Hail to the Chin

by Bruce Campbell

  But the idea of going to a war zone was a whole new ball game. I was used to playing war, but to see it for real – that was the great unknown.

  I met up with Jeffrey in the Red Carpet Club in Washington, D.C. We both had the same reaction upon seeing each other: Yikes! We really are going!

  It hit me when I walked up to Gate 14. The schlumpy businessmen normally associated with air travel were now scruffy PSDs (Personal Security Details) and unshaven middle-aged contractors spitting tobacco into Styrofoam cups. We were not going to Kansas.

  Brother Don arrived at the gate and by the time we exchanged hugs all around it was time to board.

  My seatmate on the twelve-hour flight to Kuwait was Hilary, who worked with the State Department. She was a fount of information regarding what we were about to encounter.

  Hilary specialized in infrastructure projects in small villages in Iraq and Afghanistan – ironically, putting back together what the military takes apart – and both factions were well represented on the plane. Jeffrey was seated next to an ex-Blackwater security guard back from leave, so he got a twelve-hour earful about the other side of the tracks.

  I’m not an airplane sleeper, so I got well into my Buster Keaton biography. Reading about a silent movie era comedian seemed the perfect antidote for the current reality.

  Kuwait City from the air at night was pretty similar to most – a mix of ancient mercury vapor lights and the new halogen. Oil well burn off, which seemed to be happening in all directions, resulted in a very science-fiction movie effect in the atmosphere – and not the healthy kind.

  Touchdown was 6:15 p.m. There were no visuals to report. We left in the dark and arrived in the dark. I always get slightly claustrophobic when I can’t see a new city skyline or geographical feature. We could have been anywhere.

  Visas were had for three dinars. The currency of choice in the TV shows Hercules and Xena were dinars and my character Autolycus stole many sacks of them, but now I was using dinars for real in the place where it all began. A case of art imitating life meeting real life.

  On the other side of Customs, which wasn’t any more intimidating than usual, we met up with our team – security guys Dave and Dave and our driver/local expert/ ex-military guy, Brody. Our mode of transport was a perfectly cushy SUV. Brody explained that since a lot of SUVs are used to ferry brass and contractors around, much had been learned about which U.S. brands sucked in 130-degree heat and which ones did the trick. Brody was a big fan of the Chevy Tahoe.

  To ensure the safety of the valiant soldiers I met in Iraq, their identites have been obscured.

  On the road, we assumed “the formation.” Our car was in the lead and Dave and Dave stayed consistently two car lengths behind. They were certainly low-key in their dress and attitude, but they didn’t dick around either. If Brody had to dodge around a bobbling Chevy Impala from the seventies (and I was astounded at the number of them on the road), the boys always kept right behind.

  As is the case in many foreign countries, driving in Kuwait is all over the map. We were passed on both sides by every kind of SUV, luxury and sports car available – some driven by women. Kuwait is a tad more relaxed in that department. It was a stark reminder that something considered “unique,” in this region, like allowing women to drive, is so mundane back home.

  TANKS FOR STOPPING BY

  Our destination was the sprawling Camp Arifjan. Used as a Forward Logistics Base (or FLB), anything that comes and goes to the Southwest Asian Theater passes through this crazy-big place. Word on the street was that the Kuwaitis covered the cost of Arifjan and still supply all the oil/gas needed to operate it – free of charge. You could say it’s a holdover gift to us for stepping in during the first Gulf War.

  Camp Arifjan hosted all the “comforts” of home.

  Kuwait has a lot of oil and would very much like to keep it. With them sitting on top of 104 billion barrels of proven reserves, with oil accounting for 90 percent of their yearly revenue, you can understand their edginess that Saddam Hussein, their aggressive neighbor to the north, was gonna march in and grab it.

  Their intuitions proved correct – so much so that this rich country was hesitant to flaunt its wealth for fear that something as grand as a palace was an easy target. Brody, who makes his home in Kuwait, explained that all the new construction was unique in that now they weren’t afraid to strut their stuff a little.

