Unit takes a break along Tapline Road, Northern Saudi Arabia (DOD)

Roadtrip
("Tapline Rd was dangerous as fuck")

1Jan91. Happy New Year. Near Tent City we’d worked all night to get the vehicles packed up and ready to move. Only the drivers had gotten a bit of sleep. It was finally time to go.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the fact that our battalion advance party was part of a larger brigade advance party that included four other battalions; 2-67AR and 4-67AR, the brigade’s M1 Abrams tank battalions,  2-82FA, the M109 equipped artillery battalion and 54SUP, the brigade’s support battalion. Those were the major components of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3^rd Armored Division. Our individual battalion advance parties hadn’t interacted prior to deployment and there’d been almost no interaction in Tent City. CPT Hilferty must have gone to a few meetings though, because our group ended up marshaled up with the other battalion advance parties the morning that we were going to start out. It was still an hour or so before dawn.

As the weeks that followed went by, I would find that I didn’t get along all that well with most of the officers in the other battalion advance parties. I imagine, in retrospect, that they saw me as a young, over-zealous knucklehead. I perceived them to be slugs. They were right, of course. But so was I. Try as I might, once we were out in the desert, I could not get them to take security seriously.

I had been told that two route options were being explored, a 550 mile route and a 700 mile route. We chose the former, thank god. Each battalion was handed a one page route-map that attempted to depict the entire trip. Once we got out of Dammam, we had only three turns.

Go north up the highway for ~100 miles and turn left. Go northwest for ~250 miles on “Tapline Road” and turn left. Go south for ~100 miles, turn left off of the highway and go east into the desert. Drive for 40 miles cross-country and stop.

There were probably 60 total vehicles in our group. Other than Greg, I didn’t know any of the other officers, and it didn’t seem like there was any support for us en route. No maintenance support, no fuel, no place to turn off and call for help, nothing at all. I really had no idea what the hell I’d do when our trucks started breaking down; I had 2 radio sets that often worked; we were going to be driving on a road that ran parallel to enemy lines, and my group of Infantrymen had only the single magazine of ammunition that I’d borrowed from the maroon beenies. There were 4 compasses in our group, and we had enough food and water for a week. My imagination ran wild with all the ways this could go bad.

Greg and I said goodbye to the hilarious, albeit always irritated, CPT Hilferty.

To my surprise, as we stood ready near our vehicles ready to head out, a HMMV came by and gave us a box of 9mm and several boxes of 5.56mm ammunition. With it came an admonishment. “Do not issue this out. Leave it in the box."

As soon as the HMMWV was out of sight, I immediately called the NCOs together, broke open the box and issued them as much ammunition as they had magazines for. I told them, “don’t issue the ammo to your soldiers unless I tell you to.” SFC Maxwell and I carried a double load so that we’d be able to, in a pinch, offer loaded magazines to whomever was near us.

As dawn broke, the convoy finally started moving. So it started raining.

I was roiled by powerful emotions; a conflicting blend of anticipation and terror. The land was bewilderingly strange. The, largely featureless, desert seemed to go on forever in every direction. I was hugely excited about what I perceived to be the greatest adventure of a lifetime, and I was absolutely terrified that I’d fuck up and as a result one of my guys would get hurt. Some problem would hit us that I’d not seen coming, or hadn’t prepared for, or prepared them for, and someone would get hurt or worse. My imagination war-gamed endless problem scenarios and I constantly asked myself, “what can I do right now to avoid this problem scenario, three, twelve, or twenty-four hours from now?”

I was also imagining sudden crisis scenarios so that I might be able to have ready an immediate and useful reaction to execute. I talked to the SGTs and soldiers often about problem scenarios so that they too might be thinking situations through before-hand. I was trying very hard to pay exceedingly close attention to every little detail in my environment. The fear that one of my guys would get hurt because I didn't see something coming and therefore left them unprepared, haunted my every waking moment.

The rain was a surprise. It was chilly in the cool morning, yet it was nice to see the dust washed away. Pretty soon all of our gear was soaked, the HMMWVs and trucks not being very water tight. In the Infantry, rain is only your friend when you're sneaking up to an objective. Otherwise, rain is miserable. In the desert the rain made the sand clingy, so everything became filthy. At our first stop, the moist sand clung to our boots as if the water was glue. Each boot felt like it weighed five pounds. A huge amount of sand got tracked into the vehicles so they immediately became filthy inside too. Once I got back into my seat, within minutes, every inch of me was coated in cold, damp, abrasive, sand.

I noticed, as we headed north on the Coast Road towards our left turn on to Tapline Road, that spaced every kilometer or so was a big sign telling military convoys to “turn left on to Tapline Road”. The last of the half dozen signs said “Turn Left or enter a Free Fire Zone”. “Dang”, I thought to myself, “you don’t see that every day.”

It was mid-day when we made our left turn on to Tapline Rd. This highway would become legendary for its hazards. Tapline Rd is a one thousand mile long, two line highway built on top of a berm a couple meters above the desert floor. Running parallel with the highway are some large oil pipes, half concealed by drifts of sand, that run along this northern border of Saudi Arabia. On both sides of the road, every hundred meters or so, were abandoned vehicles, many rolled and/or burned. The rolled vehicles were surrounded by debris fields. A thousand miles of crashed vehicles.

Tapline Rd was dangerous as fuck. Those abandoned cars and trucks represented probably a decade’s worth of high speed crashes. The US lost all sorts of soldiers on Tapline Rd. Our ~60 vehicle convoy probably stretched for two miles. Civilian cars and trucks routinely passed us on both left and right. On the right there was a car-width dirt shoulder but beyond that was the downward slope to the desert floor. If a vehicle got on that slope and the driver reacted wrong, the vehicle would roll. If your vehicle ended up moving off the shoulder to the berm’s slope, one had to carefully keep going down. If you tried to correct aggressively to get back on the shoulder, you were doomed.  

Our convoy was doing probably 40mph. Roughly a third of the convoy was the old Deuce-and-a-half truck, a designed dating back to World War Two, and many of the vehicles pulled trailers. There wasn’t a steady stream of cars and trucks passing us, but the cars, as they approached the trail HMMWV, were all doing >100mph and the trucks almost as fast. When you're doing barely 40mph in a big lumbering beast full of people, it's exciting when another car suddenly appears in your rearview mirror doing 120mph.

The passing cars and trucks seemed disinclined to slow down so they tried to roar past our convoy, on our left in the oncoming lane or on our right on the shoulder, without any diminishment of speed. Yes, the cars would happily pass us on the shoulder at >100mph. Sometimes when an 85mph truck was passing us on the left, a 120mph car would head even farther left for the left shoulder to pass it, or zig thru our formation, actually between two of our trucks, to the right shoulder to pass. Then the 120mph car would zag left back thru our formation to the oncoming lane to continue passing the convoy.

Our drivers just maintained speed, spacing, and their lane, and hoped to survive. The passengers, me among them, because we weren’t at the controls, were even more scared. But, trying to set a good example as a leader, I couldn’t just close my eyes, curl up into a fetal position and whimper. I “might” get killed, but reacting poorly would result in “certain” humiliation. I tried to keep myself still so there’d be no obvious signs of cringing. I didn't say much. My driver's attention bandwidth was already max'd out. Occasionally I spoke words of encouragement in a tone carefully controlled to radiate confidence and conceal my terror.  It was like something out of a Mad Max movie, without the leather and pretty girls.

Then there was the oncoming traffic. There were times when traffic moving in our direction occupied both lanes and both shoulders. That's four abreast on a two lane highway. The oncoming traffic occasionally had two lanes occupied and sometimes three. Obviously a two lane highway allows for east and westbound traffic to pass each other. However, on that same highway, three cars abreast traveling east cannot pass three cars abreast traveling west. Since it was all happening at high speed, any car could rapidly change their mind as to which position, of the three or four abreast on the two lane highway, they wanted to take and make an aggressive lateral move that took everyone by surprise. It was total madness.

In the movie Tron the protagonist is playing a video game, with the usual death and violence, and all the sudden he’s “in the game”. What was blithely accepted as abstract violent entertainment a moment prior, is all the sudden terrifyingly real and dangerous. That is what Tapline Road was like. After spending years driving in western countries where traffic was reasonably cooperative and death-averse, Tapline Road was like being in a full-realism video game because barely controlled tons of steel barely missing each other at rates of closure often over 200mph just didn't seem real.    

Tapline Road would only get worse. In that first trip we were a big convoy so no one really expected us to move over. That lent a degree of predictability to the impromptu somewhat cooperative effort that allowed four vehicles in one direction to pass through four vehicles moving in the other direction. All this happening at speeds >100mph and on a two lane road elevated on slopes likely to roll any car that used too much shoulder. Later, we would be solo or a pair of vehicles. That was much harder because then the locals expected you to know their plan and get out of the way. I was a lot closer to death on Tapline Rd then I ever was in the war that followed. The sides and top of a 6000lb HMMWV is a structure of vinyl and thin aluminum tubing that is no more stout then a camping tent. No one would survive a roll-over.

At around 0200, we pulled off of Tapline Road to catch some sleep.

