Trip to Camp Buehring

Sunday 1 April 2007
1130

For the past two weeks I have been totally immersed in the never-ending tile floor project from hell, unable to think of or accomplish much of anything else. I will write about that eventually, but until now I haven’t had the time (or, frankly, the heart) to think about it after walking away for the day. So that will have to wait a day or two. Instead, I’ll write about my trip to Camp Buehring yesterday.

It was an interesting day, and was a change of pace for me. We had to go up there for some training. Since the training was classified, I didn’t take my camera. I figured I wouldn’t be able to take any pictures of anything, and probably wouldn’t see much new anyway. Big mistake! It was a varied and interesting trip.

Camp Arifjan is in southeastern Kuwait, near the Persian Gulf. Camp Buehring is farther northwest, more in the interior of the country. The drive out started pretty much like any other trip downtown, as we went past the towns along the coast and past Kuwait City.

I took this opportunity to become more familiar with my GPS. After I got here I bought a Garmin eTrex Vista Cx, which is one of their top-of-the-line handhelds for backpacking, etc. I have played around with it on Camp Arifjan, and also used it to mark locations of places in town that we go to, along with the routes to get there. It’s more for practice than anything else, since it’s pretty hard to get lost here. But if I ever get sent forward I’ll want to be well-versed in its use, and of course I will use it backpacking when I get home. So I set it up to record our route out there, and also marked a couple of waypoints along the way.

After we got to the west of Kuwait City the landscape changed. The desert turned into more of what I had visualized as desert before I came – flat, featureless sand. There was a sparse, low covering of grasses and other plants in some places, but it was barely thick enough to see at all. Here and there we’d pass a building or something. One thing that is noticeably absent are fences. At home, there is not much open countryside – everything is bounded, marked, and fenced off. Even out west in the wide open spaces of Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana, I remember seeing fences, both along the roads and also dividing the various expanses of property.

Not so here. It’s just open. I don’t know if it’s because it’s not private property, or because they manage it differently. I have heard that the sheiks control the grazing rights in their respective areas, so I suspect that fences just are not part of their scheme. The one or two fences I did see resembled midwestern snow fences, running along the roadside for a ways. But they were made of wire mesh, and were stacked nearly to their tops with accumulated trash blown there by the wind. I’m not sure what their purpose was - maybe they are trash fences! That’s another thing you notice here – people just toss out their trash pretty much anyplace. Old tires, rusted out vehicles, and miscellaneous trash litter the roadside. Not continuously, but often enough for it to be a noticeable feature of the landscape. It seemed to diminish as we got farther away from the city.

I remember when I was very young, in Sioux City, Iowa, we had tumbleweeds blowing past our house all the time. Here they have tumblebags - plastic grocery bags that blow across the desert just like tumbleweeds. It sucks when they get hung up in the wire; I have to climb up and get them out because it looks tacky to have trash like that around the headquarters.

A constant feature of the areas I’ve traveled through up until now has been the herds of sheep and goats. You see them everywhere, with the shepherds walking among them, dogs working the edges, and sometimes a loaded donkey being led along as well. They are just everywhere. We saw a few of these as we got farther out, too, and then suddenly we saw a herd of camels! I had not seen any camels since coming here, and instantly regretted not having my camera with me.

At first I thought they were wild, but then I noticed that some of them had markings of various kinds – mostly colored cloth tied around their midsections or around their rear legs. Some were wearing jock-strap-looking contraptions, presumably to control their mating. I was hoping to see a camel herder riding along, but they were in pickup trucks, not riding camels.

The first herd was off to the side of the road, about 50-60 animals. Then a while later we came upon another one that was in the process of crossing the road. A couple of the camels changed course as we approached, and ran away from the vehicle on the road. It reminded me of a time when we nearly ran into some moose in northern Michigan. The moose started to cross road ahead of us and then did the same thing the camels did, running away from the vehicle and blocking the road, when they would have been better off just to hurry across. The camels were various sizes, from the size of a small horse to the size of a moose or even a little larger. They were all Dromedaries – I don’t know where Bactrians come from, but it is apparently not here.

We passed a couple of other herds along the way, and probably saw several hundred camels all together. It was kind of cool. Sorry, no photos. :-(

Along the way we passed Ali Al Salem Air Base. It was the first time I’d seen non-rotary military aircraft here. There were several C-130’s parked on the tarmac, but we passed pretty quickly so there wasn’t much to see.

One interesting roadside feature was a junkyard full of rusted vehicles. It must have been from the first Gulf War, because I saw several destroyed military vehicles, including a number of ambulances with the Red Crescent. Here in the Middle East that is the sign for medical emergency vehicles, not the Red Cross. Of course, our ambulances have the Red Cross on them. I wonder what the local people think when they see it. You’d hope that the normal everyday people understand, but I wonder if it doesn’t stir up negative emotions. I’m so habituated to seeing the Red Cross as a sign of compassion and mercy that I never thought of it before.

Another interesting feature was the dead animals on the side of the road. At home, it’s not unusual to see dead deer, etc. by the roadside. In fact it’s extremely common. Here the wildlife is much more scarce, but there were still occasional carcasses by the roadside. They looked like mostly goats and a couple camels. The striking difference was that almost every one I saw had one or more dogs feeding on it. You never see that at home, but here it was rare to see one that did not have a dog eating off of it. I don’t know if the dogs were wild or domestic. I didn’t see any collars, but that doesn’t really mean anything here.

