KUWAIT CITY - The sign that greets visitors as they walk off the airplane in Kuwait City proclaims in English with black, bold letters: “Welcome to Kuwait.” No Arabic script accompanies the message.

Perhaps that’s no accident.

Likely 80 percent of the people crammed into the KLM flight from Amsterdam to Kuwait were American. In the terminal before takeoff, eight employees of DynCorp – you could tell they worked for the defense contractor because of the matching hats and khakis bearing the company’s logo – talked about their upcoming assignment in Balad.

A few young Marines stood in the plane’s aisles before the flight took off, cursing loudly and trying to figure out which of the flight attendants was the most attractive. (They settled on the blond Dutch woman.) The flight crew first made its announcements in Dutch, then English. Each time, they followed up five minutes later with the same message in Arabic, as if it was an afterthought.

Sitting next to me was a fiber-optic technician who working in Kuwait. “Even when the economy goes south,” he said, “people always want to fight. And they’ll always need people to help those people.”

Three rows up sat a man proudly wearing his hat for Kellogg, Brown and Root, the contractor. And a nearby tattooed thirtysomething bragged about how he left Triple Canopy for his new job because they paid better. He, like many other younger contractors, had that fresh-out-of-the-military look: They wear the regulation haircut but have grown a goatee and put on a few pounds.

As the plane descended into a dusty haze (the horizon was blurred from the sky), the first plane it passed was an Air Force C-17 Globemaster. As the passengers walked off the plane, dozens carried camouflaged backpacks.

The contractors, though, provided valuable experience. A crowd of about 200 people mobbed the visa counter. “Follow me,” said a guy from Wisconsin who was going to work for KBR. “This is my third time. I know exactly what to do.

“It isn’t easy,” he continued, breaking into a smile, ”but hey, it’s Kuwait.”