25th Anniversary of Operation Desert Storm

[Zack Baughman]

With this year marking the 25th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, I would love to hear from veterans who participated in that monumental event. Please feel welcome to share any stories you have of your experiences during the war, from the humorous to the humane and anything in between. Share them here if you would like. During AirVenture 2016, the EAA Timeless Voices of Aviation oral history team would be honored to help preserve your memories of the Gulf War. My thanks!

As for my own memories, I was a freshman in high school when the war started. I didn't have any immediate family in the service at that time, but some of my classmates and a few of my teachers did. I remember the school (Davis County Community High School in Bloomfield, Iowa - Go Mustangs!) had some banners on display in support of the troops and in some of our classes we watched what was happening on TV with the coalition bombing. I didn't understand, or really care at that time, about the politics involved. To an immature 14-year old kid, it was fascinating to watch F-15s and 16s blow up Saddam's buildings and tanks with narration by a guy named Wolf (I remember thinking, who names their kid Wolf, anyway?) on CNN. It was so far away in a different world. That is until the newspaper articles about service men and women from neighboring counties who had been killed started showing up. These were people who were really only a few years older than me. I had watched some of them play against our own basketball and football teams over the years. It made a big impression. I think I kind of always knew it, but the Gulf War really solidified it for me that freedom truly is not free. It is earned. It's fought for. People give everything for it. I have not served, but I have the utmost respect and admiration for all who do.

So as unpolished as it is, that is my memory of the Gulf War. What are yours?

[crusty old aviator]

I still have my "no war for oil" T shirt...but not my picket sign.

Once the shooting stopped, and the no-fly zone was enforced, Saddam had his remaining Mig and Sukoi fighters wrapped and buried in the sand. They were dug up after Bush 2 invaded, a decade later, and some of his supporters tried to pass them off as weapons of mass destruction...ha! I wonder whatever became of them?

[TedK]

I flew P-3s in the northern gulf. We flew out of Masirah Island Oman, took on free gas at Fujarah UAE and then up into the Gulf. We had the then new ISAR imaging radar and Infrared so our job was to find the Iraqi Navy and make sure they didn't come out into the Gulf to harass the Carriers. We all still remembered the Iraqi Exocet that damaged the Stark a few years earlier.

Despite the pleas of the carrier Admirals for us to carry weapons, Harpoon and Rockeye, we had one senior inappropriately placed in our chain of command who nixed that idea, so we became multi crewed Forward Air Controllers. The northern gulf is really a big River delta a lot like the Mississippi Delta, and there were plenty of off shore oil platforms so there were plenty of places for the small ship Iraqi Navy to hide. The weather was really poor on many days, plus Saddam had set the oil fields afire so it was WOXOF in a lot of places.

Our new imaging radar had no problems with this. One night during lousy weather the Iraqi Navy came out of the Delta like someone had kicked over an anthill. My crew was on station and we vectored A-6s and A-7s and talked them onto target...all they could see were blips so they blind bombed the Iraqi Navy into oblivion. This went on for about two days and is called the Battle of Bubiyon Island.

Our patrol stations were north of the F-14 CAP stations...we wondered if we were hung out as Mig Bait. I only had one incident with a Mig and it was kind of a goat rope. We were rendezvousing with some A-6s and changing radio frees when we were handed over to an E-2. When we dialed onto the freq it was pandemonium wih the E-2 vectoring us South ..."Migs Inbound."

We and the A-6s bustered South. We were trading altitude for airspeed and were well beyond our redline. As we scrambled to regroup I queried the A-6s, who were supposed to be with us, as to where they were. They were clearly faster than us and left us behind. When I chastised them about leaving us behind, the A-6 leads comment was, "don't have to out run the bear, just have outrun you." Nothing like a little black humor to lighten things up. I never forgot their callsign..."Heartless." As it turned out, there was no fighter pilot in the Mig, he was headed toward Iran to defect.

We went to Iran one night, too. By mistake. We were running an ISAR engagement vectoring attack aircraft and watching the targets for BDA as their weapons hit, and continued a little to long to the NorthEast. When we flipped the radar back into the normal mapping mode the Iranian coast line was behind us!!! We immediately turned around and got back into the northern gulf. Fog of war.

We did drop one piece of Ordnance near the end of the war that got me into hot water. I received a nonpunative Letter of Reprimand for"Unauthorized Expenditure of Ordnance on the Enemy." It hangs on my I Love Me wall by my Air Medal making me sound like a Yankee Air Pirate. P-3s in our normal sub hunting role drop lots of sonobuoys. A sonobuoy is a hydrophone used for listening for submarines.

We we were feet dry over southern Iraq about 2am. My onboard Ordnanceman was frustrated (like we all were) at our lack of weapons. I let him take out his frustration by punching away a sonobuoy. Even though we were feet dry, we were nose into a hundred knot headwind at 25kft. The buoy came down right where I knew it would...in the Gulf. You would have thought I dropped a nuke. The episode became know as the Buoy of Bubiyon Island. "Bubiyon Island??...I thought you said buoy on island!

ted

[rwanttaja]

I have only a back-asp, weird relationship with Desert Storm. I'd gotten out of the Air Force about eight years earlier, and being an ROTC graduate, still had a number of years to serve as inactive reserve (no drills, no meeting, no pay, just come if we call).

