We found accommodations on the 6th floor of one of the Kohbar Towers. Our entire platoon occupied one, four-bedroom, three-bath apartment. Most of our equipment was MIA, and that meant the brand-new cots that we were issued at Devens were among the missing. The floors were made of marble and had a thin layer of indoor/outdoor carpet on them. Then, other than our sleeping bags, that was it. I dare say, my joints have paid for that hard floor for the rest of my life.
I was in the smallest room with 5 others. It was strange to arrive in this unfamiliar part of the world and spend the day lying on your sleeping bag. Upon climbing the stairs to our apartment dozens of times, as the elevators seemed to always be full and overloaded, we all collapsed on our sleeping bags, which had a thin piece of foam, about the thickness of a cardboard box, between them and the carpeting. Outside, the bridge stretched over the water of the Persian Gulf to Bahrain.
Photo by Aaron Beh on Unsplash
Back at Devens, we had three members of the unit transferred over to our platoon from Detachment 1. One of them, who was about 20 years older than I, was having difficulty with the heat and carrying things up the stairs. After some heat injury treatment, he was quickly whisked away to medical and finally ended up back in CONUS at Fort Devens.
The irony was that he had put incredible effort and money into having a flight jacket specially made with an eagle and "Operation Desert Shield" embroidered on the back. He boasted constantly about the design of the jacket he was having made. Right after the jacket was done and he got it, the air war began, and the President announced that Desert Shield had just become Desert Storm. In a way, the fact that he put all that effort into a Desert Shield jacket and went home after carrying duffel bags up the stairs made the Desert Shield jacket make sense.
There was a rotation of guard duty to oversee the trucks that had been demolished during the ship's ride to the Middle East. That consisted of getting fully geared up and packing enough for an overnight stay. Meal choices were MRE or MRE. Transportation accommodations were courtesy of the back of an open 5-ton truck. This place was definitely different. We had heard that when a Saudi male reaches the age of 18, he is given a vehicle by the government. Looking around me on the ride out to the port, that vehicle would be a white Datsun pickup truck. They were everywhere. Their driving demeanor could only be described as fearless.
As the sun set in the port, my two others and I performed our guard duty rotation. We slept under the tarp of one of the trailers, so getting in and out was a challenge since our cover was four feet high and the cots were 2.5 feet high. There was a schedule where we would guard for 2 hours and then sleep for 2 hours, and we followed this pattern on and off over 12 hours.
At the end of one of my shifts in the middle of the night, I looked forward to climbing up into my rack and putting in my headphones and drifting off to sleep. A nice guy from Detachment 1 was just starting. He kept talking to me as he began to his watch. Politely, I kept my headphones off my ears as he spoke. He went on and on about the bag that he was carrying. When I thought there could not possibly be more to say, he then described the entire contents of the bag right down to the toothbrush. Finally, after about 22 minutes, my sleep time was up, and silence came.Well, as much as there can be at a port where the whole world was shipping weapons, tanks, trucks, and food to supply the war effort.
Other than pulling guard duty down at the port on our smashed-up trucks, there was nothing to do. The day started with getting up, getting into full gear, and heading down to one of the many underground parking garages, where a catering company contracted by the US government was serving us. A Styrofoam tray, and the usual line-style choices: overcooked scrambled eggs, a dried-up sausage patty, chipped beef (allegedly), and gravy (possibly a form of glue) over toast. This was the first time I had ever seen shelf-stable milk. I had no idea what to think about that.
I did not expect the food to be great, and at this point in my life, how food tasted was not as important as it would become to me in later decades. Thank goodness for that because things were pretty awful. I could deal with the food because, as I saw it, I had no choice. What happened to me was something I did not see coming.
The morning meal was served at the underground parking garage, as was the evening meal. Lunch was an MRE. So, for lunch, I didn't have to gear up in 70 pounds of Kevlar, neoprene, and gunmetal. I did not mind gearing up, it was what happened frequently when I was outside getting breakfast or dinner that was aggravating. Obtaining food in the garage and then coming out to the street to sit on the curb and eat it was difficult enough, but then Scud missiles would be headed their way. Air raid sirens would sound, followed by the helpful MPs on the Humvee, "SCUD LAUNCH!" over the bullhorn. The six-second dash, drop the food on the ground, put on a protective mask, then MOPP4. Tearing out all the heavy protective clothing from the butt pack and putting it on.
