Mideast tour: serious things, and vegetable things, and another 120 degree day on which I could feel my lips sunburning through my lipstick

For new readers: I am currently on an Armed Forces Entertainment tour of the Middle East, beginning in Kuwait, with three other comics.

Camp Beuhring, 15 miles south of the Iraqi border, is many tents and some number of utterly flat, mostly bathroomless buildings in the absolute middle of nowhere, an hour's drive through terribly empty desert. The idea of being stranded there -- either literally, through some roadside accident, or simply in the sense of being stationed there for some months -- was terrifying. All the water is trucked in; the very fact of having water and being able to survive on such a patch of land seemed obviously unnatural.

Beuhring is a training camp, mostly -- a waystation for new troops on their way to Iraq. The audience was a little quiet; afterwards, an officer explained that most of the guys in the audience are shipping off to Iraq tomorrow, and "20-30 of them are going to get blown up just getting there. Their minds are elsewhere." There's nothing to say to that. As alcohol is illegal in Kuwait, our audience was sober in both senses of the word.

We were treated to a tour of a tent-based clinic in which we observed materials for the treatment of both scorpion bites and chlamydia, a dental office, and most enjoyably the shooting range, in which we shot M-16s in simulation exercises. A Naval dentist named Anthony took charge of my camera and took many photos while I shot baddies in video-game-like desert and then night-vision exercises, and then in a very different exercise called "SHOOT OR DON'T SHOOT," in which you watch a narrated scenario in which live actors portray a situation in which you, the shooter, are at risk of shooting innocent people, or inappropriately shooting a bad guy before he has drawn a weapon. When you do such a thing -- shoot someone who has merely punched someone else, or yelled in Arabic -- the exercise stops and flashes the words "DEFEND YOUR ACTIONS."

After the show, we went right back to the airport (three nights in a row there!) to finally get Christina's luggage. And we saw a corn stand! Some months ago, the Intrepid Young Journalist had happened to mention that, during his time in Lebanon, corn was impossible to avoid. "The Lebanese will put it on anything -- pizza, sandwiches, hamburgers. You have to specify: NO CORN." It seems the phenomenon extends to Kuwait. We each bought a cup of corn. It was really just corn. It had butter, salt and pepper, and lemon juice, but seriously, people were lining up for corn. At a place called ... "Mr. Corn." The Mr. Corn stand also sold nachos (i.e., corn chips) and "corn smoothies," but everyone just seemed to be getting corn. Laura said she'd line up for really any "single-vegetable stand."


One of our security guys loosened up and started telling us that lots of Kuwaiti guys have gay sex but are married to women and don't think of themselves as gay. I pointed out that -- from ancient Greece to modern-day South America -- that actually is pretty much the global norm. Christina saw men holding hands and kissing, even there at the airport (which isn't always indicative of a sexual relationship, but clearly sometimes is).

Also on the sociocultural front, I've been talking about Christopher Hitchens fairly well nonstop, as things he's said about Islam keep coming up, and Christina just mentioned she saw Hitchens' new book "god is Not Great" on sale at the PX, which makes me happy, as it balances out the giant wall of religious pamphlets provided in Beuhring's recreation room. Sure, that makes religion free and atheism a thing that must be paid for, but then again, people more appreciate things that cost. Which makes this post come kind of full-circle.