Blue Water Navy

I had a pretty good week.  One of the things we have to do is make sure any vehicles the military uses are free from dirt, bugs and all that before they go back to the US.  The Navy maintains an afloat military presence here in the Middle East known as the Amphibious Ready Group, it is a few ships carrying an entire Marine Expeditionary Unit – Marines, helos, tanks, Hummers, guns, bullets, all sorts of cool stuff.  They are here for 6 or so months then they rotate back home.  Since you can’t keep more than 1,000 Marines trapped on ships for months as they will start going crazy and eating through the walls, the military runs joint exercises with other countries so we can practice beach invasions and show off our capabilities.  That makes all this Marine stuff dirty, so it has to be cleaned before they go home.  There aren’t a whole lot of locations over here where they can prop up these things to wash everywhere, you even have to pull the engine out of the tanks (it is modular so it is not as bad as it sounds), so ships occasionally come to Kuwait Naval Base.  Anyway, the USS Green Bay was here this week to wash all their stuff but I couldn’t tell you it was coming as that would have been an operational security violation and I would have been disappeared by the men in Fedora hats and dark sunglasses.

I used to work on the beach end of things in the Reserves, there is a whole part of the Navy that runs landing craft and secures the beach.  I was in an Assault Craft Unit, so our job was to ferry equipment and troops to the beach.  Our unit had LCM 8’s and also used LCU’s (think D-Day type things that hit a beach and drop a bow ramp), and then there were the glamor boys, the LCACs.  They are huge air-driven craft, sort of like those things the good ‘ol boys use in the Everglades, but these also ride on an air cushion that is inflated by their huge gas turbine engines.  We had a good-natured rivalry, they make a big deal out of the fact that the LCAC is more like a plane and we would point out that just like military planes they were broken more often than not.  This is all relevant because the Green Bay anchored off the coast and used her two LCACs to ferry everything to our wash racks at Kuwait Naval Base, so not only did this create an opportunity to get out on a ship for a visit, it meant we had to get an LCAC ride to get there.

I have made some Army friends (it is, after all, an Army base), and I couldn’t think of a better way to show the superiority of the Navy than by getting some of them a ride on an LCAC and a tour of the ship, so that is what we did.  It was a nice taste of the actual Navy after dealing with the desert stuff for the past few months, and my Army buddies were suitably impressed.  We then brought all of the Navy officers I work with here at Camp Arifjan out on Saturday, but our crew had done the inspection job so well that the ship was able to get underway a lot earlier than they initially planned, so I could only get everyone an LCAC ride and not a ship tour.  A major bummer, but on the bright side I got a nice cup of Dunkin’s coffee; Kuwait Naval Base has one of the few DD’s in Kuwait.  Interestingly enough, the franchise is owned by a member of the royal family here in Kuwait:   http://dunkindonutskuwait.com/dd_uae.html

In other news, my roommate left for another job last week and I will be without one for at least the next couple of months. I initially wasn’t going to move things around because frankly I am perfectly satisfied with the living accommodations, but then I started looking at the room critically and noticed that we had not been using the space efficiently - there was a whole area that was just storage for junk, for instance.  I spent some serious time tossing out stuff that had been here for at least a couple years, sweeping and dusting (you would not believe how much dust accumulates in the desert, or maybe you would…), and rearranging lockers and now I have a nice sitting area in addition to my bed and desk.  It is the little things…