But then daybreak came, and all of a sudden, up drove the bus and the hugely smiling driver that had left them there the night before. He took the hearty band to a huge air base farther out in the desert, where they would spend the next few days sleeping on a hangar floor and eating MREs until Bill Rider could send tents and field kitchens to them.
They had plenty to do, as the F-16s from Shaw AFB needed to be turned around for combat air patrols or put on alert with air-to-ground munitions.
Everywhere it was the same — chaos — with everyone pitching in to help each other survive, build housing, and somehow come up with all the necessary comforts that Americans normally take for granted.
In those early days, only the locals — such as the Ethiopian bus driver — seemed to know what they were doing, though their reasons often mystified the Americans. Faced with the end of a long day and a craving to go home, he’d simply dropped his passengers off in the desert where he knew they couldn’t get hurt or in trouble. When his duty day had ended — at midnight, in this case — he’d gone home to get a good night’s sleep, picked them up the next morning, and taken them to the air base as instructed.
? Most of the arriving troops came into Dhahran, a huge Saudi Air Force base on the eastern coast. Its commander, Brigadier General Turki bin Nassar, an RSAF F-15 fighter pilot, held a master’s degree in business administration from Troy State University, and was a graduate from the USAF Air University at Maxwell AFB. Prince Turki had hosted a small detachment of Chuck Horner’s people from CENTAF during ELF-1 and EARNEST WILL. Turki was also responsible for the air defense of Saudi Arabia’s vital eastern province, with its vast oil refineries, oil storage, and transshipment points. And then, in August 1990, he had a huge additional job dumped on him.
The 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, commanded by Colonel (later Major General) “Boomer” McBroom, arrived first. Even before all of the forty-eight F-15C fighters had arrived, they were moving to help out Turki’s force of RSAF F-15Cs and Tornado F-2 Air Defense Variant (ADV) fighters in patrolling the skies along the Iraqi and Kuwaiti borders.
Meanwhile, thousands of Army troops from the 82d Airborne Division’s alert brigade were also unloading at Dhahran. Turki’s men opened every facility they had in order to beddown and process the arriving troops as they streamed though the air base en route to their camps in the desert. British and French troops and aircraft also arrived, and Turki found them homes, too.
He and McBroom formed quite a team. Since Turki was the host base commander, for most practical purposes McBroom worked for him, and together they solved a thousand problems every day: where to construct munitions storage areas, how to divide up ramp space, and the like. Cross support of RSAF and USAF F-15s became a daily occurrence, including the sharing of parts. Frequently, one would see USAF and RSAF repair teams helping one another, even if it meant that the two sergeants repairing the jet were a bearded Saudi and a fresh-faced American woman.
Throughout the Kingdom, the emirates, and the other host nations of what was already becoming known as “the Coalition,” other examples of cooperation were going on — from generals and admirals, to sergeants and seamen. Day in, day out, trust, confidence, and cooperation grew as they all turned to defense of the Kingdom.
While all of this was happening, Major General Tom Olsen formed up the Air Force’s Tactical Air Control Center (TACC) in the RSAF headquarters. The TACC was a vital part of what was to happen in the next nine months; the USAF could not have functioned without it. From there each day, Brigadier General Ahmed Sudairy and Colonel Jim Crigger and their staffs published an Air Tasking Order (ATO) for the growing Coalition air force. The ATO is the key document for running air operations in a theater — the sheet music that the aerial orchestra must use in order to play together. It covers everything from fighter and transport flights, to surface-to-air engagement envelopes and artillery fire. Anything that flies through the air needs to be in the ATO if it is to be safe, both for itself and others. In those early days, the ATOs out of the TACC were designed to execute the air defense of the Kingdom and the emirates, and to place aircraft on alert to repel a potential Iraqi invasion.
LINE IN THE SAND
The defense of the Kingdom was the other main driver during the “beddown of troops” period of Desert Shield. Every day, U.S. capabilities to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraqi aggression grew, which meant that new plans for that defense needed to be formed on an almost hour-to-hour basis.
On one of their first nights in-country, Horner asked John Yeosock what he had that night to fight with if the Iraqis decided to attack into northern Saudi Arabia. Yeosock reached into his pocket, pulled out a penknife, and opened its two-inch blade. “That’s it,” he said.
He wasn’t far from wrong.
From the start, air defense was the first order of business. Fortunately, much of this defense was already in place, owing to some congressmen who had weathered criticism in order to support the sale of F-15s and E-3 AWACS to Saudi Arabia. These very aircraft now made possible the safe passage of the giant USAF transports vital to the rapid buildup of U.S. forces.
The first deploying forces were USAF F-15 fighters and E-3 AWACS aircraft, to flesh out the Saudis who had been flying combat air patrols since the beginning of the crisis. Next came the U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, USS
Shortly after this, U.S. Marines aboard an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) arrived offshore, followed by the larger and more powerful 7th MEB (Marine Expeditionary Battalion) from Twenty-nine Palms in California. These units drew their equipment from a just-arrived squadron of prepositioned ships based in the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia. With them came a Marine air wing of fighters, attack aircraft, tankers, and helicopters to support their efforts. Then 82d Airborne Division began to land in Dhahran.
All these forces deployed along the east coast, the high-speed avenue of attack, to protect the strategic assets there — the oil facilities and the desalinization plants, which supplied water to the interior as well as to the ports, towns, and airports in the eastern province. The forces were small and light, without much of the armored muscle that would be required to stop an Iraqi advance if it came.
The fundamental job during this time was to find places to put all the people and equipment as they arrived, and to do it as fast as possible.
The USAF units were bedded down by Bill Rider and the CENTAF staff, who set up shop in the RSAF headquarters, and were working the USAF beddown right from the start. At Horner’s direction, the F-15s and AWACS went side by side with their counterparts in the RSAF. The F-16s went to the UAE, because they had the range to cover Saudi Arabia, and this way they were based pretty much out of harm’s way from either ground, air, or missile attack. The A-10s went into Fahd Air Base, ten miles west of Dhahran, since they would be vital to stopping an Iraqi tank attack — though in all likelihood they would have had to fall back in the actual event of an Iraqi attack. The F-111s and U-2s went to Taif, near Mecca, and the F-117s went to Khamis Mushayt, south of Taif and about thirty miles north of the Yemen border.
Grant Sharp did most of the Navy work. Since he already had a standing command afloat in the Gulf, the initial actions were to expand that command. Air tasking for the carriers would come out of the RSAF headquarters, while surface actions would come out of Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty (until Vice Admiral Hank Mauz arrived to take over at NAVCENT).
John Yeosock was in charge of the land forces, with Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, the Marine commander, and Lieutenant General Gary Luck, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps commander, working together immediately under him.
