I woke up on the hood of my truck. My favorite place. The impossible day was here. The sum of all fears, or expectations, or answers. I had no idea which of these this was going to be. For the first time in two generations, someone in my family was going into combat. It was definitely surreal.
I jumped down, met all my friends, and fired up the old Chinese cook stove to make coffee. All we knew about today was that we were leaving soon, and we would know when we knew. I almost did not get to sleep outside last night because a few raindrops fell. I put my night desert jacket over my face. If this got wet, I would go inside the truck, and then Jeff and I would have to sleep sitting up.
Let me tell you something about an AM General M915A1 tractor. The backs of the seats were flush against the cab's back wall, straight up and down, with no play to recline whatsoever. The foot area on the floor was 14 inches from the seat box to the under-dash plate. No room to stretch at all. In the right seat, you were sitting up so straight, back, seat, and legs, you may as well have been sipping tea in delicate china cups. In other words, if it rained outside, you never really slept.
We collected our trash and lit it on fire. The fire and the coffee made things better. We all lived together in whatever this was, and times like these were the norm, making things feel normal. I always carried a giant jar of Nescafé and Coffeemate with me, so that I always had coffee for my friends who wanted it. Jeff did not drink coffee. I could never figure out how he could do that. But that was a Jeff thing.
The conversation as we stood around the burning trash fire could have been the same one we would have had had we merely been on a weekend drill, training at Fort Devens. There was a real bond among us that could not exist in the regular Army. Sure, you melt into one unit when you are thrown together in a situation you cannot control, but this was all that and more. We were neighbors; some of us grew up together, worked regular jobs together, and, ten thousand miles away from here, our families were hanging out together and having meals together.
We were notified that it was time, and we all saddled up and took off. 110 trucks, driving straight through the desert in a single file, northbound, in support of the 3rd Armour Division. We were carrying enough firepower to vaporize a small city.
It was slow going. Our trucks, although highway tractor-trailers, spent a significant amount of time off-road. This entire invasion was off-road. It was so gray outside that it was impossible to tell what time it was. We were slowly crawling towards the Iraqi border. There were a couple of times earlier in the day when we could look to the right or the left and see off in the distance another line of trucks, just like ours, moving north as well. As the day progressed, they disappeared from our view; perhaps we were fanning out.
There was absolutely no concept of time now. All we could see was the distant tail of the truck in front of us. Military convoys have a prescribed following distance, so if one truck is hit with an RPG, artillery, or hits a landmine, it does not set off a chain reaction, blowing a 110 truck fault line into the earth. We had no radio communication. That could be used by the OP4 to rain artillery down upon our position.
This ride for Jeff and me was a little quieter than usual. It just felt like we were in this void. Nothing changed. The convoy, or the truck in front of us, would move, then it would stop, then it would move again. We did our best to manage a safe following distance. The whole time, it felt like we were driving outside of time, just like a jet airliner flying above the clouds, keeping the weather below its movement.
There was no "Iraq Welcomes You!" sign. But we had a good idea that we were there, or at least nearby, because the convoy made one of its stops, and we noticed one of the command Humvees stopping briefly at each truck and talking to each driver team.
The Humvee stopped at the truck in front of us. It was Dan in truck 30. Dan, with whom I had ridden on one mission. Dan, who at times had a short fuse. Jeff and I sat in the truck and watched. This one was different; the Humvee lingered longer at truck 30. Then a Captain got out of the passenger seat. You could see an intensity about him. He was speaking sharply to Dan. Most likely ordering Dan to get out of the truck. The captain stood face to face with Dan. The Captain locked him at attention and was speaking sharply to him. Dan reached into his protective mask carrier on his left hip, pulled out the packet of pills we were given on the plane as we flew to the Middle East.
It made sense now. The pills. We were issued an experimental drug as we arrived in country. Chemical war is barbaric. We carried sets of two atropine injectors to self-administer should we get hit with chemical weapons. We had learned a lot about NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) weapons and the physical symptoms of what happens to the human body. It was hard to imagine wanting to live beyond that state. We also carried a high dose of Valium to follow the antidote because any level of active consciousness after a chemical attack or injection would not be humane.
When they gave us the pills, they told us there was a high probability that we could suffer a heart attack because the injectors sharply spiked our heart rate and respiration. These pills would raise these things gradually so that they were already elevated, and the injection would not be such a big step up. We were told the drugs were experimental and harmless.
There were two reasons I decided to not do these pills. 1) I was not going to be a test subject of an experimental drug in a scenario where the provider gets to "win". 2) My friend Pete, who was about my father's age, meaning he was just a kid when he was sent to Vietnam, told me stories of his truck-driving days. There was a supply route through a very thick part of the jungle that was so dangerous that an attack was imminent. No person in their right mind would drive it, so the drivers were injected with a drug that made them fearless. I wondered, of course, if these pills were an excuse to boost a little adrenaline to help the cause. I was not going to find out.
