As Colonel Moshe and I were chatting about this, he said, “Let’s go down to the Old City.”
“No, I’d better not do that,” I thought to myself. “I’m already out here when I shouldn’t be; I shouldn’t push this thing.”
“Look,” he said. “Nobody’s around. I’ll take you to West Jerusalem; the Jewish section. You can see the city’s empty.”
He was right. Everything was quiet. People were all indoors, hunkered down.
“Listen,” he said. “We go into the Old City, go to a cafe, have a little coffee or something, and it’ll all be okay.”
And that’s what we did. We found a little cafe, with all its doors closed and its windows shuttered and taped in anticipation of Scud shots; but we could still get coffee.
We were sitting there with our cups when the end of the war hit.
It was like an angel had passed overhead. Suddenly, there was a rumbling sound. It quickly grew louder, and before we knew it thousands of people burst outdoors and came into the streets yelling. Everybody in West Jerusalem was in the streets cheering. We were swarmed (I was in my Marine cammies). Women ran up and kissed us. “The war’s over!” they screamed. “The Iraqis have just surrendered!”
Pretty soon a camera crew showed up. I tried to duck out and get back to our car, but it was no use. When they saw my general’s star, they had to ask me who I was and why I was here. I explained as best I could; but of course the embassy had their TVs on; and there was Zinni in Jerusalem where he was not supposed to be.
On the way back to Tel Aviv, I received a call from the embassy telling me to go right to the airport and leave. I notified our aircrew, picked up my gear, said a quick good-bye to the troops, and headed for the airfield.
Israel is the only country I’ve ever been thrown out of; but I couldn’t think of a better place other than Jerusalem to be at the moment the Persian Gulf War ended.
OPERATION PROVIDE COMFORT
Back in Stuttgart, the command was celebrating. And when I came in, so was our staff; they were elated but exhausted. The nearly yearlong twenty-four-hour manning of the CAT and the Battle Staff had drained all of us. Everybody in the EUCOM J-3 shop was just beaten… worn thin. And yet there was still a lot to do before we could shut down the Battle Staff and the CAT and get back to normal. We kept targeting a stand-down date, but it kept getting delayed.
Finally, on Friday, April 5, we came to the point when we thought we could actually shut it down.
There was one possible hang-up to that. A situation was developing on the Iraqi-Turkish border that merited concern (much of the following information we did not learn until later): Urged on by promises of U.S. military support (that subsequently was not provided), the Kurds had mounted a revolt against Saddam, which Saddam had brutally crushed. The Iraqi military had then pushed the panicked Kurds into the mountains along the Turkish border, slaughtering many in the process. Just about the entire Iraqi Kurdish population was involved in this exodus; hundreds of thousands of refugees were now pouring over the border, few carrying more than the clothes on their backs, all of them in dire straits. The Turks (who had had a bad previous experience with Kurdish refugees, and have a Kurdish problem of their own) refused to let the refugees down from the mountains; and the harsh winter conditions were threatening to devastate these traumatized masses.
Early on the fifth, we got a call to tell us that Secretary of State James Baker had become concerned about the refugees and wanted to take a firsthand look. (He was already in the region.) He flew into Turkey, and we provided him with a pair of Navy CH-53 helicopters to carry him out to the camps where the refugees had collected.
We were monitoring this developing situation, but it didn’t take up very many pixels on our screen.
Later that day, a call came from the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. “Maybe you ought to keep the CAT in place,” they advised us, “in case Baker wants to take some action.” So we were ready to keep the CAT going. But then they came back: “No, forget it. It’s no big deal. Baker’s gone up in the helicopters. Nothing much is going to come of it.”
That meant we could close down the CAT at last. “At the end of the workday — normal hours,” Snuffy Smith announced, “we’re going to shut down the CAT.” The exhausted staff was in heaven after two solid years of double duty.
Then Snuffy took me aside. “Get Debbie,” he said. “I’ll get Dotty”—his wife—“We’re going down to Pietro’s.” Pietro’s was a little Italian restaurant just outside the gate, one of our favorite places. “We’re going to have a big dinner and get shitfaced tonight. Have a good time and celebrate the end of all the crises.”
That sounded pretty good to me. In some very real ways, going out to Pietro’s was like getting released from prison. Not just because we’d been working hard. Security on the base had been iron tight. Except for flying off to do our jobs, we’d been locked in: German police had discovered terrorists observing General McCarthy’s house (located in a nice neighborhood in town where Americans had been living for a long time). This raised serious security fears. There had also been peace demonstrations, and some of the demonstrators had managed to get inside the base. The resulting precautions were necessary, but a burden: All the officers were issued.45s; and guards armed with machine guns had been placed all around the base.
This was going to be the first time we could just go out and relax since the war started (though we still had to have a security detail outside the gates).
Pietro, the owner, and everybody else at the restaurant were all delighted to see us; it had been a long time; everybody was laughing and in high spirits. There were mandolin players; and we sang along with them. We were enjoying a splendid Italian feast; Snuffy and I were drinking a lot of wine; and we were feeling really good.
All of a sudden, the door swung open and the colonel that runs our command center rushed in. “Sirs,” he told us, “you have to get back to the base right away. The director of operations at the Joint Staff wants to talk to you immediately. It looks like you need to launch an operation ASAP.”
“Holy shit,” I said to myself. It was the middle of the night, and we were feeling no pain; but we dropped everything, got our wives out of there, and hurried back to the command center.
When we called the director of operations, this is what we learned: Secretary Baker had spent the day observing the Kurdish refugees, and he was appalled. The refugee situation was developing into a terrible catastrophe. There were already tens of thousands of people collected in makeshift camps; and hundreds of thousands more were in the mountains moving in. Worse, the Kurdish authorities were pointing the finger at George Bush for encouraging them in their revolt. The Bush administration potentially had a lot of egg on its face. If something wasn’t done fast, things were going totally to hell.
We were ordered to have relief supplies on the ground in thirty-six hours.
This seemed like an impossible task, given the remote locations where the ravaged people had clustered and the lack of forces in position to react immediately; but we put our heads into the problem.
The first thing we did was call Jim Jamerson at USAFE to give him a heads-up: His guys had to rapidly develop a plan for a humanitarian airlift. Jamerson, who had just returned from commanding JTF Proven Force in southeast Turkey, instantly began piecing together a force to move back into position and conduct airdrops to the refugee sites. The mission would be organized very like Proven Force. Though he’d have a different mission and different kinds of airplanes, the structure and the staff control would be the same. And knowing the area was going to be a big plus. “We’ll need C-130s and helos to carry the stuff; and they will need escorts to fly with them. Where will we get all of that? Can we get enough parachute riggers? Where can we get the food?” We spent all that