I was totally exhausted. There’d been no sleep the night before, and the day on Tapline Rd had been stressful. The rain had moderated to a sprinkle. We placed our vehicles, unloaded and assembled some cots such that our vehicles would protect us from the insane Saudi vehicles that might, in the darkness, swan off the two lane highway down on to the desert floor at high speed.

All too aware that were were nothing more than a long walk from the Iraqi Army units to our north, I discretely handed a loaded magazine to each of the 5-18IN sentries. I quietly told them to give the loaded magazine to their relief guy, and they give them back to me in the morning. "Don't chamber a round unless you actually plan to shoot someone, and for the love of god," I told them "don’t let anyone outside of 5-18IN know."

I was woken by a sentry an hour later. Or it might have been a couple minutes, I wasn’t sure. The sentry told me that there was some MP walking around and he was pissed. I was so groggy with sleep that I couldn’t really function. I sat up on my cot and tried to make my brain work.

“So what is the problem again?” “He wants the convoy to move?” “Why?” “Well fuck him." The soldier gestured to the shape next to him. "Oh, that’s him next to you? Ok, well, nothing personal. Give me a minute.” Marshalling emergency reserves of self-discipline to get myself moving, I reached for my boots. "Let me get my boots on," I grumbled.

What I was really thinking was “Jesus Christ, there are 6 other officers in this group and I’m junior. Why the fuck is this my problem?”

I got up, tried to hide my intense aggravation, and talked to the 2 MPs. All I really wanted in the world was to go back to my nice warm sleeping bag.

The MPs wanted us back on the road. It seems that the convoy pulling off the road and setting up a safe laager site to get some much needed sleep required “authorization." I did not bother to ask, "How the fuck was an exhausted convoy, in the middle of fucking nowhere, going to get "authorization", to pull off this deathtrap of a road for some rest?" I've never really understood MPs. Everyone in the military is expected to apply common sense in carrying out their orders. Often one has to improvise a bit in order to arrive at the best solution. Somehow, however, I always get the lunatic MP that strictly adheres to his guidance no matter how poorly it fits the present circumstance. I was reminded of all the reasons Infantry types dislike MP’s.

It was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to talk the MPs into leaving us alone. I certainly didn’t have the authority make any commitments on the brigade's behalf, and nothing short of an attack was going to get us moving after just getting to sleep. This was one for the boss. So I made nice to the MPs while we moved through the darkness to where I thought Major Kinsey’s rack might be.

MAJ Kinsey was the guy actually in charge of the brigade advance party and he was awesome. His number two was CPT Jupiter who was also awesome. I kinda had the idea that the battalions had all sent officers that weren’t much good, but Brigade had done the opposite and sent total studs, and thank god for that. There on Tapline Road, however, I barely knew MAJ Kinsey yet. I was one of several in a group that he'd briefed prior to the convoy moving out. He had an intimidating, brooks-no-foolishness presence--and the MPs were bringing him foolishness.

MAJ Kinsey was old school. He was former enlisted so he was older than most. He was an engineer type and wore both of the most coveted uniform markings in the Army, the Ranger and Special Forces shoulder tabs. He radiated a “greatest generation” hard-as-woodpecker-lips gruff father sort of vibe. While the Advance Party was in the desert, he was my boss. It was kind of like if John Wayne was your dad. He was a big, very likeable, soft spoken guy, that loved you. But if you needed your ass beat, your ass would get beat. Not because he was mad at you, but because that was simply the lesson you needed in order to return to a more virtuous life. On several occasions when I was driving the other Advance Party officers bat-shit crazy, he managed some gentle mentoring that was really good for me.

Unfortunately wide awake now, I gently shook MAJ Kinsey’s shoulder to wake him up. I clearly said “Sir, it’s LT Gress” a couple times. I took a quick step back just in case he suddenly came up out of the deep sleep surprised and alarmed. MAJ Kinsey sat up and struggled to get his neurons firing, just like I had. I explained the concerns of the two MP’s behind me.

In the weeks that I was near MAJ Kinsey, with all the frustrations and knuckleheads we dealt with while our puny group was all alone in the middle of the desert, I never heard him raise his voice. He was very nice to the MPs. He told them that everyone was exhausted, they’d found a safe place to RON (Remain Over Night) and it would be very unsafe to try to get all the drivers back on the road right now. If the MPs felt otherwise, they were welcome to come back with their Battalion commander so the two of them could discuss it personally. It was a clever approach. MAJ Kinsey didn’t say anything even approaching “no”. He said, “bring your boss so we can talk about it"--and of course, there was no way they were going to do that.

Within minutes I was climbing back into my wet, and now also cold, sleeping bag.

Then the screaming started. It was two hours later, or maybe it was just a moment, I really couldn't tell.

“Jesus Christ”, I thought, “is it too much to fucking ask to get two hours sleep in two days?" Somebody was absolutely freaking out of their goddamned mind. I laid there and prayed that the near-hysterical shrieking had nothing to do with me. But the yelling kept getting closer to my rack. “How the fuck”, I thought to myself “is it possible that the yelling is actually traveling towards me?”. It was like being in a hotel in a strange town and you are awoken by a train. You lie there in bed hoping that the train tracks will carry the loud train away. Instead, as the volume gets louder and louder, the tracks seem to be bringing the train right to your room.

I remained motionless in my wet and sandy sleeping bag and wished fervently, "Please, oh please let this have nothing to do with me." I was then able to make out that the hysterical voice was now accompanied by other voices. I recognized some of those voices to be officers. I looked up and there were people surrounding my cot. “FUCK," I thought resignedly, and sat up.

I sat there for a couple minutes trying to massage sense into my brain. I put my boots on. Apparently some fucking DAT (Dumb-Ass Tanker) had figured out that 5-18IN sentries had live ammo and had positively freaked out of his mind.

Note that the nickname DAT is used good-naturedly. The DATs called us Infantrymen “Crunchies” for the sound made when they run over us. So when you read the word “DAT”, see a smile of sibling rivalry.

It seems that one of SSG Allen’s boys, and his squad was often a problem, was on security and had decided to chamber a round, the military phrase is “lock and load”, and the DAT captain had happened to notice. There was no question that my guy was an asshole and so was I. It’s human nature, though, to remember your triumphs clearly while your goat-screws quickly become soft-focus in recollection. So what sticks in my memory is not the ass-chewing I received for being a fuck-up, but how unsettling it was that the DAT officer expressed his concerns with ten minutes of screaming and carrying on.

I had accepted risk when I issued the ammunition despite clear guidance not to do so. Part of “accepting risk” is be willing to take the consequences if need be. It was not my day, I had insufficiently prepared my troops for the responsibility, and I got caught. This was MAJ Kinsey’s show so he’d have done the ass chewing, but I’ve no recollection of what actually happened. I imagine that he settled down the over-wrought DAT officer that wanted us to remain defenseless against the infiltrators from the fourth largest army in the world a stone's throw away, and promised him that he’d chew the ass of that reckless young Infantry LT. Then he would have gone to me and said something along the lines of “Jesus Christ Gress, can’t you let me get any sleep? I understand your intent, but for love of god can’t you be more clever about it?"

Unsurprisingly, I was directed to police up all the ammunition I had distributed. I left SFC Maxwell and I with our double-loads.

That was the introduction between me and the officers of the other battalions.

The next morning I talked with the 5-18IN(M) guys.

“I was given some ammo with clear instructions that it was not to be issued. But our route is parallel to a 100,000 enemy only 50 miles away and I didn’t want you to be defenseless. So I issued the ammunition to the NCOs. Then, when we pulled off the road to get some sleep, I issued ammunition to our security guys and told them “make sure you don’t get caught.” You guys are not DATs nor Support pukes. You are trained Infantrymen. I had confidence that you were mature and professional enough that you could be trusted with the live ammunition.

Within a couple hours of me issuing ammunition to the security force, someone was fucking around and got caught. We couldn’t even make it through one night without someone fucking up.

We are a family. We have to look out for each other. Now we’ve stepped on our dick and it’s going to be a helova lot harder for me to get away with disobeying guidance that makes you vulnerable. We’re a hop, skip and a jump from the Iraqi forces in Kuwait and we’re defenseless because we fucked up. Look out for each other. Look out for your family. Help each other make good decisions.”

After a fine breakfast from whatever field ration was handy, we continued our trek down the perilous Tapline Rd. Around noon we were intercepted by a “contact team” HMMWV sent from Division (3^rd Armored). Their mission was to lead us to the location in the desert that we knew only by “drive 150 miles south. Turn left into the desert and drive 40 miles”. These guys had a LORAN device that could sort of navigate in the desert. LORAN was a precursor to GPS. It was based on High Frequency (HF) transmissions, as in AM radio, from ground stations and was used by ships, post World War Two.

Once we finally turned off of the highway we drove thru the desert for 3hrs. There were no tracks, no trails, no dunes, no vegetation, no surface features of any kind. It was just flat arid earth with scattered small sharp rocks. It was kind of like one might imagine the surface of the moon, except in khaki. As we slowly drove single file in the long line, the contact HWWV made repeated relatively sharp turns. It was like being on a ship in a middle of an ocean and the ship suddenly turns hard to port and stays on the new course. One couldn’t help but wonder “why did we just turn sharply left?”