It would seem like an eternity, and then the sound of missiles coming in would happen. That is a very unique sound because you know they are intended to harm. Just as their sound became louder, the 4 to 8 loud explosive sounds of Patriot missiles taking off, and then the final series of explosions happened, taking the Scud to the ground. NBC testers would then test the air near the detonation to determine if any chemicals were present in the warhead. When the test came back negative, three short blasts of the siren would signal the "All Clear." I would then take off the mask and protective gear. Of course, I was sweating from being so wrapped up in material that was not allowed to breathe. Putting away all the gear, I looked at my food, in its pathetic Styrofoam tray, now dirt-encrusted on top, cold and hard. Into the trash it went. There had to be a better way.
Every day, there were a few in the apartment who were absolutely fed up with the MREs. There were 12 complete meals to each case: Ham slice, beef patty, pork patty, chili mac, lasagna, chicken and rice, tuna noodles, chicken stew, beef stew, stroganoff, spaghetti, and finally, the proverbial bullet in the chamber: chicken la king. None of this stuff was all that bad tasting. This lot of MREs was manufactured in the latter part of the 1980s, but a small percentage of the Chicken la King was found by testers to be spoiled. If one of these were spoiled, it would be obvious to the senses. If a package were cut open and was not offensive, it would be okay to eat. Unfortunately, that is not how it worked, though. You can tell everyone that the Army had zeroed in on the lot number with the spoiled chicken à la king, and removed them from circulation, but that did not make the issuing of MREs any less like a game of Russian Roulette. Out of 12 people, someone was not getting fed a full meal. Call it PTSD, or whatever you will, chicken à la king has been ruined for me forever.
The sky rained SCUD missiles day and night. As it did, I lacked the desire to put on all my gear on; Kevlar helmet, Kevlar flack vest, LBE with ammo pouches, first aid kit, and canteen, protective mask, full MOPP gear, and M16, then go stand in line inside an underground parking garage to procure a styrofoam tray of badly cooked food and shelf stable milk, only to have it end in the vulnerable task of throwing it on the dirty ground and suit up for a chemical style attack that harkened back to nearly 70 years ago during the 1st World War. The end result was that I always came back sweaty, still hungry, and a mess who simply wished I had stayed upstairs and hung out on my sleeping roll reading. The couple of roommates who rejected the daily lunch MRE suddenly became my refuge. I accepted those MREs and was able to remain in the apartment all day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner all came out of a box of shelf-stable food, which I didn't have to don a hundred pounds of gear to enjoy.
When it came to gear, there was one very pronounced oddity that I could not comprehend. Eighty thousand US troops were staying at Kohbar Towers. It was a regulation that the full protective gear was worn at all times when leaving a building. The very heavy vest could protect your torso from the shrapnel of a grenade blast, just as the helmet protected your head. The MOPP gear on your back was at the ready so that when a SCUD hit, you could put that gear on 10 seconds into the masking-up procedure to save your life. As I said, required. Unless you were wearing your light gray, cotton Army PT (physical training) sweatpants and sweatshirt. Then, you just had to have your protective mask in its carrier, strapped to your left hip.
It was fascinating to me that the military would spend so much money on all of this very expensive gear, when this mysterious gray cotton could deflect shrapnel, bullets, and create a forcefield around your body in which deadly chemicals could not penetrate! Why did we just not make our protective gear, trucks, and tanks out of this invincible cotton fabric?
As the days went on, I began to notice something. If I could not secure enough MREs to get me through the day and I needed to go down to the parking garage to eat, I had a fear of going outside. It had snuck up on me without my knowledge. It worried me because, historically, most wars are fought outdoors. I recognized that I had some challenges to face, and although I shared a room, and even a whole apartment with many others, I dealt with this little-known secret alone.
Sleeping on the floor was brutal. Marble turned out to be even harder than they say it is. The rest was very ragged. I would get up a couple of times to go out onto our little balcony to smoke during the night, look over the great sprawling city on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Prayer echoed out of loudspeakers over the city every night.
On January 28th, I woke up early in the morning. Armed Forces Radio played in my headphones. It was Super Bowl 25. Coincidentally, the Super Bowl number is always equal to my age at the time the game is being held. I am not, nor have a I ever been a sports fan, but listening to the last quarter of the game was like a little slice of home anyway. The New York Giants were playing the Buffalo Bills and won 20-19. This comfort in a football game was one of those weird moments in my life that would never be duplicated, sort of like eating a serving of potatoes once in my life that, strangely, tasted good to me.
