Days in Saudi merge into sameness in soldier’s memory

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The 286th Supply and Service Battalion, Maine Army National Guard, home-based in Gardiner, was mobilized Nov. 17 and arrived in Saudi Arabia on Dec. 6. It has been at its desert outpost, “Junction City,” in northeastern Saudi Arabia since Christmas Day. Capt. Stuart J. Bullion is Headquarters Detachment commander and is professor of journalism at the University of Maine. The following is excerpted from his daily journal.

Feb. 3, 1991

DAMMAN, Saudi Arabia — We’re having a dust storm today, another of the desert’s weather extremes, along with the summer’s searing heat and the flooding rains and freezing nights of winter.

In the desert, the wind blows constantly, untrammeled by trees or hills or cities. Where the landscape appears so barren and lifeless, the wind and the sun are the greatest energies, angry and relentless as if punishing some ancient sin of Biblical magnitude.

In the rainy season, the dust storms come after two or three days of dry, warm weather. The first day or two, the wind blows clear, drawing the moisture from the ground, which it leaves rock-hard.

The dust starts to blow a couple of hours after dawn, after whatever nocturnal dew has evaporated. Dusty arrows streak along the ground, darting, pausing, then disappearing like frightened snakes.

Then the myriad streaks meet, mingle and coalesce, gaining strength and size and boldness in their number as they rear into the air and more in waves and floods of tan.

The dust storm becomes a parody of a blizzard, cutting visibility to mere yards, raising and lowering its curtains on goggled men and women swathed in scarves, walking crooked against the wind, heads and shoulders hunched, feet taking small, quick, uncertain steps.

Inside our tents — sealed as tightly as possible with plastic, cardboard and cord — it’s uncomfortably warm from the filtered sunlight on the canvas. A layer of dust the color and texture of cocoa power settles on everything and steadily thickens. Bare lightbulbs highlight the standing haze.

Your sinuses clog, and your nostrils shut down altogether as a dull headache throbs in your skull. Your mouth fills with the taste of long-dead centuries, and your teeth crunch on microscopic particles. Touching anything is like erasing a chalkboard with your bare hands.

Visitors come and go quickly through the tent flap, stomping their boots and shaking out their parkas like people coming indoors from a winter nor’easter in Maine. The tents, themselves, groan and slap. No one ventures out without a damned good reason.

On the perimeter, however, a muffled soldier huddles in every other foxhole, weapon ready, straining to peer through the murk. Two soliders armed with AT-4 anti-tank weapons are on vehicular patrol a few hundred meters out. They’ll need to use their radio and compass to come back in because of the poor visibility.

We’re only a couple of hours from the Iraq border, by T-72 Soviet tank, and only a Saudi Army screening force is stretched thin between us and the bad guys. Just in case, we’re providing our own early warning.

Feb. 4, 1991

War, they say, is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer terror. This is as true as any cliche and both the boredom and the terror are those feelings at their most absolute.

We have been in Saudi Arabia close to two months, and the 60-odd days have merged into one memory of sameness. There is only our time in ad-Damman and our time in the desert.

It’s amazing how a day can seem so monotonously purposeless and yet the actions and activities that make it up are critically essential to survival, itself.

Feb. 17, 1991

The dawn of this first day of the Gulf War broke windy, cold and sullen.

By contrast, the mood of the whole unit was upbeat and relieved, if not elated. Not because war had started, but because the war of nerves was over. I, too, have been anxious, sometimes depressed, in the last few weeks.

Part of it was the vague fear that Saddam would strike first and catch us off guard. That would have been one more humiliation for the United States and it’s plausible that a large-scale Iraqi raid could bloody us even now, but to do that, they’d have to expose themselves to more bombing and we’d ultimately destroy their attack force.

Last night I wrote my wife a letter in which I said that we’d probably be at war by the time she read it. After that, I spent some time on the perimeter checking the guard posts and got to bed around 11 p.m.

At about 2:30 a.m. the phone rang in my tent. It was the sergeant of the guard, who informed me that 150 Tomahawk missiles had been fired on Iraq. I was to report to the battalion commander immediately.

That was my last sleep of the night.

Our higher headquarters was confused about the MOPP level in effect, so the batallion commander checked with 1st Infantry Division and confirmed that we did not have to have chemical suits on, just have them handy. Meanwhile, however, a few soldiers had overreacted and broken the seals on their chemical suit packages, making them good for only two or three weeks.

First sergeant and I got back out on the perimeter, feeling our way through the moonless night, to reassure the soldiers in the foxholes and bring them up to date. They were alert, a little on edge, but relieved that we were striking the first blow. We returned to our command post.

We took turns dozing for a while, then the sound of a truck horn beeping, beeping, beeping, braced us wider awake: a chemical alarm. Battalion advised us to mask but not break out the CPOG (Chemical Protective Over Garments). Back out to the dark perimeter, visibility further obscured by our protective masks. Everyone was standing fast, masks in place. A slight tremor in some voices, but no panic. Our training was paying off, and the troops were confident in their protective equipment.

The alert was called off in a half hour and I headed back out to give the all-clear, this time with the battalion chaplain in tow.

Not one of our soldiers had unmasked, despite the shouts of “all-clear” from the next unit over. They were waiting to hear it from me. At that moment, I realized I had effective command over my unit and I was proud of my soldiers’ discipline. We’re going to need both to accomplish our mission and survive.

It was almost dawn then. When the men came up, we reduced our security. Before long, the cooks had conjured up stew and grilled-cheese sandwiches, a welcome treat for bleary-eyed bone-chilled soldiers coming down from the jitters.

The rest of the day we spent keeping up with the air war on BBC and VOA while we started planning our move forward in support of the 1st Infantry Division.

I just realized it’s been several days since I’ve seen my face. My travel mirrow was shattered on the flight over and I’ve been shaving by feel. I wonder what I look like on this first day of my second war.

More of Capt. Bullion’s dispatches will be published as they are received from Damman. It takes between two weeks and a month for letters written by servicemen to arrive in the United States.