Not until later, when I got some time on a LORAN device, did I understand that they were somewhat fickle. They listened to transmitters positioned for ocean use, and we weren't in the ocean. Since there were few nearby transmitters, if you demanded precision, the LORAN could change it's mind as to your location, and therefore what direction you needed to go, in order to get to the Latitude and Longitude you’d entered as a destination. There was no Google Maps, nor even military grid references. LORAN used latitude and longitude. Had it not been for having read many dozen paperbacks of World War Two naval fiction, I'd have had no idea how latitude and longitude worked.

Finally the long convoy stopped. The vinyl passenger door of the lead HMMWV opened, the division officer got out and looked back as our long convoy closed up and halted. Vehicles with officers in them moved forward and we all collected around the division guy. He looked at us and said “here you are. This is the center of the 3Bde Assembly Area. I did a slow circle looking all the way to the horizon. There was nothing as far as the eye could see.

Near the 3^rd Bde, 3AD Advance Party site. Sharp rocks in foreground, a rare sighting of sheep and camels in the background. Look closely at the horizon and note the complete lack of terrain features. 

Photo of the surface of Mars. No, I'm not kidding, that's really Mars. A little blue in the sky and the Saudi desert is Mars. (JPL/NASA/Cornell)

We were about 50 mile southeast of King Khalid Military City (KKMC), a modern military facility of big office buildings, barracks and motorpools that would not have looked out of place in the American southwest. KKMC was the center of Saudi ground forces. As such it was "secret" and did not appear on maps of the day. For the next several weeks we would make daily runs to the US Army National Guard logistics units at KKMC to get fuel, water, chow, tires, spare parts, and everything else a small force needs to survive out in the middle of nowhere.

MAJ Kinsey went to a division command and staff meeting and came back to tell us that we were to get our support from “Logistics Base E”. Although this sounded like a specific place, it turned out that Log Base Echo was actually a big 400 square kilometer area, theoretically home to dozens of recently arrived units, none of whom for which we had precise locations. It was like being told there were a dozen warehouses that you needed to go to, but instead of being given addresses, being told only the name of the county.

Desert Convoys.
During the weeks that followed we tenaciously wandered around the 400 square kilometer trying to find those logistics units. We needed to pin down their location, and identify who they were and what they could provide. Further, we always needed a few things “right now”, so finding these units was more than just some abstract requirement.

Each day we sent small convoys of trucks and HMMWVs to the rumored location of this unit or that. For guidance we'd have something like "The site is five kilometers north of the Division Tactical Command Post (DTAC)." Then I'd do some 10th grade geometry and come up with a course of 15 kilometers at 45 degrees. Once we got to the approximate location of the unit we'd search until we found some cluster of tents, often not the unit we were looking for. These little groups of tents were always starved for information. Because our brigade advanced party had a representative going to the division command and staff meeting each night,  we usually had news and information for these lonely little groups of tents. Sometimes they asked for food and water that we might spare.  Ironically, they were the logistics units that we were supposed to be relying on.

Often these units would be able to tell us about their neighbors, always over the horizon, and be able to give us guidance like “we think the unit you’re looking for is 10 kilometers that way” pointing off in one direction or another. So we’d drive that way a while and try to find the unit. Usually it took some swanning around to find anyone in the direction we’d been pointed. Then we’d stop into the latest little cluster of tents and repeat the process. The NCOs that were pretty good at keeping track of their location, relative to brigade, got their convoys home before dark. The NCOs that weren't very good at it got their convoys home around breakfast. 

Very little of the division's support infrastructure was actually out there and operating. Most everyone was just trying to survive day to day. This kind of made a mockery of the whole advanced party idea. We were supposed to be figuring out the logistical infrastructure of the area in order to help our main body hit the ground running. Instead, what we'd figured out is that the logistics units were not ready to support. They were advance parties just like us, in little groups of tents scattered around the desert.

The only place that had water, food, diesel, tires, and other consumables, was KKMC, because that's where the US Army National Guard units were. Those units had arrived in the previous months and were a lot more functional then we were. 100 mile roundtrip at 10-15mph was a pretty long haul, but going faster increased the rate at which we lost tires due the surprisingly sharp rocks. We were burning through a shocking number of tires, about one tire every trip.

The daily runs to KKMC had to leave well before dawn. It was easy to find KKMC because they were off of a highway that couldn’t be missed. The blacked out convoy would move slowly through the pre-dawn gray until decent visibility allowed them to speed up to ~15mph. It was a four hour trip to KKMC.

We’d go in and bond with the National Guard units, try to figure out what the various units did, and try to coax them into giving us a few things, the latter being difficult because their unit had no relationship with our unit. Formally, we weren’t going to get squat. Their place in the Army "org chart" was not on the same page as the 3^rd Armored Division. Us getting supplies came down to what informal relationships we could foster. Every day's food and water relied on our ability to sweet talk and cajole.

Or if it wasn’t tied down, we borrowed it.  

What really kept us supplied with the basics of life was that the National Guard types, especially the gals, liked having us Infantrymen around. I went on the KKMC missions several times per week and I always visited multiple National Guard units. Those I'd not met before got added to my map. Those units I was already familiar with, I'd stop in again to try to sweet-talk them out of supplies, or just say hello and maintain the relationship so I could talk them out of supplies the next day.

What was bewildering is that most every time I walked into a National Guard HQ tent with some of our soldiers, female soldiers would start flirting with our guys. It was as if there was something in the water. This was the first war I’d ever been invited to so most everything was a learning experience. There were new and interesting lessons in human nature unfolding all around me.

Many of the trysts between our Infantrymen and the National Guard gals resulted in windfalls of supplies to us. Since the National Guard soldiers all lived in "GP Medium" tents that probably had 20 cots in them, I was a bit of a puzzle for me just how our guys, or their dates, managed enough privacy to score all that action. The tent-mates in the designated female tents must have been awfully, ah, understanding.

This was not a coed summer camp and we couldn’t have our guys scattered around and outside of our control. Yet, we needed those supplies, and it was this flirting that was producing them.

The unit that helped us out the most was from the Tennessee National Guard. They flew a big Tennessee flag. To this day, every time I see the state flag of Tennessee, I’m reminded of the gracious folks in that unit and our debt to them.

This is the military. Be on time. The military tends to be more obsessive about being on time than the civilian world. If a convoy is supposed to be leaving at 0600, 0605 is not acceptable. It is understood that the vehicles are to form up in the minutes prior and at 0600 the lead vehicle starts moving. If a vehicle shows up at 0601, all they're going to find is a dust cloud. If you call for artillery to land on a road junction just before your folks are to get there, the arty falling a bit late is bad.  If you're not on time, no one is interested in your excuses unless it includes reporting that you were unexpectedly killed.

Often the convoys I led included vehicles from the other battalions in the advance party. To my frequent aggravation, the vehicles from the other battalions were never fucking ready to go at the appointed hour. Every single time, every damned time, we had a mixed unit convoy, I’d have to walk over to at least one of the other battalions and get them hustling. Sometimes the delay was over an hour because they had a tire they needed to change, a truck that needed to be unloaded, maintenance that needed to be done, all things that could have been done the previous afternoon if the officers had cared enough to see that their people were prepared for the following morning. Of course, since the other battalion officers were all senior to me, my various obsessions just served to irritate them.

Convoys getting lost at night.
The KKMC convoys needed to be heading home before dark. This was Winter near the equator, so the days were short. It was a three hour trip home because convoys hustled to beat the setting sun. If one didn’t find our couple dozen tents by full-dark, it might mean an overnight sleeping in the vehicles.

Desert navigation was difficult, particularly at night. The vehicles weren’t allowed to have their headlights on, only their “blackout” lights, which emit a glow no brighter than your wristwatch. From a distance, you can see it, but it won't give you warning that you're about to drive off of a cliff.  

Our little enclave of tents was absolutely invisible at night. Well, truth be told, some of our battalions found light discipline to be inconvenient so occasionally lights peeked out of tents so that Iraqi infiltrators might have an easier time finding us. Generally though, at night, your convoy either ran right into us or you stopped in the desert before you became disoriented, and waited until dawn. The weaker NCOs would stop in the desert only after they got disoriented. Those were the ones that didn't find home until lunch.

Every night someone in the brigade had a new “Jesus Christ, you would not believe how I got back here” tale.

Navigation was all azimuth and pace count. Or in our case azimuth and odometer. When one of our various daily small convoys was delayed into the hours of darkness, it was common for them to drive right by us. We could hear them slowly go by, their tires crunching over the hard pan soil and sharp little rocks. Soldiers would turn to each other in the darkness and quietly say "I wonder who that was." 

During the day, the prospect of blowing tires kept everyone at a cautious pace because it was a long walk home. At night, you practically had to inch along because you couldn't see a damned thing. In the inky darkness you could plow into a unit’s tents, a fighting position, parked vehicles, a sudden drop off, a Bedouin tent or herd--you could hit positively anything. Often, if a vehicle was out after dark, the passenger would get out and start walking in front of the vehicle, to ensure that the they didn’t hit anything in the darkness. The driver would have to slowly follow a few inches behind the walker trying to keep them visible in the wristwatch glow. Sometimes it was a long walk.

