It is the 18th March 2003 and I am busy working at our facility on the Causeway between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The Causeway is 25 KM long and I am on Middle Island, a sizeable artificial island with customs and immigration facilities, a mosque, gardens, and fast-food restaurants. I am working at the Saudi Arabian Customs facility which is, of course, in Saudi Arabia not Bahrain.
It's 2 am and I need to drive to my hotel in nearby Dahran to find my hotel and get a good night's sleep before returning to Bahrain in the morning. But I am very tired, and Arabic road signs mean nothing to me. So how to find the hotel at night? Eventually I give up, but I do see a sign with an airport icon ... surely there will be a hotel there? Sure enough, I follow the signs and find the airport. Fun fact, the flight time from Dahran to Bahrain direct is 4 minutes, one of the shortest in the world between two airports. But I won't be doing that, I have my hire car.
So, at 3 am I'm safely in my room and ready to sleep... But then roar! And roar again! And again, and again, and again. I look outside my window and can see the airfield. Every 3 minutes I see a B52 taking off. I turn on the TV and look at CNN... The 2nd Gulf War (US Invasion of Iraq) has just started... Why am I here? I don't need to be here. "Here" is probably not a safe place to be, within striking SCUD missile distance of Baghdad. It's time to go!
So, back into the hire car, off to Bahrain, straight to the Bahrain Manama airport and on the next flight to Hong Kong. From there I watched the Gulf War unfold knowing that I witnessed, up close, at least the first part of "Shock and Awe.”