As we progressed westward, the topology changed. If you look at a topographic map of Kuwait, you’ll notice that the northwestern border of the country curves around from southwest to northeast. This border follows the natural features of the land, which contains a series of ridges in the same pattern which separate the interior of Iraq from the coastal plain of Kuwait. It’s easy to see from a topographic map why this became a separate country. As we got near Camp Buehring, we approached one of these ridges. You could see the land rising in the distance, and the desert became more rocky. We actually climbed up and into the first of the rises. I don’t know how pronounced they become further west – my maps makes them look almost like mountains. I doubt if they are actually that high, but we at least got a hint of them.

Camp Buehring was quite different from Camp Arifjan. It was much more like what I expected before being sent over here. Every building I saw was temporary – either an RLB (relocatable building, i.e. trailer), or some kind of tent. There were large expanses of the typical Army modular tents like I stayed in in Korea (I don’t even know the terminology for them – they are different than what we had when I was in the Army earlier). There were also many larger tents like the ones we had our training classes in at Ft. Benning. These are very large Quonset hut-like structures (semicylindrical) consisting of a frame covered with vinylized canvas. Looking in I could see that these were also configured as open bay barracks for the units there.

Overall, the atmosphere was much more like a field environment than the garrison-like atmosphere at Arifjan. Stacks of MRE’s (Meals Ready-to-Eat) and water pallets shaded by camouflage nets were dispersed at intervals. There were no buildings higher than one story. There were no plants anyplace that I saw, just sand and rock. You got the definite sense that this was a no-nonsense Army base in a forward area. It’s probably as close as I’ll get to Iraq while I’m over here.

The training was interesting and up-to-date. The Army is obviously making a huge effort to spin up all the units going into Iraq on the latest COIN (counterinsurgency) doctrine. If the results could get fairly reported back home, I think the American public might have a different perception of the war. But the politics of the war have become so bitter and the major media are so fixated on crucifying the Bush administration that I doubt that is likely to happen.

The reality of this kind of war is that it takes a very long time to succeed. Published articles (unclassified) have estimated this timeframe at around a decade or so, based on historical experience. The media and the Democrats are all whining about us having been here four years, but we are not even to the halfway point of the prototypical successful counterinsurgency campaign. We are calling this the “Long War”, and if anything it will be longer than those that came before, because the enemy (Militant Islam) is differently motivated, more determined, and more geographically dispersed, in an age of instant communications and rapid travel. I am confident that this war will occupy the remainder of my military career, at least.

Anyway, back to the trip. Upon our departure from Camp Buehring I decided to use some different features on my GPS. It worked well, and I feel much more comfortable with it than I did before.

On the way back I saw fairly extensive expanses of Arfaj (Rhanterium epapposum), the national flower of Kuwait. I’ve only seen a few scraggly plants growing here on Arifjan, but these were the fully-rounded plants you see in plant books (or if you Google it). It sort of looks like the sagebrush out west.

(Arfaj)

I also noticed that as we neared the city there were *way* more trees and greenery along the highway than I have seen so far in Kuwait. I don't know what kind of trees they were, but they had clearly been planted at intervals alongside the road, and also in some groves (orchards?) near the highway. The funny thing is that they didn't really strike me on the way out, only on the way back. It may be because the change was gradual while driving away from the city, where there is at least some greenery, versus coming back into it from the open desert, which was very stark and nearly bare of growing things.

I saw one more interesting sight on the way back. As we passed Ali Al Salem Air Base, I saw a C-130 coming in to land. The C-130 is a real workhorse aircraft, used both for cargo transport and also for paratroop drops. It has been in service since at least the 1960s. I jumped out of C-130s at Airborne school in 1981, and it was already an old aircraft then. It has cargo doors in back that open up and a ramp that deploys downward, so vehicles can drive in and out or cargo can be loaded in on pallets that travel on rollers.

Seeing it land, I could see why they still use it. The aircraft I saw was circling the airfield at a fairly high altitude (I’m no good at estimating altitude, so I won’t try). The way our vehicle was driving, I thought I’d get to see it land. It turned towards us and I could see it begin to descend. But then we turned and it was lost from view for a few seconds. When it came back into view, I just caught a glimpse of the end of its descent.

It was descending very rapidly at an angle that seemed extremely steep, based on watching planes land and take off at commercial airports. This was almost like a dive. Then when it was at an extremely low altitude, it flared up and seemed almost to hover as it came in for a landing.

I have read about this type of landing but never actually see it in action. They flew in to Sarajevo airport in the same way in the early 1990’s – diving into a landing approach from altitude to avoid ground fire, coming out of the dive at the last minute and then landing normally. I know in Vietnam they used to come into firebases like this and then deploy cargo pallets out the back with parachutes. The parachutes would pull out the pallets, which were on rollers in the back, and the planes would never even land, just cruise a few feet over the runway to drop their cargo and then climb quickly and steeply out of range of enemy fire.

Of course there’s no danger here in Kuwait, but they must do it as a standard procedure. Or perhaps it was a training flight. In any case, it was cool to see.

The rest of the trip back was uneventful. I took my iPod along, and after a few minutes of listening to music I remembered I had some lectures recorded that I hadn’t listened to in awhile. So I listened to one of my favorite speakers, Dr. John Ridpath, give a lecture entitled “George Washington, Integrity, and the Founding of America”. It was very interesting, inspiring, and thoroughly delightful to hear.

It was a good day.

Mood: Good
Music: Cold air swooshing through the ductwork (music to my ears!)