  It was also significant that Arifjan was permanent, with multistory administrative buildings, living quarters for nine thousand, three buffet-style mess halls serving four meals a day and four base exchanges (stores) that would dwarf your local Walgreens. Recreationally, a massive weight room, an outdoor pool and a full-sized basketball court were available – some twenty-four hours a day.

  Not that it was necessarily good for them, but apart from the base chow, the modern-day soldier had access to an astounding array – fifteen to be exact – of brand-name fast-food outlets.

  The basic plan was to crash for the night in our dorm-like rooms (Building 162), get to know the base a little better and do some signings the next day.

  Because my sense of time was whacked, I was up at 5:30 in the a.m. doing e-mail and changing my return flight. The base really did make it seem like you were just in a different state, albeit a hot, dusty one, rather than a different country. I guess that was the idea.

  Most everything is planned in the military, so grub was in order at 7:15 a.m. Chow was at the Oasis, a bright, superclean facility where we dined on made-to-order omelets. I know that many soldiers have it rough, but not here.

  We did a walk-around after breakfast, trying to take in the scope of the base. It started to dawn on us what it takes to stage a military operation. I swear to God, half the soldiers we met at our 11:30 signing were in some form of logistics. It makes a hell of a lot of sense when you have hundreds of tons of gear and thousands of humans coming and going from sea, land and air.

  A pattern soon developed at signings. Soldiers stepping up to our table would invariably blurt, “Hey, where’s the chick?” We were okay was the insinuation, but Gabrielle Anwar would have been way better. This became such a regular refrain from soldiers that Donovan eventually insisted that I give him a dollar every time a soldier made that reference. I’m not exactly sure why I agreed to the payout. It was really a losing bet and you never want to bet with Donovan. He’s a wicked gambler who actually understands what he’s doing at casinos.

  To combat an ever-dwindling pile of single dollar bills, I therefore insisted that he fork over a dollar every time a soldier came up to the table with, “Hey, Ash, where’s your chainsaw?” The Evil Dead films are very popular with the armed forces – I knew that from meeting servicemen and women at “civilian” signings over the years and it turned out to be the perfect antidote to this stupid bet. For the next week, Donovan and I silently exchanged dollar bills whenever the appropriate references came up. Soldiers wondered what the hell was happening, but it amused us to no end.

  The afternoon was free and we readily accepted an invitation to drive an Abrams tank. It wasn’t an offer you get every day and it wasn’t something Donovan – a motor sports guy – and my crazy brother Don were going to pass up. Hey, what the USA Network didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  Donovan was up first. The controls of an Abrams tank are kind of like a motorcycle, but the grips are much closer together. You steered and revved with the same controls. Donovan was off like a shot around the dusty oval track and he tore the place up, taking turns that made even the tank guys shudder. A quick reminder: The Abrams tank is powered by a gas turbine engine. It’s a freaking jet turned sideways – and it sounds like one.

  After three or four laps, I was up next. As I maneuvered all sixty-two metric tons of this beast onto the track, I gunned it. Nothing happened.

  “You got to give it some gas, sir,” the commander urged me from his perch in the turret.

  “I’m gassing, I’m gassing,” I said, twisting the
throttle toward me as much as possible.

  Then – poof! Dark smoke billowed from the back of the tank. I’m not a mechanic, but I knew that wasn’t a great thing.

  “Uh, we should go ahead and hop out,” the commander said calmly, but he wasted no time putting distance between himself and what was soon to become a fire.

  Brother Don and Donovan reacted with unmasked glee.

  “Way to break the tank,” Don said, smiling. “It’s only six million and change.”

  In about five minutes, a fire truck showed up with an assortment of men on ATVs, fire rescue equipment at the ready.

  “Thanks for giving us something to do today,” one soldier offered as he drove past.

  Arifjan was also a RAD (Repair Activity Depot), so they had what they needed to repair just about anything. Minutes later, another fire truck arrived and a group of men stood around watching a couple guys do the actual work.

  Just like home, I thought.

  Eventually, a giant vehicle arrived to tow the disabled war machine away. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of machine is needed to tow an Abrams tank, the answer is: a really big one.

