Editor's note: Star Senior Writer Matthew Korade and photographer Kevin Qualls are on special assignment in Kuwait and Iraq. This is another installment of what will be a continuing journal providing personal insight about their trip. MUBARAK AIR BASE, Kuwait – People on military business in Kuwait almost always pass through Camp Wolverine.
The camp, the U.S. military station at Mubarak Air Base, is a wayside station for military personnel and Department of Defense civilians flying in every direction, to Europe, to the United States, to Iraq.
Flights are flown on standby. Sometimes you way a few hours, other times more than a day.
Cots are provided for the overnight stay. There are tents full of cots for people going to Baghdad, Balad, Udari, Fallujah. You wouldn’t want to sleepwalk into the wrong tent.
While waiting, there are plenty of things to do. The dining facility, like those at most U.S. bases, has a full menu. There is an Internet café, a subway, a barber and a gym. There is a shower and a Post Exchange, where you can buy postcards showing pictures of the invasion of Iraq and buy non-alcoholic beer.
A sergeant has a case of the stuff sitting under the shade of the picnic tent out front.
“We’re getting ready to drink ourselves into the ground,” he says. The soldier nearby looks skeptical.
“The point is, this is the best we got here,” the sergeant says.
But the best place to go is Paradise Sands. Paradise Sands is the United Service Organizations tent in Kuwait.
The USO tent is camel with red furniture and tan carpeting, and an attempt has been made to give it a luxurious, lamp-lit appeal. There are red beanbag chairs for playing video games, wide seats for watching DVDs on two large flat screen TVs, laptop stations for checking emails and a futon area for lounging about and reading from a selection of books, mostly thrillers, or magazines. The place seems strangely out of context. Soldiers lay down their M-16s to play video golf, and as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testifies about alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Master and Commander plays on a wide-screen TV nearby.
Most interesting, on the floor of the “amnesty” tent where travelers dump all items deemed unacceptable by Customs, sits the head of the statue of Saddam Hussein that was toppled in the fall of Baghdad.
It is an odd feeling to see the statue here, in this traveler’s limbo, and it springs to mind that the future of Iraq and America, so inextricably entwined, may go in any direction.
