Mission triggers Iraqi family reunion

By DENNIS ANDERSON
Valley Press Editor

CAMP DOHA, Kuwait - A drive down the highways of Kuwait is like navigating a sea of sand interlaced with black ribbons of highway that appear to lead to nowhere.

Ultimately, the highways circle, cloverleaf and stretch out to really only two major destinations, south to Kuwait City on the coast or north to Iraq.

On a Sunday, a day after arrival "in country," the officer who functions as second in command of the California National Guard's 1498th Transportation Company was navigating the sea of sand linked by the black asphalt archipelago and finding it tough going.

In most cases that wouldn't be much of a surprise, considering the National Guard lieutenant who makes his living in the world of finance just got in country a day before.

On this particular Sunday, the officer leading a little convoy of two Humvees had an advantage.

Lt. Hatem Abdine, executive officer of the 1498th, was born in Kuwait.

Even for a native of the desert kingdom on the Arabian Sea, getting around the kingdom can be like trying to find your way through a maze. But Abdine's advantage is clear. If he gets turned around, he can ask for directions in Arabic, even from a Kuwaiti soldier at a roadside military base.

"They told us back at Camp Victory to keep your eyes on the map and the highway, because you can think you are going north and you are really headed the other way."

To drive across Kuwait is to watch a sky that covers horizon to horizon with a gray-brown haze.

"It is the humidity," Abdine said. "The sky is almost always this color except when it rains, and then it is blue."

So, how often does a nice rain occasion blue sky? "Four or five times a year," said the lieutenant, who traded the gray skies of his homeland for the blue skies of Northern California many years ago.

Horizon to horizon, varying shades of gray-brown sky are broken only by the black asphalt and by the black brush strokes of interminable power line grids. G.I.s who fought in the two Gulf wars waged with Iraq call the unending power poles that crisscross the desert "SCUD goal posts," for the missiles Saddam once hurled like rocks at freeway drivers.

The graying monotony of the landscape is punctuated with sudden flashes of beauty or strangeness, like a "Camel Crossing" sign in English and Arabic that calls attention to a herd of grazing camels. A few "klicks" (kilometers) down Highway 70, past the checkpoint at the entrance to Aly al Salem Air Base for the Kuwaiti Air Forces, the wreckage of Desert Storm is parked on the desert.

For a square mile, the Iraqi trucks that were burned and blasted during the "Iraqi Highway Turkey Shoot" rest like a graveyard for vain military ambition. Across the road a similar blasted plain plays host to the twisted cannon and tank turrets of the devastated Iraqi tank corps in the war of a dozen years back. Wind howls around the brown, burnt plain of parked, wrecked combat steel.

"The invasion (by Saddam) was devastating personally to me and my family," Abdine said. "I was going to college in the States. We were cut off, and my support from my family was cut immediately. I had to survive working at Burger King and bagging groceries until I could finish college."

Meanwhile, his family waited for the U.S. Marines to arrive to liberate Kuwait City.

A drive on the dizzying network of highways reveals surprising instances of Kuwaiti goodwill and fond memories of American G.I.s. On one such trip a woman, clad in full black veil and driving a Mercedes, honked and waved in friendly fashion at the G.I.s in the lieutenant's Humvee.

"Should I wave back?" Spc. Johnny Jurisch asked.

"Yes, you can do that, because she waved first," Abdine said. "She actually was quite revealing. She showed you the palm of her hand."

Beauty on the desert arrives with its own intimation of peril. One of the rare rains showered the desert.

Rain hit the windshield of the speeding Humvee, followed by a lowering sandstorm. So as raindrops flecked the windshield, cooling the hot and humid sky, sand enveloped the vehicles, headlights forging ahead like beams of illumination in a Steven Spielberg film.

The day's objective was for Abdine to journey with a few soldiers from Camp Victory a few dozen miles south to Camp Doha.

Camp Doha, on a Kuwaiti port, served as one of the principal staging areas for troops assigned to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Daily, it is crowded with thousands of soldiers returning or arriving for duty north of the Kuwait border.

If Camp Victory resembles a tent city for allied armies in "Lawrence of Arabia," with little more than strands of barbed wire surrounding a sea of tarpaulin, Camp Doha looks like a combination of Edwards Air Force Base and California State Prison Los Angeles County in Lancaster.

Roadblocks and checkpoints with concrete road barricades block all but the most authorized access to Doha, which is the bustling center of military operations in Kuwait much the same way that Cam Ranh Bay served as a principal staging area for a massive U.S. force in Vietnam.

