Division Street

Kuwaiti exit strategy

By DENNIS ANDERSON
Valley Press Editor

That was months ago, about the time we decided to follow our hometown soldiers assigned to Operation Iraqi Freedom all the way to Bagdhad. McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, urged approval of our plan to travel to the combat zone with local troops of the National Guard who are doing yeoman duty in Iraq where bullets and rockets fly daily, sometimes killing our GIs.

Months and nearly 10,000 miles later, it was time for a news guy to return to home base. Getting to Bagdhad with the hometown heroes was not easy. Hard to imagine it would be trickier to get home, but it was.

"If you haven't got a Kuwaiti visa, that could be really tough," a nice major in public affairs at Camp Doha in Kuwait told me.

I had a passport, but no visa. I'd arrived in Kuwait at Camp Wulf with 263 Cal Guard soldiers wearing boots, flak vest and bayonet, but carrying no tourist credentials. Under cover of night, on buses with windows curtained against terrorist grenades and Kuwaiti sensitivities, we were packed 60 miles up the road to Camp Victory on the way to the Iraqi border.

A month later, after a bunch of missions and a 1,400-mile, eight-day convoy to Bagdhad and beyond, it was time to return to the editor's chair. I returned to Camp Victory from the Saudi-Iraq-Kuwaiti border with enough sand in my boots to remake "Lawrence of Arabia." Return plans, like the whole venture, were wing and a prayer. I could hitch a ride back with the field artillery to Ft. Sill, Okla., but that was days or weeks away. I could book a flight from Kuwait International, but my friendly major told me that was a non-starter without the visa. "Since you entered Kuwait with the military, and you don't have a visa, you've never officially been here," he said.

Never officially in Kuwait? During the war, the Kuwaiti government wasn't issuing visas, and if you arrived with the military, no problem. Leaving as a civilian? Could be a big problem.

Email from Stults: "I'll write you a letter of introduction for the U.S. Embassy." Nice letter. More than nice. I've never seen 007's "Licence to Kill." Has anybody? This wasn't that, but it provided a measure of comfort hard to grasp unless you're 7,960 miles from home in a desert kingdom ruled by an emir. No way of knowing what the king's doing tonight. I went to the U.S. Embassy with my friend, and often protector, Army National Guard Lt. Hatem Abdine. He was born in Kuwait, and returned to defend both his homeland and adopted country from Saddam.

"Don't worry," he said. "We'll take care of it." With a couple of officer pals, we went off to the American Embassy in Kuwait.

The U.S. Embassy is a state-of-the-art fortress embedded among date palms, sensors and cameras. Consular officers sit behind bulletproof glass in buildings separated from the flow of life by concrete anti-tank barriers. The lady furrowed her brow as she read the letter. "You must talk to Marwan. Where can you be reached?" Marwan? Absent the letter, I think they'd have sent Basil the evil troll to force me to sell dates on the "Highway of Death."

Instead, from the embassy depths, emerged Mary Fanous, an Egyptian embassy employee with the dazzling smile, directness and panache of the born public affairs officer. She dazzled. Then, "Mr. Anderson, your problem is very difficult." How difficult, I inquired. "Very difficult. Almost unique."

Dazzlingly effective embassy public affairs officers handle the very difficult quickly. Impossible takes longer. "I will write you a letter," she said. Great. "We're done?"

"No," she said. "Now, you go to the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information, where my counterpart Intisar al-Azmi will translate it into Arabic."