Now, Jeff and I watched as Dan was locked at attention, ordered to take the pill. When you are put at attention, you just become a tool for your superior officer to manipulate. You go from being a person to a piece of Army property. Failure to comply results in Court Martial. That is "Arrest and Conviction and Prison" for you "Civs".
After Dan swallowed the pill, the Captain obviously even asked him to open his mouth to check to make sure he swallowed it. Dan climbed back into the truck, and the Captain into his vehicle. We were next. The Humvee slowed to the driver's side of our truck, and Jeff rolled down the window. "Alright, guys, start popping the pills." Jeff and I reached for ours and smiled at the Captain, "Yes, sir!" Just like two good little puppies. Happy with our obedience, he drove away from us to the next vehicle. We popped the pills out of the cards, I rolled down my window, and each of us threw the single pill out the window. We continued to do this at the prescribed intervals in case a check was conducted later for accountability.
We knew. We were now in Iraq. It was really happening. It was eternally gray outside. We were at MOPP Level 1, which means wearing the heavy neoprene/charcoal-lined suit, boots, gloves, and a mask. Nasty was not the word for what we were and what we would become. We were told that the mission plan was 18 hours to whatever our objective was. They always told us to double the provisions for the time they told us. Jeff and I always doubled that again. Sometimes even more. We knew from experience that we shouldn't let the military determine our well-being. That part was up to us.
This thing we were doing was as surreal as it gets. We were moving across the face of the earth, while we knew that somewhere ahead of us, there was a firestorm on the ground. Oil wells were burning, tanks from the fourth largest army in the world were being pounded into the ground by the same artillery we were carrying.
The day dragged on for what seemed like years. We were in this gray void moving at 15 miles an hour through the sand. The convoy would stop, then it would go again. We were never sure why we stopped, or for how long it would be. There was consistency. I was assuming that trucks were getting stuck in the sand. They were not built for off-road use like the tactical trucks that the military had so many of. In the US, the DOT gross weight limit for a tractor-trailer was 80,000 pounds. When we did the math for these trucks with the loads they had, we calculated somewhere in the neighborhood of 115,000 pounds. That, combined with the powdery, soft sand, made the tactical parts of this operation a balancing act: velocity and momentum against the ground surface and the truck's weight. Some of us did well, and some of us did not.
There were no mealtimes or stops. We were self-sufficient. We were carrying our water and food. Alegedly, there would be fuel tankers meeting us when the convoy needed fuel. We had two gunships, which were HUMVEEs with an M60 machine gun mounted to a gunner ring in the roof. In the event of an attack on the convoy, the gunships would respond and take out the threat, calling for air support if the attack warranted.
Endless sound of the diesel engine, sweating in our MOPP 1 suits, the eternal grayness of the sky slowly began to darken, and into the night we went. Blackout drive, which meant we were using the pinpoint cat eyes to follow the truck ahead of us, which, after long periods, became almost subliminal.
Whoever invented the blackout drive system for the military was an absolute genius. They designed a solid opaque housing. In the middle of that housing, there were four vertical short hashes of dim red light. When you were too close, you saw all the hash marks in that housing, so looking at the back of the truck, you could count 4 on the left and 4 on the right, for a total of 8. This actually meant you were in danger of running into that truck.
As distance increased, the optical illusion caused the 4 hashes in the housing to morph into 2, which means 4 total when following the truck in front of you, and, by design, the exact regulation following distance of military convoys. As the distance increased, the two hashes in the housing merged into one, leaving a total of 2 on the back of the truck. If you only saw two, you were too far back and needed to move closer. Also, if the truck in front of you stepped on the brakes, a tiny and dim white light appeared above the red hashes. Specifically designed, none of these lights could be seen from any distance outside of the convoy, therefore never giving away your position.
I was at the wheel overnight. The convoy droned endlessly into enemy territory. Just those little pinpoints of light, almost imagined in front of me. There was nothing else to see, no dash lights, nothing. We would stop, presumably due to armed reconnaissance or stuck trucks. There was no way to know why. Some stops were momentary, some took 40 minutes.
I kept resting my head against the glass window, seeking micro-sleeps to get me through. Every time I would open my eyes, those "cat-eyes" as they were called in blackout drive would be there in front of me.
So many stops, with no rhythm of a schedule, made me even more tired. Jeff was napping in the passenger seat. We were stopped for an extended period. I rested my head against the glass again. I was so tired. The night spun in my weary head. The lack of sensory stimulation allowed a free mind to take over in my dreams. I was anywhere but here, yet somehow alert to my surroundings.
