#15 - 2003 (Part 1) - Deploying to Kuwait

It is January 2003. The buses stop in the northern Kuwaiti desert, and there is nothing there. A sand berm somebody had pushed up with a bulldozer. Concertina wire around it. A few tents, two of them knocked over and lying on the ground. A pallet of cots. It is dark, and the instruction is: take a cot, find a tent, go to sleep. In the morning they walk to the wire and look out, and there is still nothing. "We're just out in the middle of nowhere." And Jeremy — a 29-year-old captain with 180 soldiers coming behind him — says the line that explains most of his life: "It's always wild how I end up in these spots where we're just the first ones there." This is 2003, part one of three. It ends on the first night of the war. In between: a colonel at the port setting up a paper easel who says "just be patient with us, we're trying to figure things out" — "it's like that example of building the airplane in flight." The fuel math, which turns out not to be about fuel at all: you can carry every gallon you need and still fail, because refueling a brigade in under an hour is a problem about nozzles. Ten 500-gallon bladders strapped to the tops of trailers. A platoon sergeant and a lieutenant out on the sand with a stopwatch, running the same drill until the trucks knew where to line up in the dark. A cousin who knocks on the door of the command post — 3-7 Cav has rolled in and nobody told him. A photograph on the wall of an Air Force medical tent that turns out to be a guy he went to college with: "Really? Yeah, that's my husband." A wrestling title, self-awarded, undefeated, disputed on air. And the dining facility burning to the ground in minutes, because of what they spray on the tents to waterproof them. A cook running up in tears: Sergeant Joseph went back in. He thought people were still inside. Everyone was out. And in the ashes, on the table they'd been using as an altar since the first sergeant started holding services there — the Bible, open, untouched. Then the last night. Jeremy asleep on the hood of his Humvee against the flat windshield. A sound like an F-15 tearing overhead. Less than five hundred metres away, missiles going up. He thinks they're Patriots intercepting a scud. They aren't. They're outbound. Terry's week: the seventh grandchild arrives, and a woman at a bar shows him photographs of her dog's output arranged into every letter of the alphabet. She wants to publish a children's book. He told her it was a terrible idea. Jeremy pointed out she'd probably make a lot of money. Comment on YouTube or message us on Instagram. We read them on the show. Watch the full video episode: https://youtube.com/@amostunpredictablelife Website: https://amostunpredictablelife.com Follow @amostunpredictablelife on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook A Most Unpredictable Life — Jeremy Lewis and Terry Lewis. We're not brothers. We might be related.