by Tom Clancy
A few blocks down from the USMTM compound was the beautiful brown-and-blue marble headquarters of the Royal Saudi Air Force. Horner would make his office here after General Schwarzkopf arrived. Along the way were hotels and upscale shops, including a Holiday Inn just past Suicide Circle, the roundabout immediately south of the RSAF headquarters, and so called because to enter it was to take one’s life in one’s hands, and many old buildings in the process of being torn down. Farther down Airport Boulevard were the buildings that housed the Royal Saudi Land Forces (RSLF) and the Royal Saudi Naval Forces (RSNF ). At last, the gleaming white MODA facility rose up on the right, about two and a half miles from the air base. It was a seven-story office building, with a high wall around it and a single square tower rising up in front. A much larger, three-winged building extended back from the street, and was backed by a five-tiered parking lot.
At about 3:00 P.M., the car carrying the American party turned in past the guards and into the parking garage in the rear. From there, they were escorted to General Hamad’s office, where Hamad and the Saudi chiefs of services—land, sea, air, and air defense—were waiting.
During the walk through the lovely, spacious MODA complex, Don Kaufman offered a few suggestions:
First: the MODA building would be a good place for CENTCOM Headquarters.
A terrific idea, it instantly flashed on Horner. In that way, CENTCOM could be collocated with the Saudi JCS equivalent . . . and in so doing they’d be going a long way toward avoiding some of the major mistakes of Vietnam, where—except for some showcase “combined headquarters” and “liaison groups”—the Americans had remained apart from the South Vietnamese. Horner wanted everyone acting as one team: all equals, no “big brother come to save your ass” act.
Second: there was a newly completed underground command center at MODA; Horner should ask General Hamad to let CENTCOM use it.
Third: Horner would be welcome to use USMTM staff ’s small suite of rooms at MODA for his advance headquarters.
All three sounded so right to Horner that he enlisted Kaufman on the spot as his chief of staff.33
A few moments later, they were shown into Hamad’s conference room. Since the start of the crisis, Hamad had been meeting daily with his service chiefs; the Americans were now to be part of such a meeting. Around the large table sat Horner’s closest Saudi friend, Lieutenant General Behery, head of the Royal Saudi Air Force. Next to him sat the Saudi land force commander, Lieutenant General Josuf Rashid, and the commander of the Saudi naval forces, Vice Admiral Talil Salem Al-Mofadhi. Also present was the head of MODA Plans and Operations, Major General Jousif Madani. And finally, to General Hamad’s left, was a man Horner didn’t yet know, Lieutenant General Khaled bin Sultan, who at the time was the commander of the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces, and was soon to become the Saudi military commander and Schwarzkopf ’s coalition equal.
Khaled, another, older son of Prince Sultan, was a big man, well over six feet tall and weighing two hundred-plus pounds, with a black mustache and dark hair combed straight back. He’d attended Sandhurst, Great Britain’s West Point, and spoke English and French fluently.
Khaled (as Horner was to learn very shortly) was a forceful man—probably due to his Sandhurst training. Instead of the bobbing-and-weaving style of most Arabs—who were so polite you couldn’t tell what they were for or against—he was direct. With Khaled, you knew where you stood, which made it much easier to work with him than with most Arabs.
Everyone shook hands all around, and after some polite remarks, got down to business. Two or three people on the USMTM staff gave the group the same briefings Cheney had given the King, including intelligence photos. There wasn’t much new there: the Iraqis were in Kuwait, much of Kuwait was in Saudi Arabia, and there were scarcely any serious military forces to stop the twenty-seven Iraqi divisions then in Kuwait from swinging south. For now, however, these seemed to be digging in on the border. The implication was that they weren’t planning an immediate attack. On the other hand, a military person plans to counter capability and takes little solace in intent. The military has been fooled too often.
Horner then gave to the assembled Saudis a brief rundown of the visit to Jeddah—the reason for it, Bush’s instruction to find out the King’s needs and wishes, as well as some insight into what had taken place at the meeting with Sultan that morning and what was likely to happen during the next few weeks:
As a result of the King’s invitation to U.S. military forces, U.S. Marines from the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade would soon be arriving in Jubail; meanwhile, the 82d Airborne would be moving into Dhahran, followed by the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and the 101st Air Assault Division. Fighter squadrons would be going to every major Saudi air base. The 1st TFW F-15Cs and 552d AWCW E-3 AWACS aircraft were already en route. The Kingdom was about to receive hundreds of thousands of Americans: an urgent response to the military threat, but also an unwanted disruption to a culture vastly different from that of the United States.
Most of these generals had attended U.S. higher military schools at Fort Leavenworth or Maxwell AFB, so they understood the enormity of this deployment. However, none of them there—including Chuck Horner—had ever experienced such a movement in real life. He was ready for mass confusion, and he was not surprised when it hit full force.
At that point, the number one Saudi concern reared up. General Hamad broached it as if he were reading a script.
“Chuck, you’re not going to deploy women, are you?”
It was more a plea than a question.
