Oct Iraq Tour: DAY ONE
October 17, 2008
DAY ONE: October 17, 2008
I’m writing from a small cell-block of a room on our first ARMY base, Camp Arifjan. Arifjan is close to the Saudi Arabian border, and is geographically huge – 6 miles by 4 and a half. The country of Kuwait by contrast is relatively small – Kuwait City, the largest city, is no more than 50,000, and the whole country is less than the population of Boston.
The band and I left New York Kennedy airport yesterday. I, in my now predictable routine of packing, had nearly two heart attacks trying to fit everything into my suitcase. I’m gone for six weeks this tour. After our first leg in the extreme desert with continual dust storms we are traveling through rainy and cold England Ireland and Scotland. Dressing for the weather was a challenge! Me being me though, I brought four pairs of stiletto heels, 2 ballet flats, flip flops and sneakers – more total shoes me all the rest of the band combined. Hey, you can take the girl out of Manhattan, but…
The weeks leading up to this tour were busy to say the least. This summer I was touring in Europe with my band from New York, and they agreed at the time to come do this Iraq/Kuwait Armed Forces Entertainment tour with me in October. In August, I left for a vacation that I’d been planning for years – to Machu Picchu in Peru and the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. It was a two-week adventure I couldn’t pass up, and my manager Alex suggested I still go, despite the amount of preparation we had for the upcoming tour. “Go,” he said. “It will be the last vacation you have for five years.”
So I went, and found myself in the middle of the Galapagos Islands swimming with penguins and sea lions, literally in one of the last places on earth with no cell phone service. Near the end of the trip, I came into a port town and turned my blackberry on. There were messages for me from the entire band, all pulling out of the Iraq trip for “various reasons.” I can only imagine. This left me with an interesting challenge: I had one day back in New York before the visas were due to audition a whole new band, or to go solo. I would have gone solo, but I firmly believed that these troops over here would get more of a morale boost from some hard-hitting rock and roll, rather than just a girl with an acoustic guitar. I called every musician I knew in the New York scene, and asked them and all their buddies to meet for a one-day 12-hour audition. All of the players were good, but I wasn’t feeling it. A tour to Iraq is more than your typical run-of-the-mill van tour across America, and taking unknown guys out here felt like too much of a risk when we hadn’t even sat down for a pint at the pub yet. Only half of it is how well they play; the other half is how much you’ll still like them after seeing them for 3 weeks nonstop.
At 10 pm, exhausted, jetlagged, and ready to call is quits, one final group of guys walked in. Bryan Bisordi, Mark Stewart, and Eric Lindberg – young guys hip to the whole underground country music scene coming out of Brooklyn now – played so energetically that I instantly felt revived. Within half an hour, I asked them: “Do you want to go to Iraq?”
There were a tremendous amount of preparations for the tour – the Army, as you may have guessed, is very detail-oriented. At one rehearsal, all of us couldn’t lift our right arm for the typhoid vaccination we’d gotten that morning. Ellis, my long-time friend and first band-mate, agreed to come along (giving up a tour with his band Fisher Spooner in Brazil) so he record the audio tracks for us in high definition, and release an EP following the experience, “Live From Iraq.”
In September I had a two-week radio tour of Ireland and some meetings in London. I wasn’t even in New York longer than a week. It was just long enough to clear out my apartment for another subletter, and get all the details sorted for the UK portion of our tour.
Some people were impressed with my plans to play in a war-zone; others were not. The ones that disapproved mistook my actions as political. But this is not about whether you are for the war or against the war. It’s about taking a risk to bring music to people who need it most – kids that are far from home, seeing horrible inhuman events, battling boredom in-between, and having no way of expressing their emotions. Some have been stop-lossed and are here on their fifth tour of duty. Others are career military men who will always be here. I’ve long known that music can heal – it gets you in the side-door to someone’s heart, where therapy and talk are suspect. The bottom line is no matter what side you fall on politically, everyone can appreciate some good old-fashioned rock and roll.
So today my quest to bring rock and roll to all corners of the world involved a twelve-hour flight, ending over the most imposing desert I’ve ever witnessed. From 20,000 feet I could see the oil refineries burning their huge effigies. We waited in a long line at the Kuwaiti visa office with the other American Independent Contractors. I called my mother to let her know I was safe, and just as I left my voicemail some guy came out singing Muslim prayers for the whole airport. It was beautiful, but perhaps not exactly reassuring for a worried New England mumma.
Outside baggage claim, our drivers Contee and Sam met us with 3 Ford Escalades. We drove 45 minutes to the Army base, with a private red SUV security detail trailing us the whole way. Kuwait is about the size of New Jersey, so from where we are in Camp Arifjan near the Saudi border to where we are playing tomorrow, Camp Buehring, 20 minutes from the Iraq border, is about 3 hours drive.
Which brings me back to the small cinder-block room I’m in. It’s absolutely freezing, and there’s no way to turn the Air Conditioning vent off. Outside is hotter than you want to know. Apparently I have it easy in a private room – the troops sleep in barracks in separate wings. I got a brief view of the bunk beds at one point, and that little voice in me that was complaining – you know, the one that says, a bubble bath would be great and I’ll take a glass of chilled chardonnay with my smoked salmon – was instantly silenced. I’m here to boost morale. No divas welcome.
Breakfast is at 0600 hours tomorrow. I should get some sleep.
