Drums of war grow louder
www.arizonarepublic.com Dave Cruz/The Arizona Republic A shop owner at the Old Souk, Kuwait City's oldest marketplace, climbs a ladder to hand a Kuwaiti flag outside his shop. By Judd Slivka The Arizona Republic Feb. 10, 2003
KUWAIT CITY A cab driver here calls it "the maybe war." As in maybe it will happen, and maybe it won't.
In the city's expensive Salmiya district, women covered in full robes carrying Prada handbags continue to walk the streets, talking on cellphones and engaging in the national pastime of shopping. At the Old Souk, the oldest marketplace in the city, the old men are still cutting meat and arguing about everything.
But for Jim Leahy, who grew up in Scottsdale and is now the assistant principal of the American International School's high school here, the past few days have been a rush to get things done before he leaves with his family.
"Everyone is kind of strung up tight like a piano wire," Leahy said Sunday, the last day of school for the two American schools in Kuwait. "Everybody has to go somewhere."
Not counting the military, there are a couple thousand Americans here by most estimates. Some of them can leave. Some of them can't. Others don't want to. And still others, like Leahy, feel as if they have to.
Leahy has been working in international education for 20 years. He has been in Venezuela during rebel terror campaigns and in Ecuador during a coup.
But this would be his first war, and as the drumbeat of war gets louder for Americans, he is one of hundreds preparing to leave.
Packing up in a hurry
The American Embassy issued a voluntary evacuation notice for civilians two weeks ago, but it was only last week that the American schools decided to close until March. That decision sent Leahy's life into a frenzy.
"There are things that go on here - budgeting, scheduling, accreditation - that don't stop even if we're closed," he said. "I'm running around like crazy trying to burn things on CD so I can essentially move my office."
He'll move that office - and his wife, who teaches at the school, and two children who attend there - to his parents' home in Scottsdale.
'Kids are all nervous'
"It's hard to know what work to focus on," he said. "The kids are all nervous, and so are the adults. It's kind of a feeling of relief that the company that owns our school made the decision they did."
Leahy will be gone by the end of the week, but others aren't so lucky.
Ricky Mutina works in Kuwait managing defense contractor Lockheed-Martin's tank simulators for the Kuwaiti army. The march toward war has left Mutina with nothing to do: The Kuwaiti army's armor has all moved north to the Iraqi border for live-fire training and pre-positioning.
So Mutina, of Orlando, has been buying groceries and trying to get as many tasks done as he can, as many in the American expatriate community are doing.
"I think that when it happens, and it will happen. things are going to be very dangerous," he said Sunday after shopping at a 24-hour supermarket popular with the foreign community. "Not bombs falling on us, but doing what I just did will be a lot more difficult. This will be a dangerous place to be an American."
Danger lurks
It already has been. Marines have been shot at on exercises outside Kuwait City, and civilians have been fired on as well. The government responded by posting machine-gun equipped police trucks at various intersections around the city and setting up checkpoints where drivers have to show their papers.
Starbucks is crowded
Still, life goes on as normal. At the Sultan Center Supermarket, people of 15 nationalities still load up grocery baskets under the strains of the Arab Muzak version of Copacabana. Across the street, Starbucks is jammed, MotherCare World is filled with mothers and their children buying clothing, and the manager at the Mercedes dealership says his business is pretty good, "though not as good as it was two years ago."
For Americans like Leahy and Mutina, hostilities draw closer with each sunrise. But for so many Kuwaitis, no one seems to have told them that a war is about to happen.