by Tom Clancy
“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 first 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 forces[34] — 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, wi
th 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).
The pain and suffering the troops endured during the early deployment was beyond belief. At some locations, there was triple bunking — three people sharing a single bed or cot in eight-hour shifts. Later, more people were added to the schedule by making room for sleeping under the bed. The Arab hosts in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman opened up their bases, schools, hangars, and homes to help out. Americans were being housed everywhere.
Yet there was caution. After the 1983 murder of 241 Marines in Beirut by a suicide bomber, hotels were seen as risky (especially by General Schwarzkopf, who had a mania against hotels, because of his fear of terrorists). Often a person would arrive late at night, get bused to a beautiful hotel, enjoy the luxury of a bath with a fine meal and television in an air-conditioned room, only to get dumped in the desert the next day. There were thousands of stories like this.
And there were many snafus — at customs checkpoints, for instance, where vital munitions convoys would be held up at a border by bureaucratic agents. Customs people in every country feel they work for nobody, and that everyone is a smuggler, but this is especially true in countries that forbid the drinking of alcohol and consider bra ads pornography. Better to be slow than to take any risks. A shipment of munitions? Those papers had better be in order.
Then there were the communications shortfalls. Americans are used to telephones and communications access. Now a soldier was deployed to a nation where he needed permission for an international telephone line. He landed and went to the nearest telephone, perhaps a few miles away, so he could call home. But he couldn’t get an operator who knew who he was and where he was trying to call. His frustration level was instantly sky-high… even as he recalled what they’d told him when he’d boarded the aircraft about being ready to fight the minute he hit the ground.
★ One of the first deploying USAF units was a support group from the 363d Tactical Fighter Wing at Shaw AFB, South Carolina, who had been on alert to deploy since the crisis had begun. After their F-16s had roared off into the night, the maintenance teams had been loaded onto C-141s en route to who knew where. Hours later — all spent in the hold of a cramped, freezing cargo plane — they landed at midnight somewhere in the Arabian Gulf.
As it happened, their F-16s were at Al Dhafra, and this C-14 had landed at the old military base in Abu Dhabi, about ten miles away, because the ramp at Al Dhafra was full and could not accept them. Nobody in the airplane knew that.
Peering out the aircraft’s door, the thirty men and women from the 363d found only a dark, empty parking ramp, with hellishly hot desert air blasting them in the face. In the distance, they could see the lights of a city.
They climbed down the boarding stairs, and somebody thrust bottled water at them. Not knowing what else to do, they stowed it somewhere, then turned their attention to unloading the equipment they carried on board — spare aircraft engines, toolboxes, weapons, and spare parts. Airpower, as the United States practices it, brings it all — enough for thirty days of fighting until the supply lifeline can be built.
Meanwhile, all around them were guys in white robes and scarves over their heads: pleasant guys, as it happened, who spoke excellent English, though not the drawling southern dialect these folks from South Carolina were used to.
Before long they learned that they’d landed in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and were to be bused to Al Dhafra, the military air base near Abu Dhabi, the capital of the emirate with that name. They were quickly packed into a small but clean bus. Then they headed out on a multilane freeway into the desert night — away from the city! Unaccustomed to the 110˚F nighttime heat (it was even hotter during the day, and more humid), they began to drink the bottled water that had been thrust at them earlier, grateful for the relief.
The bus driver, a nice fellow, was from Ethiopia and spoke very little English. After a time, he turned off the highway and onto a dirt road that quickly became part of the vast desert. Up and down they bounced, over sand dunes and rock-strewn waste, until finally the bus came to a halt. “All out here,” the driver ordered. The miserable band, loaded down with duffel bags and personal weapons, straggled out of the bus and assembled somewhere in the hot desert nowhere. Then off went the bus.
At that point, the lieutenant in charge, a young man named Tom Barth, took charge. Charge of what? Charge of whom? Where? Going where? It was pitch black, and the questions from the others started coming. But no answers were apparent.
Soon wild desert dogs began to circle the group, attracted to the smell of food from a few MREs (Meals Ready to Eat — field rations of questionable taste) and leftover in-flight meals. The big question was who was most afraid of whom, but the people did a better job of bluffing, so the wild dogs kept their distance.
Later, from the direction of the city lights they could still see over the horizon, a white cloud started to form. Was it a gas attack from invading Iraqi forces?
Actually, no.
Though this hearty band didn’t know it, they were in fact hundreds of miles south of Kuwait, just a few miles from the UAE coast, and they were observing the sea fog roll in. But just to be on the safe side, the lieutenant had everyone check their gas masks. Though their full chemical protection suits were loaded on the cargo pallets on the ramp next to the aircraft, they all carried a gas mask for just the threat that now seemed to be confronting them.
The fog did not reach them, but in the distance a new terror appeared — the lights of an oncoming car, bouncing from dune to dune. Up drove a
dark Mercedes with tinted windows. Terrorists? It stopped, and the electric window slid noiselessly down. Tom Barth, fully aware that it was his responsibility to keep this band alive, ordered security policemen in the group to be ready to shoot, but to aim for the legs, in case this visitor wasn’t really a terrorist. Gathering up all his courage, Barth stepped forward to the open window and peered in. There he found a swarthy man with a large black mustache and cold dark eyes, and wearing one of those white robes.
The driver looked at him. “Are you Lieutenant Barth?” he asked politely.
“Yes, I am. Why?” Barth answered, in his most manly manner, greatly relieved.
The driver brushed off his questions and handed Barth a cellular phone.
Composing himself, he spoke into it. “Hello, Lieutenant Barth.”
Rapidly, an American on the other end replied, “Tom, where the hell are you?”
Though Barth had no clue, he did his best to explain. Finally, it was decided. They would just stay put, and someone would come and get them in the morning. Without a word, the Arab (just somebody from the UAE who was told to find the lost Americans) retrieved the phone, closed the tinted window, and drove off into the night, never knowing how close he came to being kneecapped by a terrified American Air Force lieutenant.
The next few hours passed slowly. There were complaints about how fucked up things were — and questions about where the women could go to the bathroom, because not all the bottled water turned into sweat. But then daybreak came, and all of a sudden, up drove the bus and the hugely smiling driver that had left them there the night before. He took the hearty band to a huge air base farther out in the desert, where they would spend the next few days sleeping on a hangar floor and eating MREs until Bill Rider could send tents and field kitchens to them.
They had plenty to do, as the F-16s from Shaw AFB needed to be turned around for combat air patrols or put on alert with air-to-ground munitions.