Everyone nodded at this wisdom, and relief filled the room. The first crisis of the new alliance had been avoided.
On to the next crisis — this one instigated by Chuck Horner.
“General Hamad,” he said, “I think we should collocate our military headquarters.” He quickly added, “Could we look at your new command center in the basement as a place to set up the central combined headquarters?”
Discussing combined command arrangements this soon was very difficult for the Saudis to handle, but even more bothersome was the prospect of hundreds of American men and women in their new headquarters building. Both Horner and Hamad were on uncertain ground… except that Horner was charging ahead, while Hamad was wondering how much he could agree to.
At that moment, the meeting switched to what Americans had come to call “Channel Two.” When Arabs changed from English to Arabic, they were going to “Channel Two.” Since Horner and the other Americans already had some experience in the Kingdom and knew some elements of the language, most of them could understand the general drift of a Channel Two discussion. This one seemed to go back and forth over two questions: whether to combine headquarters and whether to let the Americans in the building, especially the secret Command Center.
General Hamad picked up the phone and made a call, probably, Horner guessed, to check with his boss, Prince Sultan. A few brief words in Arabic indicated that General Hamad could not get through to His Royal Highness. Back to English and those at the table.
“Chuck,” he said, “I don’t know about using the command center. You see, it’s brand new, and not all the phones and communication equipment are installed.”
In Saudi Arabia, you seldom get a direct no. It is considered impolite. Instead, you hear excellent reasons why it is not possible at this time to reach a decision.
Just then, the man Horner had never met, the head of the Royal Saudi Arabian Air Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Khaled, went to Channel Two and delivered an outburst in Arabic to General Hamad. Horner roughly translates it as something like this:
“Boss, this is bullshit. The Iraqis are on the border, and we’re fencing words about using one stupid command center. We need to get off our asses, and, with all due respect, sir, I’m going to see what can be done.”
He then threw his notepad onto the table and charged out of the conference-room door. The room grew quiet, and for a while everyone talked about more mundane matters. But everyone around the table, including Horner, was more than a little dumbfounded by the force of his departure. Saudi Arabia is a most polite society, and the Arabs are extremely deferential toward officers of senior rank. In a second, Khaled went from a three-star general to a prince. And it took some time for everyone else to note the title change. When he reappeared and sat down, he was a subordinate general once more, but the prince had obviously made a phone call to put the train back on the track.
Next, as if by magic, General Hamad’s phone rang. The conversation that followed took some time, and it was, at least on this end, very respectful. When Hamad hung up, he smiled and turned to Horner.
“Why don’t we adjourn and go down and look at the command center?” he said.
Within minutes, the group was headed down the elevator to the two-story underground complex Horner would soon set up for General Schwarzkopf and his staff. Though he had no way of knowing it then, he would visit this command center every night he was in Riyadh, for the next very long nine months.
? It goes without saying that this meeting was important. It set the stage for Horner’s own relations with the Saudis as Commander before General Schwarzkopf ’s arrival and as CENTAF Commander; and of course it had a large effect on the dynamic of U.S.-Saudi relations throughout the Gulf crisis. Even though the themes touched on that afternoon were few — women soldiers and use of the MODA Command Center — the consequences were large.
These themes, in fact, by metonymy, spoke for much, much more. They were focal points for a thousand other themes — telephones, rental cars, hotel rooms, basing, training ranges, port facility access, ramp space, airspace, storage areas, sharing of ammunition, on and on. Not the least of these issues was what military people call status of forces[34] — something never explicitly discussed but always in the back of everyone’s minds. Fortunately, the USAF had been in the Kingdom for the past ten years, and the Air Force people had behaved themselves in an admirable manner. This trust built up over a decade made it possible for both parties to start the relationship without formal agreements, just the verbal agreements reached in Jeddah.
Nonetheless, there was real concern about all these Western troops barging into a deeply religious nation, a nation where customs changed very slowly and where no outside military force had been stationed since the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire. The women soldiers issue stood in for all that. It was, in reality, a status of forces agreement, and it said, “We will respect your laws, but you must understand that we are a force that recognizes a different role for women than your culture does.”
The ground was broken. At that first meeting, the Americans and the Saudis tackled the tough issues with prudence and sensitivity, and that — along with the forceful leadership of General Khaled bin Sultan — enabled all that followed. If Horner had gone into that meeting and asked for 5,000 international telephone lines, 50,000 rental cars, and food for 500,000 troops, the Saudis would have gone into shock. Moreover, he had no idea then what he actually needed, and no one then could have estimated the final size of the force that deployed to conduct the liberation of Kuwait.
The command center issue was slightly different. Horner and his American colleagues worked that as an entree to establishing a combined headquarters. If he had asked the Saudis to establish a combined command, they would have rejected the idea. Instead, he’d asked if he could move his headquarters in where theirs was. This de facto established a combined headquarters, without the direct request to do so.
SHEPHERDING CHAOS
The next few days were frantic.
Major Fong, John Yeosock’s aide, moved Yeosock’s and Horner’s gear into the top floor of one of the buildings in the USMTM compound. Bill Rider, Horner’s logistics chief, moved into the Saudi Air Force Headquarters and began to set up the air headquarters with the support of his RSAF counterpart, Major General Henadi, a man of great intellect and energy.[35]
Nothing went smoothly, yet everyone made do, and somehow forced everything to work.
One small example: the club manager at the USMTM compound went from serving thirty lunches a day to serving three thousand, all in a matter of days. Everyone ate on paper plates and sat on the floor, but they survived.
Anyone walking into Horner’s cramped offices in MODA in those difficult days would have gazed on what looked like absolute confusion, but that wasn’t quite the reality. Confusion arises when you don’t know what you are doing, and they did. There was simply so much to do, however, that everyone was always busy.
Meanwhile, the difficulties of deploying thousands of troops with their equipment were immense, even while speed was vital — the intentions of the Iraqis on the northern side of the Saudi border were still unknown. There was no time for rest, and twenty-hour days became the norm, with naps whenever possible.
In the meantime, Schwarzkopf was directing the sequence of deployments from his headquarters in Tampa, Florida. The thousands of miles between the United States and the Middle East were quickly spanned by an air bridge of immense capacity. Back home, they called it “the Aluminum Bridge.” Around the clock, C-5 Galaxy and C- 141 Starlifter aircraft were loading and taking off at bases all around the country. C-130 Hercules medium transports were beginning to head across the Atlantic, to distribute throughout Saudi Arabia, and the other countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, all of the supplies and people that were being sent. The main hub was Riyadh, but the routes covered Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Egypt. It was not unlike the Klong Courier in Thailand. One “line,” the Blue Ball Express, carried passengers, while the Red Ball Express carried cargo.
