Sixteen years ago - where were you?

[biscuit]

I was in the Royal Australian Navy serving on a landing craft with a crew of 13....i remember we were up

in northern Queensland and were talking to some people and they said "are you guys going to the gulf?"

and we looked back at our little ship and said "It'll be over by the time we get there" :lol:

but to all the guys who served <_<

mick

[Will2K65]

In January 1991, I wa , errr, 5 years and 3 months old....so don't really remember anything from the war.

My earliest 'memory' of news coverage in Iraq was from 1993, the establishment of the no fly zones...I remember watching old footage of AAA over Baghdad on the BBC as part of their coverage, planes taking off, and photos of Saddam Hussein, and my dad saying not very nice things about him! Strange how that stuck in my mind, being only 8, but this was when I first started getting into aviation I guess and my dad would call me into the living room when the news was on so I could see the planes.

Edited January 20, 2007 by Will2K65

[Murph]

Sitting in the tower at Langley, pulling night SOF.

Regards,

Murph

[Mike Phillips]

Well, mine isnt near as exciting as some of the posts here but here's mine:

I work at a radio station. My dad works there too as the news director. At the time I'd been there about 5 years, and was always listening to Dad say "I remember when I pulled the story off the wire about (insert big news happening here)". The cheif engineer lives on site and walked over and asked if I had heard anything about the war starting. I said no. There was a piece of gear in one of the racks that had an alarm on it, with various numbers for different levels of urgency for news stories. The highest level was 15 for "National Emergency". I figured I'd never see 15 show up. When he asked, I just happened to look at the machine and 15 was flashing on it. So I went to the news machine printer and printing out was something to the effect of "Operation Desert Storm has begun".

I now say to my Dad when he mentions something hes pulled, "Yea, but you never pulled off the beginning of a war!"

Mike

[parche]

Freshman in High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. Completely blew off studying for exams to absorb all the info I could from the TV. Still managed to ace my exams...sick...isn't it. Definitely solidified going into the military for me (I had said since I was very little that I wanted to join the Navy).

Fast forward to 2003. Sitting in Guam with my submarine, unable to get underway because of maintenance in the Torpedo Room. Knew something had started for OIF because my wife hadn't made her daily call from the USS Abraham Lincoln. My CO was so bent out of shape about not being able to be involved that he went out of his way to try to find spots for all of us Junior Officers to get temporarily assigned to commands in the Gulf so that we could get involved. I was the only one who really wanted to go, but unfortunately we couldn't get anything worked out. So I sat in Guam while my wife did stuff.

On the sideline for everything.

Cheers,

Dave

Edited January 20, 2007 by parche

[A6BSTARM]

I has just started 7th grade at Oak Harbor Middile school. I remember that day because I was at a friends house that night and we were going head to head playing some nintendo game. I just remember we were screamed at to unplug that thing so that she could catch the news. His father had just been transfeered to the Ranger from Whidbey AIMD. Then at school the next day there was 3 tvs set up, one at the library, at the student center, and at the cafeteria. We were told not to talk to any of the media by the school admin and for a few of the senior Officer's kids were removed by NIS and OHPD. The police also stationed a couple of officers at the school. It seems that threats had been made by the Iraqi's and other selected groups against the skippers of couple squadrons.

[Chris Kethan]

I was a LTjg in the Navy at the time, on my first deployment to Keflavik, Iceland. I was busy keeping the red hoard at bay while my comrades ousted Hussein from Kuwait. Like everyone else, when I wasn't on the flight schedule, I was watching it on CNN. (and I HATE watching the news).

Chris

[MKopack]

sitting in a brand new M1A1, watching the world go by in my nice night scope, trying to explain to my troops how we were at war, but did not have one live round for any weapon we had.

it was 5 days later befoe we were armed.

supplies had went back to fort hood, paperwork mistake!!!!!!

ray

Oooooh, I'm sure thinking "I hope they don't come cross the border...". Had a friend I later went to A&P school with who was in an Army transportation company at the time, up on the Iraqi border. Due to a weird bit of Army planning, he said that the only thing between him, his vehicles and the enemy border (and the Iraqi troops that he could see through his binocs) was a half mile of sand. A mile to his left was a French Foreign Legion armored unit, and a mile behind him was a US mechanized infantry unit. He said he just sat there thinking "You know, this just isn't the place to be if anything happens..."

Mike

[MKopack]

Well, mine isnt near as exciting as some of the posts here but here's mine...

