By Jim Lavalley

It’s hard to believe that January 2013 will mark 22 years since I first set foot in that vast, dusty, windblown parking lot of a country, Saudi Arabia. Realizing that I’m now old enough to consider using a cliché like, “Seems like only yesterday” doesn’t make it any easier. Thinking back to the four months that I and 700,000 of my closest American friends spent over-seas, the time in between becomes a short, fuzzy blur in my memory. I finally did it; I became an old soldier telling war stories…

In the summer of 1990, my brother died in an accident, causing my then-fiancée and I to postpone our wedding in favor of a less happy church ceremony. I had been in the Army for six years, the first four as a combat medic  and the next two as an Army respiratory therapist based in a hospital at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri. My wife and I later got married on Labor Day, but few of my family were able to show up for another trip. This being such a banner year, Iraq had just invaded Kuwait. It was apparent that many of us soldiers would be deployed soon.

I got my orders in October to support the 109th Evacuation Hospital, a National Guard unit out of northern Alabama. Another guy from my home unit was with me, but otherwise, it was all new faces. I had a few days to make some acquaintances, but on January 5th, after a 17-hour plane ride, we all touched down in the airfield south of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was cool, dusty, windy… and dark. There were a few lights lined up on the horizon and no glow from any towns or cities. I had experienced this kind of environment a few times before, on long trips through eastern Colorado and southwestern USA.

For the next week we were set up in a tent-filled sand lot with the not-so-exotic title of “Cement City,” a way station of a few thousand soldiers. Except for the 80 or so of us who were active duty, all the rest of the troops were reservists. So when we heard that our hosts had a miserable 19% rifle qualification rate, many of us, out of a sense of self-preservation, volunteered for night guard duty at our next stop. It turned out to be a hospital under construction in Dammam. It was lovingly referred to as the “White Elephant,” due to the fact that it stood out from the other buildings in the city like a giant white big game hunter’s target. Happily, we guards were kept off other details.

On January 17th the rumors began of an attack heading into Kuwait, so it was no surprise that night when we heard the constant roar of northbound Air Force jets overhead. Three nights later I experienced my first SCUD attack. The city air raid sirens went off first. By the time the warning came over the radios, we were all half into our chemical protective gear. On a moonless night with a few clouds, I watched through my gas mask as a trail of sparks made their way across the sky, like a sputtering comet. It wasn’t until the SCUD was out of sight that we could hear the Patriot missile batteries launching behind us. There were several distant booms afterwards. The scene repeated itself often, sometimes occurring more than once a night. Sometimes SCUDs hit the ground far off; we could hear the explosion and feel the vibrations.  With the sounds of war, the truth of my situation became very real…… To be continued in our next issue.