by Tom Clancy
Horner excused himself, ran back to the VOQ, and called Shaw AFB to set up a C-21 to leave about 10:00 A.M., to get him to Andrews by 11:30. As usual, he didn’t tell his wife. He knew that if he did, she would have to keep the secret, which was very difficult for such an open, friendly person, so he decided to keep the burden away from her.
Besides, he said to himself with a laugh, she thinks I’m an insensitive lout anyway.
★ The next morning at dawn, Chuck Horner’s F-16C leapt off the ground and soared up just as the orange ball of the sun broke the horizon.
Joy!
No matter how troubled he was, no matter how fearful or anxious, flying put his mind right. He couldn’t take his troubles with him in the jet. There was no time for extra thoughts, no room for distractions as he slipped past the tumbling bright clouds and shielded his eyes from the sun, feeling the incredible union with the beautiful, sleek jet to which he was strapped.
Shaw AFB was asleep when he landed. After the transit alert crew chocked the Lady Ashley and put her covers on, he gave her a parting glance, not knowing then that he’d never fly Lady Ashley again.[25] He threw his flight helmet, parachute harness, and G suit in the trunk of his staff car and left.
The drive home took him around the base golf course, where hackers were already out on the front nine. He could understand their eagerness. It was a beautiful South Carolina morning, and the course was lovely. Will I really be leaving all of this? he asked himself. And leaving Mary Jo yet one more time? He thought of the demands pilots asked of their wives: “Take care of the home, raise our children, and face the emergencies alone, while we chase around the world. And always be ready for the visit — you know the one.”
Mary Jo knows what’s going on in Kuwait, he thought. She knows I’m likely to go if a war starts. But it’s still not fair to her.
When Mary Jo met Chuck at the door, the questions started, as they always did when they met after an absence. But Horner could give her no answers. He was returning from a chat with the President of the United States and was about to leave home for an undetermined amount of time in a strange and distant country, but he still couldn’t talk about it. She was still asking questions as they kissed hello. He told her he needed to pack some things, and she helped him pack enough underwear and clothes for a two-day trip. Nine months later, when he returned, the shorts were worn out. As he packed, he whistled and sang the way he always did when he was about to go off and slay dragons. Mary Jo always hated it when he packed, because she knew that she was going to be left behind.
★ When General Schwarzkopf told Horner he could take one person on the trip to Saudi, he probably expected him to bring his aide, Jim Hartinger, or his executive officer, Colonel George Gitchell. But Chuck Horner’s thought process was different. He said to himself, If you’re going to a war, and you can only take one person, who would you take?
The answer was obvious — his logistician. There are three kinds of staff people who are never heroes, but without whom a commander is dead in wartime: his intelligence, communications, and logistics chiefs. He can limp along in peacetime with less than capable people in those slots, but he’s dead if there is any weakness there when the shooting starts. There is great truth in the old adage that amateur warriors study tactics, and that professionals study logistics. So Horner called his own command’s logie, Colonel Bill Rider, and told him to pack his bags for the Middle East, and to be prepared for the deployment and beddown of some fighter squadrons in the CENTCOM area of responsibility.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, “I’ll meet you at the plane.”
★ The next morning, Chuck Horner woke up the way he had many times before, eager as a bird dog before a hunt.
His goodbye kiss with Mary Jo was as special as he could make it. She still didn’t know he was leaving for war, and he wasn’t sure himself; but he couldn’t get out of his head the times when he’d left for Vietnam. Each time they’d both had serious doubts about whether they would see each other again. When he’d gone as a “Wild Weasel,” the odds had been high that he’d be killed or captured, leaving her with two kids and rapidly receding support from her Air Force family.
This day, he knew, was another such moment of truth in their marriage.