Mike

Nothing wrong with that Mike - this thread has actually turned out pretty well. Here while everyone is talking about all of the exciting things that were happening when the war first started (My sister was at the SU vs. I think it was BC basketball game in the Dome, it was just about to go into OT when they made the announcement that the war had started and everyone left. I still think she was crazy for leaving...)

As for me, when the war actually started, it wasn't all that exciting either. I was asleep on my cot in the tent. I slept through the first four or so hours of the war, until...

_______________________________

A sneak peek of: The Storm

for more, please visit: http://www.lucky-devils.net

Sirens blaring. It’s dark in the tent. Almost automatically my hand reaches down under the right side of my cot and pulls out my gas mask. It’s open, and over my head. Without even thinking, I cover the exhausts and blow hard to clear the mask. My palm is over the intake and inhale, there’s no air as I can feel the mask collapse and seal around my face with the vacuum. By this time, someone has turned the lights on and as I am suiting up in my chemical gear I can see all of my tentmates doing the same – with one exception. Our ‘Ninja’ has lost it; he’s running up and down the aisle in the center of the tent yelling:

“I don’t know how to put my mask on!”

“We’re all going to die.”

He’s ignored for the moment as I finish suiting up. It’s amazing how short a time it takes from a deep sleep, and over the next few weeks we’ll all get even faster. Suited up now, several of us grab our panicked compatriot, hold him down and get him into his mask and as much of his suit as we can. I grab my helmet and radio and head for the door. Through the first tent flap and a quick left turn after the second, up the steps and jump into our sandbag shelter – where I immediately, and rather forcefully encounter whoever it was that had jumped in just before. I slid over into a corner, all the time hearing the sirens and the recorded message, which went something like this:

“Air raid, air raid. MOPP 4, MOPP 4. All personnel don protective equipment.”

The commotion of suiting up in the tent gives way to silence in the bunker. The sirens have gone quiet and we’re just left with our thoughts. ‘What is going on? Did the Iraqi’s slip a bomber through the air defences?’ I can’t remember if the QEAF’s Mirages scrambled that night, but even if they did it would be a difficult intercept. I pulled out my shortwave radio and slipped the ear-piece beneath the seal of my mask. Turning the unit on quickly brought news from the BBC in London that had received word that a SCUD had been fired from Iraq that was headed towards the Saudi capital of Riyadh. It was a relief to know that even though Iraq was firing ballistic missiles, they weren’t directly at us.

Twenty minutes later we were given the “All Clear” signal and we were able to remove our gear. It was then, sometime after four in the morning of the seventeenth of January 1991 (since there was no use in trying to go back to sleep) that through radio and television that we learned that the war had in fact started and the aircraft from the first airstrikes were returning to their bases, all while we were asleep. The news was good, although there was no official confirmation, CNN reported that most, if not all of our aircraft were accounted for.

When we walked into the hangar that morning, it was a different place. The people, the aircraft and the tools were the same; but there was an entirely different ‘feeling’, a different attitude from the day before. It’s difficult to describe the change, there was a feeling of ‘seriousness’, yet also excitement. We’d been in the desert for almost five months and were finally to start what we came here for. The previous night President Bush had said:

"The liberation of Kuwait has begun. In conjunction with the forces of our coalition partners, the United States has moved under the code name Operation Desert Storm."

All of our aircraft were to be flying missions, so we wouldn’t be getting another inspection soon. My main ‘mission’ was now decontamination and crash recovery. I picked up the ‘brick’ (radio) and checked out the Decon truck, out behind the hangar and our equipment, hoping that none of it would be used. We had a quick meeting with our team, making sure that we all knew where to find each other if we were called. I then headed back to the hangar.

Mike

Edited January 20, 2007 by MKopack

[davetur]

I was at home at night watching TV (Italy is only a few hours late with respect to Iraq)

The funny thing is that the following day I had to travel for business from Milano to London, and the airport was a desert, myself and a colleague (and a few others, less than 10) had the whole airplane staff at our disposal, and when I got into the hotel in London it was bloody freezing since, due to the lack of customers, only a few floors (out of 18) were active and heating was kept to a minimum to save money.

:lol:

Davide

[bigpaul]

I was in 8th grade and I remember our teacher got put on leave because he stopped teaching and basically just went off on how the war was wrong and it was going to be another vietnam and how we were all going to get drafted when it was still going on in 4 or 5 years. Nutjob.

