20 years ago today
COB6 wrote to remind me that Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait twenty years ago today beginning the wars we in which we are still engaged.
COB6 says he was going to the wash rack that day on Garlstedt’s Clay Kaserne when he found his troops engaged in a water fight. This caused him some thoughts on taking these guys to a war.
I was driving up the east coast on I95 from another seven weeks of playing TAC NCO at Cadet Command’s Region One Advanced Camp on Fort Bragg thinking I was stabilized for two more years at the University of Vermont. Within a month I was packing my bags to take over a platoon in Co. C 1/41st with COB6 in a sister platoon and less than a month later we were alerted for (then) Desert Shield.
Category: Historical
I had just gotten home on leave and was at a NASCAR race at Michigan International Speedway. When I got home I had a message to call my Plt. Sgt. I was 3 days into 2 weeks of leave and had it cut short. We were on alert and I had to catch the next available flight back. Thankfully the airline exchanged the ticket and didn’t charge me an extra dime to do it.
Sat in my mother’s living room thinking, maybe I should forget this college thing and just go back. The reserve unit I ended up in solved that problem for me, pulling me out of school and sending to Saudi. Good times.
I was at USCG Explosives Handling School in Yorktown, Virginia on August 2, 1990. Three-quarters of the class didn’t know where Kuwait was (even though we had particpated in the Kuwaiti re-flag operation five years before), and everyone laughed it off as another isolated global skirmish. Twenty years later. . .
I had just returned from the Master Fitness Trainer course at Ft Ben Harrison, IN when this all went down.
We, the 7th ID (L), with the exception of a Combat Engineer company, got to watch Desert Shield/Desert Storm from the sidelines.
It sucked then and remembering not being there sucks even more twenty years on.
20 years ago? Damn times flies. I was just married (June 1990) and about to start my second year of college. By October I was back in uniform and on my way to Hood. I really need to retire.
I was mid-rotation @ NTC, attached to the 5th ID’s 2nd Brigade when the news came in.
The writing was on the wall of what was to come very soon.
20 years ago today I was underway on my first boat in the middle of who-the-fuck-knows-who-the-fuck-cares doing an Op while we were on Westpac. On a submarine we obviously don’t get regular newscasts, just occasional one- or two-line blurbs if the radio guys had time to catch it after all the regular traffic.
Needless to say, even the little paragraphs we got made it sound serious. We didn’t realize just HOW serious it was until we pulled into Yokosuka, Japan, a month later. First question on everyone’s minds was, “Are we going, and when?” SUBPAC settled that question soon after. Not us. VLS (vertical launch) boats only (I went to prototype with a bunch of guys off the Chicago, who DID go). We were in Pearl when Desert Storm came down.
I was at Ft. Drum, Second day of AT with the 71st Infantry NYARNG
I was at Ft Sam graduating from the 91B20 course. As my roomies & I were getting ready for the graduation ceremony, we were listening to the radio reports of the Iraqi invasion. One of my roomies was from 1st Cav Division, as was I, and we both were supposed to come down on orders for Korea within a couple of months of our grad date. After listening to the radio, I bet him that we would see Kuwait before we saw Korea. I won the bet. What was real fun was watching our unit trying to get hold of one soldier who had just left on leave for Okinawa. He did make it back in time for deployment. Ahh, good times.
I was doing summer courses at John Carroll University while home in Cleveland taking a break from getting called a “Baby killer!” at Kent State (doing ROTC there was a trip– a bad one, mind you– but a trip nevertheless).
Our Company had returned in February to Camp Pendleton from a UDP rotation on Okinawa and then found ourselves 2 weeks later in Saudi Arabia. At least our platoon was one of the lucky ones that got to ride a Delta L1011 out of March AFB. Two of the other platoons rode C141s out of Norton AFB, poor bastards. The Delta aircrews really took good care of us and we had some in-flight movies.
Too bad it took so long to finally get rid of Saddam and his cronies.
Meant that we had been back 6 months, then 2 weeks after the invasion we were flying to Saudi.
We got the word to break down our MH-53Es (Airborne Mine Counter Measures), pack up and get ready to deploy.Thanks to an alligator mouthed Airman (Navy type) reporting our departure date to the local news, we were put on hold for over a month. We’d come in every day, watching for a C-5 on the flight line. If it wasn’t there, we got sent home for the rest of the day.
Ohhh, and Dutch ?? Yeah, you should retire!!
I was in Korea, and had just gotten orders to go back to Bragg, so I knew I was desert bound. Two months later I joined my new unit in Saudi.
Mr. Chips and Dutch,
What units at Hood? I was 1-8Cav.
“It was twenty years ago today
Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. . . ”
Couldn’t resist.
I’ll take my lashes with a wet noodle quietly.