Anyway, a couple of years before the war, I got a letter from the Air Force. I had completed my inactive reserve commitment, and the Air Force was wondering if there was any reason I shouldn't be given an honorable discharge.

I wrote back that I had some fairly specialized experience, during my active duty time, and that the Air Force might want to keep me on the back burner. What I had done was still classified, so I couldn't get into specifics (since declassified, BTW).

I got a nice letter back containing my my discharge papers, and that was it.

When Desert Storm erupted, I was reminded of my offer. You see, what I did on active duty was use satellites to detect missile launches. As in "Here come the SCUDs....."

Ron "Confidence High" Wanttaja

[Zack Baughman]

Love these stories! Thanks so much for sharing them, Ted, and thank you Sir for your service!

[Zack Baughman]

You see, what I did on active duty was use satellites to detect missile launches. As in "Here come the SCUDs....."

Ron "Confidence High" Wanttaja

[WLIU]

I will hazard a guess that more folks have not spoken up as being shot at is something that can not be explained. One friend recounted over a beer being inbound over Bagdhad in an F-117 on night number one and thinking "This stealthy shit better work!" just before the sky lit up with randomly aimed AAA. A 10th Group SF friend recounted stepping into the night sky with his team, at 40,000', the real deal for the first time ever, to begin several days of hiking around to locate and direct airstrikes on mobile SCUD launchers. And the battle at 73 Easting proved once and for all to the Russians that their T-70's and traditional tactics were no match for US M-1's and modern maneuver techniques. Not to mention the strategy and planning of the Jedi Knights being validated (look it up).

Hard to believe it was 25 years ago. Stormin' Norman left us several years ago. And the Nighthawks rest in the desert at Davis-Monthan.

Best of luck,

Wes

[Bill Greenwood]

I had a friend visiting who was a Southwest pilot and flew C5 s also. Two days later I turn on tv and there he is flying anti scud missiles to Israel. He said he didn't know in advance, but got the assignment when he got home.

Our wars since then have sure turned out much more difficult and costly, and still going on,

[Mayhemxpc]

Bill, its not the war, its the clean up -- especially when the decision makers refuse to take that into account when planning for the war (or planners/executors are allowed to take that into account.) Remember what happened to GEN Shinseki and Secretary of the Army White when they told Congress what post-conflict ops would take. Anyway, the first phase of GW2 went pretty much like GW1. It's when we try to stick around and rebuild another culture to look like ours that we get into trouble.

Anyway, in 1991 I was an Armored Cavalry officer, incongruously assigned to the HQ XVIII Airborne Corps. (Major culture shock -- for them!) My aviation story was the day after the Iraqi's left Kuwait International. I was told to be a one man advance team going into the airport and scout it out as a potential forward base for the airborne corps. I went in a CH-47, sitting in the jump seat between the two pilots. We had Doppler, INS, and Omega. None of which agreed with any of the others. We figured we had a navigational CEP of about 2 nm. We were flying over terrain that might as well have been a blank piece of paper except for the main road going to Kuwait City. Oh, and there were the oil fire clouds referred to above, but we were below them. I played navigator (we were much closer to may operational environment than theirs.) The clouds could not have been more than 100' or 200' AGL. Every once in awhile we would see towers on either side of the road extending up into the oil cloud. We would stop forward motion and go up into the cloud. "Do you think we are high enough?" (To avoid any wires). "I guess so." Fly forward. "Do you thing we are past them," and, "We'll find out." Down we go until the next set of towers. Nasty sickly yellow to everything below, but preferable to the total blackness in the cloud (and everything the engines were sucking in.) finally we get to about where we think the airport is. Contact the USAF Special Ops team already on the ground. "We are at the airport." "How can you tell?" "There is a lot of nothing around us. (Vis was too low to make out if there were any runways nearby.) Is your GCA or GSR up?" "No, we just got here. Nothing is up. Fly heading of 060 until you see something." Roger 060. "Oh, and under no circumstances let your wheels touch the ground. Bomblets and UXO everywhere." Lots of fun. It was raining oil below the clouds. (What would the weather code for BR be if it were oil instead of water?) The destruction was amazing, mostly caused by the Iraqi's, not us. Corps HQ decided not to move north.

When I came back 13 years later I was amazed how well the Kuwaitis fixed everything up. It was hard to believe it was the same terminal that I carefully scouted out those years before.

I suppose the lesson is that those places can recover from the destruction of war, if they want to -- and are not interfered with by elements that do not want that recovery.

[TedK]

Chris is absolutely right. The environmental destruction done by Saddam made the whole place seem absolutely hellish. The oil fires and WOXOF black clouds were something out of sci fi movie. And he opened the taps at his oil terminals absolutely fouling the Gulf with oil.

AAA at night seemed way too close even though we knew we were 20 miles away. Watching a plane get hit by a SAM was nauseating. Watching broadsides from the Battleship fly underneath us was, well, different (did you know there is a table in our tactics handbooks entitled Max Ordinate for Artillery, eg, how high will a shell go...as I recall, 16" shells max out at 16kft or so....who knew...)

We weren't trained for this. We were trained for independently hunting submarines in the Big Blue Ocean. But nobody asked us. The question we kept getting was, "can you do this?", to which our answer was, "uh...Yes. I'll figure it out as we go along." On the ground we kept asking ourselves what can we do with all these expensive sub hunting systems that will make a difference here. War is truly a come as you are pick-up game.