Home > Gulf War Diary > "Welcome to Saudi Arabia"
In the peacetime U.S. Army, things are relatively predictable. For example, if an outfit is going on a training deployment to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, or the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany, that unit knows exactly how long it will be gone from its home station. The soldiers can count on having decent billeting, latrines, and rations. Generally speaking, that unit knows what's going on, and what's going to happen.
When I boarded the commercial airliner that had been chartered to take us to Saudi Arabia, I really had no idea what to expect on the other end. All I had were fantasies, romantic images of the American soldier, the "knight in shining armor", deployed overseas to defend freedom. I was in for a rude awakening.
What I did learn was to "expect the unexpected." The process of deploying a military unit, with all of its personnel and equipment, 8000 miles to a harsh environment to accomplish a contingency mission is, at best, a tough, uncertain business. The problems that I had to contend with as a battery commander were many. Accounting for and taking care of people and property, acclimating the unit to a rough climate, and maintaining discipline and control did not make any easier the job of downloading ships and airplanes, fixing broke equipment, reconfiguring load plans, and moving out into the desert.
I was the planeload commander of the flight that took us to Saudi Arabia. I was responsible for ensuring that all of the personnel and equipment manifested for that flight got on the plane at Robert Gray Army Airfield at Fort Hood, got off the plane at the Dhahran Air Base in Saudi Arabia, and did not get lost at any of the stops in between. I was not, however, the senior man on the flight; our battalion executive officer, a Major, was accompanying us. That meant that I was not in "command" in the classical sense of the word. I did, however, have a very important mission that, if screwed up, would cause an abrupt and unfavorable termination of my military career.
The passengers on this flight included the 2nd platoon of my battery, the entire Service Battery of 3-82 FA, and an assortment of other soldiers from other units who, for one reason or another, did not deploy with their own units. This situation was not of my choosing, nor was it of my liking. I would have preferred to have taken my entire outfit, insofar as maintaining unit integrity allows a commander to maintain positive control over the unit for which he is responsible. However, my 1st platoon, along with my first sergeant, had been tasked to "close up shop" for the battalion, and would thus have to be the last soldiers in the battalion to leave Fort Hood.
After roughly nine hours of flying, we landed in Paris, France for fuel. From there, we proceeded to Cairo, Egypt for another fuel stop. At about 2100 hours local time, after the DC-10 had landed and was taxi-ing to its designated terminal, the smooth flow of the airliner rolling down the tarmac was suddenly interrupted by a rough grinding to a halt. Looking out the window, I noticed that the plane was straddling a row of runway lights, one of which appeared to be broken. On one side was asphalt, and on the other side was sand. The airliner had skidded off the runway.
The Egyptians went ballistic upon hearing that the plane that had run off the tarmac contained about 200 armed U.S. soldiers. They immediately sent a ground crew to investigate. When I observed this rather motley looking group of men tampering with the damaged nose gear, I casually suggested that some, if not all, of the ground crew might be terrorists, and, if that were the case, we were sitting ducks. This observation, which greatly distressed some of the younger soldiers and flight crew members, drew a harsh reprimand from my battalion XO.
Soon thereafter, an Egyptian Army captain, accompanied by an Egyptian civilian and several buses, boarded the plane. Obviously afraid of adverse publicity and terrorism, the two Egyptians were both nervous and caustic. The chain-smoking Egyptian captain gave an order in Arabic, which the civilian translated as meaning "get off the plane, get on the buses, and leave your weapons behind." At the insistence of my battalion XO and me, we were permitted to leave behind a few soldiers to guard the weapons. Once we boarded the buses, we were driven to a remote corner of the airport, where we were told to remain on the buses.
We immediately ran into a problem of a biological nature. Since we had assumed that we would have access to latrine facilities (if nothing else those on the aircraft), we had consumed large quantities of beverages: water, coffee, and soda. Consequently, many soldiers had to urinate badly. When I suggested this to the Egyptian captain through an interpreter, he adamantly told me no, and to get back on the bus. Fortunately, many soldiers had brought bottled water with them; those plastic bottles were summarily pressed into service as field-expedient urinals.
Finally, the airline decided that it would not be able to repair the damaged airliner in a timely manner. Therefore, at the considerable urging of the irate Egyptians, who were quite eager to rid themselves of the problem they had inherited, the airline station manager diverted another DC-10. Once this plane had taxied alongside the disabled one, the Egyptians instructed us to provide a detail to download the old aircraft and upload the new one.
