Exactly 35 years ago today, January 17th, 1991, I was at Dhahran Air Base, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where I had been since August 8th, 1990 in support of Operation DESERT SHIELD. It was 0100 hours or so (that's 1AM for you civilians) and I was posted as CM-3, the mobile patrol for the part of the flightline that included the parking area for the Kuwaiti aircraft that had been evacuated out of the country when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait the previous August. One of the things about the fighters from my base (Langley AFB, Va) was that they ran flight operations 24/7, so it wasn't unusual to see jets taking off and landing at all hours of the day and night. They always flew in groups of 4, but they always took off in pairs. So it wasn't unusual for me to see several pairs of aircraft taking off at 0100 hours.
Then it suddenly dawned on me that I had been hearing aircraft taking off non-stop for the past fifteen minutes, and that was unusual. I parked my vehicle and sat on the ramp, watching pair after pair of F-15s take off one after the other. I sat and watched for a good half an hour, and when the final pair of F-15s had left it was strangely quiet. I had just watched both squadrons of F-15s leave the base, all headed northeast - towards Iraq.
"We just went to war," I said out loud to myself. (My partner was doing chow relief for one of the listening posts so I was alone for the moment.)
Two hours later the news was reporting that Baghdad was being bombed. Operation DESERT SHIELD had just turned into Operation DESERT STORM, and the Gulf War had begun.
Things got kind of frantic after that. The game we had been playing since August had just gotten very serious, and things suddenly became very real again - just as they had been for the first month or so that we were there. For the first month or so everyone was very serious, very cautious, and very alert, but the longer we went without any hostile action taking place the more complacent everyone got. Pretty soon Dhahran had become what we called "Langley East," with it just being business as usual - except that we were in Saudi Arabia.
Now all that changed. We broke out the helmets, flak vests, and gas masks, and the orders came down to wear them at all times both on and off duty. Everybody suddenly got serious again, and the change in attitude was so intense that you could almost hear it when it changed. I spent the next 4 hours or so going from post to post, trying to explain what was going on to everyone and trying to calm the younger airmen down. The Reservists that we had received the week before were having conniption fits, with one of them - a female - going so far off her rocker that we had to relieve her of duty and send her to the medics. She was found mentally unfit for duty and was shipped back to the States the next day.
We were at war, and we all knew that it was only a matter of time before it came our way.
24 hours later Iraq launched the first of 27 SCUD missile attacks, and for us the war was truly underway.
None of us would ever be the same again.
No comments:
Post a Comment