  This was just a glitch in the road to our gracious hosts and they simply brought over a different piece of equipment to drive around – this time an M2 Bradley IFV (Infantry Fighting Vehicle), which was also a troop carrier and a tank killer.

  Don was all over this thing like a cheap suit and he cut a pretty macho rug over a large, dirt training area. Driving a Bradley was kind of like driving a giant go-cart. The controls were primitive, with an oversized gas pedal. As with driving anything large, nothing could be done “on a dime.” You always had to give extra room and time to any maneuver.

  If you have claustrophobia, tanks aren’t for you. If you’re heavier than two hundred pounds or taller than six feet, give up your dreams of staging epic battles in the desert. Manning a tank is a job for short, wiry guys who don’t have an issue with baking in their own little Kuwaiti desert oven. Luckily for us, the temperature was a chilly eighty-three degrees.

  Tank Brothers II. (Tonight the role of Mike Campbell will be played by Jeffrey Donovan.)

  Cliff the tank guy ran us through our paces. Cliff was a throwback from another war. But this wasn’t a Vietnam or even a WW II throwback – this guy was positively WW I. He had “a pinch between his cheek and gum,” but he may as well have chomped on cigars. His teeth were yellow, veering into brown because he chewed tobacco, and like most scary people you meet, there was a coldness in his eyes. He had a warm smile, but it evaporated quickly, depending on the subject at hand.

  Cliff’s current goal was to get to Afghanistan.

  “Why would you want to go there?” I asked.

  “That’s where the action is. They won’t let us do nothin’ in Iraq anymore. We’re just babysittin’ here.”

  “But isn’t the idea for the soldier to get his ass back home as soon as possible?”

  Cliff shrugged. “I got everything I need here.”

  “Everything?” I asked, pushing him a little. “I thought this was a dry kingdom?”

  Cliff looked at me without blinking or smiling, but his voice reeked with sarcasm. “Yeah … okay, sure it is.”

  When pressed about his personal life, he explained that his last leave was mostly wasted finishing up a messy divorce from his second wife.

  “Tell you what – I’m done with that shit,” he said, shaking his head slightly, letting a brown streak of goo dribble out. “Ain’t worth the aggravation.”

  “That shit” I assumed meant dating, or wives or women in general.

  “Sometimes war makes a lot more sense,” Cliff said, scanning the horizon. “I can fix a tank in my sleep, but I can’t fix a damn woman.”

  I could have talked with a guy like Cliff all day. He was a zero BS-er who also acknowledged, as a soldier, that not all of it was good.

  “I done some bad things,” he confessed. “But I seen some bad shit they done and it was way worse.”

  A rigid military schedule pulled me away from Sergeant Rock and we were off to a different part of the base and another signing. En route, we saw remnants of the Gulf War. A series of concrete bunkers had been destroyed by what was clearly precision bombing – and who’s gonna clean that crap up?

  In an interesting twist, the bunkers weren’t destroyed by Saddam; they were destroyed by the United States once Saddam took the airfield over. This caused an uncomfortable situation, as the bunkers, built by the French, were supposed to be bomb proof. The French position in the dispute was simple: “We did not say the bunkers would withstand American bombs.”

  Signings for military folks half a world away always came with their own curiosities. Although we traveled with our own miniposter to sign, this was, after all, the information age and these people had access to the Internet.

  This produced freshly printed obscure photos of my past or present and some very interesting DVDs. Some bases allowed third-country nationals to sell wares to the soldiers at small bazaars, or “haji shops” as they were known on base. For starters, most of these DVDs were bootlegs and in places such as Kuwait and Iraq the cover art has to pass a different set of codes.

  Showing bare skin is a Bozo No-No in this culture, so it was very amusing to compare the cover of a legitimate Burn Notice DVD brought from home and the “photoshopped” cover of a bootleg, where Gabrielle Anwar now mysteriously wore leggings and long sleeves. With a couple clicks, she went from Hollywood to Bollywood. Either way, I was just glad that Burn Notice was popular enough in Kuwait to drive such a need, albeit under-the-table.