It took until midnight to accomplish this task. Once we got the "thumbs up," the buses took us to the new aircraft. Since I only had one copy of the flight manifest, and since I had to ensure that all soldiers were accounted for, I instructed all soldiers to enter the aircraft at the forward cabin door. I posted myself there, and as soldiers boarded, I checked their names off the list. The last thing I wanted to do was accidentally leave a soldier behind in Cairo.
The Egyptian captain decided that I was taking entirely too long to get all of my soldiers on the aircraft. Therefore, he went up to the line of soldiers waiting to be manifested onto the plane, broke the line in two, and demanded that the second group of soldiers board through the rear cabin door. They dutifully complied. One can only imagine my chagrin when I observed un-manifested soldiers boarding the aircraft by the dozen. My personnel accountability efforts were shot to hell.
After that fiasco, I checked off as many names as I could. Once everybody was on the plane, I called off the names that had not been checked off on my manifest over the plane's intercom system. Those soldiers proceeded to the front cabin to show me that they were in fact present. Once I was sure that we had everybody, we left Cairo and proceeded on to Dhahran.
On 11 October 1990, at about 0700 hours local time, we touched down in Dhahran. When I exited the air-conditioned plane, I immediately felt a powerful blast of heat and humidity. We were met by APOD (aerial port of debarkation) personnel, who fell us into a formation, briefed us on what was going on, and marched us to a huge white Bedouin tent, where we were told to wait while our plane was being downloaded. We were also reminded to drink plenty of water, so that we would not become heat casualties; next to the waiting tent was literally a mountain of bottled water provided for that purpose.
After a one hour wait, Saudi buses and tractor-trailers arrived to take us and our equipment to the seaport. We loaded our duffel bags, rucksacks, NBC suits, and ammunition on the tractor-trailers, and crammed onto the buses. The Saudi buses, in accordance with Islamic law, had separate compartments in the back for women. I could not help but wonder what NOW (National Organization for Women) would think of this, if they could see this.
The buses took us to a little piece of hell called the King Abdul Aziz Port Authority. Actually, Saudi Arabia has some of the best, most modern port facilities in the world. However, I can sincerely state that the week I spent at that godforsaken berth was the worst week of my life. The living conditions we were subjected to at the Port Authority would cause riots in U.S. prisons.
After weaving through a maze of concrete security barriers and manned checkpoints designed to stop even the most powerful truck bombs, the buses deposited us at Warehouse 14, our new home. This warehouse billeted about 5000 soldiers. Each soldier had a living space of ten feet by four feet: enough space for a cot and duffel bags. Sanitation facilities were primitive; our latrine and shower facilities were prefabricated monstrosities that were located a mile away from the warehouse. This was necessary to keep their overflow of water, urine and other bodily fluids from shorting out the huge, orange, electric cranes that were used to offload the ships.
There was a urinal located in the adjacent warehouse. However, since we were drinking about four gallons of bottled water a day to avoid becoming heat casualties, there usually was a long line. Even then, it was not worth the wait. Since the plumbing had long since clogged up, there was usually about 2 inches of urine on the floor that had to be waded through to get to the urinal. Personally, I would normally just make the one mile hike to the prefab latrines.
For breakfast and dinner, we normally got hot "T-rations" served by a consolidated mess hall located in a nearby warehouse. T-rations are field rations that consist of various entrees vacuum-packed into large tin containers that are immersed into boiling water to heat the contents, then opened and served. We were served supplemental rations, usually fresh fruits and vegetables purchased off of the local economy. Unfortunately, these supplements normally gave soldiers dysentery. Since this ad hoc mess hall was serving 10,000 soldiers, the lines for chow averaged about one kilometer in length. Located on the berth was also a chicken stand run by a couple of Palestinian expatriates. Their food was fairly tasty, if one could handle the inevitable dysentery. For lunch, we were issued MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat), which were consumed cold.
The day we arrived, I attempted to block off a corner of the warehouse for 3-82 FA in a feeble attempt to maintain unit integrity. Despite my best efforts, this was impossible. The rule was "first come, first served." We had to satisfy ourselves with taking the first empty cots that were available, as units vacated their warehouse space and deployed to the desert. In fact, we were very lucky to have received cots for all of our soldiers that first day. The end result was that my soldiers were spread all over the place; command and control was very difficult. We solved that problem by conducting numerous formations during the course of the day.
Obviously, in a situation like this, both morale and discipline suffered. Since we had arrived almost a week prior to our ship-loaded equipment arriving (in order to acclimate the soldiers to the climate before doing any heavy work), our soldiers had nothing to do except being hot and miserable. We tried to fill the time by conducting physical fitness and individual skills training, as well as making our soldiers clean and reclean their rifles and protective masks. We also kept the warehouses, which were quickly turning into garbage dumps, clean. This helped a little, but I still sensed big morale problems developing.
