Which Bright Star did you deploy for, and what were your impressions of the duty, living conditions, and of our host countries in general?

I did Bright Star in 85 or 86 TSgt Bret Whitmore. We were stationed as MP's on an Egyptian air base in the middle of the desert. Every day the sand storm came in on time and it was just lousy conditions. When they asked for volunteers, I usually didn't raise my hand but I figured anything had to be better than the desert. Turns out I was tasked to run the MP desk in Alexandria. We were running the desk out of a hotel where we were also quartered with hot meals not that I ate very many hot meals at the hotel provided by the Army. I usually went to a very nice Italian restaurant in the embassy district that also had beer! I couldn't have asked for a better assignment. I loved it. We even got invited to a party at the embassy quarters. The one pic is me sitting on the sea wall in Alexandria and the other coming up from the burial chamber in the Great Pyramid. The plane in the one picture is supposedly Anwar Sadat's plane that never made it off the ground during the Israeli Arab War. Now the Egyptian soldiers were living in it. We can't knock our Army!

I deployed iso Bright Star 97 with the 194th MP Co. 101st ABN Div. Our company was separated after arriving to the Cairo West air base where we lived in large rug tents. Later a small group stayed at Cairo West with an Air Force Det, and lived in air conditioned tents. My platoon moved up to the Port of Dekheila and slept in another rug tent. We assisted with port operations and did convoy ops to the MMC until complete. My platoon then set up a MP station out of a GP small at Burg al Arab air base for the duration of the training. After the joint training was over, we moved to MMC and conducted customs operations for all vehicles prior to them convoying back to the port. Overall, it wasn't bad. We did an MWR trip to Cairo and visited the pyramids.
I didn't realized the pyramids were not guarded. They had graffiti all over the stones, at least at ground level; disappointed in that actually.
Also, the flies were pretty bad during the day. I'm glad we were issued insect bars. The small mosquitoes would hit anything up against the insect bar. Those that tossed and turned on their cots got chewed up. Also, who knew Burg al Arab had so many wild dogs. They attacked our tent the very first night.
The amphibious operations with the Marines on the Mediteranean with the use of the hover craft was the best part of the deployment.

I did BS in 2001. Moved into a barracks bldg. after cleaning the crap and dirt out. Hot and dirty but been in worse. I was on the third floor so the mosquitos were able to fly up to eat us first and left the higher ranking folks above alone. People from all over and various countries were awesome though. Sucked being in Egypt and locked down at FP Con Delta.