We got word that there were two separate instances, elsewhere in the division, were blacked out vehicles moving at night had plowed into a Bedouin herd and tent. The owner of the herd wanted many 10s of thousands of dollars for a couple KIA goats. We would figure out later, negotiating to buy a goat for our stewpot, that Bedouins are mighty proud of their goats. The vehicle that hit the tent had apparently failed to stop. They instead had reacted in sudden mortification and terror, and drove off into the night. Hopefully no one was killed.

Most soldiers had little practice with compasses outside of a classroom or parking lot. It's a lot harder to make it to a destination 50 miles away following a compass skewed by the metal in your vehicle, then it is to take a sighting across a parade field. Also, it had long been understood as "Truth" that compasses couldn't be trusted near metal. Therefore most soldiers dismissed my suggestion that there was a way to figure out how to use a compass in a vehicle after all. Human nature at work.

Just prior to Officer Candidate School, I'd spent 8 years surrounded by engineering students. Sure, we were socially handicapped, but we liked figuring things out. I had not yet come to understand that "figuring out" something was perceived by the average human as really quite a burden. Any guy who has taken second semester physics will tell you that magnetic fields are easy to visualize, it's chicks that are incomprehensible.

Every convoy, and every single vehicle mission, was given clear guidance to be home before dark. Every convoy leader tried very hard to comply because it was quite unpleasant to spend half the night anxiously searching for a small cluster of tents in the inky darkness, only to finally collapse from exhaustion and catch a few hours sleep before the twilight that precedes dawn. Also, it was a rare convoy leader that had the tenacity to keep track of their own location as their search pattern made multiple turns in the inky darkness. Once you lost track of your own location, you were screwed.

An hour or two after dawn, each morning, the lost vehicles would show up. The exhausted soldiers would stagger out of the vehicles with sheepish grins full of vast relief for having made it home.

The first couple nights we sent out HMMWVs to look for lost convoys. It didn't take long for us to recognize that sending out search vehicles just added to the list of missing vehicles. The temptation to send out search vehicles, however, was overwhelming. It's very hard to react to a big problem by sitting on your ass and doing nothing. Usually I stayed up most the night and paced around the area with worry.

In the second week, after having vehicles lost every night and then show up every morning safe, I stopped staying up all night with worry.  

Desert navigation.
Common wisdom is that compasses don’t work in vehicles, but that’s not actually true. The trick was to get a feel for how the metal in the vehicle distorted the magnetic field at whatever location one typically held the compass. I was always in the passenger seat of a HMMWV. It only took a couple minutes of testing at different vehicle orientations to determine how much Kentucky windage needed to be applied to my compass to be able to rely on it as reasonably close. It was just a matter of holding the compass in the same place every time and remembering some “corrections”.

I navigated, not using a map, but using a blank piece of paper. Maps, that I’d obsessed over for 9yrs in the military, were suddenly worthless because there was nothing on them. A map of a featureless desert is largely blank. I navigated as if I was on a boat in the middle of an ocean. Using the blank paper, compass and protractor, I’d just draw lines to represent the course we’d traveled and the turns we’d made. I kept the length of the lines to whatever scale made sense for the route, and no matter how many turns we made trying to find our destination, I could pretty much keep track of where we were, relative to home and my initial guess as to the location of our destination.

The brigade only had two LORAN devices and they were in heavy use. The brigade burned thru all our AA batteries in only a couple days. We ended up having to beg soldiers for AA batteries that they'd brought for their Walkmans. For you youngsters, Sony Walkmans were personal audio players that were just then transitioning from cassette tapes to CDs, neither of which lasted a day due to the ever-present abrasive sand. Not until our guys started sleeping with the National Guard lasses did we have adequate AA batteries for the LORANs. Personally, this wasn't much of an issue. I quickly gained confidence in my "blank piece of paper" navigation, and as the junior officer, I almost never got one of the LORANs for one of my convoys anyhow.

The one day I did get a LORAN was a KKMC run. The plan had us doing a long day at KKMC and then making our way home that night. Hence me having the LORAN. Instead of just using compass and pace count for most of the way, I started using the LORAN with about 20 miles left to go. This turned out to be a mistake. In the darkness we moved along at a walking pace while I watched the LORAN frequently change it's mind regarding the vector to the lattitude and longitude of little hamlet we called home.  Recall that the Division Contact Team HMMWV had made numerous incomprehensible turns. Finally, around 10PM, the LORAN indicated that we were almost home. A heartbeat later it said we had to move three miles. Sadly, I then took the convoy off towards that distant location. Once there, with odometer and compass I started my careful search pattern of expanding squares, the other vehicles inching along behind us.

Around 1AM, exhausted from peering thru the darkness and inching along, I said “fuck it. This can’t be right." I had kept track of our location though all of the 90 degree turns in our search pattern and was able therefore to backtrack the three miles to where we’d been before. We started another grid pattern search and found the hooches in 15 minutes. I felt like an idiot.

A search pattern. When my pace count (odometer) and azimuth said I was in the right place, we’d start a search pattern. I’d create an imaginary box 200 meters on a side with my vehicle in the center. Then with odometer and compass we’d move to the perimeter of that box and then, with careful 90 degree turns, we'd do the box. Then I’d expand the radius of box by 200 meters and we’d do a bigger. How big of a box we’d do depended on how sure my navigation was good. If we’d dead reckoned our way 50 miles from KKMC, it’d be awfully easy to be off by a couple miles. So if you were off by a mile or two it could be a long night.  

Every moment of that search pattern, I’d have to mentally keep track of where we were vs. our start location. Otherwise I’d get disoriented and all the night’s navigation would lack an accurate start point. Some nights it took a while, but never once did I spend a night curled up in a seat at the head of a small convoy waiting for dawn to arrive.

The Swamp. The hooch that Greg Weaver and I shared in the desert. The ring of rocks was supposed to provide some protection from shrapnel and small arms once you rolled off your cot on to the ground. No sandbags yet. Saudi Arabian desert, January, 1991.

The endless sea.
Around 8Jan it started raining again. Unlike the trip out, this rain kept on and on and on. By the end of the first day of rain, the water was starting to form ponds. The water was strangely disinclined to soak into the earth. With no contours to the ground at all, water didn’t form into creeks and go away, it just sat there on the surface. By day two of the rain the featureless desert had turned into a featureless three inch deep sea.

Rain week. A cold, wet, and unhappy LT Gress trying to keep a stoic face on. The camo netting in the background collapsed because once the soil turned to muck, the stakes let go. Those are showers in the background.

Upon setting up our tent a week prior, Greg and I named had our hooch “The Swamp”, a reference that made us both grin because we’d both grown up with the good-natured hilarity of the TV show MASH. 

Our hooches were not very waterproof so everything we owned soon became wet. As an Infantryman, once your gear gets wet, it’s hard to get it dry again. The temperatures were in the high 50’s during the day and low 40’s at night. Once everything got wet, you could only stay warm if you were working hard. Once you stopped moving, you got cold.   

There were no small areas of slightly higher ground so there was simply no dry place to stand or keep your gear out of a pond. Unless you were lying on your wet cot, you were ankle deep in cold water and muck. We managed to reduce the water level in our hooch a bit only be shoveling in enough muck to raise the floor.

The irony of naming our hooch “The Swamp” was a never-ending source of gallows humor.

Being inescapably wet and cold wears on you. Everyone else was at least as miserable as I was, so I had to be a source of strength for the whole unit. Doing my best to  maintain a façade of stoic good spirits sucked even more out of me.

Wet, cold and exhausted in The Swamp. The high point of that day was a cup of noodles. Saudi Arabian desert, January 1991.

On the second day of rain, our sandbags finally arrived. G2 (Division Intelligence) had been pounding us with threat warnings for days so division demanded that we construct sandbagged fighting positions immediately. Filling hundreds of sandbags per person is a backbreaking job. Filling them with wet muck is a horror show. 

I desperately wanted to blow off the sandbag effort until the desert dried out. I'd have been willing to blow off the guidance from division that we fill the sandbags immediately, but the constant drumbeat of threat warnings from G2 weighed on me. I worried that we’d be hit and my family would take casualties simply because I hadn't had the spine to force the group to sandbag positions now, instead of waiting until we could do it more comfortably. Throughout the Iraq1 deployment, I was constantly haunted by the fear that people would be hurt because I was a slug.

Of course, filling all the sandbags under such lousy conditions pissed everyone off. So the only way to get it done was for me to be right in the middle of it and ensuring that I was working twice as hard as anyone else.

Sandbags are pretty heavy. Sandbags of wet muck are really heavy. Filling hundreds of sandbags with wet muck is filthy business. We spent 2x 12hr days filling sandbags, carrying them to the perimeter and then building fighting positions. The amount of toil sucked. Being filthy sucked. Being the subject of all the soldier’s gripes sucked. Turning the screws on them all the tighter to get it done, sucked.

