Christmas at Camp Victory in Kuwait: My Experience

In 2003 and 2004, I had the privilege of serving the United States of America in Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was in the United States Army and my tour of duty was to be stationed at Camp Victory Kuwait. This camp was a newly established military camp since most military operations were being conducted in the middle of the dessert. When I first arrived at Camp Victory Kuwait, I was amazed to find out that I was actually going to be living in the middle of a hot desert for as long as the military was going to keep me there. In the Army, you are given orders and sometimes those orders don't tell you exactly when you are going home. Sometimes you even get orders that tell you, you will be leaving a deployed area in just a few months and then find out that your orders have been extended.

I arrived at Camp Victory in February of 2003. The soldiers and I all thought that we would be leaving Kuwait and Iraq soon after we invaded the country. We thought that we would be out of there in just 6 months. However, history became much more evident that we would not be coming home anytime soon. We all prepared for the worst when we realized that soldiers were still being deployed to the region in October and the following months. Something was telling us all that this would be a never ending war. At first the idea of another Vietnam felt far fetched. We didn't feel like we should be honored in the same way that Vietnam Vets had been honored for their military service in Vietnam. We thought that by saying this would make us seem as though we were blowing our deployment out of proportion. However, we all felt like we had no idea why we were in Iraq and Kuwait. The only thing that we told ourselves was that it won't be for long.