Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

and operated twenty-four hours a day. Very few accidents occur in combat. In combat, pilots avoid undue risks and keep everything as simple as they can. If an enemy kills you, that’s a tough break, but no one wants to be killed by his own dumb mistake.

ROTATION POLICY

In the midst of the training and deployment, Horner had a serious disagreement with the generals and lieutenant generals in Washington over rotation policy. They wanted to rotate troops back to the States; he didn’t.

He could not forget Vietnam, with its one year or 100 missions over the North, a policy that had robbed the deployed force of its commitment to success. He was going to have nothing like that in the Gulf… or he would go down swinging.

There were phone calls from General Russ, seeking Horner’s views about such a policy. “Chuck,” he asked, “what do you think about this—120 days in the AOR, and then we rotate the individual but not the unit?”

Horner’s reply was close to an ultimatum: “Respectfully, General, there’s no way I’ll ever agree to a rotation policy.”

“See here, Chuck,” General Russ answered, disturbed by Horner’s attitude. “This isn’t a discussion of whether or not we are going to have a policy. It’s a given that we are. Rather, it is a chance for you to give us your views about what policy we should implement. We can’t keep those people in the desert forever.”

To which Horner replied, “General, I respect what you are trying to do and appreciate your concern, but I will never agree to a rotation policy. We have been sent over here to do a job. When we get the Iraqis out of Kuwait, then bring us home. We are here until victory.”

These were brave words… and maybe foolhardy ones, Horner told himself, and sometimes he didn’t think he could make them stick. Yet he felt that this was one of those issues he needed to get fired over if it went the wrong way.

Fortunately, General Schwarzkopf felt as he did (probably as a consequence of his own Vietnam experience, though Horner can’t say this for sure), and so Horner’s policy stood — even in the face of higher-ups in Washington.

After that, Horner had to convey this hard message to the troops.

I found, he says, that if I told them the truth, they understood: That in fact I didn’t know when we would go home, that I didn’t know when the war might start, but that in Vietnam we had a rotation policy which made it our goal not to win but to stay alive until we rotated, and that I wasn’t going to be caught in that trap again.

I also told them that I wanted to be home as much as they did, and while I had better living conditions than theirs, I understood their frustrations. “We came to do a job,” I went on to say, “and it’s a worthwhile job. So as far as I’m concerned, we all stay until that job gets done. Sorry, but none of us can go home until the Iraqis are out of Kuwait, and the murder, rape, and robbery stop. It is my decision to make, and that is the decision I have made. If I get fired, then the new guy can do whatever he wants, but for us today it is here until victory.”

Certainly, we let people with special circumstances go home, and we had to let some of the reserve forces rotate their people, because they were on active duty for only a limited time. As for everyone else, morale was sky-high; people understood the contract and they had a stake in the outcome. They were committed to it, so let’s get on with it. A far cry from Vietnam.

THE AGONY OF KUWAIT AND THE HOME FRONT

Every day, the commanders in Riyadh and their staffs received reports of the Kuwaitis trapped in their occupied country — firsthand accounts of brutal acts of murder, torture, rape, and looting. At their best, the Iraqis in Kuwait City were a gang of thugs, stripping cars and houses. At their worst, they were beasts, executing children in front of their parents, decapitating with power saws men suspected of being resistance fighters, gang-raping foreign women once employed as domestic servants in wealthy homes.

Meanwhile, there was governmental and U.N. uncertainty about how best to remove Iraq from Kuwait, including considerable talk of alternatives to fighting. Most Americans wanted to avoid war, while many in and out of government — highly respected people such as Senator Sam Nunn and General Colin Powell — were counting on diplomatic initiatives and the U.N. embargo imposed soon after the invasion of Kuwait.

Others felt that the United States should not rush into a war where thousands of Americans might be killed, simply to secure Kuwait’s oil — or as some op-ed wag put it: Would the United States have risked so much of its wealth and so many of its young warriors if the chief export of Kuwait had been broccoli? (President Bush famously disliked broccoli.)

The view in the Gulf was vastly different. Proximity to the suffering in Kuwait made war seem increasingly better than waiting for the always doubtful success of the embargo or other initiatives.

All the talk of delay, along with the confusion of aims among their leaders, disheartened the families of those who were deployed, and left them in a conceptual bind. Without the appreciation of events in the Gulf afforded by firsthand knowledge, they were reduced to whatever information was provided by the U.S. media — a perplexing variety of views about what should be done to end the crisis in the Gulf. The families at home saw at best a vague end in sight to the crisis — and what appeared to be an ever-longer separation from their loved ones.

Yet — as always with service families — they bore up under the stress of separation in always inventive and heartening ways.

The spouses, most often wives, began to call themselves “the left-behinds.” The support they gave and received was a lifesaver, not only for their overall morale but also for their success in coping with everyday problems.

The yards in Sumter, South Carolina, near Shaw AFB, never looked so good, as neighbors turned out to mow and edge the lawns of families whose husbands had deployed to the desert.

The “left-behinds” began to bond together. Meetings were held to squash rumors, find out who needed help, and provide communication for those families living in unusual isolation. The wives got together for social functions, for a chance to just plain bitch to one another, and to take pride in not having to endure their terrible loneliness and pain on their own.

The shared sacrifice helped ease the panic and tears that came stealing into them when they were alone at night, wondering not only “when” but more importantly “if ever again” they would see their mates. Those in the desert had knowledge (though always sketchy and imperfect); they were busy; they were involved in a great and noble act; while the “left-behinds” worked to make their faithful, lonely lives seem normal at a time of almost unbearable abnormality. They did it because it was expected of them, because they had no other choice, and because of their courage and selflessness. They were real heroes of Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

? On October 24, Chuck Horner at long last answered what had been Mary Jo’s constant question: “When are you coming home?”

I don’t know when we are coming home, I wrote her — with added comments—but for sure it will be after we fight Iraq. So the question is when are we going to fight? The answer is pick one of the following:

1. After the ’90 election. (Generals always try to sound politically aware.)

2. After the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait runs out of food and water. (We had plans to rescue the trapped staff, if their lives appeared to be in danger.)