Vikings Cheerleaders in Iraq
MVC in Iraq Journal: Entry No. 1
3/25/2009 | By Lissa, 2-Year Veteran
Several Minnesota Vikings Cheerleaders were recently in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East to visit military personnel. Below is the first of several entries that recaps their trip. Check back with vikings.com over the next several days for more from the trip.
JOURNAL ENTRY DAY ONE—March 1, 2009
Gina, Jessie, Amanda, Melissa, Kelly and I are headed to Iraq via Kuwait to visit the soldiers stationed in the Middle East. We met our tour director Carmen from Pro Sports MVP at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport. She is from Denver and told us this will be her 14th tour into Iraq or Afghanistan.
The girls and I held hands and “circled up” much like we do before games. We prayed and ask the Lord to keep us safe in travels and also keep our loved ones safe back home. I keep reminding myself that no one has ever been hurt on an entertainment tour. .
Usually I fall asleep on flights as soon as they start the engines, but on this flight, my mind isn’t interested in rest. I can’t believe I’m going to see Iraq. My whole life, I’ve only known it as a war zone or place of political unrest. I keep thinking that this was probably my grandpa, grandma and great grandma’s impression of Germany… a place I wouldn’t think twice to visit today.
We’re landing in Amsterdam at 6 am. We have a four hour layover before we get on a five-six hour flight to Kuwait.
JOURNAL ENTRY DAY TWO—Monday, March 2, 2009
After seventeen hours, we have finally arrived in Kuwait. It was a six hour flight from Amsterdam to here. We all slept the entire flight.
It’s 68 degrees here. We are waiting for our visas at Kuwait City International. The process takes about an hour.
11:00 pm Kuwait
We have arrived at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.. Kuwait City is nothing that I expected it to be. The roads are beautiful. We saw some really pretty housing on the forty minute drive to the base. We also saw a line of semi-trucks a couple miles long bring fuel into Iraq. One of our security guys told us that’s a nightly routine.
We are staying in a barrack that’s really similar to my dorm in college—a little nicer actually. We each have our own room here tonight and tomorrow until we head to Iraq. We saw a note one of the male soldier’s common sleeping bay that said “The Purple Cheerleaders have arrived. Go Vikings.”
JOURNAL ENTRY DAY THREE—Tuesday, March 03, 2009
CAMP ARIFJAN/ CAMP BUEHRING
Today we had our first official day of touring bases. We met some of the SeaBees before we left Arifjan. They are Navy construction guys who go in and set up camps, roadways, etc. We mostly use tents as much as possible so that American’s aren’t paying for structures or assets that we are no longer using after we leave an occupied zone.
At 11:15 we went to lunch at the DFAC (dining facility) and right after went to tour the medical facility on base. There were only two patients available to be visited. One was a young man named Ricky. The other was a guy named David. He was from LaCrosse, Wisconsin and had just had surgery on his leg.
We received a tour of the entire operations of the medical facility which also supports transportation, IT, morale, mail communication, etc. It was a great reminder of how many career paths there are in the military.
From there, we went to a Commander’s Briefing. A gentleman named John talked us through the situation in Kuwait. As he told us, the U.S.A. first developed a relationship with Kuwait in 1991 to help defend Kuwait’s sovereignty against Iraqi invasion. Since, Kuwait has funded an American presence in their country to help train their troops. Kuwait pays for a majority of the U.S. presence here including salaries of personnel, meals, water, camp installation and maintenance, etc. We were also told that Kuwait gave $500 million to the U.S. after hurricane community, but didn’t promote the fact to avoid backlash from the Arab community.
After the briefing, we went over to Camp Buehring. On the way, the girls were excited to see camels along the roads. I was laughing because one of our media photographers had to scrape sand and dust off her car much like we scrape ice back home. At Camp Buehring we signed photo cards and took pictures with their troops. We ate dinner at their DFAC. It was Sgt. Chris Wilson’s birthday, so we sang him Happy Birthday and helped him eat his cake.