Edited January 20, 2007 by bigpaul

[Vesper]

I was 8, my dad was still flying off shore w/PHI, and that all I 'member.

Ves

[MKopack]

I'd woken up in a much better mood on the 20th of January, the fourth day of Desert Storm, than I'd gone to bed the night before. We all knew that the chances of losing aircraft and pilots was always there, but it was a shock when it happened. Hopefully when I got to the hangar I'd hear that they'd picked Tico up during the night and that he was on his way back.

I was running early that morning, so before I left Tent City to go over to the hangar I stopped off at the Rec Center to catch up on CNN and to see if I could find a recent Gulf Times (Qatar's English language newspaper http://www.gulf-times.com) or even better, a Stars and Stripes. The news that came from either was pretty limited, but any news was better than nothing. Probably one of the best parts of working with Transit Alert (which was also among my duties) was occasionally getting real news from the States as airlifters were transiting through. I was once lucky enough to talk a C-141 crew out of a day old Sunday edition of the New York Times which we all read 'cover to cover' for about two weeks...

Just as soon as I opened the door to the Rec Center and stepped in, I heard "Look, there he is!" as several Crew Chiefs rushed towards me (I'm now thinking Holy Crap, what have I done now???) The night before, after I'd gone to bed, the Camel and the Star C-130's had come in with supplies and mail, one of which had also carried the letest issue of the Air Force's "Airman Magazine". The crew chief's held up a copy, open to the inside of the back cover, printed on which was a page of 'airmen doing their part' in Operation Desert Shield - one of those airmen was me, in a picture taken a couple of months before, sitting on the wing of 87-0228, Mike Robert's jet that had been lost the day before over Baghdad. They explained to me that 'it would be better for all of us' if I didn't have my picture taken with any more of our jets, and not being one to tempt fate too often, I agreed. It is the only picture I have of me with one of our aircraft. Having your picture taken with a jet before a mission is 'old school' bad luck, dating back to WWI, where pilots would refuse to fly if they'd been photographed prior to going up.

I grabbed a binch of copies of the magazine and carried them back to the tent, they'd be good things to send back to all of the relatives - probably even better than the MRE fruitcakes that I sent everyone at Christmas. All the way to the hangar I heard a lot of 'hey, you're the guy in Airman' (but didn't sign any autographs...)

The mood was still dark on the flightline, we were still missing two of our own. There was no word from Tico up in Iraq which troubled everyone. Last night we all felt the chances were so good that the Rescue guys would have gotten him, but when they arrived over the area, there was no sign of him.

We'd also lost two of our aircraft. As a crew chief, your airplane is more than just a machine. You know it inside and out, its personality (every jet has one, and they're all different) they may be made of metal and plastic and wire, but they might as well be alive as much as they can become a part of you - afterall, you probably spend more time with your jet on a day to day basis than any member of your family or any of your friends. Trying to lighten the mood, one of the guys said, "What's even worse, was that 228 and 257 were two of the last three jets that had gone through Phase. At least the Iraqis could have shot down the ones that were due inspections..."

I was worried about what I'd see when the pilots came out of Ops that morning on the way to the jets. They'd had two friends blown out of the sky from amongst them the day before, and from seeing ET's tape the night before, it was obvious that even a second of distraction could be the difference between coming home and not. I was worried that I'd see what I'm sure that they were all feeling, after yesterday's mission, and how it would affect everyone else on the flightline. I hadn't had to worry though despite what they'd been through in the past 24 hours. As each pilot walked out of the Ops doorway on the way to their awaiting jets, they touched the top of the doorframe - on which hung a hand painted sign that read "God Bless Mr. and Tico."

As Col. 'Orville' Wright, the Lucky Devils Commander put it: "The motivation and commitment on the faces of our Lucky Devils as they walked across the flight line on the morning of the 20th to attack the enemy and avenge the loss of one their brothers was clear and, had the Iraqi military been watching, scary."

I don't know what the 'protocol' was, but whenever I walked through the Ops doorway, I touched the same sign. In that moment the darkness that had hung over us, and me personally, lifted. The war was personal now, and it had hit home close to all of us. We were no longer fighting just to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, we were fighting for our own two friends who were still up there. Somewhere.

Mike

3.7 million pounds of ordinance, 1303 sorties, 42 days. The 'Forgotten 1000'.

Visit the Lucky Devils in the Gulf War at: http://www.lucky-devils.net

[John B]

Da Stumps...

