Mideast tour: you do not know the meaning of "hot"

I'm online right now in the USO tent at Camp Virginia, Kuwait. I'll post more photos when I get back to my own computer, but you might be interested in Chris Freeman's tour coverage here.

We've been averaging 600-700 people per show, and 126 degrees during the day. I have been given a Marine hat, which I'm totally wearing all the time when I get back to Williamsburg.

All of the bases have either a Starbucks or a Cool Beans coffee, which seems lovely and comforting. Except that they are in trailers, air-conditioned to about 97 degrees, which when you first step in seems like a humane temperature -- fully 20-30 degrees cooler than outside -- until you sit down with your coffee and realize that you probably shouldn't be drinking caffeine in 97 degree heat, much less 125 degree heat.

One Lieutenant Commander described the heat as "like putting your head in an oven and getting a bucket of sand thrown in your face."

I would describe it like this: You know the uncomfortable feeling of blow-drying your hair on a hot summer day? Now imagine blow-drying your entire body, for perhaps 20 minutes solid. Imagine the skin on your face tightening and drying up. You think you're not sweating, but then you realize that you think that because every inch of skin on your entire body is sweating at once, so you haven't noticed. Yesterday, it was 126, and Laura and I had our jewelry melt onto our skin.

Next time you blowdry, point that thing into your face, and then your armpits, and think of me. Or, you know, of the troops. Obviously.