BehindBlueI's
Grandmaster
- Oct 3, 2012
- 26,608
- 113
Blue Gardens was it! Nice little apts. Made it to the Lu LUs once but mainly just to the little strip right by the villa. Do you remember a young guy that got drunk, wrecked a car on a round about and went to the local jail? I left right after that. Wasn't there long as an opportunity opened for Iraq so I took it.
Bob
Yeah, it happened more than once. Most of the guys who ran afoul of the locals did so via alcohol. We had one guy hurt himself pretty bad in a DUI wreck. The guy I think you're talking about didn't get hurt, but did get fired after spending a little time in the jail. The Qataris pulled his visa, IIRC. He said the jail wasn't as bad as he was afraid it would be, but everyone ate off one big plate per each cell and hygiene seemed to be in short supply among his cell mates.
For those who are curious, you could get alcohol in Qatar. The hotels could have bars, but you had to have an ID to show you were foreign to drink there. There was a brisk market for foreign passports among the Qataris who wanted a drink. There was a package liquor store, but you had to buy a permit to shop there. You basically paid your fines up front, and if you didn't get in trouble, you got refunded at the airport when you left and turned in your alcohol permit. There was a limit to how much you could buy each month, and it was by dollar amount. Guys who drank would agonize over if it was better to buy a little American whisky or a lot of Chinese beer. Companies didn't have quotas, so if DynCorp wanted to host a party they could buy as much as they wanted.