| Sixteen years ago, I was an F-16 crew chief, out at the de-arm end of the runway in Doha, Qatar, as the NCOIC of our squadron’s aircraft decontamination team.
Less than twelve hours before the President had said: “The liberation of Kuwait has begun. In conjunction with the forces of our coalition partners, the United States has moved under the code name Operation Desert Storm.”
Our F-16’s had launched out several hours before, and were due back within the hour. We were suiting up in our chem gear, ready to inspect the acft on their return, hoping that we wouldn’t find signs of chemical weapons residue. Everyone was quiet as we waited, wondering how the mission was going as we sat in the back of our truck ‘Decon 1’, listening to reports on the war from the BBC on my little SONY shortwave radio…
3.7 million pounds of ordinance, 1303 sorties, 42 days. The ‘Forgotten 1000’.
Visit the Lucky Devils in the Gulf War at: http://www.lucky-devils.net/
Mike
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The first day of the war had gone well by all accounts, the Allies had lost six aircraft, which considering the resistance and the heavy anti-aircraft defenses was less than most expected. The Iraqi’s were taking a beating from all sides, both in Kuwait and in Iraq itself. Thousands of sorties had delivered thousands of tons of weapons on a wide range of targets. Things were looking good, although we all knew that we were only at the beginning of what had the potential to be a hard fight.
For us in Doha with the Lucky Devils, our pilots and aircraft came back without a scratch from their first missions. I did have a nervous moment at Decon when our first aircraft came back - one of the guys ‘swabbed’ the wing and carried the ‘stick’ up to me. There was a blue-gray haze where it had been wiped across the wing, theoretically at least a possible positive indication; could it be chemicals? Damn, it couldn’t be. I’d just talked to the Ops guys and nothing at all had been reported anywhere in the theater. I swabbed the acft myself in all of the places where residue could/should hide. Everyone on the team looked at me - it was my call. After a moment I said, “No, it’s clean. Send them home.” I’ve second guessed that decision a million times since then, even though I swabbed an acft that didn’t even fly that day and got the same result after we got back to the hangar. But what if I’d gotten it wrong…
It had been a long day, in and out of chem gear who knows how many times, for decon inspections and for the intermittent SCUD launches. In theory the SCUD’s couldn’t reach us in Qatar (according to Intel) but later we’d find that to be not quite true. Between the war at work, and watching the war on TV, I was tired, and tomorrow would come soon enough so I called it a day. Our first day at war. But before I crawled into my sleeping bag I placed my old steel helmet and gas mask just under the side of my cot where I could reach it the instant the sirens went off again. And again.
Over the next few weeks we’d have plenty of chances to practice. Before I fell asleep I said a little prayer for the guys that we’d lost that day, and hoped that tomorrow would go as well.
Mike
The 18th of January, the second day of Desert Storm, had gone well. In the morning and then again in the afternoon we’d launched our pilots and jets north, to Kuwait and Iraq and - as a reporter said during the Falklands - I counted them all out, and I counted them all back. The Allies had lost several more aircraft today, but we were all relieved that the numbers of losses were much lower then the official projections, or those that we had discussed around the picnic table. Although the weather wasn’t as good over the theater as we’d hoped, the Iraqis were still being pounded around the clock by US and our Allies airpower and whenever the Iraqi Air Force decided to launch a sortie, it was generally a ‘one-way’ trip, courtesy of our Saudi based F-15’s. We all hoped that our guys would have their opportunity against the MiG’s and Mirages as well.
Tent City seemed a little odd though, being apart from the ‘action’ on the flightline, there didn’t seem to be much going on out of the ordinary - as if ‘the war’ didn’t really effect many of those who didn’t work on the aircraft and with the pilots. One change that there was in Tent City didn’t last long though, the chow hall (I know that it’s not the ‘politically correct’ modern name, but this is my d*mn story…) announced that the dining hours would be reduced and that there would be no more midnight meal, as they had been tasked with their secondary wartime roles. This didn’t go over well with our Wing Commander. Apparently the chow hall and its services personnel double as the morgue during wartime “My people are hungry, not dead,” he said as he assured the SVS commander that there would be four full meals a day and “Any time of the day or night that one of my flightline people is hungry, there WILL be something for them to eat, even if it’s just an MRE.” Anything for his people, I’d have followed him anywhere.
Once again we were in and out of our chem gear and masks quite often during the day and night. Several SCUD’s had hit Israel for the first time, and we were concerned about them retaliating, quite possibly with nuclear weapons as a response to a major chemical attack - which had the potential to break up the Allied coalition and put us in a pretty sticky situation with our host nations. I had dinner with a couple of the pilots one night as we discussed it and the fact the the prevailing wind pretty much headed our way. “If they did something like that to us and we had to evacuate back to Spain, I know where we could jettison a lot of bombs…” Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and the Israelis stayed out.
