The 82d Airborne Division was the first on the ground, but there was no way to move them around except in the limited vehicles they had brought with them and the trucks and rental cars that could be scrounged from civilians. Owing to their lack of mobility, not much else could be done with them except to move them out from Dhahran into the desert near the air base, though some elements moved up toward the Kuwait border in position to fight delaying actions.
Defenses were dreadfully thin.
In those days, just in case, John Yeosock and Chuck Horner always kept their staff cars filled with gas, with a case of water in the trunk, and in the glove compartment a map of the road to Jeddah — if all else failed, the last-ditch fallback.
Most of the direst predictions did not envision a retreat that far, instead projecting the loss of the east coast down to Qatar or the UAE borders. In that event, the plan was to take refuge in Bahrain by blowing the causeway to Dhahran, an island.
There would eventually be bright spots, like the arrival of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division with its M1A1 heavy tanks and M ? Bradley fighting vehicles, or the rapid movement of the French ground forces from the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea across Saudi Arabia to the eastern province. But those events were weeks ahead, at the end of August and early September. For most of August, things were really hairy.
In the event of an invasion, the plan was for the 82d Airborne to act as “speed bumps.” They’d move forward and blow the bridges through the sepkas and then fight until dislodged. Sepkas were swamplike low spots near the coast, where the salt water lay just under the desert crust, making them impassable for vehicles. The 82d would then melt into the desert, escape down the highway… or be captured or killed. They’d do this over and over.
If the Iraqis tried an attack down the Wadi al Batin, the Saudi forces in King Khalid Military City would place a large roadblock across it and try to halt the invaders. If they failed, not much lay between the Iraqis and Riyadh, except some very difficult terrain and airpower.
Such an attack remained unlikely, since the Iraqis’ best avenue of attack would have been to race down the coastal road in the east, then make a right turn at Dhahran and come east toward the capital. But again, distance worked against them: the farther they attacked, the closer they came to the U.S. air bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and southwestern and western Saudi Arabia. Additionally, the Iraqis did not have the means to sweep the Arabian Gulf clear of the U.S. surface navy. Thus, the farther south they came, the more they exposed their flank to naval gunfire and air attack from the carriers. To cap it off, there was an aggressive disinformation campaign to inform the Iraqis of a planned U.S. amphibious landing in Kuwait City — the worst-kept secret since the story that D Day was going to take place at the Pas de Calais.
? Of course, there were other problems, as well.
Working out corps boundaries between the USMC and the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, for instance, might seem easy enough — draw a few lines on a map; you stay on this side; you stay on that — but it wasn’t. The corps had to be placed carefully so that the enemy couldn’t take advantage of the terrain.
The basic situation was this: Khaled’s Arabs (the EAC — Eastern Area Command) were on the coast; the Army’s XVIIIth Corps was on the left; and the USMC was in between. The problem was that significant avenues of attack had to be properly covered, and could not be split between different units. For example, the north-south highway needed to be entirely in one corps area, if for no other reason than simplified traffic control, but since there were curves in the highway, the corps that owned it had considerable area to defend. To make matters more difficult, the sepkas caused chokepoints, and these chokepoints funneled the enemy back and forth from one corps area to another.
Since it was vital for Walt Boomer and Gary Luck to work out these issues together, from time to time Horner called on one or the other to make sure everything was going well. Though they didn’t always reach full agreement, they achieved reasonable cooperation.
There were also disagreements about the placement of EAC forces — two separate issues, really, though they were related.
First: Khaled insisted that if the Iraqis attacked, Arabs had to be the first casualties. Horner understood the significance of that position, and he did not disagree. That meant placing Khaled’s forces close to the border — too close, as it turned out. They were within Iraqi artillery range, which gave the Iraqis the opportunity to inflict easy casualties. In time, Khaled’s objections were overcome, and the EAC and the SANG (Saudi Arabian National Guard, a small, elite force whose normal function was to protect the two principal holy places, Mecca and Medina) pulled back from the border. (This jammed them into the USMC coming out of Jubail, but that problem was also solved.)
Second: Khaled had orders from the King not to give up Saudi land. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, in those early days, the Coalition did not have sufficient land forces to execute that strategy, and even if they had, they’d have incurred large numbers of casualties. Though Khaled was truly caught in the middle between Horner and his King, he played his cards adroitly: even as he cooperated with the mobile defense concept the Coalition was faced with implementing, he extracted promises that U.S. forces would do their best to join with their Saudi allies to contain an attack on Saudi Arabia.
KHALED
Working out corps boundaries wasn’t the only hurdle Walt Boomer and Gary Luck faced. More serious for both men was logistics — food, water, housing, latrines, and gunnery ranges. The last item became a problem when the Bedouins who had herds grazing in the parts of the desert that were to be given over for ranges declared that they didn’t want to vacate them. Prince Khaled had to fix that.
Then congestion in the port at Al Damman became a problem. John Yeosock’s port masters couldn’t find anyone in charge. They would go to one agency, only to be told that some other agency worked the problem, and when they went to that one, they were sent to another. No one was responsible, yet everyone could cause delays or raise obstacles.
After a visit from Horner and Yeosock, Khaled stepped in. He put one of his people in charge, with full responsibility, and that was that. Then, when it was clear that there were not enough trucks to carry the stuff off the piers, it was Khaled who found more trucks.
His Royal Highness, Khaled bin Sultan, got things done. Another instance came with the problem of where to put the tens of thousands of Americans pouring into the nation. They had to be housed in a place where they’d be both comfortable and safe — and where Saudi society could be protected from so many antithetical cultural and religious customs.
Khaled came up with the answer. Eskan Village, a huge housing complex on the southeast side of the city, became home to most of the U.S. forces stationed in or near Riyadh. It had been originally built as military housing, but then the base it had been designed to support was delayed, so this huge compound had been mothballed.
Horner and the CENTCOM J-4 (logistics chief), Major General Dane Starling, took a tour of Eskan Village to see if it would meet their needs. They found hundreds of villas, each with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. There were also high-rise apartments, schools, swimming pools, and recreational areas — a complete village just waiting for power and water to be hooked up. It was perfect.
Still, Khaled could not solve every problem. He could find housing for 30,000 people and open seaports, but when Chuck Horner asked him for a television and videocassette player for each villa at Eskan, he balked and grew evasive. Horner was amazed. It was such a simple request. Only a few thousand TVs and video players, so the troops could watch Armed Forces Television and play videotapes from home.
One day, over a cup of cappuccino in his office in the MODA building, Horner pressed the issue, and the reason for Khaled’s refusal came clear. His people didn’t know where to buy thousands of TVs and video playback units.
“If I can get them,” Horner asked, “will you pay for them?”
“No problem!”
So Dane Starling phoned in the order to some lucky electronics dealer in Atlanta, and in a few weeks, the
