kilometers per hour (I’m not sure if this is a security measure of if Little Rock simply hasn’t had his fill of NASCAR for the week). Arriving at Ali Al Salem, we work past the first of several checkpoints. At the last of them, just before the American section of the base, the vehicle and my bags are thoroughly checked.

Inside, three huge tents sit in front of scores, maybe hundreds, of smaller, air-conditioned tents — billeting. Those tents sit in front of the camp’s store (PX), chow hall (DFAC), activity center (MWR) and a dozen or so retail shops (McDonald’s, Subway, Pizza Hut and KFC among them). The tents, the housing center of this small city, play home to contractors, soldiers, civilian auditors and reporters making their way through Al Salem, the gateway to the U.S. war in the Middle East.

DFAC, the dining facility, reminds me of the lunchroom in a public high school. Big enough for a couple of hundred hands, it’s an all-you-can-eat, buffet-style affair with food only a notch below the vaunted Vegas version. Everything I eat is tasty, particularly the mashed potatoes (without taking any compliments away from the chef, I’ve begun to wonder — after delicious spuds in several camps — if they aren’t just that easy to make). My grandfather spent more than five years in the Army during World War II, fighting the “Japs” on Guadalcanal and throughout the South Pacific, and I wonder how many potatoes he must have peeled for chow duty. Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

It’s likely that nary a potato has been skinned by an American during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Not only is everything prepackaged in this herculean operation, but Americans don’t seem to fill any positions here outside the hard guts of the military machine. From base security and electrical work to toilet cleaning and spud-doling, it’s Iraqis, Kuwaitis, (Eastern) Indians, Filipinos, Peruvians, Ugandans and a host of other nationalities that are putting in the back work. War by contractor.

In the 18-man tent I’m assigned to, my bunk neighbors are largely contractors. The night I leave, a six-man crew of bearded white men with paunches (some with long hair) meander into the tent. They tell me they’re electricians and they’re headed to a base west of Baghdad. I’ve already encountered one of their own. A bulky, thick-chested contractor with the name of an aerospace company on his enormous travel bag — and the kind of face Dick Butkis would have had if he’d played the ’69 season without a face-mask — Neanderthal Man had provoked my ire the night previous. He impressed me as former military, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. As I was to learn later — from statistics scribbled on the latrine wall — the vast majority of the war’s contractors are former soldiers.

At about four in the morning (soldiers and contractors — even lowly reporters — come ambling in and out, at all hours) he’d turned on the lights and left them on while sorting out the contents of his bag. My gut instinct was to give him a bump on the head, but I was timid. Less for the fact he’d have surely crushed me than my lingering anxiety vis-à-vis military authorities (it was my first day in theater and I was preoccupied about pissing off the brass … plus, it took me about two days to realize the men I was bunking with probably weren’t Army, but civilian numbskulls, just like me).

But now, I’m outside the tent, where a steady stream of faces ambles by in the 60-degree darkness. Ali Al Salem airbase never sleeps and in that sense — among others — it reminds me of Nevada desert’s annual counter-culture festival, Burning Man. The landscapes are strikingly similar and there’s something surreal about thousands of people living in tents in the middle of the unforgiving desert. At Burning Man, attendees dress in outrageous, inventive and sometimes elaborate costumes (if they’re dressed at all), while at Al Salem, half the world is dressed in military fatigues and a jaunty segment of the other half — largely contracted — sports tattoos, long hair and the casual American-dropout style.

Both places evoke an open-eyed sense of adventure. There’s something about being stuck in the middle of a harsh environment, a sensation amplified by sharing the experience with thousands of others, in an exploratory and artificial society. That sensation, combined with the fact everything seems foreign and new, generates a sense of eager anticipation — as if some spectacular new experience or adventure is waiting around every corner.

Kuwait is about 10 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time and I don’t sleep very much the first night (thanks to the N-Man). I drift off around daybreak and sleep through the morning. Day two is filled with chores. First I shower. Mobile trailers ringing the camp have latrines, showers and free laundry facilities. Then it’s off to check e-mail (the retail end of the camp is wi-fi friendly — $4/day connection fee, American currency only) and graba cup of joe at the Green Beans 24-hour coffee shop (the coffee’s not bad). I catch up with the day’s news and then venture off to the supply warehouse at the leading edge of camp.

The government has been kind enough to assign me Interceptor Body Armor (IBA) — a flak jacket and helmet — saving me about $1,500 in expenses. But there’s a snafu in the process: Because I don’t have an official Department of Defense number, I can’t be assigned equipment. I look at the hundreds of pallets sitting full of gear and realize there’s no way in hell I’m going to be given any without that number. Little Rock gives me a set of gear left by another reporter. It doesn’t have the IBA’s protection factor, but it’s enough to get me into Anbar province (nobody can ride military transport without body armor, and the Marines won’t send me to my prospective unit in Anbar without it).

After that, I get lunch, do some laundry and repack my bags. Chow is as good as any $13.99 all-you-can-eat diner in the states. (I’ve read Haliburton charges the government $28 for every plate served, but I’m not sure of that). Then I go to the military transport tent and sign up for a flight to Baghdad International Airport. They tell me to return at 20:30 for roll call. After that, I’m officially on the wait list. As a journalist, I have about as much priority as a Frenchman at a Fourth of July party. Most of the flights throughout the night are full and it’s not till a 05:30 transport that my name is finally called. The waiting room in the huge tent, which is actually deemed an airline terminal, is littered with bleary-eyed soldiers and contractors, nodding off in rows of airport seats or watching basketball on the big-screen TV.

It’s 08:30 before I’m loaded onto a cavernous C-17 transport plane with about 80 other people — among them a contingent of Tap Out ultimate fighters on tour with the USO, a 12-man team of Danish soldiers and three pallets of equipment. We take a bus to the tarmac at Al Salem where we see concrete airplane bunkers with walls 10 feet thick. The roof of the one closest bears a gaping, raggedy-edged hole with steel rebar sticking out at odd angles, compliments of a 500- or 2000-pound bomb — remnants of the first Gulf War.

The C-17’s ascent is so steep my head goes light. An hour-and-a-half later we start the descent into Baghdad and I’m exhausted. I catch a couple of hours of fitful sleep passed out on a wooden pallet before being loaded into a helicopter at 14:45 for a short lift over to LZ Washington, in the Green Zone. There, a team of M-16-toting Peruvian security guards pats me down and appropriates my pen knife. I run into a three-man team of French TV reporters before being thoroughly fingerprinted and having my iris scanned. I’m shown a group of cots in the well-apportioned press room, and within an hour I fall into an exhausted sleep filled with dreams of old high school buddies, carloads of contraband narcotics and a vague, pernicious sense of being illegal.

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »