Mine is much simpler than this guy's. And I didn't have the stress of command. I was a lowly enlisted man. When my tank unit was deployed to the Gulf from Germany, we were on a chartered Pan Am 747 flight (not long before the airline went bust), and that dreamlike flight is a story all on its own.

We landed at King Fahd International just as the sun was coming up. The final leg of the journey was going to be a C-130 flight to King Khalid Military City. But it took all of our first day in-country for the plane to arrive and do a maintenance and refueling turnaround. We had to hang out at the airport. There was no food, but there was a bottomless supply of bottled water, as you can imagine. We hunkered down under plywood sun-shelters, and drank water all day. We were trying to get used to the idea of frequent re-hydration. Since we weren't working out under the hot sun, we didn't sweat away the water, so instead, it was frequent trips to the plywood latrines.

I whiled away the time inspecting the Arabic-language labels on the water bottles. Somehow, it was a commercial product label entirely in Arabic that made the whole thing real for me. Until then, it just seemed like a rather unorthodox training exercise.

to boarding. They kept us busy going through Customs and Ag inspections and then the often FOD walks of the runway especially on redeployment from Osan. After all that, we still had to wait about 5 hours for departure.

They were building King Khalid City when I was in Dammam in 79 on business. Of course, no one knew what they were building at the time. It was all hush hush.