The following Saturday, we got to see how high-paid, supposedly intelligent, ranking military masters could totally screw up so bad that there was no way to measure the potential disaster and stupidity of the idea. Military intelligence at its best at play, someone with authority decided that the eighty thousand of us staying at Khobar towers were all mixed up. Why not put all of the medical staff in one set of buildings together, transportation in another, engineers in another section, and military police in yet another? There could be no logic to a move like this. Patriot missiles were exceptional at taking down SCUDs, but sometimes, even that technology missed, and a missile would hit the target. I could only determine that with this move, one stray missile could wipe out an entire profession of people who just trained for the last 3-5 months. This would cripple American forces and give Iraq a temporary advantage, allowing Saddam to strike and possibly do some real damage, not to mention destabilize the area, by provoking Israel as he had been trying.
Day after day, night after night, the sirens would go off. Armed Forces Radio was the only source of English-speaking media we had, and of course, it was used just the way they wanted to use it to keep us thinking exactly as they would have us thinking. Kudos to the planners of this format, really. It was a mix of music, AP Network news highlights, and anecdotal snippets of military tradition, dramatized with just the right dosage of salt to make it mainstream. When a SCUD missile was launched, however, Armed Forces Radio would play the Saudi Arabian national emergency alert broadcast repeatedly. It was like an oracle that would begin with a dual-horn blast-like tone, followed by the emergency message in Arabic, followed by the same message in English. It was hypnotizing. The whole time it played, we sat in our gas masks, listening, waiting for the sound of the missile approaching, hoping that the Patriots would be successful in stopping it from hitting the 80,000 of us in the Towers.
"Civil Defense in the Eastern Province has sounded the Danger Alarm Siren. Please proceed as follows. Put on your gas mask. Stay in a safe place. Stay tuned to channel three television, or to 91.4 or 101.4 FM on the radio."
Over, and over, and over it went. First, the tone, then the Arabic version, followed by the English version, until after the missile came down, then the All-Clear would be broadcast in the same manner.
I did not tell anyone about my reluctance to going outside. I had no idea what to do about it. I was transported ten thousand miles to fight a war, chances are, sooner or later, I might need to leave the apartment to do that. I just took it one day at a time, by which I mean, I casually tried to procure the two extra MREs per day that would allow me the 3 squares I needed.
Another Saturday arrived, and we were informed that our unit's turn for roving guard duty had come. This rotation required each soldier to walk OUTSIDE on rooftops, sidewalks, and the perimeter of the complex where Kohbar Towers sat. We were assigned a post. Then for 24 hours, you would alternate every 2 hours. 2 hours walking guard duty, two hours in a little room with a couple of cots, back outside for two, then the cot room again, etc.
I was determined that I would absolutely not disclose what was happening with me, and I reluctantly reported for this duty and carried it out. Miraculously, I was cured. It felt amazing to be outside again! I loved the feeling of the sun on me! What was an occasional missile, now and then? I learned a lot from this experience, and I continue to glean lessons from this even decades later.
I started going to the parking garage again for hot meals, but I quickly learned from friends that if we walked about a quarter mile away to another garage, the cooks over there were actually good. This became a regular thing, and I could say that at this point in my life, this was food that I would pay for in a diner and not be disappointed. It is little things like this that can really brighten the day. After all, I had no idea how long I would be living here in the Towers.
It turns out, it wasn't that much longer. I was out smoking on the balcony one night, and my squad leader came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go up into the desert Advanced Party to set up the company area ahead of the unit. I immediately accepted. SCUD missiles were constantly being fired at us down here in the city, but up in the desert, closer to Kuwait and Iraq, everything was quiet. This was appealing to me. The next morning, a group of us were taken to the port, saddled up in our trucks with whatever equipment we could find, even though 90% of the company's equipment still could not be found, and headed north into the desert.
Kohbar Towers was behind me. We affectionately referred to it as Kohbar Targets because of the large number of us and all the missiles. Unfortunately, in June of 1996, five years after the war ended, a real terrorist attack happened at the Towers. I always thought that the measures they were having us take were sufficient, but that was wrong. Some never got to go home that day.
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