Holidays just plain suck when you are deployed! There isn’t a great deal I can say to improve on that sentiment. What I can do is give you one soldier’s perspective on what it was like in the fall of 1990. I’ll be honest, I don’t think anyone paid a lot of attention to Halloween other than the fact that we could not receive packages and we did eventually get some goodies sent to us. However, since most Halloween candy cannot survive the desert heat, that wasn’t a biggie anyway.
By the time Thanksgiving arrived, we were in full sustaining operations mode. We had gotten all of our equipment and we’d worked the aircraft maintenance program to the point that we were well ahead and had “Banked” a lot of available aircraft hours so that when and if we were needed we could fly the maximum hours possible before schedule maintenance was needed. Unscheduled maintenance was the big problem due to the excessive wear and tear the harsh desert conditions wreaked upon the helicopters. But that is for future narratives, for now I’ll stick to how I felt about the approaching holidays.
I was fortunate to have a pretty strong network of friends and family who were trying to keep my morale up in the desert. I started a project to document my experiences in the Military and some other personal memory projects. (This is around 2016 when I was encouraged to do write all this down by an old Army buddy.). I dug out the letters I received while I was deployed overseas. These are both letters I received in Korea a year prior to the Gulf War, but for the most part, these were letters I received in Saudi Arabia. Sitting in a folder in front of me are 40+ letters I received from my mother alone while I was in Desert Storm. She was a legal secretary and a prolific writer. Her letters, and over 100 others from my wife and other relatives were my link to home.
I guess the hardest part of fighting a foreign war was understanding why you were there. I was there because I’d volunteered to be a soldier and soldiers do what they are told is the simple answer. To a great extent I agree with that, but there are other factors. A lot was said about the USA fighting for oil and to an extent that was true I would suppose. Others would say we were liberating an unjustly invaded country which is also fairly factual. Regardless of these factors, the reason I was there is because I’d volunteered to be a soldier.
A soldier rarely considers the political considerations of why he ends up where he or she is at because for the most part soldiers are much more concerned as to what their sergeant or lieutenant thinks about what they are doing than the overall “Big Picture”. Yes, we were there to kick Saddam’s Ass, but for the most part I was much more concerned about what my supervisor or instructor pilot thought than what President Bush was saying or doing. 1990 was a midterm election for the President so the biggest political considerations were for Senate and the House of Representatives. I know I requested an absentee ballot and voted, couldn’t begin to tell you who I voted for though.
Enough about elections, it is time to move on and discuss other November events. One thing that came to my attention was “Any Soldier” letters. The Red Cross had sponsored a program to encourage people to write letters at random to “Any Soldier”. These letters were sent to the units and soldiers were encouraged to participate in the program. I any unit there are individuals who, due to no fault of their own, don’t have a strong family support system and I believe this was one thing the Any Soldier mail was hoping to address. But the bigger picture I believe was and is to lend public support to our soldiers.
Before the Gulf War, especially POST-Vietnam, it had fallen out of favor to publicly support active duty soldiers and veterans. I can tell you that the past 25 years has done wonders to erase the anti-military sentiment that the American Public held for soldiers in the 1960’s and 1970’s. When I joined the National Guard in 1978 the antipathy seemed to be gone but it was replaced by apathy in the 1980’s and in many ways, that was even worse. The Any Soldier program to me was the catalyst of the new support your soldiers and veterans’ movement of today.
My participation in the Any Soldier program was initiated by our Battalion Chaplain, Chaplain (MAJ) Hatch. Chaplain Hatch asked me personally if I could respond to a letter from a Mother and her young son in Cleveland, TN, a suburb of Chattanooga. Chaplain Hatch knew I had sons and he felt that I was a good match for this family. There were actually two letters in the envelope, one from an eight-year-old boy and the other from his mother. They were genuine in their desire to have an impact not only on a soldier but also his family. With my and my wife’s consent, they became pen pals with both me and my family and it was heartwarming just to know that people gave a damn about total strangers. Both my family and I received letters and presents our pen pals even called my family at Fort Campbell. I to this day still have a warm place in my heart for these pen pals who I’d hope to one day meet up with if the wonders of the Internet can make that happen.
Back to the desert in November of 1990. Mail, packages, food from the USA, A-rations, a Shoppette; all these things had come together to make living in a parking garage a tad bit more bearable. Thanksgiving came and we had the required turkey with all the trimmings and other holiday fare. We had United Services Organization (USO) shows and yes, Bob Hope among hundreds of others came to visit with us. Since I’d been in the military for a long time and had seen a lot of these shows I pulled staff duty so others could go see some of these historic shows.
November left us and December arrived and along with it the reality that this would be another Christmas away from home. Added to that was the fact that Christian symbology was a sensitive subject in Saudi Arabia. There were a lot of things that out host country was quietly overlooking and the fact that the majority of the force defending them was Christian was one of them. We had rules too. While we did have our standard non-denominational chapel services, we were very discreet about them and never made any kind of public demonstrations of faith. All Muslim worship buildings and practices were respected with the highest regard. Christmas in a Muslim country is best celebrated in a subdued manner though, as again; we were trying hard not to offend our host nation whom we depended upon for a lot of logistical support.