A terrible moment, as always. “There’s no justice when you marry a military person,” he observes. “Words are useless. So you just embrace and kiss each other. The pilot’s anxious, nervous, and raring to go; and she’s jealous because of all that, yet she loves him anyway, just as he loves what he does. Tears are not permitted. He can’t cry because he’s never learned how, and she can’t because it hurts too much. Besides, there will be plenty of time later during the dreary loneliness she’ll endure. So it’s an ‘I Love You’ kiss, then he’s off to somewhere that he can’t even tell her, and she’s off to play the organ at the nine o’clock Protestant service. He climbs in the car with a prayer, ‘God give me time in Heaven to be a loving husband, because I sure as hell have been a shit to her on earth.’ ”
★ This is getting to be a habit, Horner thought when the C-21 disgorged him and Bill Rider at Andrews AFB.
Waiting in the distinguished visitor lounge was Lieutenant General John Yeosock, commander of the United States Third Army, which was the Central Command ground component, known as ARCENT. He, too, had the hunting dog look.
Yeosock was a soldier other soldiers referred to as “a piece of work.” He had an IQ of about 140 and a homely face; he was totally selfless and impossible not to like. His only vice was cigars, expensive ones that came in metal tubes. John and Betta Yeosock had been at the National War College with the Horners and the Powells, and they’d all remained friends afterward. Even today, Horner and Yeosock still call Colin Powell “Your Highness.”
Soon they went out to meet Schwarzkopf ’s assigned VC-135, a military version of a Boeing 707, from the 89th Airlift Wing. Then the three of them piled into a car and headed for the Pentagon. During the ride, Horner learned that confusion had already set in. Who was going to Saudi Arabia? What was the agenda? What authority did they have to negotiate agreements? They didn’t even know whose airplane they would take. As he listened to all this, Horner kept silent, but it seemed a little disorganized for a military operation.
Since it was Sunday morning, the Pentagon was almost empty. They went directly to Secretary Cheney’s office, where Powell was waiting. As usual, the Chairman charmed everyone, especially Yeosock and Horner, because of their time in school together. A ready laugh, a hug; the man knew no strangers.
Then the discussion started. At first, it was, “Cheney’s going. No, Powell’s going. No, Cheney’s going.”
Then, “We’re going to take Schwarzkopf ’s airplane. No, Cheney’s airplane.”
Why was there all the confusion and changes of mind, especially after Camp David, when the President clearly seemed to want Cheney to talk to King Fahd? Horner had no idea.
As the powerful flew in and out of the office and talked on the phone, Horner and Yeosock chatted, mostly about how confused and screwed up the powerful seemed. They both wondered what the Saudis would think about all this, especially considering that Americans often accused them of being slow to reach a decision. They’d probably get a laugh out of watching the Americans run around in circles.
Since smoking in government buildings was prohibited, Yeosock spent some time in the bathroom. You can reasonably assume it was thick with blue cigar smoke before he left.
Finally, the powerful came out of Cheney’s office and seemed to know what was going to happen: Cheney would lead, and they’d go on his airplane. Colin Powell wished all of them the best of luck and they were off.
The trip to Jeddah was long and uneventful. The jet was a standard Boeing 707 that had been reconfigured with a private, simulated-wood-paneled “office” for VIPs just behind the cockpit. It took up about a third of the cabin space, with a double door opening toward the aft two-thirds of the aircraft; an aisle along the side of the
aircraft connected the aft cabin with the plane’s entrance behind the cockpit. The VIP office had large leather chairs, a sofa that opened up into a bed, a small desk, and a telephone hooked up to the communications panels forward in the cockpit area. This let the VIPs talk with anyone in the world on encrypted telephones with the highest levels of security. The lesser lights were seated behind the office in rows of large, comfortable, business class-type airliner seats. Aft of that was a small galley where a host of stewards heated frozen TV dinners (worse, if you can imagine, than standard airline meals).
During the flight, General Schwarzkopf frequently disappeared into Cheney’s stateroom, and these visits fascinated the ordinary mortals. From where Horner sat, he could see the CINC through the open double doors squatting down next to the Secretary’s easy chair, talking with great animation and intensity. Whatever they were talking about, the CINC chose not to reveal it, so Horner and Yeosock just chatted, read, and tried to get some rest.