“General Hamad,” Horner answered, “you know our services are totally integrated, that women make up ten to twenty percent of the units, and that even if we decided to prevent women from coming to the Kingdom, we couldn’t do it because it would make our units combat-ineffective.”
Hamad knew all this, and Horner knew he knew. They had worked this issue for the past ten years, as women assigned to AWACS had deployed to Saudi Arabia.
“Well, Chuck,” General Hamad pleaded earnestly, “I know you are not going to let your women drive.”
Here he was also well aware that women assigned to AWACS drove when they were on duty, in uniform, if their job required it. Sure, there were occasions when women drove while off duty or not in a uniform, but Horner had never heard about it, and therefore, in the logic of the Saudis, it didn’t happen.
“General Hamad,” Horner spoke softly, “these women will be leaving their homes, and in many cases their children, to come to the aid of your nation. Some of them may very well shed their blood, give up their lives in the defense of the Kingdom. If their military duties require them to drive, then of course they will drive.”
For a time they were at an impasse, until the Land Force Commander, Josuf Rashid, came to the rescue. He asked some questions, his face stern but not angry. It was no time for warmth. There was too much to be done and too little time.
“Chuck, let me get this straight. You intend to deploy women as part of your forces?”
“Yes, sir,” Horner replied.
“These women may have military duties that require them to drive cars and trucks?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will these women drive cars and trucks when off duty?”
Seeing where he was going, Horner replied immediately, “Of course not! Your laws and customs do not permit women to drive in the Kingdom, and we are sworn to obey your laws and respect your customs.”
“Will these women wear uniforms when on duty?” he continued, apparently satisfied.
“Of course they will.”
He smiled broadly. It was as if a curtain had parted. “General Hamad,” he said, “you don’t have a problem. Chuck is going to deploy women with the American units. They will respect our laws about driving. During the military duties, they may have to drive; but they will be in uniform, so they are not women, they are soldiers.”
Everyone nodded at this wisdom, and relief filled the room. The f
irst crisis of the new alliance had been avoided.
On to the next crisis—this one instigated by Chuck Horner.
“General Hamad,” he said, “I think we should collocate our military headquarters.” He quickly added, “Could we look at your new command center in the basement as a place to set up the central combined headquarters?”
Discussing combined command arrangements this soon was very difficult for the Saudis to handle, but even more bothersome was the prospect of hundreds of American men and women in their new headquarters building. Both Horner and Hamad were on uncertain ground . . . except that Horner was charging ahead, while Hamad was wondering how much he could agree to.
At that moment, the meeting switched to what Americans had come to call “Channel Two.” When Arabs changed from English to Arabic, they were going to “Channel Two.” Since Horner and the other Americans already had some experience in the Kingdom and knew some elements of the language, most of them could understand the general drift of a Channel Two discussion. This one seemed to go back and forth over two questions: whether to combine headquarters and whether to let the Americans in the building, especially the secret Command Center.
General Hamad picked up the phone and made a call, probably, Horner guessed, to check with his boss, Prince Sultan. A few brief words in Arabic indicated that General Hamad could not get through to His Royal Highness. Back to English and those at the table.
“Chuck,” he said, “I don’t know about using the command center. You see, it’s brand new, and not all the phones and communication equipment are installed.”
In Saudi Arabia, you seldom get a direct no. It is considered impolite. Instead, you hear excellent reasons why it is not possible at this time to reach a decision.
Just then, the man Horner had never met, the head of the Royal Saudi Arabian Air Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Khaled, went to Channel Two and delivered an outburst in Arabic to General Hamad. Horner roughly translates it as something like this:
“Boss, this is bullshit. The Iraqis are on the border, and we’re fencing words about using one stupid command center. We need to get off our asses, and, with all due respect, sir, I’m going to see what can be done.”
He then threw his notepad onto the table and charged out of the conference-room door. The room grew quiet, and for a while everyone talked about more mundane matters. But everyone around the table, including Horner, was more than a little dumbfounded by the force of his departure. Saudi Arabia is a most polite society, and the Arabs are extremely deferential toward officers of senior rank. In a second, Khaled went from a three-star general to a prince. And it took some time for everyone else to note the title change. When he reappeared and sat down, he was a subordinate general once more, but the prince had obviously made a phone call to put the train back on the track.
Next, as if by magic, General Hamad’s phone rang. The conversation that followed took some time, and it was, at least on this end, very respectful. When Hamad hung up, he smiled and turned to Horner.
“Why don’t we adjourn and go down and look at the command center?” he said.
Within minutes, the group was headed down the elevator to the two-story underground complex Horner would soon set up for General Schwarzkopf and his staff. Though he had no way of knowing it then, he would visit this command center every night he was in Riyadh, for the next very long nine months.
★ It goes without saying that this meeting was important. It set the stage for Horner’s own relations with the Saudis as Commander before General Schwarzkopf ’s arrival and as CENTAF Commander; and of course it had a large effect on the dynamic of U.S.-Saudi relations throughout the Gulf crisis. Even though the themes touched on that afternoon were few—women soldiers and use of the MODA Command Center—the consequences were large.