During the lousy cold and wet days, I distinctly remember checking on guards after nightfall, collapsing on to my cot, feeling sorry for myself, and finally letting the stoic façade go, curling up and feeling sorry for myself for a while. Then I'd set my watch alarm, shiver for a couple hours, and finally get up and check security in the middle of the night, as usual. I left my filthy sodden clothes on. Taking anything off would just have made me colder. I had no dry clothes left. I was just a sad shivering thing, lying on the sodden cot with a sodden sleeping bag thrown over me.

On the third day of rain we received a report from Division that there were 200 wheeled vehicles and 10 tracked vehicles mired in the desert. I saw a couple vehicles that had gotten so stuck in the muck that they’d rolled over Consider that. The surface was totally flat, yet their churning wheels, digging deeper on one side than the other, dug into the muck deeply enough that they finally turned turtle. I would not have thought that possible.

Slowly some of the routes in the desert were getting marked with barrels. The Division engineers were putting out hundreds of them and the Bedouins were stealing them at night at the same rate. Even though many of the barrels were missing, tracks in the desert were becoming predictable. Those “sort of marked” routes made it easy for us to find mile after mile of abandoned vehicles, mired in the muck. This presented some shopping opportunities and some of our guys managed to liberate some consumables. I figured that it was either us or the Bedouins. I told the guys “don’t get caught”.  

After the desert dried out a bit, the other battalions built bunkers with their sandbags, instead of fighting positions. At 6’ tall, a tank could have seen and engaged one of their bunkers from  two miles away. With walls only one sandbag thick, they wouldn’t have stopped a bullet. This wasn't rocket science. A tall, easily visible bunker isn't protection, it's a target. A bunker with thin walls isn't "cover", it's "concealment." The other battalions just didn't care.

Our sandbagged fighting positions were low profile and therefore hard to see. They were two feet tall between firing ports, and the recommended two sandbags thick. 

Near beer night. One day we somehow got cases and cases of non-alcoholic beer. We drank it all. Lesson learned: No matter how hard you try, you cannot get a buzz from non-alcoholic beer.

KKMC was an interesting place. In addition to a number National Guard support units, there were also military organizations from a number of allied nations, chief among them were the Brits, French, Egyptians and Syrians.

Of course we got along very well with the Brits. We also got along really well with the French thanks to our Medic, SGT Miai, who was not only a hilarious source of adventure stories, was also a Belgique former French Legionnaire. Having him with us instantly made us great pals with the French Armored division that had elements at KKMC.  

The only people we had trouble with at KKMC were the Syrians. The French positively loathed them, and cautioned us to be wary of them. Apparently the French and Syrian units were adjacent on the Kuwait border and the French could see Iraqi soldiers openly crossing into Syrian lines at night and being feted by the Syrian units. Whenever one of us was outnumbered by a couple Syrians, they’d be shitheads. Typical high school bully behavior; accidental bumps of the shoulders, lots of scowling at us, that kind of thing.

The worst of our incidents with the Syrians, of course happened to me. I was in the temporary KKMC PX impulse shopping. I had my usual gear on, M16 over my back, harness and web belt with bayonet, ammo pouches and 3qts of water. Butt pack with more ammo and a red star cluster. 9mm in a shoulder rig. Knife in my boot. My helmet was hanging at my waist by its chin strap over one of the canteens. Call it 40lbs, all told.

The PX was about the size of a convenience store and there were only a couple shoppers about. Some Middle Eastern looking guy in a foreign camo pattern came down my aisle and I shifted to give him more room to get by. He was not a big guy. I probably had 30lbs on him. Which is when he bumped into me, obviously on purpose. I turned around towards him, irritation surely on my face. He took a step back and pulled out a knife.

“What the fuck?” I was so surprised that I was momentarily paralyzed trying to make sense of this impossible situation. “Maybe it's a joke”, I thought, like "ha, ha, I scared the American." I mean christ, it just wasn’t plausible that he figured he’d be able to knife an American soldier in the PX and probably get away with it.

Growing up, I'd often been one of the smallest kids in the class and I’d had a lot of problems with bullies. There's two kinds of small kids. Wolverines have the balls to get in some good licks of their own and so bullies learn that the wolverines are not prey. Wusses, however, are too scared to fight back and bullies sense the weakness like sharks do blood in the water. I had not been a wolverine. I had been scared of the big and aggressive kids, and too stupid to realize that's what made me prey.

I was no longer that same kid. I was 80lbs bigger then I'd been in 9th grade, the Marines had embedded some "don't be a pussy" into my soul, and I'd spent a lot of time in martial arts in college. I wasn’t Chuck Norris but I could hit pretty hard.

I was in a garrison-like environment so my guard was down. I was in a PX for chrissakes, not on some urban street at an ATM, nor was I in the bush moving with a platoon. I didn't have a reflexive response, I didn't even have a conscious response. For several seconds I just stood their jaw agape.

Keeping my eyes on his center-mass and watching for some shift of balance, I bent my knees a tad as I slowly reached towards my right hip where my bayonet was fastened to my web belt. But instead of unsnapping and grasping the bayonet, my fingers lifted my helmet chinstrap off of my canteen. I then whirled the helmet around in wide arc and, with the unexpected additional roughly fourteen inches of reach, smacked him in the head with it.

There was a “whack” and he went down.

I stood there a moment sorting through what had just happened and what I should do next. I decided that I should be somewhere else.  

Division Command and Staff meeting.
One evening each week it was my turn to represent the brigade at the 3^rd Armored Division Command and Staff meeting. I’d never been to a division level meeting before. I figured it really wasn’t a good place for a LT to be. A LT wasn't going to shine at division command and staff, a LT wasn't even going to add value. A LT would either be invisible or trampled into paste. I resolved to sit in back, take lots of notes, and not say a goddamned thing.

It was much worse than I’d imagined.

There was a general running the show. He was not a nice person. 

The general commanded like the stories you might hear about McArthur. He was king, and he apparently felt that his due was a royal court of fawning sycophants.

A division command and staff meeting is a critical couple of hours of information sharing and command guidance that helps all units maintain situation awareness and adjust to changing conditions. Each key staff officer G1 (Admin), G2 (Intel), G3 (Ops), G4 (Logistics), and G6 (Commo) briefs the assembled leaders. Then the three brigade combat teams, the aviation brigade, and separate battalions brief. Finally, the division commander, or his representative, gives updated guidance. 

In this room were commanders or representatives of every significant organization in the huge division. To my very great surprise, however, the information was not presented for their benefit. There was no “briefing the group”; this was a briefing solely for the general. The rest of us were an audience

We were in a group of tents that made for a shallow and wide array of folding chairs probably five chairs deep and 20 chairs wide. the general was front-center. Because there was so little depth to the room, only a few officers in the audience were in front of the graphics and officer speaking. Everyone else was distantly left or right.

Each staff officer, in turn, came up to brief the general. There was a three ring binder standing up-right on a table a couple feet in front of the general that had slides in it. Because the graphics were on 8 ½ x 11 paper, the briefing book was close to the the general. The briefing staffer stood beside the little table with the up-right binder of slides. This allowed the briefer to point to elements on the little graphics and to flip pages. But it also meant that the briefer was talking to someone three feet in front of him, and appreciably lower, so the speaking volume used was appropriate for that distance and directed downward.

As a result, of the probably 80 leaders in the room, the only ones that could hear the briefer or make out the graphics were the general and the several officers immediately adjacent.

It was bewildering, for example, to be aware that the G2 was reporting threat issues that I, as 3Bde’s representative, certainly needed to be aware of, but the G2 was only briefing the info the general. The briefer's simpering "please don't beat me" tone and word choice, seemed bizarre and appalling. 

A heavy (meaning armored) division is an incredibly large and complex show. It can have around 25,000 soldiers, 1500ish tracked vehicles and probably 10,000 wheeled vehicles. All those soldiers need food, water, a wide variety of ordnance and combat materials, administrative actions and medical support. The vehicles need diesel, spare parts, maintenance support, and ammunition. Finally, a tremendous amount of information sharing and coordination is going on as every group is making plans and executing missions in support of their headquarters and their subordinate units.

Millions of individual tasks in the division require adjustment every day. Our evaluation of the enemy’s disposition and intentions, change. The status and plans for the divisional units, and outside units that support us, change. Often, confusion has to be corrected. The guidance to the division from higher changes. The division command and staff meeting is the brain sending signals to the spinal cord nerve bundle. “Here’s what is going on around and above you. Here’s some guidance on how to adapt.”

The division staff seemed to be terrified of the general. Now, retired with 23 years of military service, I can look back at hundreds of command and staff meetings. Most were at battalion level, but I also spent six years in brigade HQs and a year in a division HQ. In my experience, the 3^rd Armored Division Command and Staff meetings were uniquely screwed up.

Staffer after staffer came up to the little table in front of the general and briefed with the body language and tone of voice of a beaten puppy. In order to point to a map or chart on a briefing slide, the officer had to awkwardly bend down and left further reinforcing the excessively submissive body language. It reminded me of an obsequious bow to one's sovereign. 

I sat about probably 20 feet to the side and a couple rows back. This was back when I could hear, yet I heard almost nothing of what was said. In terms of the briefing graphics, I was occasionally aware that the briefer often gestured to “something” in front of the general that was too distant, low and “edge-on” for me to see.