[Val K]

I was a senior in HS at the time. When I first heard that the air campaign had started I was sitting in a Rax restaurant munching a roast beef sandwich. Most likely anyway since that is all that Rax sold. I probably wound up seing more of the war through print coverage because I was on the school speech team and I was one of the people in charge of organize the research materials for extemp speakers. I will always remember the gatefold pic in Newsweek of the tomahawk being launched off one of the battleships.

[A6BSTARM]

I was in 8th grade and I remember our teacher got put on leave because he stopped teaching and basically just went off on how the war was wrong and it was going to be another vietnam and how we were all going to get drafted when it was still going on in 4 or 5 years. Nutjob.

A few of the teachers in the Oak Harbor school District were like that too.

[kap64]

I was in Norfolk, VA building radio scanners for EA-6B Prowlers that were in Saudi.

[Chorse6]

I was shoveling S#$t in Schweinfurt!

My Cavalry Squadron was thinking it might be alerted, but I was spending my time deliverying our unit's equipment to others deploying.

[Tiger27]

I was 15 years old at the time, and in school. I got home as soon as possible after school, and watched CNN and Sky News all day and most of the night.

[Gerard]

I'd been watching a late-night Western movie on tv at home here in the UK.

It was either 11:35pm, or 0:35, and I was thinking about an early night, with having to go to work the next morning.

I just turned the radio on, hoping to hear the news headlines, and it was "reports are just coming in of explosions in Baghdad". Naturally, I decided to stay up, and then the tv channel changed from the movie to a news report.

After a few minutes, it was clear that it was the real war to recover Kuwait, so I went upstairs and told my father, who I knew would want to know what was happening. We then watched the news until 2 or 3am that night, and for the next few nights.

At work the next day, I got a local newspaper at lunchtime, and we all read it for the latest news on the war.

Regards,

Gerard

[siesta3]

SOF???

Supervisor of Flying - during flight operations a pilot is in the control tower in case something happens and helps monitor flight activity. The SOF normally passes the time of take off and landings to base operations. Depending on the base or location you will have a SOF for each type of aircraft (normally just for fighters!)up in the tower. Think of it as the air forces land version of the carrier air boss.

I got to bump into Capt. Rick Tollini (Iraqi MiG-25 killer) at Kadena when he pulled SOF duty when he was with the 12FS. He would have to pick up a case with the F-15 TO from the command post and be up at the tower before flight ops and he would have a direct line to the base agencies and also to engineers at the time McDonnel Douglas (Boeing).

Sorry to preemp your thunder Murph!

[phantombullet]

We were lined up and ready to go up Tap Line Road! It was 3am there (and I still wake up everyday at that time, part of my PTSD), me and my TC were woken up to a guy running around saying " We're bombing Bagdad!!!" We went up Tap Line Rd the next day and sat there for a month before the 24th ID was part of the "Left Hook"!!

Just wanted to add something! I think every Red Blooded American needs to know!

The state of NJ is planning on passing a law, that the school kids are not going to be taught anything about our history anymore! This includes 'Veterans Day, Memorial Day' The A**HOLE who is putting it forward, (just waiting for the govenor to sign it into law.) says it cost too much to teach this stuff. Any Veteran should (as I have done and will keep doing) should call or email their Congressmen about this! Check it out on;

Military.com Vets Fight Changes in N.J. Curriculum Forum!

Edited January 21, 2007 by phantombullet

[Will7813]

I wasn't even concieved yet!!

Will

[Murph]

Supervisor of Flying - during flight operations a pilot is in the control tower in case something happens and helps monitor flight activity. The SOF normally passes the time of take off and landings to base operations. Depending on the base or location you will have a SOF for each type of aircraft (normally just for fighters!)up in the tower. Think of it as the air forces land version of the carrier air boss.

Siesta,

Unless it's changed the tower crew handles passing on take off and landing times. The SOF's real job is to handle EP's, as you mentioned, and weather decisions (diverts, WX CNX/Hold), and to be the designated spear catcher if something went wrong during daily flying ops; that's why his wings are on velcro.

Regards,

Murph

[MKopack]

The weather in the Gulf region is usually pretty nice during this time of year, and it really had been in Qatar. Highs in the 60's and 70's with comparatively low humidity was a whole lot nicer than the 120+ and 90% that we had a few months ago. Unfortunatly the weather in Iraq and Kuwait hadn't worked out quite a well. Iraq was going through a '100 year winter', cold, cloudy, with heavy rain and in places, snow. All of this made bombing quite a bit more difficult for our guys who went north each day - it also made it a lot more difficult to find the SCUD launchers, hidden in the western deserts, that the Iraqis had been using to launch missiles against Israel.

