My First Week at Camp Arifjan

My trip began by reporting to Atlanta Airport at 12.00pm to check in on Wednesday, May 20th. 8 hours later we climbed in a plane. Thank goodness for the USO and WiFi. :)

http://www.uso.org/

We flew on a DC-10 charter flight with Omni an airline I'd never heard of till then. The nickname of the flight is the "Freedom Bird". It's the flight that takes soldiers to and from the states for leave/RR. I was lucky enough to get a first class seat. These seats were based on first come first serve by rank. They started at Colonel (O-6) and had seats all the way down to O-2 (LT), E-8 (Master SGT), and W-3 (Chief Warrant Officer). I fall about in the middle as an O-4. We flew 6 hours to Shannon, Ireland, took a break to refuel and change crews for 2 hours, and then flew 5.5 more hours to Kuwait City, Kuwait. Combine that with the 7 hours we lost from Atlanta and that's a 18.5 hour trip. Not to bad. :)

We loaded up on buses at the Kuwait International Airport and headed over to Al Al Salem Air Base for our initial inprocessing.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/ali-al-salem.htm

It was a strange ride in that we weren't allowed to open the shades on the bus or listen to personal music players. Strange rules in a much, much different country.

We unloaded at Ali Al Salem Air Base and grabbed a bite to eat at McDonalds. (Yes, they had McD's even in the middle of the desert.) Here we caught a really nice break. We were supposed to take a bus from the Air Base to Camp Arifjan. Each of us had 3+ bags filled with all the wonderfully heavy equipment the Army had issued us. Our compadre with Space Ops, Major Phil Speth, acquired an SUV to pick us up. No small feat when you consider he had to borrow the vehicle (not easy), get someone to come with him as VC (vehicle commander), come armed with ammo (you can't leave post without being armed), and get a mission letter from a LTC (O-5) or above. Great job Phil!

The trip to Camp Arifjan was about 1 1/2 hours. Crazy trip. No real speed limits. Kuwaits pass on shoulders and many times there were 3-4 lanes of traffice doing 120K (about 90 mph I believe) with no lines.

We arrived a Arifjan about 0030 (12.30am) Kuwait time. Now keep in mind that this is 7 hours ahead of est and 8 hours ahead of cst. We checked into the open bay transition barracks in the dark. Thanks to Phil again and to MSG Stewart (VC) for travelling with us and helping us lug our stuff to our bunks (2nd floor). I finally crashed about 0130.

That was the trip. I'll be back to talk about the 1st week later. :)