Sure, we--3rd Brigade, were actually 100+ goofs in a ratty collection of tents and no threat to anyone, but theoretically I was at the meeting representing one quarter of the combat power of the entire division. In three minutes we could have re-oriented briefer and chairs so that we could all hear him if he would just speak up and talk to us all. Division could have made handouts of the briefing slides if they didn’t want to set up a big board of some kind. This shit was easily fixable.

the general positively beat the shit out of most of the staff officers and unit leaders there. The aisles between chairs ran red with blood. There are rarely good reasons to beat the shit out of subordinate leaders. If you have a subordinate leader that isn’t much good and is resistant to be fixed, you get rid of him. It’s almost unheard of to beat the shit out of a subordinate leader in public, because that fucks up everyone that overhears.

In the absence of anything to see or hear, I studied the officers around me. I watched the body language and facial expressions, and listened to the tone of what was said. I imagined what struggles must have occurred in previous months, within the division staff, to create the result I saw around me.

The units representatives gave their short briefs from where they sat, unless they had slides to hand to general. My speaking part consisted of a couple forgotten sentences that mostly served to confirm that 3rd Brigade had a representative at the meeting. Trying hard not to sound like a pussy, I said that I was LT Gress representing 3rd Brigade". The futility of trying to yell at 3rd Brigade by pounding on some hapless LT was culturally understood.

A typical vignette. There was an engineer LTC right next to me. Unlike me, having naturally drifted to the concealment of sitting in a chair, he was standing near an adjent tent wall. I figured him as the Engineer Battalion Commander, or maybe the Division Engineer. I’d sneaked some peeks at him while I was studying all the players at this meeting. Big strapping guy that looked like he could take on a tank if need be. You can tell a lot about a guy just by the way he stands and pays attention. I didn’t even know him and I was starting to like him.

The general yelled “ENGINEERS!!!”

Big Engineer LTC, with a tone of authority and resolve: “Sir”.

The general: “WHY THE FUCK AREN’T ALL THE ROUTES MARKED YET!!? WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM THAT YOU CAN’T GET THIS SIMPLE TASK DONE? DO I NEED TO REPLACE YOU WITH SOMEONE WHO CAN DO THE JOB?”

I positively knew that the engineers had been working their asses off finding, painting and placing those damned barrels, but the Bedouins were swiping them at night. We were only going to win the barrel contest once the Bedouins had all the barrels they could possibly ever want. We often drove by engineer trucks, as they replaced missing barrels, and I’d stopped and talked to them several times. There were probably 1000 miles of routes, in the division assembly area, that were supposed to be lined with barrels. At 100 meter spacing, that’s 17,000 barrels. "Where," I wondered, "in the middle of the desert many hundreds of miles from civilization, do you find barrels and orange paint sufficient to do that?"

Big Engineer LTC: “Sir, we’re conducting 24hr ops acquiring, painting, and placing >1000 barrels/day. The number of missing barrels is going down so the net is 40 to 60 kilometers of routes marked each day.”

That seemed to me to be a pretty squared away report. Jesus Christ it must be a helova effort to find, paint and position 1000 barrels/day. “Christ”, I thought, “I bet that’s taking 1000 guys and 100 trucks. How the hell do they even do that in darkness?”

The general: “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY DAMNED EXCUSES. IF YOU HAVE TO GUARD YOUR BARRELS, DO SO. I WANT MY ROUTES MARKED, AND I WANT THEM MARKED FUCKING NOW!! IF YOU ARE NOT UP TO THE TASK, I WILL FIND SOMEONE WHO IS.

I made that last part up because I don’t remember the general’s exact words. But it was certainly no more sympathetic than my version.

The last 30min of the meeting was the general in talk mode. He got up and addressed the room full of officers. We were two hours into this meeting and this was the first time that someone was actually speaking with the clear intent of communicating to the entire room officers. He spoke of Iraqi threat issues, our need to be on the alert for threats at all times, and what was being done to make it harder for the Iraqis to sneak forces deep enough to strike us. Then he started barking out fairly generic questions. Like maybe he was encouraging folks to keep up with their professional reading.

All the sudden I heard the general bark out: “THIRD BRIGADE!”

Me: “Holy fuck that’s me”, I thought. “When Kinsey told me to come to this thing he didn’t say anything about having to answer questions. Oh no.” <I dropped my voice an octave to a tone that concealed my horror with confidence and resolve> “SIR”.

The general: “WHO ARE THE ELITE IRAQI HEAVY FORCES AND WHAT TANK ARE THEY EQUIPPED WITH?”

Quick as a whip, I said, “Sir, Revolutionary Guard and Soviet T72”. As soon as I blurted this out, I knew I’d fucked up. The correct answer was Republican Guard. The Revolutionary Guard was Iranian. But I couldn’t bleat “oops, ah sir, what I really meant was Republican Guard, sorry”. I’d take my lumps. I wasn’t going to simper.

the general: “GODDAMNIT 3rd BRIGADE. IT’S REPUBLICAN GUARD.”

"Shit", I thought, "Fucked up again."

Eventually the horror show was over. I’d not really learned much of anything. I heard “Our support units were set up and ready provide logistical support”, which I knew to be bullshit because I’d been visiting their lost little collections of tents almost every day, and they weren’t providing anything. They were asking for food and water from us.

I also heard that foreign national “Heavy Equipment Transports (HETs) would be arriving shortly with our armored vehicles.” That sounded optimistic. I figured “foreign” meant Egyptian HETs; well-intentioned hapless folks that I’d already encountered. In my opinion you could throw a convoy of Egyptian HETs off of a cliff and even if they did successfully reach the ground below, they'd be days late.

The inside of the tent had been well illuminated. That mean one had to fight their way past multiple flaps of heavy burlap, designed to make the tent light-proof, to get outside. Once outside, I was faced with inky darkness. I could not see my hand in front of my face. I gingerly sidestepped to get away from the door, knowing full well that there were staked down guy ropes there waiting to put me on my face, and stood there for five minute until my eyes adapted enough that I could see something.

This foreign site looked completely different than it had 3hrs earlier at dusk. That always happens so one learns to check out a site’s significant features carefully when you know you’re going to have to find your way around in the dark. But this time I’d not memorized the lay-out of the place upon arrival so now I was completely disoriented.

Some other folks came out of the meeting tent so, hoping they were heading for the parked vehicles, I followed them. Stumbling into concertina would be no big deal, but if I stumbled into a fighting position I could break a leg. I did find some concertina, but otherwise following others worked. 

The fourth HMMWV driver's window I approached and quietly asked, “SPC Jones, 5-18?” was mine. I ground-guided (walked in front of) the moving HMMWV until we cleared the parking area. Then we started the slow trip, through the darkness, as I carefully kept us on azimuth and watched the odometer.  

About a year later and thousands of miles away, I almost ran the general down with my car. It happened on an Army base in Northern Germany. I was putt-putting along at the required 9mph speed limit, that was ferociously enforced by bored MPs, when the general surprised me by suddenly stepping into my path from the adjacent sidewalk. I’d been watching this anonymous person carefully because we were near the division building which is a high threat environment for a lieutenant. Because my attention had been locked on the guy, I’d gone to brakes the very instant I saw him abruptly turn and step. I stood the car up on its nose. My front bumper probably ended up resting against his shin. He stood there and glared at me. Not recognizing him and very aware that my alertness had just saved his ass, my return glare radiated "you fucking idiot." The recompense for saving the life of the general was a phone call to my battalion commander. He'd tracked me down via my DOD license plate. That got me a couple weeks of night “staff duty officer” at division. the general taught me a lesson there, but maybe "don't leave survivors" isn't the lesson he'd intended.

SSG Purvis.
The 5-18IN S4 (Logistics) shop apparently had some struggles. In my several weeks with 5-18 in Germany I’d had no contact with the S4 shop so they were an unknown. I would understand this better when, months later, the S4 (Battalion logistics officer) would eventually end up my boss and he was not strong. In the Advanced Party, our S4 representative was SSG Purvis, and he was really quite bad.

The role of the senior S4 type in our 5-18IN advance party was critical. For all practical purposes, our entire mission was a logistics one and SSG Purvis was our senior logistics guy. He was also a problem.  

SSG Purvis was not just our senior logistics guy, but as a SSG, he was also one of three squad leaders. SSG Stevenson had the strong Infantry Squad, SSG Allen had the weak Infantry squad, and theoretically SSG Purvis ran the eclectic HQ Squad of drivers, mechanics, medics, and a cook. As a result SSG Purvis was in charge of 1/3^rd of our entire group. In reality, what kept HQ Squad organized and functioning was SGT Maia the Belgian former French Foreign Legion Medic.

It proved unwise to put SSG Purvis in charge of anything, much less a convoy. Instead of navigating from a vehicle's passenger seat, he would nap. Then the convoy would get lost, someone would wake up SSG Purvis, he'd get mad, and the convoy would sit there--screwed because once you lost track of your location, further attempts to get to your destination just made you more lost. The next day the over-due convoy would turn up and the soldiers would tumble out of the vehicles tired and pissed off. 

