Kuwait

So I know it has been a while since I last wrote and many of you are probably wondering why I am updating my blog as I should have been back in Texas as of the 15 October.  Well we were redirected to Kuwait instead of coming home.  I am currently stationed at Ali Al Salem Airbase in Kuwait where it is about 15 degrees hotter than Iraq and literally 10 degrees cooler than the surface of the sun.  As we are setting up the site for us to work at, we are in the sun all day long and we are all covered in sunburns.  I told Amber I have a great tan, except it stops at my T-shirt line.  There is so much sand and it is so fine you would think you were at the beach except there is no water anywhere.  We are living in tents where there are 12 of us per tent.  I am including a picture of the tent as it looked when we first got here, but now it is covered in everybody’s junk.   We are working out of an old bunker that the French built for the Kuwaitis back in the 1970’s.  It isn’t that bad of a location as it stays considerably cooler in the HAS (Hardened Aircraft Structure) and it has A/C with running water to a bathroom.   I would have included a picture of the bathroom, but we do not have any lights in there so it wouldn’t have mattered.  We had to leave everything in Iraq that we bought with money allocated for the Iraq war (which is weird because we fly to Iraq everyday and I am pretty sure we are still fighting the war) so we have no furniture.  As you can see my office is pretty pathetic, but I am also the only Soldier with an office as I am the commander, so everyone else has it worse than me.

The great part of being in Kuwait, is at least we are out of harms way.  The last night in Iraq got a little crazy and so we have a lot to be grateful for since we are here.  As for an update on school, I just finished statistics (a course required for all Texas medical schools even though every other medical school accepts Calculus which I took at BYU) and I am at the midterm for my other two courses.  While I got an A in Statistics and I worked really hard, I hate Statistics.  Some of it was interesting, but most of it was really too in depth for what I need.  I definitely understand why Doctors need to know statistics as you can make a study or a drug’s side effects trials say anything with statistics so it is important to understand how they came up with those probabilities.  

I will try and keep you posted on how everything is going and I will post more photos once we get up and running.

This is the Bunker we are working out of.  I will post a picture in a few days of what it looks like now and it will blow your mind at how much we have changed the site.  Our unit is like locusts, taking over and destroying everything.

This is the inside of the bunker.  There is plenty of room for whiffle ball home run derby. 

This is my office and it is pretty nice.  I have a computer and a phone, so what else could I need?  I spruced it up a little after I took this photo with a BYU flag.

This tent is empty now, but with 12 grown men living in it, it is pretty smelly and cluttered with personal gear, supplement containers and all manner of electronics.

As we were leaving Iraq, they got rid of all hot meals except dinner.  There were over 10,000 people that went through this dinning facility in four hours to eat.  I compare the time spent in line to the time it takes to get to the Finding Nemo ride at Disneyland.  The line wraps around the building and the food was really horrible so it made it worse to wait so long for it.

This is a typical Iraq sandstorm.  You can see on the right it is clear and blue, but there is a wall of sand blowing our way that is 2000’ high and 30 miles wide.  Five minutes after this photo you couldn’t see the vehicles in the parking lot visibility was that bad.

This is the group of us pilots right before everyone redeployed home and I moved to Kuwait.  I am the fourth from the left and no I am not a midget the guy next to me is 6’7”.