After a little more than three weeks into the deployment the wing was really starting to settle down, and the “early deployment jitters” that had plagued everyone had pretty much gone away. The seriousness of the deployment was still with us pretty hard and heavy – although that wouldn’t last much longer – but no one was as nervous and on edge as they were when we first got there. The longer we were there the safer we felt, and the reason for that was obvious to those of us who were there and had a chance to see it firsthand.
The reason was the airlift, and the hundreds of thousands of troops that began pouring into the county. Once we had established our presence at the base and hammered out an agreement with both the Royal Saudi Air Force and the Kingdom itself, a massive airlift got under way that eventually brought half a million troops into the country. Since the part of the flight line that serviced the incoming aircraft was a part of my patrol sector, I had a chance to see it firsthand almost every day, and I mean to tell you it was something to see. There were two runways at the base, one runway located on either side of the base and running parallel to each other; one side of the field and one runway belonged to the civilian airport, and the other side and other runway belonged to the air base and the RSAF. When the airlift kicked into high gear, we took over both sides of the field and utilized both runways. There was an aircraft either landing on one runway or taking off on the other once every ten minutes, and this went on 24 hours a day for nearly three months. I watched troops by the thousands and tens of thousands march off of the aircraft after they had parked, and these aircraft included C-130s, C-141s, and C-5As. They were carrying everything from troops to hummers to light tanks, and after watching this airlift in progress for more than a month and a half I came to the conclusion that we were going to be there a hell of a lot longer than the 90 days we had been told once we got in country.
As it turned out, we were there for nearly three times as long.
So as the Wing settled in and the airlift cranked into high gear our squadron commander, Lt Colonel Pack (he of the in-flight gas mask drills on the way over), set about establishing security for the base according to his own strange and unusual guidelines. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on air base security and I never went to the War College or anything like that, but I’d attended the Air Base Ground Defense training courses that were commensurate for my rank of E-6 at the time, and I’m here to tell you that the line of “logic” our commander was using was beyond me. We had been told by the OSI that the threat of a ground attack was “minimal,” yet our squadron commander set about preparing the base defenses to defend against – you guessed it – a ground attack. And in order to fulfill the requirements of his base “security” plan, we needed more cops on the ground than we had, so he immediately started screaming for reinforcements.
And he got them. No one in the Pentagon wanted to take any kind of a chance that any US air base would be overrun should the Iraqis decide to come across the border, so when our commander screamed for more troops he got them. And like I said before, at that particular point in time, he was right – we needed them, badly.
However, each time he got more troops he redesigned his defense plans, increasing the posts and the numbers of troops needed to man them, and would then scream for more troops. As far as I know, he was still screaming for more troops up until the day the war ended, although by then someone in the Pentagon had realized what was going on and had stopped sending him troops. But what started out as a deployed Security Police unit of 125 men from one unit ended up with a deployed unit of more than 400 men from five different bases throughout the world, and this included some Air Force Reserve troops that had been activated.
And because of his convoluted and complicated base defense plan, he kept our squadron working a six day on, one day off schedule of 12 hour shifts for nearly the entire deployment, long after the rest of the base had gone into 8 hour shifts. We worked 8 hour shifts for the 3 weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but the day after Christmas we went right back into 12 hour shifts and we stayed that way until the war ended and we came home.
For this and many other reasons, many of us had little if any faith in his competency and leadership abilities, and his nickname of “Wambo” became more fitting than ever.
I mentioned this nickname earlier on in this series, so I guess it’s time to tell how it came about.
Lt Col Pack was a short, chubby, balding man with a large nose, jowels, and a pot belly, and he strongly resembled Elmer Fudd from the “Bugs Bunny” cartoons. As a matter of fact, his nickname among the enlisted troops at Langley was “Elmer Fudd.” When we were recalled on 6 Aug and were waiting on standby at the Armory, the morning of the 7th he had all of us gather in the covered patio of the Armory so he could give us a pep talk. When he stepped out of the hallway into the patio wearing his “chocolate chip” desert uniform and webbed gear (called “LBE,” for “Load Bearing Equipment”), we nearly busted out laughing. He was wearing more crap on his LBE than Batman had in his utility belt, and those of us who had any field experience at all knew that the first rule of going into the field was “travel light.”
Normally, an LBE setup consisted of a webbed belt, suspenders that attached to the belt front and back to help support the load, two M-16 ammo pouches worn in the front on the belt on either side of the buckle, a butt pack worn on the back of the belt to which the suspenders were attached, and a 1 quart canteen on either side of the butt pack. Experienced troops would wear a small pouch containing a field dressing on one of the suspenders at the shoulder (always on the non-gun side so it wouldn’t interfere with shouldering your weapon to fire), and that was about it. Once you fill the ammo pouches with ammunition, the canteens with water, and the butt pack with gloves, a flashlight and a poncho, the whole rig could get pretty heavy. Not too bad, but you felt it after a while.
In addition to this gear, when “Elmer” stepped out of the hallway he was also wearing a police walkie-talkie on one of the suspenders, an upside-down knife on the other, a nylon 9mm ammunition pouch holding one 9mm magazine next to one of the M-16 pouches on his right front, a holster with a 9mm Beretta in it on his right side, a black leather handcuff case with handcuffs behind that, a compass on his left side next to the M-16 ammo pouch, and an M-16 bayonet next to that. All told, that LBE must have weighed close to eighty pounds!
One week after we got there, all of that crap was gone. The 9mm and the radio stayed, but the radio moved from the suspender to the belt where the bayonet had been. But all of the other crap had vanished. Guess he learned the idiom of “travel light” the hard way.
But when he walked out of the hallway into the patio that fateful morning, one of the men standing next to me said in a low voice to the man standing next to him, “My God, it’s Rambo!” to which the man next to him simply said in his best Elmer Fudd voice, “WAMBO!”
And a nickname was born.
Those of us within earshot of this nearly busted our guts stifling the laughter, and “Wambo” never knew what was going on. He was too wrapped up into his pep talk by that time. By the end of the day the new nickname had spread throughout the squadron like wildfire, and for the rest of the time he was squadron commander both during and after the deployment, he was known as “Wambo.”
One of the things he did that did not exactly inspire confidence in him with his men took place about three or four days after we arrived and before our operations really got established. We were all gathered in one of the barracks rooms to get our briefing before going to work, and Pack came in to talk to us. Once again, he regaled us with the seriousness and direness of our situation (Captain Obvious lives) and included the following two statements in his speech, neither of which inspired us.
“And the one thing you should do is never, never, NEVER go anywhere without your M-16!”
Which, of course, he didn’t have. He had his pistol, but that was it. Actually, aside from the day we got on the plane, I don’t think I ever saw him toting an M-16.
“And you should also never, never, NEVER go anywhere without your gas mask!”
Again, which he didn’t have. And don’t you think for a moment that every single man in that room didn’t notice it, because we did. ALL of us did.
But this was only the beginning. It was going to get worse in more ways than one, and from more sources than just “Wambo.” And I’m not talking about the Iraqis, either.
More later.
IHC
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