The very most important rule of military service is to never volunteer. Never, never, never. No matter how good a deal it sounds. Never. Look at it this was if it was that good a deal, they wouldn’t be asking you, now, would they? So when PJ asked for volunteers at the beginning of what looked to be a long, buy easy 12 hour shift (as we had no jet to work) there weren’t any takers.
“It’s a good deal guys, you’ll only have to work six hours…”
- Silence – “If I can’t get any volunteers I’ll have to pick people…”
Oh well, I was probably going to get ‘volunteered’ anyway… “Ok, I’ll do it.” That must have broken the ice because within a minute or two Ben Goynes had volunteered as well. PJ pulled us over to the side “Don’t worry about it guys, it is a good deal. Get your stuff and report up to the First Sergeant at the Orderly Room.”
From past experience, the ratio of good things, to bad things that resulted from a trip to the orderly room didn’t fall in our favor… When we arrived “the Shirt” was waiting for us.
“Hey, you must be the guys from Phase. What we need is to have a couple of armed people in Tent City, that way if somebody takes some shots at us, at least we’ll have somebody to shoot back.”
I wasn’t really concerned about a large scale attack against our base. We were pretty well defended between our SP’s, the Canadian ground troops doing airbase defense, and the Qatari’s Still, we'd been told that it was possible, in some opinions likely, that we would have individuals or small groups that would attempt to come over the fence. In my opinion, both snipers and mortars were probably even more of a worry.
The Shirt told us that as long as we weren’t sleeping, he didn’t really care what we were doing, whether it was just wandering around, or sitting in the Rec Center watching movies for our shift – which worked for me… He also asked that we also keep an eye inside tent city at some other things, over the previous few days a couple of cables powering several tents AC units had been found damaged and that there we a concern about possible sabotage. Of course, with the amount of voltage running through those lines, if someone actually attempted to hack through one with a knife, it would be probably be relatively easy to identify the culprit…
We each slung the M-16’s over our shoulders that we were handed, and were given 30 round clips, “Yeah, just come back if you need any more…” With that, and my probably 200 rounds of M-16 experience, we were set loose on Tent City.
People look at you completely differently when you’ve got a rifle over your shoulder and I didn’t even get a hundred feet before the first person stopped me and asked a question that I’d hear a lot that evening “Hey, what’s going on?”
In the end, it was almost like having a night off, I watched some TV, read a little, but spent the majority of the time going from hootch to hootch, talking to everybody. Occasionally I’d see Ben: (yelling down the path between tents)
“Hey Ben, have you seen any Iraqi’s?”
“Hell yes, I got a couple of them coming over the fence back there. How about you?”
‘Gentle’ Ben was one of the most ‘wide-open’ guys I’d ever met, he never stopped, and ran at top speed all of the time. One day while waiting for roll call at the start of our shift, Ben (who wasn’t tall) seemed to fly right over me to land on the shoulders of one of the unsuspecting wheel and tire shop guys - just to say ‘Hi!’. He was also always willing to help anyone out who needed it. Once at the end of a long day on which I was really struggling to safety-wire a JFS exhaust shroud (and had already sliced my knuckle open) Ben slid up on one of our rolling stools “Are you still in there? get your ass out of there and let me do that…”
“Just one for me over on the flightline side…”
“Well you’d better pick it up, how else are we going to have stories to tell the women when we finally get home…”
The evening of the sixteenth of January was a normal night. We’d finished our phase inspections, so work was going well. Our aircraft were all armed, ‘bombed up’, and were ready to go. The previous several days our pilots had been tasked with flying provocation missions up to the Kuwaiti and Iraqi borders. Most of these missions consisted of cruising up the Gulf and then accelerating towards the border, just to see what the Iraqi reaction would be – a combination of intelligence gathering (watching defensive radars and aircraft) and keeping the Iraqis awake and a little nervous. Our guys also said that if the Iraqi Air Force wanted to come up and fight, well, that would be all right too.
Yesterday was the day of the UN ultimatum for Iraq to leave Kuwait. It seemed that the war might be just days away. How many days, was open for discussion. Most of us thought that there would be several days or a week before anything would begin.
There wasn’t much going on tonight, I’d listened to the news on the shortwave, so I went to bed early. I don’t know what time it was, but I can remember being woken up. It was Mike from Transit Alert.
“It’s going to happen tonight. At midnight the Stealths and the Strike Eagles are going in.”
I don’t really remember having any reaction at all. Truthfully, I don’t think I was awake enough for it to really sink in.
These are 'unedited' chapters that I'm posting as I write. Some day I'll work them all in together...