The jets were flying well, so my main job was decon. We prepositioned ourselves over at the Qatari parachute shop, which gave us a good place to wait prior to our runs out to EOR. We usually went out an hour before the acft were due back, giving us time to get suited up and to have our equipment ready. Now that I knew what to expect when I checked the swab, the inspections went quickly. Spirits were high, things were going well. After just two days, the war had settled into a routine. President Bush asked the American public to not get too confident, that there was a long way to go, but perhaps this whole thing was going to turn our easier than we’d expected. Time would tell.
It seemed that the only Iraqi target that hadn’t been hit in the first 48 hours was CNN’s Peter Arnett.
Mike
January 19th, the third day of Desert Storm, began as a ‘normal’ day. My alarm went off in the tent at about 5am, then it was over to the shower tent (about 100 yds away) for a cool shower, as our hot water heater had failed almost as soon as it was installed and the water, kept in a large rubber bladder, cooled quite a bit at night. Fortunately I wasn’t driven from the shower this morning by another SCUD - it felt odd to carry your chem gear, mask and helmet down to the shower.
Back at the tent I put on the same woodland BDU’s that I’d worn the day before. By this time most of us were down to only a few pairs of serviceable uniforms, and the laundry had a couple of days turnaround, so we didn’t change too often. Once I had the BDU’s on I kitted up with the rest of my daily wear gear, my web belt with canteen, first aid kit, gas mask, and Fairbairn Sykes SAS dagger (good for slicing MRE’s and whatever else may need ‘opening’) about 10 each of the Atropine and 2-Pam self-injectors, I took my P-tab (nerve agent pretreatment) put my helmet on, and headed out for the day. First stop was over at the chow hall to pick up a case of MRE’s. Most of us would get a case every day or two, because we normally couldn’t get back for lunch, and so we would have a good choice of menus and no one would get stuck with the disgusting omelet with ham. Those of us who didn’t get MRE’s would pick up a case of water for the day.
It wasn’t a long walk from Tent City over to the hangar and the flightline, not more than a couple of hundred yards. We’d always stop by and talk to our Qatari friend who manned the flightline checkpoint. Always carried an exotic looking (to those of us that were used to our M-16’s) FN rifle. When we asked if he had been given ammo, he tapped his shirt pocket and laughed “Yes, five rounds. I’m not allowed to load them unless someone actually shoots at me.”
Over at the hangar we completed our shift change with the night-shift decon team. They would always make sure that we were gassed up and ready to go, so I took my M-16 and ammo and walked over to the phase dock to see how everything was going. Rumors were going around that there was a big mission today and as soon as the pilots were stepping from Ops we heard it. The “Target for Today: Baghdad”. There was almost a sense of excitement in the air. While Baghdad was a long way away, and amongst the most heavily defended targets anywhere, our guys were going to take the fight right to the heart of the enemy. Once again we stood in front of the hangar as our pilots taxied away, and the ground seemed to shake as each aircraft lifted off.
We were busy back at the Phase dock where we were preparing to open back up for business. The Colonel told us that there were two options for the unit as far as inspections went. We could overfly the phased until the end of the conflict, at which time all of the aircraft would be grounded until inspections were completed, or we could do combat phases as we went along. Several guys asked what a ‘combat phase’ in fact was, unfortunately no one knew. So a group of us sat down and laid out exactly what we wanted a ‘combat phase’ to be. “How fast a turnaround do you think we can get on an inspection?” It was difficult to say without actually attempting one, “How long do we have?” “At our current flying rate we’ll go through our 150 flying hours roughly every 24 days.” Twenty-four days, twenty-four aircraft. We had to find a way to complete a normally 3.5-4 day inspection in a day…
Soon it was time to take a break from the planning and head out to EOR to prepare for our decon inspections on the returning aircraft. We loaded up ‘Decon 1’ and headed out down the ramp and across the hard-packed sand to the end of the runway. I put my chem suit on, keeping an eye to the sky looking for the jets, listening to the brick to hear if the MOC had an ETA, but the net was quiet, probably more quiet than normal thinking back. Soon the first aircraft appeared, with no overhead break, they were coming straight in. I counted each aircraft as I’d gotten into the habit of always doing and was several into my count when I noticed something odd “What’s that under the wings?” it took another couple of aircraft before someone answered, “They’ve all blown their wingtanks, that’s the mounts…” From that moment I had a bad feeling about it and as I continued to count the last aircraft touched down “They’re not all here. There are two missing.” The bad feeling had gotten worse. I’d hoped that two had needed to stop in Saudi or Bahrain for fuel, but inside somehow I knew that it wasn’t the case. As we waited for the aircraft to backtaxi to our position, they cut back across the runway and were headed straight back to the ramp. “Everybody in the truck, let’s go. Now.”