These themes, in fact, by metonymy, spoke for much, much more. They were focal points for a thousand other themes—telephones, rental cars, hotel rooms, basing, training ranges, port facility access, ramp space, airspace, storage areas, sharing of ammunition, on and on. Not the least of these issues was what military people call status of forces34—something never explicitly discussed but always in the back of everyone’s minds. Fortunately, the USAF had been in the Kingdom for the past ten years, and the Air Force people had behaved themselves in an admirable manner. This trust built up over a decade made it possible for both parties to start the relationship without formal agreements, just the verbal agreements reached in Jeddah.
Nonetheless, there was real concern about all these Western troops barging into a deeply religious nation, a nation where customs changed very slowly and where no outside military force had been stationed since the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire. The women soldiers issue stood in for all that. It was, in reality, a status of forces agreement, and it said, “We will respect your laws, but you must understand that we are a force that recognizes a different role for women than your culture does.”
The ground was broken. At that first meeting, the Americans and the Saudis tackled the tough issues with prudence and sensitivity, and that—along with the forceful leadership of General Khaled bin Sultan—enabled all that followed. If Horner had gone into that meeting and asked for 5,000 international telephone lines, 50,000 rental cars, and food for 500,000 troops, the Saudis would have gone into shock. Moreover, he had no idea then what he actually needed, and no one then could have estimated the final size of the force that deployed to conduct the liberation of Kuwait.
The command center issue was slightly different. Horner and his American colleagues worked that as an entrée to establishing a combined headquarters. If he had asked the Saudis to establish a combined command, they would have rejected the idea. Instead, he’d asked if he could move his headquarters in where theirs was. This de facto established a combined headquarters, without the direct request to do so.
SHEPHERDING CHAOS
The next few days were frantic.
Major Fong, John Yeosock’s aide, moved Yeosock’s and Horner’s gear into the top floor of one of the buildings in the USMTM compound. Bill Rider, Horner’s logistics chief, moved into the Saudi Air Force Headquarters and began to set up the air headquarters with the support of his RSAF counterpart, Major General Henadi, a man of great intellect and energy.35
Nothing went smoothly, yet everyone made do, and somehow forced everything to work.
One small example: the club manager at the USMTM compound went from serving thirty lunches a day to serving three thousand, all in a matter of days. Everyone ate on paper plates and sat on the floor, but they survived.
Anyone walking into Horner’s cramped offices in MODA in those difficult days would have gazed on what looked like absolute confusion, but that wasn’t quite the reality. Confusion arises when you don’t know what you are doing, and they did. There was simply so much to do, however, that everyone was always busy.
Meanwhile, the difficulties of deploying thousands of troops with their equipment were immense, even while speed was vital—the intentions of the Iraqis on the northern side of the Saudi border were still unknown. There was no time for rest, and twenty-hour days became the norm, with naps whenever possible.
In the meantime, Schwarzkopf was directing the sequence of deployments from his headquarters in Tampa, Florida. The thousands of miles between the United States and the Middle East were quickly spanned by an air bridge of immense capacity. Back home, they called it “the Aluminum Bridge.” Around the clock, C-5 Galaxy and C-141 Starlifter aircraft were loading and taking off at bases all around the country. C-130 Hercules medium transports were beginning to head across the Atlantic, to distribute throughout Saudi Arabia, and the other countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, all of the supplies and people that were being sent. The main hub was Riyadh, but the routes covered Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Egypt. It was not unlike the Klong Courier in Thailand. One “line,” the Blue Ball Express, carried passengers, while the Red Ball Express carried cargo.
> Despite everyone’s best efforts, the next few days were utter chaos. The units back in the States were loading the equipment and supplies that they believed would be the most important, but their reporting system could not tell the people on the receiving end what would be dumped on the airport ramp or dockside in the Middle East; and no one knew where to send it to unload. In other words, the strategic airlift delivered their shipments to the wrong bases, and God only knew where equipment and supplies might be found.
Thus, a C-141 might take off from Pope AFB with 82d Airborne Division equipment on pallets. It would land in Spain or Germany to be unloaded, then part of the shipment would be loaded on a C-5, which would land at Riyadh. Meanwhile, the 82d was in Dhahran, in the northeast. So now the troops there were looking for their gear—which was sitting in a mountain of containers on the base at Riyadh—and Transportation Command was listing it as being en route. Try that times ten thousand, and at a growing rate, and you get an idea of what was going on.
(The C-130s turned out to be invaluable in straightening out the strategic airlift mess. Bill Rider just had the loads dumped in theater, then, while people there straightened things out, he sent the big jets back for more.)
In addition, every day people would arrive with no idea of the location of their unit. Thousands of men and women would land, starved for sleep, half-frozen from the long airplane ride, only to emerge in the blistering hot desert, given bottles of water, and asked, “Who are you and where do you want to go?” Most did not have a clue (in which case, if you couldn’t find your unit, you found someone who could use you until things got sorted out).