Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Should I drink the blue latte or the red latte?

Kuwait City Airport, Kuwait - Starbucks Coffee and Caribou Coffee sit right next to each other in arrivals area of the Kuwait City Airport, seperated by a neutral Cinnabon. In one of these familiar establishments lurks the white rabbit ready to offer me the red pill (this as reference to the movie, The Matrix, for anyone that is throughly confused). Take the red pill and start a strange trip into another world.

Every night he sits there, a blond man with short hair in civilian clothes, who seems to know everybody that works in the airport. SSG Kevin Buckley picks up arriving journalists everyday, 24 hours a day, and expertly sheperds them out of the airport, through the desert, and into another world at an Unnamed airbase in the Kuwaiti desert.

The transition from the polished chrome of the airport to dirt roads and a tent city in the desert is dramatic. The Kuwait City Airport shows no sign that a war is being fought just a few miles to the north, but out in the desert our passports are triple checked, and a serious and heavily armed security team searches our vehicle for explosives. We spend the night in a brown tent that flaps in the wind, and the air is thick with dust.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Excellent! We love you guys. Keep up the good work! Our prayers are with you.

Day by Day, by Chris Muir (updated daily)



Chris Muir is the cartoonist that I met in Kuwait. He spent two weeks in Iraq at the same time I was there in February 2007, and so thought it would relevant to showcase his work on my site. Here is a link to Chris' humorous travelogue of this Iraq trip: http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/03/arrival_alignright_v.php