CHAPEL HILL -- Imagine risking your life for a leader like Iraq's Saddam Hussein. During the Persian Gulf War his officers cut the Achilles tendons of adolescent and elderly soldiers so they couldn't abandon their posts in the face of a ferocious U.S. assault. Even survivors would be crippled for life.
Five young men who commanded U.S. tanks during Desert Shield and Desert Storm -- the nation's defense of Saudi Arabia and subsequent liberation of Kuwait -- have teamed up to write about their short war against such a monster.
Led by Alex Vernon, now a doctoral student in the University of North Carolina's English department, the veterans contributed memories to their new book, "The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War." Kent State University Press published the 330-page book late last year. Other contributors were Neal Creighton Jr., Greg Downey, Rob Holmes and Dave Trybula.
"This is a story of courage, dedication and agonizing self-doubt as these young officers faced the gut-wrenching responsibility of leading platoons through the enormous confusion, fear and physical fatigue of high-intensity combat operations," wrote retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey in his foreword. McCaffrey commanded the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during the war, which he called "one of the most violent and rapid military attacks in the history of mankind."
Before deploying to Saudi Arabia, like countless others before him, the introspective Vernon worried that he "did not have the stuff to lead soldiers in combat." Within minutes of talking to an army chaplain, "I was bawling. I had myself convinced that soldiers would die because of me, that I would panic, think too much, seize up, make a critical mistake. I did not want to go." He went anyway.
Early on, the enemy was the desert, and like his friends, Holmes spent his first night in Saudi Arabia "lying on the concrete floor of a warehouse in the port city of Ad Damman packed in like cord wood. I remember looking at my watch at midnight and then the thermometer clipped to my field pack: 112 degrees. It was absolutely oppressive ... so hot we couldn't sleep.
"We were trapped in this furnace waiting for the ships to arrive with our beloved tanks. Armor soldiers are the modern day cavalrymen; tanks have simply replaced horses. I missed my four M1s. I landed in Saudi with nothing but my .45-caliber pistol. We were a terrorist's dream: 500 American soldiers packed into one warehouse. One truck bomb would have done us in and made a huge media pool splash."
An intelligence officer estimated that the pier where they stayed the first few days contained several hundred thousand pounds of explosives that, if detonated, would have created a kill zone six miles across.
At night, temperatures dropped to freezing and during days exceeded 120 degrees, far higher than the young men and women experienced during rigorous training at Ft. Stewart, Ga., and elsewhere.
"It's hard to explain how hot it was, even under the net's shade," Trybula wrote. "If you drank before going to sleep, you still awoke dehydrated. Exposed flesh felt like it was on fire."
Blowing sand found its way into everything, including Thanksgiving dinners. Machine guns on the tanks were too hot to touch and became so clogged on the first day in the desert that Holmes' crew could not chamber rounds, much less fire them. Oil couldn't be used to lubricate weapons because sand would stick to it. Maps noted that the topography changed with the wind.
Scarab beetles, spiders, scorpions, ticks and horned sand vipers shared their little spot of earth. Tankers battled flies constantly, waving empty plastic water bottles as swatters. Wild camels wandered by regularly, as did Bedouins, those desert nomads who did not recognize national sovereignty and lived much as they had for thousands of years. Cheerful Arab children delighted the soldiers but movie images of Vietnamese kids wired with explosives also made them nervous.
Heaters in the tanks on cold nights made water condense inside and drip on them like the ancient Chinese water torture. Mail from home, even from strangers, and rock 'n' roll music kept spirits up.
Sixty percent of the division fought dysentery for weeks. Downey dropped from 145 pounds to 112. Hussein's biggest mistake -- beyond invading Kuwait in the first place -- was not pressing his attack before massive U.S. forces began arriving in Saudi Arabia and before those forces began acclimating to their harsh conditions.
Creighton often listened to Baghdad Betty, an English-speaking propagandist on Iraqi radio warning about the pain and death the U.S. forces would suffer if they pressed the fight. "She was a scream. She once said something like, 'go home! Your women are running around with Tom Cruise, Burt Reynolds and Bart Simpson.'"
The ground invasion of Iraq and Kuwait began Feb. 24, 1991, and turned out to be little more than a long weekend from hell. Months of continuous discomfort and training and the air war, which began a week earlier and unleashed more bombs in the first 24 hours than fell on North Vietnam, paid off handsomely. Many Iraqis, as well as Kuwaitis, later applauded the Americans.
"I couldn't believe it," Holmes wrote. "I thought Desert Storm would last a month, two weeks at least. I never thought we could do it in four days! In 100 hours, we had dismantled the fourth-largest army in the world. The 24th Infantry Division had traveled farther and faster than any division in military history, and Task Force 1-64 had led the way."
President Bush's hasty 1991 declaration that the Persian Gulf War had "closed the book on Vietnam" insulted the American participants of both conflicts, Vernon said. One response of Gulf War veterans to the conflict has been belittlement, and one of his fellow West Point graduates called it "the Beach Party."
"I would never assert any general parity between the horrors of the Gulf War and those of a Vietnam, Korea or World War," he wrote. "How dare a Gulf vet, after all, mope down like a dropped sack onto a barstool next to a veteran of a real war? Yet how dare we dismiss our experience."
Vernon and the soldiers under his command, his superiors and fellow officers saw and created more than enough civilian and military carnage to last a lifetime. He and many others, given a cost-cutting Defense Department offer to resign their commissions early, quickly accepted.
Note: Vernon can be reached at (919) 962-5481.
For review copies, call (330) 672-7913.
Contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596.