Division Street

A swim in a haunted oasis

By DENNIS ANDERSON
Valley Press Editor

After tooling around during a day of short-haul missions in the Kuwaiti desert, Staff Sgt. Jerry Hagen offered the half-dozen soldiers in the little convoy of two Humvees a treat. "We're going to go swimming."

Water here is precious. It is life. Without it, people quickly parch and dehydrate into unconsciousness. Water propels a vast purified-water industry in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which purvey endless bottled brands with romantic names like Oasis, Gulfa and Baraka (meaning "the divine enlightenment").

But water for swimming? For weeks, the troops have only known water for sweating and for cooling their engines. Showers, if available, are on alternate days.

The oasis that loomed up miragelike was a small Kuwaiti naval base at the edge of the Arabian Sea. Nobody here calls it the Persian Gulf.

At this sparsely occupied Kuwaiti station there were, well, Kuwaiti fast-boat sailors, and, improbably, the Ohio National Guard.

"You can't swing a dead cat in this theater of operations without hitting a Guard unit somewhere," Hagen said as he led us through the checkpoint.

The heat of day relented a few degrees, moistened by humidity that radiates off the sea.

An Olympic-sized indoor pool shimmered, yes, miragelike. Only it was real. Outdoors, in the dusk and slight breeze, a smaller pool sported 25- and 35-foot diving towers.

Our convoy leader, Kuwaiti-born Lt. Hatem Abdine, sized up the towers. "We had to dive blindfolded at Officer Candidate School, and swim to retrieve the partner underwater that we were assigned to."

He looked up at the high dive and gave it a pass in favor of a more sedate, cool drenching. "No need," he said of the huge diving tower. Maturity beckons.

Spc. Raymond "Scotty" McDowd, the baby of 1498th Transportation, wondered what he might be getting for his 19th birthday Saturday. Sometimes, you've got to just look around. If you get to swim in the desert, you just got more birthday than most GIs out here can expect.

"My mother wants to see my name in the paper," he said. OK. Doable.

What was the rest of the story? Hagen shared it with me, and I declined to share it with the others. I believe now is now, and the past, the past. But somehow, mirage-like, the past welled up out of the cool waters. Haunted history that sometimes screams.

"When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the area commander that rolled into this base massacred everyone here," Hagen said, relating the story he'd been told. "Then they looked up the lists of everyone who hadn't reported to work that day, and they ordered them in. When they showed up, they were killed, too. It was a slaughter."

Hagen reflected: "No matter what they found in terms of weapons of mass destruction, we did the right thing fighting that son of a bitch the first time, and we did right finishing the job this time."

And that was our mirage-like swim in the haunted oasis. Don't even mention the cobra.