By Jim Lavalley

Recap of Part 1 (For the full version, please see the recent January 2013 issue of Surplus Today, which can be viewed online at: www.surplustodayonline.com.)

Jim LaValley, twenty year veteran, US Army, Chief Warrant Officer Three, retired, recounts his experiences in “My Desert Storm.” Jim reminisces about the time he served in Saudi Arabia. He begins by telling how he joined the Army and was stationed at a National Guard field hospital, nicknamed the “White Elephant.” Part 1 ends with his gripping description of his first SCUD attack and the US Patriot missile batteries firing back. Jim relates: “With the sounds of war, the truth of my situations became very real…”

Part 3

Days were pretty normal; that’s when we slept, which was fine with us night guards. After a month in the compound, the unit packed up and headed north to Logistics Base Charlie. It was a support area about 30 kilometers west of Rafha, a tiny little town on the northern border of Saudi Arabia. I remember the drive in the unit’s water truck. The arrow-straight highway passed through the flat, endless desert: two lanes of tar with two unpaved passing lanes on each side. Bedouins in government-provided white pickups, with sheep packed in the beds, passed by. They took chances driving that shocked our Western safety consciences. Every few miles the stripped, burnt-out hulk of a vehicle would punctuate the roadside, adding the surreal expectation that Mel Gibson would fly by at any moment, chased by Australians in black leather jackets. Arriving at the compound itself was anticlimactic; it was simply a dirt berm surrounding a bunch of vehicles in the middle of the desert. The circus was in town, but there was no town.

The days leading up to the ground war were like any other field exercise. We set up the field hospital, got our living quarters situated, stood in line for chow, and passed time during the few off hours reading, listening to music, and playing Spades and Risk. Showers were every other day, and they were cold. Nobody complained; we all knew there were war-fighters out there who had gone weeks without a rinsing of any kind. On the cold nights we could feel the ground rumble from B-52s pounding the enemy senseless a hundred miles away. Flashes of distant explosions were like a thunderstorm that was out there somewhere, but never came. The few sandstorms we endured were gritty but novel events. We had all seen them in movies. Actually being in one, unable to see five feet in front of us with our mouths and noses filled with sand; now, that was memorable.

When the ground war started, it wasn’t vehicles doing the announcing, it was helicopters. Since one of our hospital’s unofficial duties was that of visual navigation checkpoint for the 101st Airborne (Air Assault), the near-continuous roar of turbine engines was a definite sign that something big was underway. We started treating wounded that same night. What was unusual, however, was that the only patients we were treating were Iraqi soldiers. There were two wards set up in the hospital, one for enemy prisoners and one for allies. The allied ward, outfitted with new equipment and up-to-date supplies, received only five visitors during that entire week of the war. Two of the five were accidents resulting from a grenade that misfired. Unfortunately for us (and to some extent, the Iraqis), the enemy ward was constantly full and our supplies and equipment for them were limited. The enemy soldiers were a pitiful lot: shopkeepers, drivers, and laborers thrust into uniform under threats against their families. Most of them were shorter than us, and they generally weighed between 120-150 pounds. All were hungry and would eat whatever we gave them. Most were educated, some in the USA. Half could speak English well; none had any love for Saddam Hussein. The one exception was a Republican Guard soldier who was brought in, easily a solid 220 pounds, this guy could have been a linebacker. He was tough, too. Proof of that fact was his ability to survive seven bullet wounds and two defibrillation’s. Luckily, he was the exception and not the rule.

It was a busy week that was over before any of us had a chance to get tired. When we were finished, we had given medical treatment to over 600 Iraqi soldiers, and processed another 1,000 more as prisoners. We packed up the hospital, headed back south to pitch tents in a sand lot, and wait for our turn to go home.

For the next few weeks we played more cards, took some trips to the beach, and lined up to call home at the phone center. Amazingly, I was selected as one of ten three-day cruise ship visit winners from the 400-plus of us in the hospital. The ship was docked in Bahrain, and every three days about 1,100 fighting men and 100 fighting women rotated to eat, drink and be merry. I did all three.

Finally, on April 19th, we boarded the plane home. During the trip we landed in Bangor, Maine, to a reception I will always remember. The entire town was taking turns welcoming each plane as it landed. We got off the plane to a terminal full of greeters, despite the fact that we were the 728th plane to land in the past few weeks. We were welcomed as if ours was the first plane. That one event and those people were why I completed a 20-year career in the Army.

We landed back in Ft. Benning that night.  After a day of turning in equipment and a spontaneous upgrade to first class on the flight back to St. Louis, I finally came back to my new wife. We got in the car with her mother for the long ride back to Ft. Leonard Wood. I don’t remember anything else after that. I was home safe, and I was asleep.