JEDDAH
They landed in Jeddah at 4:00 P.M. on Monday, August 6, and a blast of hot air hit them the minute the aircraft door came open. It was a not totally unwelcome reminder to Horner that he was in a country that he loved and among people that he loved. He was looking forward to seeing and working with his friends again.
Chuck Horner relates how his association with the Arab world first began:
Though I’d met a good many Arabs before 1981, the first senior Arab Air Force officer I got friendly with was a tall, taciturn brigadier general named Ahmed Behery, who was then the base commander at Taif. [26] By 1990, Behery had become commander of the RSAF, the Saudi Air Force.
In 1981, Behery was escorting an energetic, fast-talking prince, whose name was Bandar bin Sultan (then a colonel in the Saudi Air Force and a pretty fair F-15 pilot, and more recently the Saudi ambassador to the United States and a major player in the Gulf War), on a visit to Nellis AFB. Major General Bob Kelly, the Fighter Weapons Center commander, held a garden party in their honor, and the wing commander of the tenant wing at Nellis, the 474th TFW, Colonel Chuck Horner and his wife Mary Jo, were invited. The generals and host wing commander clustered around Bandar, who is extremely charming, and so I felt it wise to converse with the equally tall and distinguished, but much quieter, commander from Taif. Mary Jo and I walked over to him and introduced ourselves.
Behery is extremely shy, but not because other people frighten him. He is just reluctant to meet and greet. We made small talk for a while, until Mary Jo, in her blunt Iowa manner, broke in with some gripes against Arab men that had long rankled her. A particular incident still burned: During the days I was the wing commander at Williams AFB, we used to go to the graduation dinners for the foreign military sales training classes in the F-5E. At one of these, Mary Jo tried to strike up a conversation with an Arab student, either Saudi or Jordanian. Mary Jo is so open and friendly, it’s hard for her to grasp how anyone can fail to respond to her overtures. So when this one did — he was off-puttingly distant, stiff, and unfriendly — she took that as a characteristic of the people. I suspect the man was more concerned that she was the wing commander’s wife than that he was talking to a woman without a veil. Nonetheless, she came away with the idea that Arab men patronize women.
When Mary Jo concluded, “So you see, General Behery, Arab men are stuck up and snooty when they talk to me, and that’s why I don’t like to talk to them,” he actually beamed with amusement. And his good humor remained as he explained to both of us why Arab men are somewhat aloof when dealing with Western women (they are not used to the aggressive behavior of strangers, especially women). Then, becoming quite serious, he gave us a nutshell lecture about the differences between the Arab and the Western view of women.
What he had to say was no surprise — the usual line that in his culture women are held in high esteem, much as they were in our South before the Civil War. For that reason, it is considered important to protect the sanctity of women, and ill-mannered for a man to talk directly to another man’s wife. That is the reason for the veils and flowing garments. They protect women, he told us, much as one protects honey from flies by placing a cloth over the bowl. And yet he didn’t stop there. The time he had spent in the United States had made him familiar enough with our culture to be aware that our women resented the kind of protection Arab men and women take for granted. He knew that what was protection for an Arab woman was suppression for an American. And he had no problems with that. In fact, Behery saw both cultures for what there were: both had good and bad elements. Good people in each culture who did the right thing for the right reasons would make each culture work, while bad people would screw things up, no matter where they were.
The conversation, which went on for hours, was a little revelation — not because he’d told us anything new, but because he was truthful, open, sensitive, and fair. I loved his honesty, insight, and understanding. Or as Bill Creech used to say, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.” In this case, the impression Behery made was decidedly favorable.
