Rain in the Dessert

My first night in Kuwait was certainly not what I or anyone else in my squad expected. We had arrived in the evening and it was hot and muggy. The battalion was being moved into a transient tent but all of our personal gear was still on the pallets in a pile. They were going to assign people to take shifts for guard duty and I quickly volunteered, not for any overwhelming sense of goodness but because I figured it would be cooler outside in the breeze than it would be in the tent. My squad leader agreed and after a quick poll of the squad volunteered all of us to take the guard duty. The rest of the battalion was quite happy to let us have it and we were quite happy with our choice. (You can sense can't you that there is a catch to this....)
Well we were making our plans for how many shifts and who would be on them and got things started. The two of us watching were up and the others had gone to sleep on the piles of gear. At this point the unexpected occured. It began to rain. Not to drizzle, no gentle shower, no scattered showers, it was a deluge. My emotions tell me that there was thunder and lightening but I really can't recall if there was or not. but it was a monsoon like rain. Needless to say pretty soon everyone was awake and huddled together in wet misery. All of the rain gear was of course in the duffles or rucks on the pallets. After awhile we baegan to open the gear and pull out some of the "snivel gear" Not because it would keep us dry, it was way too late for that, but becasue we began to have real fears of hypothermia. The early signs were hitting us and we thought it would be really lousy to go down from that on our first night in the dessert. (I say dessert, that is true as far as all of Kuwait is a dessert, we were at the airport.) Needless to say it was a LONG night. The rain finally stopped and the dawn finally came and we were relived and went to the tent to sleep. So much for our grand plan to sleep in cool comfort, now we got to try and sleep in the tent in the heat during the day. And for those who came later, this was before any of these tents had AC set up in them, it was just going to be hot. Now before we started our shift we had been warned to be alert of SCUD alarms and during the night we had heard a few things but in the noise of the downpour we were never sure if one of those sound had been the alarm. No need to worry. A couple of hours, more of less, after I got to sleep the screaming trumpet of God went off in my ear. Actually it was more like a monster buzzer, it was the SCUD alarm and there was no way you could miss it. All that mask training paid off becasue I had that damn thing on before I was fully awake. Then with further alert we went to full MOPP. this means I am now sitting in the tent in the dessert heat wearing my full chemical protective suit waiting for a missle to come raining destrucion down on the airport I was sitting in. Not the most comfortable morning to follow on the long night. I have some pictures I took while sitting here someplace and whenever I can get all of my stuff out of storage I'll try to post some of them.
This was our introduction to Kuwait. Things went downhill from here.