If war is Hell, then Kuwait is Purgatory

Ah Kuwait, the ugly mistress I can't seem to get rid of. I've lost track of how many times I've been through this country.

All personnel that are going to Iraq and Afghanistan come into the Kuwait City International Airport and then take a military transport into their specific theater of operations. Unfortunately you don't ever go into KCI, as I would guess it's nice on the inside. We're always unloaded on the tarmac and bused to a holding area until we're taken out into the inland desert for processing and consolidation until we arrange transportation to our final destination either by military flight or ground convoy.

Military flights fly out of an airbase outside of the city that consists of a huge tent city. It's literally a grid system of transient living quarter tents with bunk beds inside them. There's a small area for limited fast food, shopping, and services like phones, Internet, and a barbershop that cater to Service Members while they wait for their flights either into a theater of operations or back home if that's their destination. Of course, there is also a DFAC (Dining Facility), MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation), USO.

I'm stuck for several days here in Kuwait waiting on one of my soldiers to arrive who wasn't able to make it out of the U.S. on our contracted Government plane since Delta Airlines lost his weapon while we were in commercial transit to our deployment point at Fort Benning, GA. I wonder sometimes how airlines even stay in business since they can't even keep track of a group of locked weapons boxes. It truly astounds me at times the absolute incompetence of commercial airlines, but then I digress.

Service Members wait here in Kuwait for flights, sometimes getting lucky and not staying here long. Others are not so lucky as their destinations either don't have flights often or the plane for their scheduled flight has an issue where it's postponed or canceled.

So here I am surrounded by people (Service Members and U.S. contractors) waiting to either go home or into a war zone. A purgatory if you will where some go quickly and some hang around for a long time as if some cosmic force is judging them or that karma is finally catching up. All around me, people are flying out to their heaven or hell, and I'm stuck in purgatory.

More to follow.