The move to Bahrain was a bit of a shock for us, the initial crews had been bundled from compound to compound as we tried to build up the framework of a det. Some TTF crews were ticking folks up in useful handicrafts and handing out scout badges (I remember doing strips at Al Kharj when it was about the size of Keevil - the next time I went back it had grown so big my tiny brain couldn't cope with the scale of the place).
We eventually ended up sharing rooms at a Riyadh hotel of the large US-chain variety (plus ca change) an experience from which I have the terrifying image of T*** R****'s silhouette in half-profile wearing nothing but a rubber face and obscenely short T-shirt seared into my retinas. The backstory was that we had received another inbound Scud warning (probably from someone watching CNN in Minhad and then setting off a 'phone-a-friend Hot Scud Action chatline for consenting adults'). As the grumpy and far too naked for general viewing skipper pulled back the curtain for visual confirmation of the firework show, the entire window (to which we had given an attractive mock-Tudor lattice effect with black nasty detailing) was bowed inwards by the blastwave and gave me a backlit vision of such unequalled horror that H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe would have fought to the death to come up with it.
After a few days back in Blighty lying down under a table with a damp towel over my head and listening to a looped tape of whalesong I went back into theatre only to find the det game of musical chairs had continued and we were now in another compound. This one was très whizzy with mahooosive cupboards which we decided to fill with bottles of electric tea. In the time-honoured fashion, as soon as the noble task was accomplished, we had notification that we were to move the det across to Bahrain. An immediate problem was identified as the nuclear stockpile of spirits which we needed to make disappear; the immediate solution was to throw the 'mother of all parties', an event of which songs are still sung and which makes grown men stare into the middle distance and recall that they were very possibly there. We left the still smouldering remains of the compound the next mid-afternoon blinking into the bright sunlight, gently stepping over the forms of nurses who had collapsed into attractive and lightly snoozing heaps, and were shipped as a collection of semi-sentient body parts across to Bahrain where we set up in another hotel at which even more fun was to be had.
But that's another story entirely...