There were no stars in the sky, and I felt like I was floating outside of time and space. Falling but slowly, losing not only where I was, but who I was. It was like I had been released from the life I owned, and now I was nowhere. I picked my head up, looked out the windshield. I was nowhere. The convoy was gone! Well, all of it in front of me, I had the rest of it behind me. I fell asleep in enemy territory, and not only did Jeff and I lose, but every truck behind us did too. This was not good!
I put the truck in gear and turned the blackout drive light one more click, which turned on a very dim drive light that only shines down at the ground and is completely blocked from aerial view. This light is usually activated only on the lead truck so the driver can see hazards in the convoy's path.
I drove faster than we had been driving, but not so fast as to lose the convoy behind me. The time passed. I was concentrating heavily on staying in the tracks of the other trucks in the sand, and also sharply scanning for the cat eyes of a truck. Once I saw them, I would need to slow down our speed fast because these were only small flashes of light. As soon as I saw them, I would be right upon them. It seemed to take forever, but we finally found them. As we did, I slowed down and shut off the drive light. I could see that the truck behind me had kept up, and so, most likely, every truck behind them. I was awake for a while. The stop-and-go dance continued throughout the rest of the night.
As the gray day broke, and the convoy stopped, I pulled out my Chinese cookstove and some Nescafé and made coffee. We rifled through the MREs we were carrying to pick something we wanted. The most common way to heat MREs was to open the butterfly hood on the right side of the engine and wedge your meal packet against the turbocharger. The running joke was, "Cook for 8 miles and serve."
Jeff and I grabbed all of the food that we could before we left. Letting the war machine decide for you if and when you would eat was not our way. We also had the same philosophy when it came to our truck and the fuel it used. The M915A1 had a 118-gallon fuel tank with 112 usable gallons. When we were gallivanting around Saudi Arabia, there were mandatory stops. Every US military vehicle had to stop at these locations to top off its fuel tank, no matter how much it had.
Because we were National Guard, some of our unit members drove commercial tractor-trailers for a living. It gave them an excellent advantage over some of us, like me, who worked in a Rent-to-Own store. Like Jeff, who was a Mail Carrier. But there were also some things that commercial drivers were blind to.
During this operation, a fuel tanker would pull up and top us off; if they kept to that schedule, we would be fine. But that is not what happened. This march droned on through the hours and days. Jeff and I would shut off truck 32 whenever we stopped. The Commercial drivers in our unit strongly disagreed with that. "We leave our trucks on 24/7! That is how real truck drivers do it." The part about being in a war and not being able to just get off an exit and pull into a truck stop was never considered in the argument.
We wandered the desert for days, never being told what was happening. As we did, food and fuel started running low overall. We were told the 36-hour run, which meant we should bring 72 hours of food. Jeff and I doubled that rule because nothing ever seemed to go as planned. We were out there, 110 trucks loaded with enough explosives to put a hole in the earth that could be seen from space, two gunships, a couple of command vehicles, and we, except for Jeff and me, were running low on food, fuel, and water.
On day three, we arrived at this very flat space in Western Iraq. We were told to hold here. It was the first time in 4 days that we had stopped advancing. We had no idea where we were going. Some speculated we were headed to Baghdad. There was no Armed Forces Radio, and even if there had been, they would only have told us what they wanted. They had all of the control.
This long line of trucks just sat in this spot in the desert and existed like we lived here. At any time, it felt like we would start setting up tarps for overhead coverage, hang up some clotheslines, and dig some latrines. We pulled overnight guard duty and just hung out. I ran the little stove all the time for coffee and water for anyone who wanted it.
Night fell, and I slept up on the hood of my truck as usual. It was so lovely to actually stretch out and sleep. I cannot say it enough: this was the place where I got the most blissful sleep of my lifetime. It had to be something given to me to brighten things up. I had my GPX Walkman, with the oversized olive-drab bandana duct-taped to the back. The clip had broken off when it was only days old, and this big green rag was allowed to tie the thing around my arm or leg, and maybe even my waist.
Trying to scrape news out of the sky, the FM radio dial had absolutely nothing on it since we were hundreds of miles from anything. If there was something, it would be in another language. The AM dial was my go-to. As a child, I would scan the night sky all night long, pulling AM stations from as far as 2000 miles away. I was good at this. Trying to sift through the AM dial here made me feel like I was on another planet. Every thousandth of an inch of turning the dial was another foreign news broadcast, prayer, chant, or program. Finally, English. The BBC World Service from London, or VOA (Voice of America) out of Northern Africa. VOA was funny. They did this thing called the news in "Special English." This was when they read the news, annunciating every syllable in a slow, steady cadence to help non-English-speaking listeners learn the language.
I fell asleep listening to VOA. I slept well. No worrying about losing the convoy, or dozing sitting upright. My body needed this. The airwaves played through my earbuds. This was the best possible life I could have at this time, and it was good.
