Jamaica Air Force Sergeant
Spends Holidays Fighting Terror

By John Dendy

Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar – In the middle of the stark Qatari plains, nomads herd camels through the desert, alongside burly workers struggling in the oil fields that do the lunar-like landscape. The son of a Jamaica couple is now part of a third group found in this tiny Middle Eastern nation.

Air Force Staff Sgt. Alistair Grant, son of Winston and Dianne Grant, Jamaica, is a shift-working electrician in this rough air and space camp that is the hub of war on Al Qaida.

Desert dust never settles while Grant talks about sustaining an expedition to the moon-like terrain of Al Udeid. It is a flat land of tumblingweeds over ancient camel trails, and a runway sized to land the Space Shuttle on.

“I provide electrical power to the facilities on Al Udeid. I also maintain, install and distribute power,” said the 1994 graduate of Jamaica High School. “We depend on energy in our everyday lives to see at night, and to communicate with people.”

Al Udeid is a frontline center of intercontinental fueling, monitoring and cargo operations in the war on Al Qaida from Northeast Africa to Southwest Asia. The accents of American, British, French, Belgian, Canadian and Dutch military members are heard throughout the camp. These GIs control all the air traffic over Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan–without radar or satellites.

They also fly over the Arabian Sea to gas most of the special operations and bomber planes over Afghanistan.

“My part in the mission is to keep all personnel on Al Udeid happy by providing electrical power to their facilities,” said Grant. “Without power there wouldn’t be any lights or electrical power to fuel the trucks.

The base camp runs with minor local media attention, considering it is just miles from where Qataris own “the CNN of the Middle East,” an Arabic TV networks known as Al Jezeera.

By night, Al Udeid’s cantina offers familiar beverages, and sports on TV. After work, Grant or others fumble in flip-flop shower shoes past desert mice on block-long walks to the camp’s bathroom tents in an area that looks like the dark side of the moon.

“My life in Qatar is somewhat different compared to someone’s in the United States, because out here we live in tents that house seven people in 50-square feet,” said Grant. “It’s hot everyday and the way we stay cool is by drinking a lot of water.”

Living hidden for security in this rocky hub of hubs and Qatari tumbleweeds definitely offered Grant an opportunity to raise some dust in a war.

And the unearthly cloud may thin soon.

The anti-terrorist caravans just began driving over eight miles of new paved roads. The camp itself is beginning to look and feel less like a lunar expedition in the war.