Camp Doha has a Post Exchange the size of a Wal-Mart, and it welcomes daily a tide of camouflage-clad humanity who came from many compass points to vanquish the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Among the desert tan uniforms spotted in "The Big PX" at Doha were soldiers from Poland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Evidence that a coalition of allies defeated Saddam could be counted in the numbers of mud-caked, dust-brown vehicles crowding the streets at Doha, including a Polish military police jeep, a little GAZ Warsaw Pact vehicle left over from the Cold War.

But the foreign forces moving through and quartered at Doha are strictly segregated from the rest of Kuwait, a conservative Islamic kingdom, where birth and family determine the status of one's citizenship.

Troops arriving in the country at Kuwait International Airport are hustled away from the capital in buses that have curtains covering the window the way a veil conceals the face of a woman in a strict Islamic society.

Abdine's business of the day at giant Camp Doha was to arrange some logistical support for his outfit, the "Big Awesome Truck Company" of the California National Guard. About a third of the unit's soldiers hail from the Antelope Valley, with the remainder from communities across California.

So, as Abdine went about his business with Lt. Tim McHugh, the sergeants who drove the Humvees - Staff Sgt. Jerry Hagen and Sgt. Abdul Magid Sughayar - guarded the weapons in the vehicle.

For Abdine, returning to Kuwait figures as something of an astounding homecoming. He left the country of his birth in 1988 to attend a university in the United States and to pursue a banking career. He returns as a warrior with the coalition that vanquished Saddam Hussein.

Abdine said he couldn't believe the outcome of the first Persian Gulf war, fearing as he did at the time that Saddam Hussein would never be thrust out of Kuwait. Now, in the second Gulf war, he returns home, bound for Iraq as an officer in the U.S. Army.

"I believed that the best way to become an American, a true American, was to be a soldier," he told troops in the company as they prepared to go overseas.

The day at Camp Doha culminated in the setup of arrangements for his troops, who will drive huge "Super Heavy Equipment Transporter" trucks on missions into Iraq.

Like Abdine, Sughayar also is of Arabic descent, with family in Jordan. Like Abdine, Sughayar believed the United States was firmly on the right side in destroying the Iraqi totalitarian regime.

Sughayar, a 16-year veteran, joined the Guard at age 20 and has been serving ever since, even though his civilian career involves running a successful heating and air-conditioning business.

"I love to get out with a mortar squad and put hundreds of rounds down-range," Sughayar said. "That's 'high speed.' " The term "high speed" is a good thing, like the cheerful battle cry, "Hooah!"

"I support President George W. Bush, and I respected his father, the first President Bush, and I'm a fan of Ronald Reagan."

"I think we did the right thing with Saddam Hussein, and I'm just in awe to be here in Kuwait," said Sughayar, a cheerful 6-footer who looks like a football player or boxer. "I know there's people in Kuwait who hate us Americans, but they need to realize we are working with a group of nations that are united, and that's how it works."

Abdine and his colleague McHugh returned from their business at the busy dockside camp of Doha, with McHugh bringing the NCOs a pizza in lieu of mealtime chow, sure to be missed at the Camp Victory chow hall.

There was one last piece of business in the busiest days of a troop deployment that was just getting under way. Abdine needed a Kuwaiti cell phone, a piece of local brand communication gear that would make everything from supplies to strategy easier.

"When you get past the last checkpoint, drive to the first traffic circle," Abdine directed Sughayar.

At the traffic circle, a big SUV with smoked windows waited. Some clandestine military rendezvous?

Piling out of the car were a pair of prosperous-looking middle-aged fathers; another man, obviously the patriarch; and then the children, young nieces and nephews, all looking at their Uncle Hatem.

Abdine climbed out of the Humvee, moving almost at a run. And running is difficult in humid, 100-degree swamp-cooler weather, wearing the armor of Kevlar helmet, flak jacket, side arm pistol and gas mask.

The children stared, wide-eyed as Uncle Hatem's companions joined up with him on the grassy patch of the traffic circle.

"My father, my brothers, my nieces and nephews," he said. "I haven't seen family in four years."

In the briefest of visits, hugs were exchanged, and handshakes and snapshots. And the children's uncle obtained the little cell phone to be used to help the lieutenant with his business - protecting the people of the United States, Kuwait and Iraq as a soldier in the uniform of the U.S. Army.