Mine is much simpler than this guy's. And I didn't have the stress of command. I was a lowly enlisted man. When my tank unit was deployed to the Gulf from Germany, we were on a chartered Pan Am 747 flight (not long before the airline went bust), and that dreamlike flight is a story all on its own.
We landed at King Fahd International just as the sun was coming up. The final leg of the journey was going to be a C-130 flight to King Khalid Military City. But it took all of our first day in-country for the plane to arrive and do a maintenance and refueling turnaround. We had to hang out at the airport. There was no food, but there was a bottomless supply of bottled water, as you can imagine. We hunkered down under plywood sun-shelters, and drank water all day. We were trying to get used to the idea of frequent re-hydration. Since we weren't working out under the hot sun, we didn't sweat away the water, so instead, it was frequent trips to the plywood latrines.
I whiled away the time inspecting the Arabic-language labels on the water bottles. Somehow, it was a commercial product label entirely in Arabic that made the whole thing real for me. Until then, it just seemed like a rather unorthodox training exercise.
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