On the road with the U.S. military

Last week we went to Djibouti, a country that, until recently, some people didn't know existed. Besides being the punchline for grade-school geography jokes, Djibouti has a lot to offer, if what you're looking for is humidity and flies the size of toasters.

Djibouti is also the home of the only U.S. military base in the region, at Camp Lemonier on the Red Sea, which is where we were headed for a story on the war on terror in East Africa. The troops were going to escort us to the remote town of Gode, in Ethiopia's Ogaden desert, to see one of their projects -- installing a water pump in a poor village. Photog Evelyn and I slept on base last Monday night because we had to report early for our 6 a.m. flight -- at 3 a.m. Our public affairs liaison, Shannon, apologized, but it was the only way we could get to Gode and back in one day. "And trust me," she said, "you don't want to spend the night in Gode."

We whiled away the early morning hours watching a DVD of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," currently the most popular film on base. (The troops like to go around quoting, "You know how I know you're gay?") The flight on a C-130 cargo plane was pretty smooth, and the Army officers waiting for us in Gode took us around the area quite efficiently. Sitting in the back of their vans, bouncing over rough terrain and munching on military MREs, we felt very welcomed. (And the Mexican-style chicken and rice tasted surprisingly, well, Mexican.)

By 2 p.m., however, our tour was over and Evelyn and I had hit the wall. The heat and swirling dust were hard to bear, despite the steady supply of cold bottled water (from Saudi Arabia). We headed back to the airstrip, where we watched another cargo plane, a C-17, load up to return to the base in Djibouti. When it took off, we expected our C-130 to land. It was supposedly circling the runway, waiting for the go-ahead to descend. But it didn't. Minutes passed. Finally we got the bad news: the plane had run low on fuel and the pilot had turned around and gone back to base.

Shannon, an Air Force lieutenant, got a lot of crap from the Army guys in Gode about her branch of the military screwing this one up. (It was a bit more complicated than that: planes only leave with enough fuel for their mission, and the C-130 had been circling for a lot longer than expected.) Chuckling, the Army guys drove us back to their base in Gode, relishing the chance to torment two journalists on their bad fortune.

To call Gode a one-horse town would be overstating it; it's more like a one-donkey town. The troops had set up shop in an old hotel, a U-shaped block of rooms with a dusty courtyard in the middle that until recently served as a parking lot. Now it has benches and a smattering of workout equipment. There's a kitched staffed by Ethiopian cooks, who do a lot of capable variations on goat meat.

We slept outside on cots, like many of the troops. They're not the most comfortable things in the world, especially without sheets, but having been up since before 3 a.m. we'd have slept anywhere. There were mosquito nets tied in knots over the beds, but as I untied mine a thick cloud of dust fell from the net onto my bed. You just can't get away from this stuff in Ethiopia. So I was left with a very African dilemma -- would I rather sleep on a bed coated in dust or risk getting eaten alive by mosquitoes? Figuring I'd get a shower back at the base and malaria is lethal, I chose the dust.

The next day we were back at Camp Lemonier, which felt like the Bellagio by comparison. The base has expanded in the past two years -- it now boasts a large gym and a Burger King truck, and there are plans for an indoor basketball court and coffee shop. It's certainly not the most glamorous place to be posted; on off nights troops have few other options in town than a tiny bowling alley or the dingy casino at the Sheraton. But Lemonier is big, comfortable, and on Wednesday nights you can play bingo with the troops for ridiculously high stakes -- $20 buy-in, $200 per game for the winner, and up to $1500 if you win the last game of the night. It's not exactly Vegas, but in Djibouti it's close enough.