Out weather, as I said, was nice, so it wasn't a big deal to be in and out of our chemical gear during alerts and decon inspections. The SCUD alerts were beginning to become less frequent, not due to the lack of ballistic missiles being fired, but due to the policy of setting off the alerts. Over the first few days of the war whenever a missile was detected, no matter the projected target, the entire theater was alerted, now it was a little more more specific. If Riyadh was the target we wouldn't end up in the bunker, but if the direction was towards Daharan or Bahrain it was time to 'go visit the Canadians'. While we had some pretty nice 'bunkers' that doubled as porches, or 'hootches' in front of each tent, 'at work' most of the shelters were basically low square walls of sandbags, maybe three feet high, that we were supposed to hide behind. On the other hand, the Canadians, whith whom we shared our hangar, half buried square cross-sectioned reinforced concrete pipe, overlayed with a thick layer of sandbags, with heavy doors, water, food, and telephone communication to their command post. You can guess where we normally went when the sirens went off. "This is shelter #5, we have four Canadians, and sixteen 'others' inside..."

It was now the 21st of January, the fifth day of the war and things were definatly becoming a routine. Things were picking back up in phase as we were preparing to receive our first 'combat phase' aircraft. Our phase plan had been approved and we were told that it was going to form the basis for F-16 inspections in the theater. Not too bad for something that we basically hashed out on the back of Chinese take-out menus and scrap paper. Our plan wouldn't leave anything out of the typcial phase package, but we wouldn't put anything else in either. Instead of depaneling the entire aircraft, we would only take off the access panels that were absolutely necessary for other work to start. Then each panel that was required to remove for inspection, would be pulled, inspected, faults corrected, and immediatly closed. Our QA inspectors had given us quite a bit of leeway, he told us what he really wanted to see, and the rest we had authorization to close on our own. I still didn't know how the phases would go, or how long they would take (well, we'd been told that we had basically a day, due to flying hours and the fact that we definatly weren't going to be the ones who made an aircraft miss a mission...) A lot would depend on just how the aircraft continued to fly in the demanding desert and wartime environment, although as far as that went the birds were doing great, probably even better than when we were back in Spain.

We were worried that we still hadn't heard anything about either of our guys that went down the day before yesterday. I don't think that anyone really expected to hear much about Mike Roberts, but we really thought that we'd have heard that Jeff Tice had been rescued and was on the way back, but he'd just dissapeared.

Photo via Gary Lane, 401AGS OIC. From the website photo gallery.

The war went on, as we did each day we stood out in front of the hangar as the aircraft departed for their morning mission, and were in place out at EOR as they returned, the same in the afternoon. As we prepared to head out to EOR that afternoon though work spread through the hangar, likely from Ops, that an aircraft had gone down. "Damn, not again." It was that same feeling back from two days before, but within minutes we heard the news that the pilot had already been rescued and the low feeling changed to high, just that fast.

Once the pilots came out of debreif we got our own, less formal, debreif in the hangar: They had been attacking a target on the Kuwaiti coastline, under Iraqi SAM and AAA fire, when Jon Ball, the 614th Ops Officer flying 87-0224, had dropped his Mk.84 (a two-thousand pound, general purpose 'dumb' bomb) just after coming off of the wing, the bomb detonated and the ton of explosives and shockwave tore through the aircraft. He was able to guide the crashing aircraft back out over the Gulf and eject. Within a short time he was picked up by a Navy helicopter that hadn't been far away. The rescue helo had transported him to the carrier for medical attention. Immediatly an investigation was started concerning out Mk.84 and their fuses, had the fuse been improperly set by a weapons crew rushed to load bombs during a long shift, or had it been a one in a million accident? The investigation would tell, but fortunatly this time we were getting our guy back. Although we didn't know Jon's condition, it was an incredible weight that had been lifted off of us. To celebrate, instead of dinner at the chow hall that night we went over the the Hardees/KFC, just outside of the Tent City entrance for chicken, and nothing goes better with chicken, than some of that 'special mouthwash' that the guys back in Spain had sent over in the CARE package...

Mike

3.7 million pounds of ordinance, 1303 sorties, 42 days. The 'Forgotten 1000'.

Visit the Lucky Devils in the Gulf War at: http://www.lucky-devils.net