Around 3:10 I awoke to something in my ears that seemed different. It was a broadcast on VOA, of President Bush's speach. I heard the words:
"After consulting with Secretary of Defense Cheney, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Powell, and our coalition partners, I am pleased to announce that at midnight tonight eastern standard time, exactly 100 hours since ground operations commenced and 6 weeks since the start of Desert Storm, all United States and coalition forces will suspend offensive combat operations. It is up to Iraq whether this suspension on the part of the coalition becomes a permanent cease-fire.
The most important words I heard in his speech were:
"And soon we will open wide our arms to welcome back home to America our magnificent fighting forces."
He was talking about me. All of the people living on these trucks in this 110-truck convoy were going home. I could not sleep. I jumped down from the truck and began waking my friends, one by one. This was something I could not keep to myself until daybreak. I wanted to fire rounds into the sky, like we have seen in newsreels of liberated countries.
Daybreak came, but we did not go anywhere. We sat right where we were, wondering how fragile this cease-fire was. In reality, we did not have orders. We were just told to stand fast, and that is what we did. Food supplies were really running low, and Jeff and I were sharing with people from our unit. Fuel didn't matter because we hadn't moved in a couple of days, but that wasn't good either. Water was distributed, but it wouldn't go very far. All reserves were tapped.
The following morning, we were told that we were leaving. The ground was littered ridiculously with garbage from our MREs over the last 3 days. We were ready to just pull out when the order came down that we were to dismount and pick up all the garbage from the ground. This was, of course, the responsible thing to do, and I do not regret it. But let me tell you, at twenty-five years old, I bristled. I was downright mad. "Are you kidding me??? We just bombed this country into the mid-1800s, and you are concerned about littering? REALLY???"
So, we left this little spot of Iraq just as clean as we found it, while oil wells burned to our east in Kuwait, making the daytime look like night. We were actually headed eastward into Kuwait, which was the plan all along as far as we knew. We drove all day and into the night. Convoy distances were now much closer since the chances of the OP4 getting a plane into the air seemed to be zero.
As the darkness set in, a lightning storm quickly approached. As it bore down on us, we were bumper to bumper. Obviously, military intelligence is at work here. It was the worst lightning storm I have ever seen. There was no rain with it, and we were the tallest objects in the desert. One strike to just one of these 110 trucks would set off a chain reaction that would be studied in military training for generations to come. Every strike felt like it might be the end.
After the storm raged on for what seemed like forever, it finally began to move away. We were expecting rain, so we had to sleep in the truck. I tried to sleep on the floor while Jeff slept in his usual spot on the seats. There was no room for me, and it was horrible and impossible. This night was going to last forever, and I knew that tomorrow also would be torturous because of being cramped and twisted up on this tiny spot on the floor.
A knock came on the driver's door. Jeff opened the window. We were ordered to get out, go out 25 meters, and dig foxholes. Then one person was to stay awake as the other slept. We could run the schedule however we wanted to. We were warned that there would be HUMVEEs driving back and forth to make sure someone was awake. They told us we needed to take this security seriously. No doubt, there was enemy activity in the area.
There was a breeze blowing, so digging down as far as we could was good to get us out of the wind. We made a dugout area about as wide as a full-size bed. We made it deep enough to keep the wind over us. Sleeping bags in, we rested. The HUMVEEs drive by every now and then. I told Jeff I would take first watch. I tuned the GPX to BBC World Service in London, since it was after 9 PM. There was a lot of speculation about what would happen next. There seemed to be 4 points on the earth right now: Washington, Moscow, Baghdad, and London. They talked at length. There was nothing I could glean from this to tell me when I could go home. I was foolish to think there would be.
The news program ended. A music program began on the BBC. I heard the first few chords of a familiar song. It bounced. It connected my heart and my mind to it. It lifted me from the desert sand, resembling the shallow grave I lay in. All of my perspectives changed. Uncertainty did not matter anymore. It was going to be OK. I knew it. I would really go home. I beat this place! I had no fears or depression. I was on top of the world. And there it played over a staticky radio: INXS's "Disappear."
The song is so bright and bouncy. Everything was going to be fine, and I knew it. I found genuine warmth and happiness in a foxhole, in what I would later learn was a minefield on the Kuwait-Iraq border. The music is practically skipping down the sidewalk. Falsetto full of free spirit. The lyrics show that, despite all the darkness, we can still feel the light. It was a moment I will never forget. I lay in the prone position, looking at the horizon for OP4 while in my ears, an Australian band sang:
Say I'm crying
I'm looking at what's on TV
Pain and suffering
And the struggle to be free
It can't ever be denied, and I never will ignore
But when I see you coming
I can take it all
You're so fine, lose my mind
And the world seems to disappear
All the problems, all the fears
And the world seems to disappear
Disappear, disappear
Disappear, disappear
Disappear, disappear
Disappear, disappear
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