Fear and Loathing in Desert Storm

I write, and prefer to listen to, first person accounts from the writers point of view. I think it is nice to judge and be judged when someone owns their opinions. These days with google it is easy to fact check, but I will be writing this from memory just so I don’t ruin my story and what I am getting at. The lessons are learned from the perspective as I write it out.
I was a in the US army from January 1989 to January 1992. I started off in a army trained for the cold war and left just after the US started really sticking it’s nose in the middle east’s business. I was one of the last people in basic training to call the dummies on the bayonet range “Ivan”. I guess they have called them “Abdul” or something for a while now.
Trained up for the cold war and very unlikely in field artillery to ever have to kill any civilians we spent a week in basic learning the UCMJ. As a semi-pacifists, I took it to heart. Looking at what the militarized police officers and some soldiers use as excuses for some of their actions, I am assuming that week went away about the same time Ivan did.
I was deployed in Germany. While there the Berlin wall fell. I was usually drunk and assumed me and the others had nothing better to do then party and occasionally pretend that zombie Hitler would come back and so we practiced re fighting WW2 on field problems practice sessions where we showed some innocent hills who was boss by blowing the shit out of them. During this time I was a chauffer for a Captain.
The Captain was once tasked with observing another unit. This unit were a bunch of knuckleheads. They even misfired a round about 100 yards from where we were standing once.
During this time I learned to work under pressure and no sleep, more then most soldiers. The Captain only needed 4 hours a day and that was anywhere including a car seat. As a mechanic, unlike most other drivers I had my normal duties as well, fixing guns, trucks exc. Cause I was out and about I was actually quite handy for this. I guess I should point out officer drivers were usually more combat type soldiers, and squared away lap dogs at that. The Captain’s superiors yelled at him several times for my antics but my usefulness as a problem solver gave him a excuse to have his pet gorilla. During long sleepless weeks I let it slip that I thought scragging stupid commanders was necessary sometimes.
I got in a very public argument with a NCO during a alert and the captain had to fire me, he switched me out for another 45D who didn’t party and moonlight as a bouncer.
Shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
I got a job as a driver on a VTR (kind of a light track tow truck) I was friends with everybody in the crew. I was almost looking forward to going to the desert.
I was informed to pack my stuff just as we were preparing to deploy.
I was sent to that unit full of knuckleheads I mentioned earlier. They had lost a man in a hemmit truck in a convoy a week earlier. The forward cab crushed like a beer can when another hemmit blew its engine in front of it on the autobahn. I went to his funeral and another guys (who committed suicide I think) the first week with my new unit. Up to that point I hadn’t been to any. Another guy at the behest of his lovely wife tattooed 666 on his forehead to avoid going to Saudi Arabia. We were all still afraid of Satanist in those days.
I wasn’t feeling optimistic at this point, but luckily there were a few guys that I knew from basic training there, so it wasn’t totally horrible. In fact I fit in with this group of terrifying misfits fairly quickly, though none of the other mechanics. Since I was also a driver I generally TCed and drove deuces in convoys at this point.
I don’t like to fly. I was in the first group sent to the desert in a C130. We got into this stripped out nightmare and just as they turned on the engines something in the ceiling exploded. We were told to get off the plane, which we did fairly quickly for a bunch of guys who never even seen one of these planes before. After a little while they said it was fine so we got back on. I think our little group stared at the ceiling more then most. We were sure Saddam Hussein was going to gas us when the C130 landed 10 hours later. What we were not ready for, was being picked up by a local driven bus and taken to a tent city.
I was kind of deaf after the flight and all the noise. We had to stay in the tent city but I was informed to never piss outside. This struck me as a odd, since on the way to the tent city, the bus driver stopped and took a crap on the side of the road. And the entire countryside resembled a cat box.
They actually had people running around guarding this. I was just outside pissing in a bottle and this MP couple, a man and a woman, comes up to me yelling “Gotcha” I have trouble being billy badass at 3 in the morning standing outside in my underwear, but I think they would have shot me if I didn’t have that bottle of pee.
After that I just started going to the huge line up of outhouses that resembled chicken tractors just beside the tents. On one of these excursions I saw a line of guys behind a 6x6 truck. Turns out a woman was selling blow jobs. She was caught later on with a duffle bag full of 5 dollar bills. Luckily I had a good weekend right before I left Germany, and I didn’t have any cash anyway. All this is hearsay and rumors for my part.
I honestly don’t know how they got there but our tracks and trucks just appeared out in the sand one day. We were all put on those buses again (by the way the busses were seated for a lot more then fit and we had at least three bags we had to carry on) and plopped out late at night to get our rides. My new boss found his hummer and sat in it and fell asleep. I found the only other vehicle with a charged battery (the truck I drove to the depot and disconnected the batteries in myself back in Germany) and ran around getting everyone started. My new boss would call me a kiss ass for the rest of the time I worked with him over this. The officers however seemed to appreciate my efforts.