I had the decon deuce-and-a-half flying on the way back to the ramp (scary in itself as I had no military drivers license and my ‘normal’ ride was an MGB) and we arrived just as engines were shutting down. A lot of unrecorded records were set in the next few minutes as the aircraft were ICT (combat turned with simultaneous rearm and refuel)(the QA guys were told to stay in the hangar because they didn’t want to see what was going on) just in case our guys could get back up there to help in the search. In the end because of the distance and the fact that more capable aircraft were already tasked and overhead they didn’t go. Still pretty much in shock, four or five of us walked up to our Wing Commander, Col. ‘Jed’ Nelson, as he walked out of debrief and although I’m sure that he had a hundred more important things to do, he patiently explained what had happened. Mike ‘Mr’ Roberts, whose son would be born in the next few weeks, went down over Baghdad and was feared lost, and Jeff ‘Tico’ Tice was down in the desert between Baghdad and the Saudi border.
Within an hour we’d seen the HUD tapes taken during the mission. Mr took a SAM amidships, his aircraft just exploded. It didn’t look as though anyone could have survived, but Col Nelson said that he thought he’d seen the canopy come off as the wreckage descended, the first step of the ejection process, so that was at least a sliver, if only a sliver, of hope. Tico’s aircraft, 87-0257, took a proximity hit and was sprayed with shrapnel. He struggled with the dying aircraft as far as it could take him, roughly halfway back to the Saudi border, when he was forced to make a controlled ejection. We felt pretty confident that if he could get hunkered down until dark there was a good chance that we’d get him back. We watched as ‘ET’ Tullia dodged at least 5 SAM’s guiding on his aircraft with no operational chaff/flare, in the best example of defensive flying I have ever seen.
While growing up, my heroes weren’t baseball players or sports stars, they were people with names like Luke, Bader, Malan, Stanford-Tuck, Gabreski, Zemke, Olds and Ritchie. I’d read about losses and sacrifice, but now I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. It was a long walk back to Tent City that night. I sat in the chow hall, just looking at my dinner, while at the table across from me sat Bill Hinchey, the crew chief who had launched out Tico, sitting alone. I felt as bad as he looked, and knowing Bill, I know that he felt much worse.
I hardly remember walking back to the tent. When I walked in, there was a loud card game going on at the table, happy and carrying on. I wasn’t in the mood, “Hey, have you guys heard that we lost to pilots today?” “Yeah, we heard, what can you do…” I crawled into my sleeping bag, rolled over and shut out the world. It was our roughest day in Qatar.
Mike
This would probably be better off in the odds and ends forum. [:)]
AS for where I was, can’t say I rightly remember… [:I]
Having diner with clients at a restuarant over looking Rockefeller Center when it started. Yu shoudl have heard the cheer that went up from the whole place.
I was visiting my son-in-law at Fort Bragg, NC. He was in the 82nd Airborne. He was very concerned about me being on the base and watching everyone go into war time status because at the time I was a reporter for a daily newspaper. I told him I was a father first. I didn’t do any stories about what was going on until after the president went on TV and he shipped out.
Sorry if I started the thread in the wrong place (I’ll claim a ‘new guy’ mistake) I’d seen a couple of others here that had to do with aviation, but not necessarely modeling and hoped it would be all right. I don’t know if I should try to get it moved, let it die, or just continue…
Perhaps this will help. My Dad’s from several years ago:
Mike
I was working in a gym at the time. We had the news coverage on the main sound system. Everyone in the place just stood frozen and listened. There were mixed emotions about it.
i was born during the ground phase of the war. man has it realy been that long ago? lol
I was in elementary school.My fourth grade class had a pen pal stationed in Saudi Arabia,sent us some sand in plastic film cannisters sealed with scotch tape.The sand was so fine it still got past the tape!
Exactly - I still have some in a little Tabasco bottle that came with the MRE’s. The sand what as fine as talcum powder and every time you took a step it would raise a little cloud by your feet. It looked sort of like seeing the guys walking on the moon - and actually the rough terrain probably looked more like the moon than anything ealse as well.
Mike
I was a young LCpl at Sheik Isa Air Base in Bahrain with MAG-11. Lived four miles north of the base along the main road to Manama in the bomb dump. We stowed, built, and delivered all of the ordnance used by the F/A-18A/C/D’s, A-6E’s, and EA-6B’s in my beloved Marine Corps.
Good times that I still remember clearly to this day. Right now I’m a young SSgt with three years to go before I retire!
Being a member of the Airforce Reserve I volunteered right at the start of Desert Shield I went to Moody AFB for A month then to Hurlburt for two months My unit had just changed from MAC to SOC so no one what to do with us when the war started. Now 16 yrs later I’m writing this reply from the main fire station in the International Zone less than 100 yards from Saddam’s main palace. Who would think that…
I was vacuum cleaning a clients swimming pool when the lady of the house came out and told that the first attacks where being shown on CNN.
I was working at Wally World, ( I still am), thanking God that my husband had retired from the USAF and didn’t have to go off to war again. His service record includes 3 tours in Viet Nam and one Purple Heart.
Grandma L
Glued to CNN and cheering on the good guys. Would that they would have given Schwartzkopf the green light to go the way and finish the damn thing back then. 
Hey, that’s a nice looking model!
I really like the presentation with the badges and the base. nicely done.
I was just finishing high school and starting work at the time.
I was in London getting drunk with my mates. [party][party][oX)][dinner][#toast][#toast][censored][;)]