One controversial subject that adversely affected discipline was the practice of billeting female soldiers in the same warehouses as male soldiers. In retrospect, this was unavoidable, but it still led to problems. Since there was no privacy in the warehouse with the exception of a tiny changing room in one corner, frustrated female soldiers eventually would just change clothes right at their cots, in plain view of hundreds of male soldiers. Fraternization was fairly widespread; soldiers would find some pier somewhere to have sex at night. There were even some cases of prostitution reported.
The biggest boost to morale was, without a doubt, mail call. The Army very astutely kept the mail flow going. Letters from home (which were just beginning to arrive), as well as newspapers, such as the Stars and Stripes, and the Arab News and the Saudi Gazette (two local English language dailies), lifted soldiers' spirits immeasurably. Even soldiers who were not receiving mail from home benefited from "Any Servicemember" letters; the volume of such letters was simply phenomenal.
In summary, the first several days in Saudi Arabia were about as unpleasant an experience as I could imagine. Everything about living at the port was hard. Simple, everyday things that we had taken for granted were major undertakings here. Life resembled that of a refugee camp more than a military garrison.
At mid-morning on 15 October, we received word that our ship had arrived, and needed to be downloaded. Unfortunately, it arrived at a different berth, about six miles away from Warehouse 14. Since all of our tactical vehicles were on the ship, we had to rely on scarce shuttle buses to rotate our people from the warehouse to the ship. In retrospect, it would have been quicker to have walked the distance. Nonetheless, we had sufficient personnel at the ship by 1300 hours to download it . By 2300 hours that day, we had completely downloaded the entire ship, and all vehicles were placed in a fenced-off marshaling area. Once a sufficient number of Heavy Equipment Transport (HET) tractor-trailers became available to transport every tracked vehicle in the battalion, the unit would deploy to its assembly area in the desert.
When an Army unit makes an administrative land movement over long distances, it usually moves its tracked vehicles by rail, or, less commonly, HETs, to save wear and tear on the expensive, breakdown-prone, hard to maintain tracked vehicles. The U.S. Army, which had focused for several decades to fight a Soviet attack of Western Europe, was much more accustomed to rail-loading than HET-loading, since European countries had such a well-developed rail infrastructure. Consequently, when Operation Desert Shield commenced, the U.S. Army had only about 500 HETs in its inventory.
Unfortunately, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not endowed with such a well-developed rail system. Consequently, in order to move the thousands of tracked vehicles from the port to desert assembly areas, we had to contract for local Saudi HETs. These local HETs, along with their indigenous drivers, were often unreliable and unsafe.
The biggest problems were the trucks themselves. Overused and under-maintained, they often had such obvious problems as balding tires, faulty brakes, inoperable lights, and leaky engines and transmissions. The drivers were not much better. Most of them were not Saudis; rather, they were "expat" workers, usually Palestinians, Jordanians, Pakistanis, Indians, and Bangladeshis. Most of them did not speak English; some did not even speak Arabic. I remember one driver who spoke nothing but Urdu. By the way they drove, "safety" was obviously not a word in their vocabulary, regardless of their native tongue.
By the afternoon of 18 October, we finally got enough HETs to deploy our entire battalion to Assembly Area Horse, located about 120 miles west-northwest of the port. We uploaded quickly, and departed the port at 1800 hours. I was never so happy to leave a place as I was to leave the King Abdul Aziz Port Authority.
I was the trail vehicle of the entire convoy, and, as such, was responsible for policing up stragglers. The conduct of the civilian HET drivers infuriated me. They exhibited no march discipline; they merely pulled over to the side of the road whenever they wanted to. Normally, they would stop at one of the many rest stops that peppered the Dammam-Riyadh freeway. One driver even stopped to take a nap. At my strenuous insistence, he begrudgingly got his truck back on the road.
After a three and a half hour trip, we pulled the convoy off the road, and downloaded our tracks for the final 3 kilometer march to the AA Horse staging area. All of the HETs, about 120 of them, became stuck in the soft, fine sand of the desert; we spent the rest of the night towing them out with our recovery vehicles. Once we arrived at the staging area, we spent 3 days combat loading our vehicles before the final move to our main assembly area.
Our move to the assembly area, about 4 miles due west, took about 6 hours. All
of our old M35A2 2 1/2 ton trucks became stuck in the sand about 3 or 4 times,
and had to be towed out. After having been in country not quite two weeks, I
was beginning to understand that there was nothing romantic or exotic about
this: this was just plain hard. "Welcome to Saudi Arabia," I thought
cynically.