I was stuck in the mechanics truck when the attack started. Meanwhile a guy I was friends with and his TC got fucked over. They were the smallest ammo crew and were forced to tow a parts vehicle CABV with a extra engine on it’s motor cover with their own CABV. When it overheated, the boss threw me and my tool box out to help and continued on with the convoy. I would spend the rest of desert storm on that crew.
The batteries were bad. I fixed them with aspirin.
Then the M109 we were attached to blew its generator, so I was forced to switch it with ours. (remember we had heat and left behind issues- now we couldn’t even shut down)
Me and the 63Ds had to replace engines in the dark twice during the war. Once when we lost the convoy we had to stop, and a recovery team towing a 103 found us. He traded the sandbag vehicles with us so we could move again. (103s are small)
I decided to override procedure and fired up the little generator/hydraulic pump to charge up the batteries to keep us moving. The little motor would later break a rocker arm.
While the attack was really going, I witnessed a firefight. I was sitting behind a loaded 50cal machine gun, but I didn’t dare use it. A loaded CABV is a aluminium box full of powder and shrapnel. That thing took a 20mm round and we would hit hell at a sprint.
In the daytime I saw the aftermath of a M1 tank losing both tracks at once. It lawn darted into the sand with the tracks behind it in a pile. They must have been hauling ass. I know this will go against everything one might read, but the Bradley Tank and the old 2 and a half ton trucks, and the old field artillery really shined during this conflict from what I saw. The M1, the hummer, and the MLRS didn’t.
Many don’t remember that Saddam tried to destroy the earth. I was woken up for guard duty one morning. I knew my shift was at 3 in the morning, but It was sun up when I was told to wake. I just figured they were late. That close to the equator, dawn and dusk are almost like a light switch, and yet dawn seemed to last forever. It wasn’t dawn, the oil fields of Kuwait were on fire.
After a few days the Iraq military started surrendering in droves. They looked happy about it. We should have finished the job in my opinion. Everybody around seemed to feel the same way. We could have made a difference.
Instead we camped out in Iraq for a few weeks. Playing football once, and since masturbating was impossible we were pretty much all wrecked each other.
We often received care packages. These contained sunglasses, batteries and G-rated magazines. Sometimes a half naked lady would sneak in on the decal of a model airplane or something, These magazine would be shared. One day we got a shower that had walls instead of just mosquito netting. A E-6 Christened this “The Jack Box”.
Other then that we sat around and played the card game Spades, connect 4 and smoked a lot of cigarettes. One guy had his appendix burst and was medivaced out. He caught up with us later before we flew back and wouldn’t shut up about how he fucked one of the nurses. Since we were a combat unit, no women were around. He was a friend, so I took him outside and explained to him that he should shut up about it. Some of the guys were contemplating doing bad things to him.
We were told it was over and started to retreat. We threw thousands of dollars worth of equipment right into a burn hole because it was easier then carrying it. We also fired away probably millians of dollars in ammo at rudimentary ranges. I got to fire a AT-4 at such a thing. I think it was said we spent 50 thousand dollars that afternoon.
At that point I was ordered to rejoin the mechanics. We went back to Saudi Arabia to await going back to Germany through Kuwait. Out the back of the 6x6, I saw the destruction of the Kuwait capital where as I read later in P.J. O’Rourke’s book Parliament of Whores, the air force had bombed the shit out of retreating Iraqis. The oil fields were still ablaze at this point. There was a eerie orange light just over the horizon and smoke everywhere.
We set up camp back in Saudi Arabia waiting to go back. Most of the equipment was sold so we were not taking much back. I occasionally worked driving truck. On one mission burning stuff I attacked a local who climbed on the truck to get something I was just going to destroy. I also stole gravel and ice from people by the truck load. I still feel guilty about those things.
The division (1st armoured) met for a sports day about this time. I met my old unit. The captain had went nuts and they all were haggered and beaten. Since I and two others known for marching to their own drummer were somehow gotten rid of just before the deployment I think it was planned. I guess I was lucky, but I felt bad for my friends who probably came out of what was a easy war with advanced PTSD.
Finally we got word we were going back. Just before we were leaving our desert uniforms came. We looked great getting off the plane in Germany. We had done our entire deployment in worn out green BDUs, now we were going back to Germany in brand new tan cloths to be immediately never used again. I turned one of the pants into Bermuda shorts. I still have them.
It seemed like in all the waiting areas for processing to leave, Lethal Weapon 2 was playing on video cassette. Everybody deployed seemed to loves saying “Diplomatic immunity, just been revoked!” or some such. By the way, we had taken a tv and VCR with us, and while we waited to start fighting, we watched old war movies. The TV and VCR were not thrown into the burn hole, they were later set up in the rec room back in Germany.
747s and crew were rented to fly us back. The stewardesses were “older”. On the entertainment screen was played a jingoist CMT type program. The first video I saw was Patty Loveless’s I’m That Kind of Girl. I still love that song to this day. No one sat in first class. I went up and sat for a minute, then went back down to the party.
I was glad to be back in Germany. Glad to be alive. And boy was I glad to see grass and trees again.