One of the things we learned about the hard was just exactly how loud F15 and F16 fighters were on full afterburner. Sometime in December, the USAF began to have fighters practice night approaches to the easter runway at KFIA (34R). That was all fine and dandy as KFIA was an alternate landing site if their primary airstrip at Dhahran was unavailable or unreachable. We paid no notice to the approaches as they couldn’t be heard and unless you were watching them approach from the south end of the building you couldn’t see the aircraft. Departing the airfield was a different story though. Due to limited space on the airfield, these fighters weren't landing only practicing their approaches. Once they completed their approach, they would initiate a “Missed Approach Procedure” that returned them to the regional air traffic controller (ATC) for route guidance for another approach or directions to their next destination.
Fighter pilots being fighter pilots and having a need to strut their stuff usually opted to depart KFIA on missed approaches on Full Afterburner. Not only did this give you a beautiful light show with a huge blue flame extending out from the engine(s) but it was LOUD AS HELL! They would start these approaches after midnight and the airport was generally a pretty quiet place at night when suddenly you woke up six inches above your cot because you were startled by the roar of a departing fighter. It was the 4th or 5th approach before we finally got up and walked to the northeast side of the and actually saw one of the fighters departing to understand where the noise was coming from. The only aircraft based on that side of the field were A-10’s. They have a very distinctive sound and don’t have afterburners, so this was all new to us.
The human mind is an amazing a resilient thing. You can learn to tolerate just about anything, including incredibly loud noises. I first learned this in Alaska on my first overseas tour when I was assigned to a 105-mm howitzer battery. Firing a cannon was loud. Firing it in sub-zero temperatures was even louder. You could easily spot a new member to the artillery doing their first field exercise. The first time they heard a cannon fire when they weren’t expecting it (When you were in your tent getting warm for example and couldn’t see what is going one outside), a new battery member would nearly jump out of their skin because the rapport startled them. It only took a couple days to adapt though and soon, like everyone else in the battery, they could sleep right through the cannons firing. It was the same way at KFIA. I’m sure the Air Force kept practicing approaches, but by the 3rd night I was sleeping through it.
I had a few friends in the unit that were people I’d known from flight school and some from my Korea tour. For the most part though, I was a newbie to the unit and I was slowly getting to know everyone. Of all these people, the most interesting friendship I developed was with CW4 PJ Kennedy. PJ was one of the old guard of warrant officers that were leaving the army in droves before Desert Shield/Storm began. Mr. Kennedy (Junior Warrants never addressed him as anything other than Mr. Kennedy) was old school and felt that all these new warrants had to earn his respect and he wasn’t shy about letting everyone know he felt that way. His cot and mine were situated more or less side by side with each being in the rear of its respective parking space. At first our interactions were pretty much limited to when I encountered him at work as an Instructor Pilot (IP). One of the things that we had to do in the desert was get and keep everyone qualified and current. This kept the IPs busy as they had to develop training standards for the environment we were flying in and determine what maneuvers we needed to be proficient in that environment. Since I never managed to stir his ire by doing or saying something stupid, we had a good professional relationship.
PJ ended up grounded for several weeks due to his having surgery to remove cancerous cells from his nose. He went on temporary duty (TDY) overnight at least twice during Desert Shield and he had additional surgery after the war, back in the states. PJ was not accustomed to being grounded for any extended period and it seems he wasn’t cleared to fly for several weeks after his surgery. He continued to teach ground school classes (You have various aviation subjects you have to learn about on the ground, then you put those lessons to work in the air.) which freed the other IPs for more flight training, but PJ ended up with a lot of slack time that he was not accustomed in his normal life. This resulted in his spending a lot more time in his personal space in the parking garage.
I noticed his bandages one day and gently inquired as to how he was doing. I seemed to have caught him at a mellow moment and he gave me the short version of what he was going through with his skin cancer. I related some of my experiences with medical hold in flight school and to an extent we became kindred spirits. I really didn’t know how much of an impression I’d made upon him until one day when I’d returned to my rack, tired from a busy day to find that PJ had managed to secure a flat of Diet Coke for me.
Supplementary rations arrived at very odd hours and if you were not present when the items were passed out, you likely would not see any of what was distributed. Canned soft drinks were a precious commodity and Diet Coke, my and many others pilots preferred drink was always in critically short supply. I don’t know how he managed it, but more than once I remember returning to find a case of Diet Coke strategically located in the space between our bunks.
PJ and I ended up remaining friends through the rest of my time at Fort Campbell and even years later when I returned to the area after leaving the army. He was a Department of the Army (DA) civilian and was running the CH-47D flight simulator at Fort Campbell. I visited him infrequently and he always had time to visit with me and go over some of the old times in the desert. It is funny how you get to be friends with some people sue to the oddest of circumstances.
Everything that we’d become accustomed to in the Saudi desert changed for us on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, January 15, 1991 when the 400+ helicopters based at KFIA left the airfield for their scatter sites. The Iraqi Prime Minister had professed during the coalition build up in Saudi Arabia that any attack on Iraq or Kuwait would result in retaliation from the Iraqis. The greatest concern of retaliation was based on SCUD missiles that the Iraqis were known to possess.
SCUDs were old and generally not very accurate hardware but they were dangerous enough that our command was concerned, especially to the possibility of one being launched containing Sarin nerve gas. Based on information we’d been learning about mostly from the BBC on high frequency radio, the warning order to initiate the scatter plan was not a big surprise. A scatter plan decentralizes the units and reduces the probability of a large element of a force to be subjected to a direct attack, say by a large, SCUD type missile. The order to scatter came by noon and we were setup in our camp in the desert about 30 miles southwest of Dhahran when our operation changed its name from Desert Shield to Desert Storm.
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