SSG Purvis was a constant source of complaining, couldn’t seem to get anything right, was never ready to go at the appointed hour, and just generally threw sand into the works of anything within twenty meters.

One night SFC Maxwell, the wonderful NCOIC of the advance party, returned from a KKMC run furious. Recall that our continuing supply of food, water, fuel, everything really, depended on some creativity. We were getting things from KKMC based support units and there remained controversy regarding whether we were entitled to receive that support. We had already learned that support units could be quick to state that they "could not" provide consumables.

In Germany we’d been part of V Corps (5th Corps), not VII Corps. However, apparently in the last month or our 3rd Armored Division had been “attached” to VII Corps. We understood the idea of our battalion belonging to the 3rd Brigade, which was part of the 3rd Armored Division, but this talk of the division belonging to some "corps" was way above our pay-grade and as such seemed some no-account abstraction.

Being enterprising and hungry Infantry, we had figured out that to the National Guard logistics units, we had to emphasize that we were part of VII Corps.  If we said the right words, we got fed and if we said the wrong words we didn't get fed. We didn't have to understand all this "corps" business, we just had to take care that we told the National Guard units what they wanted to hear. Any mention at all of V Corps, for example, an attempt to explain that "we had been V Corps but now we were VII Corps", would cause the disconcerted National Guard unit to decide that they needed "check with higher HQ first," and we'd drive away with empty trucks.

While the ill-fated convoy was en route to KKMC, SFC Maxwell reminded the inattentive SSG Purvis as to the phrases that resulted in getting supplies and the phrases that resulted in us getting rebuffed. Upon arrival at one of the National Guard logistics units at KKMC, a couple hours later, SSG Purvis went into their “office” tent area while everyone else hung out in the trucks.

15 minutes later the MPs showed up.

SFC Maxwell climbed out of a truck’s passenger seat and walked cautiously into the office tent. The unit commander was asking the MPs to take SSG Purvis into custody for "engaging in government fraud," or some such. The very affable SFC Maxwell waded in and started fixing the “misunderstandings." Soon the simple confusion was resolved--resulting in chuckles all around. The MPs departed and National Guard soldiers were sent to fetch us pallets of food and water to load into our trucks. Then the sullen SSG Purvis opened his mouth again and all was lost. SFC Maxwell and SSG Purvis were directed to leave.

It was too late to hit up other support units so our KKMC convoy went home empty-handed. Sadly, this was not an isolated example of SSG Purvis seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Had I a do-over, I’d have suggested to CPT Hilferty that what the captain really needed was a senior S4 representative to help him welcome our battalion main-body vehicles at the port.

Frightened units.
One day, shopping at KKMC, I stopped in at National Guard Medical unit to say hello. We’d not talked to them yet so I needed to get them on my map of units in the area and identify what it was that they did. All the better if we were able to mooch some supplies off of them.

By this time I’d been going around and talking to units all over the place for a couple weeks. One of the common threads I’d come to recognize, even if I didn’t really understand it, was that these support units that we stopped in and talked to were effusively delighted at our visit. It wasn’t just that they were starved for someone new to talk to. They positively lit up when we came into their area and they would encourage us to extend the quick "hello" into a visit of several hours. The National Guard units seemed anxious being relatively alone in a strange, far away place while bombarded by threat warnings every hour. The presence of some, by their measure “heavily armed” Infantryman, for a couple hours, made them happy far out of proportion to our actual usefulness.

At the Medical unit we'd dropped in on, I talked to the HQ hooch types for a bit, and as usual, their whole chain of command came out to bond with us. They took me on a tour of their tents, seeing all the nurses was good for my morale, and they gave me a goody bag to take back to our Medic--the really terrific SGT Maia. I asked SSG Stevenson to collect his squad from the various activities that I probably didn’t want to know about, and I headed for our HMMWV and truck.

SSG Stevenson gave guidance to his fire team leaders, and jogged to catch up with me. “Sir”, he said, “check this out. See that CONEX box over there that’s half buried?”

“Ok”, I said, looking where he was pointing.

A CONEX box is a standard shipping container. 8 feet wide, 40 feet long, and 8.5 feet tall. This particular CONEX box was about three feet into the ground. A ramp had been dug down to the CONEX doors. The ramp was big and deep enough to allow one of the big doors to swing open wide. Someone had moved a lot of dirt.

“Their plan" said SSG Stevenson as he gestured towards the Medical unit,"in the event of attack, is for everyone to run for that CONEX box, get inside, and close the door.”

I looked at SSG Stevenson and we read each other's minds. I looked back at the CONEX box and the two or three feet worth of genuine hole it's dug-in approach provided.

“There’s gotta be 200 people in that unit”, I said. “That thing is no protection. Bullets would go right through it.” I visualized 100+ panicking people all trying to lay down in the dark in a space that couldn’t handle half that many people.  “Really a terrible idea”, I said. The both of us shook our head with wonder.

 
SCUD B mobile missile and launcher. ~1000lb warhead. Range 200miles. At max range, 50% chance it will hit within 500 meters of you, which is pretty far away. You’ll probably be ok. (DOD)

SCUDs.
We received our war news from Armed Forces Network (AFN) radio. There was a constant stream of stories emphasizing the horror of SCUD missiles. We found this hard to understand. The US Army forces in theater consisted of a bunch of lightly armed Airborne types and some barely armed advance elements associated with follow-on forces still in transit. Our meager bunch could have been steam-rolled at any time by the fourth largest army in the world--currently consolidating just over the border. Yet our news was full of some 1950's technology long range missile that was hard-pressed to put it's bomb on the city it was aimed at. Saudi Arabia was huge; the number of SCUDS that Iraq owned was numbered in the dozens, and half of them were getting launched at Israel. There was no way SCUDs were going to destroy enough of anything to make a dent in the allied forces build-up.

What SCUDs could do though, was hit the luxury hotel the reporters called home, lacking only a pool-side bar as they lounged in the January sun. That formed the basis of our theory as to why we kept hearing about them on the radio. We got some good laughs listening to the recorded accounts of terrified newsies cowering in the shadow of roaring Patriot batteries firing to stop the SCUDs.

When the Air War started, SCUDs got as much coverage as our bombing campaign. The difference was that our bombing was knocking the shit out of Iraqi armor and command & control facilities vs. the largely feckless SCUDs that were mostly just causing us to burn through our inventory of Patriot missiles. The Patriot hadn't been designed to take out missiles so they were not full of win, but most of the SCUDs wouldn’t have hit anything important anyways.

One evening we were at KKMC enjoying the hospitality of some National Guard unit. Once they found out that we were Infantrymen, practically bristling with weapons, they suddenly had hot chow and showers for us. So we hung around later than usual. We’d gotten pretty confident of our ability to find our way back through 50 miles of inky darkness. Just about the time we were starting to think about how much it was going to suck to spend four hours getting home, they offered us cots and blankets for the night.

 
Mission Oriented Protective Posture 4 (MOPP4). Suit, mask, booties, and gloves. (DOD)

A couple hours later we were wonderfully clean, warm, and almost asleep when we heard on AFN that a SCUD launch had been detected by “National Technical Means”, which is code for satellite. This particular SCUD, so the radio said, was heading for Israel. Also, the SCUD flight time being six to eight minutes and we were hearing this on public radio, it would have impacted hours ago or maybe yesterday.

Suddenly there was bedlam. People were running around screaming SCUD SCUD SCUD at the tops of their lungs. Someone was banging metal on metal, which is the NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) signal telling everyone to quickly go to MOPP4  (Mission Oriented Protective Posture 4) by donning their chemical suit. We were in a GP Medium tent, a big green cotton hooch that is common as dirt in the military. It sleeps 20 with ease. Our tent went from a quiet home for slumbering troopers to an insane asylum. NG soldiers had leaped up and were frantically tearing through belongings for their chemical suit, booties, gloves and mask.

We sat up on our cots, very confused, while we watched, wide-eyed, all of the activity. Once the soldiers were fully kitted up in MOPP4 so that they could barely breathe, see, speak, hear, and would soon sweat to death, they all ran out of the tent into the darkness to do god knows what. We all sat on our cots, looked at each other, and tried to understand what just happened.

Suddenly a guy in MOPP4 rushed into the tent and with the muffled voice that is inevitable trying to communicate out of a gas mask, yelled, "YOU THERE, WHY AREN’T YOU IN MOPP4?”

Sitting on the end of my cot wondering what the fuck these people are doing, I looked up at him and asked, in a calm and puzzled tone, “Why are you in MOPP4?”

MOPP4 guy: “SCUD sighting. We heard it on the radio. I’m CPT Johnson, get into your MOPP gear.”

“You mean that SCUD report on AFN?”

MOPP4 guy: “Yes, goddamnit, now get into your MOPP gear.”

“Sir, I’m LT Gress. We heard that SCUD report too. It was headed for Israel, and would have impacted hours ago.”

MOPP4 guy: “Yes, but it might be CHEMICAL."

Me: “Sir, that shit has to actually splash on you to kill you, and Israel is a long ways from here. Y’all do whatever you want. We’re going back to sleep.”