Break Break. It was now seven years later. I had been told I was going to replace Bill Kirk as Ninth Air Force commander, but it had not been announced. Bill Kirk was about to take our boss, Bob Russ, around the Middle East, so Bob could see how the TAC men and women were living and serving in those countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, and Pakistan. Since this would become my beat, Bob took me along. While I was in Saudi, I met Behery again, and was even more impressed when I saw him on his own turf.
Americans have a tendency to look down on other people (I’ve done that myself). But when we meet foreigners who exceed our rather low opinion of what they should be, we tend to go too far in the other direction and get overawed by them. Let me tell you, all the Arab leaders that I met, colonel and above, were very impressive, and not because I was overawed — Turki at Dhahran, Sudairy in Riyadh, Henadi at RSAF, on and on. These men are truly exceptional individuals, regardless of where they are from.
In my journeys around Saudi Arabia, I found a far different country from ours. It’s quiet, for one thing — a quiet that comes from the isolation; there aren’t many people there; so for a New Yorker it must be hell on earth, but for an Iowan it is natural. The food is strange but good. And I love the exotic customs and traditions, the extremely handsome architecture, the smells of spice. The weather is hot and dry, to be sure, but I can take that. You don’t miss our television; and besides, you get to hear prayer call now and then during the day, especially before sunup and at sunset. This is beautiful, even though you don’t understand the words. And finally, the tradition of the desert demands that hosts honor guests; there is nothing that competes with the welcome provided by an Arab host; he is delighted to honor his guest. Truly all that he has is at your disposal. Your home is his home.
Saudi Arabia is not my land or my home, but I have loved it more than I could love many of the places where I’ve visited or lived in my own country. A binding and genuine friendship with the Saudi land and people has grown steadily over the years and has touched me deeply.
After I took over Ninth Air Force, I made regular visits to the Middle East to visit my troops and see to their needs, to work issues associated with the prepositioned materials in the region, and to forge relationships with the leaders of the various nations’ air forces. Sometimes these negotiations were very difficult, yet they were always carried on with mutual respect. Each side knew the other was only trying to do the best for his country — certainly an honorable motive.
I sensed, too, that they held (and still hold) the USAF in high respect, and I made sure we did nothing to weaken that esteem. So when one of our people committed an unlawful act, I took quick action — not primarily to come down hard on whoever was responsible, but to make sure that the countries involved know that Americans respect their national sovereignty.
In time I began to read all I could about the region and came to appreciate the long and rich history that goes back well before Euro
peans were still clubbing supper and living in skin shelters. I studied Islam and discovered its similarities with Judaism and Christianity. There is a common heritage that is lost when the doctrinaire types feud over ideas that are human interpretations of what God is all about, not what God thinks he is all about. Most significantly, I discovered that Arabs respect Americans because we work hard, we honor our own religion (or at least most of us do), and because we have for the most part dealt with them honorably.
On numerous occasions in those years, I negotiated with the various nations in the region about cooperation in the event of a crisis there. And we were involved in a number of major operations, such as protection of the oil fields and refineries during the Iran-Iraq War and the tanker reflagging and escort of Kuwaiti tankers down the Arabian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz during the time when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were attacking them. I also helped out where I could: I spoke in their war colleges, I attended joint and combined exercises in the region, and I visited their people in the United States… little things and big things, because it was my job and because it was the right thing to do.
I soon became sensitive to the way Arabs have been presented to the American people. Not well. It’s another zero-sum game. Because we’re pro-Israel (and I have no quarrel with that), we look down on the Arabs. When was the last time Chuck Norris fought a terrorist who wasn’t Asian or Arab? Ignorant terms like “Islamic fundamentalist terrorist” fill our newspapers — as though all Muslims were fundamentalists and terrorists. Sure, I have met Arabs I don’t like or trust. And there are as many dumb son-of-a-bitch Arabs as there are in any culture, but the Arab military officers I have worked with have earned my respect, and I hope they hold me in the same regard.
Trust takes time, but when you have it, you have a wonderful gift. I cannot tell you how binding the emotions are between me and my close Saudi and other Arab friends; it is genuine and deep.