  Not a Globemaster, but a Super Hercules, another big ass aircraft

  While waiting for our “ride” – a C-17 Globemaster III – we took in a concert by Hip Kitty, a really fun band that did upbeat, familiar music. With music still ringing in our ears, we loaded our gear into the massive C-17. With just five civilians and a couple white SUVs in the hold, we were comfortably shy of their 170,000-pound payload limit.

  There was room for Donovan and me in the cockpit and we jumped at the chance. I was continually astounded at how young the soldiers were – or airmen in this case. The three-man team seemed barely out of college, but this was no frat house. They were focused, coolheaded and generally pretty cheery. It was a kick to listen in on the chatter (which may as well have been a different language) as these guys methodically checked and cross-checked in preparation to get this hog up in the air.

  THE GLASS PALACE

  Along the route (which is only an hour by car from Kuwait City to the border), we were invited to check out a local oddity, courtesy of night-vision goggles. As I scanned the desert below, the goggles revealed about two dozen flickering lights, with a pronounced haze around them.

  “That’s eerie looking,” I said to the pilot. “What the hell is it?”

  “Those are the oil fires that Saddam lit on fire.”

  “The ones back in ‘91?” I asked, incredulous. “I thought they were put out.”

  “Not all of them,” the pilot said casually. “I guess the Kuwaitis figure it’s not worth it.”

  “That’s disturbing,” I said, handing the goggles to Donovan.

  Around 11:00 p.m., we touched down at the “Glass Palace” – Saddam’s personal airfield in its heyday. On the ground, we got acquainted with our new guides – J.J., an ex-military guy who spent some time at Disney Studios, and his soon-to-be replacement, Judd.

  It was dark again, so there wasn’t much to see on the way in, but we were again going to another sprawling complex – Camp Victory. In the morning, wandering outside before 7:30 chow, I took in the layout. When Saddam ran the show, this area was a series of palaces. He had sixty-some around Iraq. In order to hunt and fish at will, Saddam dredged a massive lake and built a series of palaces, large and small, around it. The lake is stocked with enormous “Saddam Bass,” which aren’t even bass – they’re a species of asp fish that grows upwards of six feet and weighs over a hundred p
ounds.

  When coalition troops rolled into this area, a number of soldiers were assigned to round up the odd assortment of wild animals that were roaming free. Sharpshooter Saddam couldn’t get enough of randomly gunning down exotic animals on his “back forty.”

  The base provided plenty of incongruity. Roadways named Missouri Street leading to an Iraq despot’s vacation palace. On the base, when soldiers didn’t have to wear uniforms they wore black shorts, a gray T-shirt and an M4 slung over their shoulder – like a crossing guard with an attitude.

  Our hotel rooms at Camp Victory were in one of Saddam’s smaller palaces, but “small” would not be the way you’d describe my suite. The ceiling was easily twenty feet high and pretty much everything was covered in a marble veneer. These rooms, used mostly for military personnel now, have gone from not-so-shabby chic to upscale multi-purpose. Don’s room had bunk beds and mine had an eight-seat conference table. Hey, if you’re going to have a boring logistics meeting it might as well be in an ornate hall.

  Furnishings provided by Home Despot.

  But looks weren’t everything. You didn’t want to drink the tap water in our palace under any circumstances. Cases of bottled water in the bathroom told the whole story. My shower was positively Green Acres. The hot water was a long time coming and when it arrived you never knew how long it was going to last. Either way, it was odd to take a military shower in a dictator’s palace.

  ODD FOBS

  The plan for the next three days was to base out of this camp and visit a series of FOBs of varying size. Troops were informed about our arrival and it was all pretty casual – we’d find a folding table, set up a couple chairs, take pictures and sign stuff that we brought with us, Sharpies included. We didn’t want the troops to think about anything.

  On our list were bases Nasir Wa Salam, Aqur Quf, Sheik Amir, COS Meade, Mahmudiyah, JSS Yusifiya – none of them even close to Wichita, Kansas.