Taking security seriously.
Our first good scare was when Division told us that there was a high probability that the Iraqis would launch a spoiling attack against nearby KKMC. A spoiling attack is a limited objective attack launched when you think the other guy is preparing to attack you. You’re not trying to take his ground and keep it, you’re just trying to chew up the other guy a bit while he’s still parked in densely packed motorpools and rows of tents, and wipe out the supply depots that have been moved to forward locations. Much easier to beat up the other guy when they are densely concentrated and unprepared vs. when their armor and artillery is all spread out across a 100 sq miles and each gun tube is pointed at you. The spoiling attack messes up (spoils) the other guy’s attack preparations. Chew up the supplies the other guy stockpiled for his attack, and you will delay the attack for months because it will take him that long to replace those supplies.

The Iraqis were supposed to be making an armored thrust down the Wadi Al Batin, supported by airborne/airmobile forces, right to our front door.

Airborne means falling out of the sky in a parachute harness. Airmobile means falling out of the sky in a broken helicopter.

For weeks I’d been agonizing over our lack of ammunition. We had a couple dozen rounds of 5.56 per man and not a single anti-armor weapon. Now we had to stop the Iraqi Army. If there were more than a squad of them, we were in trouble.  

Division continued to ramp up the threat warnings. They directed 33% security. I figured that if you’re a division staff weenie, 33% security could sound reasonable. However, for us on the pointy end, 33% security was a real pain in the ass. The mission of our little unit was not to sit there and defend our tents and shitters. We were busy as hell all day long trying to conduct our mission--figure out the area so the main body would have an easier time once they arrived. 33% security meant that a third of our force had to be in fighting positions, another third was asleep, and so all we had left was a handful of guys for a couple hours until it was their turn in their fighting positions. 33% security ground us to a halt. Which is when division specified 50% security.

Which we ignored. My recollection is that reasonable heads prevailed and our little hamlet we ignored the guidance to go to 50% security. Not my reasonable head, mind you--moderation was not my strong suit.

Around evening chow time we got a radio alert from division that an Iraqi brigade size armored column had been sighted moving south, towards us, down the Wadi Al Batin. Aviation assets were apparently being deployed to interdict and one of our sister brigades was being rushed north to occupy a blocking position. Hopefully that sister brigade had more combat power than we did. Or, just like division seem to imagine that logistics units had their supplies, maybe division imagined that the sister armored brigade had some armor.

It looked to be a long night peering into the darkness.

I overheard one of the DAT officers discussing amongst themselves whether or not they should issue ammunition. “HOLY SHIT!", I thought. “We’ve been out here for two weeks and they’ve not even issued ammunition? Oh. My. God.”

I caught a couple hours rack and then got up around midnight to spend the rest of the night up with the guys. The first thing I noticed was the unbelievable number of flashlights on, and a group of soldiers laughing and carrying on at the HMMWV used for radio watch. “For Christ’s sakes”, I thought, “here we are essentially defenseless, our only protection is remaining hidden in the darkness and these assholes are having a party in the middle of the perimeter. We might as well commit suicide.” I was pretty upset.

I might have told the senior guy at the radio HMMWV flashlight disco party that if “he wanted to get us all killed, I’d gladly shoot him myself.”

The next day MAJ Kinsey bumped into me and said “Scott, did you really tell a SGT that you were going to shoot him?”

I re-ran my memory banks looking for something that fit that description. I recalled the night before when I’d been yelling at Radio HMMWV disco party dancers.

I said “Sir, well, sort of. It was more like “if he wanted to get us all killed, I’d help him out…..””

The MAJ gave me a disapproving frown, shook his head wearily, and headed off to do Major things.

Anything worth doing is worth doing as best as you can. I don’t have any “passive-aggressive” in me. I can’t agree to do something, and then do a half-ass job. If I'm told to do something that seems dumb, I’ll either try hard to get out of it,  accept risk and not do it, or I'll do the task as best I can. There's no fourth option where I commit to doing the task and then do a half-ass job.

Often what needed to be done was unpopular. In that case it was up to me to find a way to encourage folks to do the task that reduced the degree of suck as much as possible. An example being my strenuous efforts to fill more sandbags with muck then anyone else. 

Maintaining good security requires a lot of self-discipline. Division was pounding us daily with a drumbeat of threat warnings. To hear them say it, we should expect SCUD missiles of nerve agent every day and infiltrators slicing our necks every night. I wasn’t too convinced about the SCUD missiles, but I did try to take the perimeter security of our little hamlet seriously. At night, I tried to make our light discipline as good as possible. The sudden appearance of a light in the desert can be seen for a helova long ways. Every night I got up, wandered around the Brigade area a bit to see how things were going, and said hello to the 5-18IN guys on security at our part of the perimeter.

The light security issue led to conflicts with the officers in the other battalions. Making sure that no light escaped your tent required care. Extinguishing all lights before someone entered or left your tent required discipline. Dealing with the light escaping through holes in your tent required the gumption to do something about the holes. If you didn’t give a shit, you exercised neither care, discipline, or gumption. Some of the officers just didn’t seem to give a shit.

I was really serious about security because I was deathly afraid that one of my guys would get hurt because I lacked the moxie to sufficiently focus on some tiresome task. Maybe someone would get hurt because I didn’t ensure that our guard-force stayed more alert. Maybe someone would get hurt because I failed to sufficiently prepare someone, or maybe someone would get hurt because I didn’t have the spine to go fix light discipline problems exhibited by the other battalions.

We were heading for war, so it was inevitable that some folks would get hurt. But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if the injury or death could have been avoided if I’d simply been a better officer.

The light discipline problems with my own guys were fixable. They were mostly Infantryman so the inconveniences associated with preventing any light from escaping were not new ideas.

The light discipline problems from the other units were not really fixable. At first, I tried to be nice about it. I figured that I was pointing out a problem of which they were simply unaware, but I was sure that they were motivated to fix. I was helping them, so my reasoning went. I was young and naive. 

With the dawning realization that the other battalion officers didn’t give a shit about light discipline, I was left kind of at sea. A hooch that was showing light wasn’t just their own problem, it could get us all killed. What I needed to do, ensure that we were dark and hidden at night, I didn’t know how to do--I didn’t know how to motivate the other battalion officers. If they, deep down inside, simply didn't give a shit, no amount of cajoling on my part was going to change that. It seemed to me like someone was going to first have to die before the other officers would be willing to inconvenience themselves regarding security. To them, the junior officer of the brigade advance party was just a pain in the ass to be ignored.

MAJ Kinsey was supportive, and emphasized the need for good light discipline at the advanced party meetings that we held on most evenings. The other battalion officers would nod their heads in recognition of the importance of light discipline and in affirmation of their willingness to enforce it, but then they'd do nothing to enforce it within their own units. Precisely the kind of passive-aggressive half-ass execution that I found so incomprehensible.

As the days went by and light discipline didn’t improve, I got increasingly strident and aggressive. On several occasions there were whole sections of our hamlet illuminated by headlights. I'd go over to the sister battalion and not-gently inquired as to what the fuck they were doing, and they’d say that “they’d be done soon, just another 30min” or some other completely inadequate response. The temptation to sweep my M16 off of my back and buttstroke a headlight was overwhelming.

“Jesus Christ people, you’re identifying our position to everyone within 10km” just didn’t seem to have much traction with them. Then I’d go find one of their unit officers, only to find that he didn’t care either.

I didn’t understand the casual approach to our collective security. I couldn’t relate to how they saw the situation. If I can’t figure out how another person thinks, I can’t influence them. “I was failing”, I thought “and the result might be that one of my guys would get hurt.”

Lacking any clever carrot or stick, or leverage to exploit, all I had was the potential to be even more tenacious, to be even more irritating. My ability to be tenacious and irritating was, of course, positively legendary.

About the end of the first week, MAJ Kinsey sat me down. He certainly agreed about the importance of light discipline so that we could remain hidden at night. He was supportive of my attempts to improve our light discipline. But he also pointed out that the other officers were doing a lot of complaining about me, and that those damaged relationships impacted the unit’s ability to coordinate together, and that impacted the mission.

MAJ Kinsey and I both had engineering degrees, something rare in the Army. That gave us a common language, of sorts.

The conversation with me about driving the other officers bat-shit in pursuit of better light discipline went something like this:

MAJ Kinsey drew a quick graph in the dirt and then a curve went up a bit and then flattened out. He said “this is a curve of how much light discipline you achieve by constantly haranguing everyone. A little haranguing achieves a lot, but after fixing the big problems you get to diminishing returns where large amounts of haranguing don’t achieve much."

MAJ Kinsey then drew a curve that started horiz but then swept up to vertical. He said, "this is how much haranguing you can do before you start damaging the relationship with other leaders and therefore you two don’t work together well.” They’ll accept a little haranguing, but pretty soon it just pisses them off for no gain.

Find a balance where you accomplish a lot, yet avoid pushing so hard that it damages the missions. Also, bring cleverness to bear. See if you can’t achieve some of that success by helping them, instead of yelling at them."

Looking directly into my eyes, he said “sometimes you need to be satisfied with ‘not perfect, but accomplished a lot’”.

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