Day 12 - So Very Close

Gwen is nearing as I type. She's either on a bus ride to the airport, at that dreaded Kuwaiti rest stop right now, or sky high in a plane. Either way, its finally happening, and its pretty damn cool.

I've made the final touches on the place so that its presentable for her return. As luck would have it, the housekeeper showed up today and did some good bathroom/kitchen cleaning and sweeping/mopping which saved me the trouble after work. (Our housekeeper, who's sort of demented, kind of shows up every now and then without warning like a ninja. He's unpredictable, but he does manage to clean the place respectably roughly every two weeks. He doesn't really straighten, but he does hit the floors and bathrooms with reckless abandon, which is the real reason we have him. But, he is literally a little bit demented, and he often leaves cleaning products out all over the place, and once I found a skillet, which was cleaned, sitting on a cookie sheet (also cleaned) in the oven, as if it were a storage cabinet. I'm also not sure he understands the German garbage system. We have five cans in our kitchen, one for each sort of trash/recyclable. But when he cleans, he empties them all out and we then find identical bags (even though there are five different types of bags - one for each type of trash) in each can. Something tells me he thinks that we simply have five garbage cans in our kitchen. Something else tells me that all the work we do to carefully sort our trash is going to waste. But I digress...)

Anyway, the place looks good. The Christmas tree is still up, and underneath it are all the presents from Gwen's birthday, Christmas, and other. Tomorrow WILL be a Christmas of sorts, all things considered.

Yesterday (instead of posting), I read through all my Hidden Lair posts regarding my return from the desert. What a journey that is, and I find myself smiling every time I think of Gwen going through the process. Each step, as long and painful as it is, is one step closer, and that makes all the difference.

I remember sitting around a lot, standing in formation a lot, joking with Jeff a lot, joking with my medics a lot. One of my medics had a MAME emulator on his lap top and it seemed we killed many hours at BIAP and also in Kuwait playing various video games.

The most surreal part of my entire journey home had to be the drive from Ali A'Saleem AFB, where final customs is located, to the actual Kuwaiti Airport. We loaded onto buses, after waiting around the customs area FOREVER, and then standing in formation FOREVER. As Jeff and I got on our bus, we noticed that our bus driver looked like Osama Bin Laden. I mean, he was like a dead ringer only he looked a little younger and had a little bit of a shorter beard. But he definitely had the far away sort of detached look in his eyes which wigged us out.

To make things worse, as our bus pulled out, we noticed that it sounded and felt barely functional. It took about two minutes for the thing to get up to 35 mph, and every time Bin Laden Jr. shifted the whole bus lurched back and forth as if the hulk was grabbing it from the back and trying to shake someone off of it. I thought the transmission was going to fall out on to the freeway.

Worse, either the bus or Bin Laden jr. was incapable of driving straight. The bus would make little S-turns the entire time it was moving, curving back and forth in the lane like a cheap skateboard with speed-wobbles. After a few minutes of this, and realizing this bus and the driver were both jacked up, I got a little concerned. And, to make things still worse, about ten minutes into the drive (which takes about an hour and a half), we had to pull over on the side of the road in our long bus convoy and just wait. We had no idea what was going on. Outside the windows, we could see our Hum Vees driving around a little, but there was no motion or activity which signified anything meaningful about why we had stopped.

I looked around the bus and several soldiers had fallen asleep and could have cared less while others like myself grew concerned. Here we were, so CLOSE to being out of there, but we were stopped for some reason - no one knew why - and Bin Laden Jr. was driving our bus with a look in his eye like he could have cared less about swerving the thing into oncoming traffic. And even if he DID care, the bus might have made up its own mind with one ill-timed shift lurching us into a sharp turn.

After what seemed like forever (about thirty minutes), we finally started rolling again. And again, the bus was a train wreck all over the road, and at this point its performance solicited several comments from passengers like, "Hey! What the f*** is wrong with this thing?!" or "Dude - can this guy not drive straight?"

I remember turning to Jeff and we shared a look that indicated, "Hey, if we don't get out here because of this bus, or because Bin Laden Jr. here does something stupid, then we both agree to kill him before we die, right? Right."

It was all very nerve-wracking. Luckily, once the bus got on the main highway, it didn't have to shift much and then all we were dealing with were the manageable, if not ideal, speed-wobbles. We ended up making it with out much to-do, but I remember that sinking feeling of being so close and just imagining something going wrong.

But, it didn't. And as the ride steadied out a little I remember settling down some and just looking out the window towards the Kuwaiti houses and buildings in the neighborhoods off the side of the road - tired thoughts drifting between relief to be leaving and disbelief at my previous eight months. Mostly, though, I was thinking about how I couldn't WAIT to get the hell out of there, and about how much money they could never pay me to live in Kuwait, Iraq, or any other part of the middle east.


Something tells me Gwen is in a similar state of mind right about now...