Once Upon a War Ch. 02

In just a little over two years in the US Air Force, I was heading to war.

We had been waiting in the mobility center for 5 hours listening to dry boring briefings, awaiting our transportation. Finally, our bus arrived and we grabbed our 'bail out bags' and got onto the bus that would take us to the flight line. Ten minutes later we rolled up under the wing of a KC-10, which was sitting on the tarmac in front of base operations. The large aircraft was going to be our chariot to the Middle East.

A KC-10 was a converted DC-10 made into an aero-refueler with cargo carrying capability. The reason for using the large green refueler as our transportation was so all the F-16s of our squadron would be able to accompany us all the way the Middle East. The KC-10 would provide air refueling to the much smaller fighters.

I don't know how many pallets of supplies and equipment were on board the plane, but it seemed like only a small section in the front of the aircraft contained the 60 passenger seats installed; there were 6 rows with that had 10 seats across. These seats were needed to transport the majority of the squadron's support personnel.

Since there were only windows on the doors of the military airplane, there were no window seats, which sucked because I loved to look out when I flew. So for the majority of the flight, we sat bored in our seats. Occasionally, I would get up and go to the sealed doorway and look out the window. It was amazing to me to see a group of fighters off our wing flying in formation with us as we flew along at 42,000 feet.

We took off late in the afternoon, and landed at Shaw AFB, North Carolina, on our way east. Shaw was another F-16 base that had the facilities to service the squadron's fighters, preparing them for the cross Atlantic, cross Europe, trip the next day. Our final destination was an undisclosed location out in the middle of nowhere in the desert inside of the United Arab Emirates. Names like Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, and Jebel Ali were kicked around. I had never heard of any of them and I considered myself a good student of geography. If you were to do a google earth search within 20 to 30 miles of the City of Dubai, I'm sure you would find the airbase. Now days it's twice as large as it was back during the gulf war and you can see all sorts of NATO aircraft parked on its ramps. Since I've never been told its location has become declassified, it's up to you to find it.

At Shaw, we were all herded into the base gymnasium and given a boxed lunch and a cot to sleep on. We were corralled inside the building; it seemed our 'officers' were worried about desertions. What it amounted to is something I learned early in my career is that officers didn't trust enlisted people. Officers as a whole were an elitist group of bumbling assholes that were always ready to fight the last war. Enlisted people were treated as second class citizens within the military at best. The longer I served, the more demeaning I found their attitude to be, especially given the fact that most officers couldn't find their ass with both hands. If it wasn't for the enlisted folk assigned to them giving them directions, they would be lost.

The next morning, we were herded back onto a bus and taken back to our aircraft. We quickly boarded and took off on the 15 hour flight. It would take that long to fly us into our vague destination.

When we landed, we stepped from the nice air conditioned interior of the aircraft into what I could only classify as hell. It was reported to be nearly 130 degrees in the shade, and there was very little shade to be found. Walking into the heat was like walking into a wall. We were steered into an aircraft hangar where we were processed in. At least it was out of the sun. Everyone was sweating so bad that they had large wet circles under their armpits, and down the front of their BDU blouses. We were all in dark 'forest green' BDUs, Battle Dress Uniforms, which were entirely inappropriate for the hot desert. Like I said, officers were always ready to fight the LAST war.

It took us half a day to get assigned quarters. In my case, being a low ranking airman, it meant a tent. Fortunately, it was a high tech tent that had metal wall supports and had air conditioning pumped in. They had built wooden platforms for floors and we actually had bunks to sleep on. The bunks sucked. They were made by the lowest bidder and consisted of a metal frame with slats that ran under the 3" thick mattress. Only the slats were three inches apart making it the most uncomfortable bed I had ever laid on. Fortunately, after tearing apart several cardboard boxes that our bottled water came in and placing them over the slats, I was able to eliminate the washboard effect the slats caused.

It felt like basic training all over again. At least MSgt Goldman was given a room in a regular barracks, he had to share an 11 ft. by 11 ft. room with a TSgt that worked out on the flight line, meaning a person who worked on the aircraft. At least someone I knew was treated like a human being. The only person I knew in my 'tent' was SSgt Nicklesby and he was anything but friendly. Like I said in the previous chapter, he was a weird bird.

That evening, Dr. Hershel, the 4th Fighter Squadron Flight Surgeon dropped by and told us that we would be setting up a clinic in the morning up by the hanger we did our in processing in. I like the idea of getting to work and doing something I was familiar with. What I was trained for was assisting in running a clinic. I have to tell you, the UAE was most foreign, most alien, place I had ever been to.

In the morning, we had to wait nearly 45 minutes after the designated time for the Flight Surgeon's to show up. Captain Hershel and Major McDunough came strolling in as if they were right on time. Wouldn't you know it, they had the key and us enlisted swine had to sit out in the heat waiting for them to grace us with their presence.

McDunough had such a timid personality it amazed me that he made it through medical school. Even though he outranked the pint sized Captain from Texas, the Captain took charge and ended up running things. It appeared to me that the Major was totally comfortable with the arrangement.

Once given permission, MSgt Goldman and the rest of us dug into one of the ATC's, which were parked right next to the portable building that would be our clinic within the next two weeks. We looked for the boxes containing our clinical gear and a couple more that were loaded with pharmaceuticals. We tried to keep the palette packed, so that we could move in a moment's notice. By the end of the day, our little clinic was up and running and none too soon.

It seemed almost from day one, we started getting a large number of dysentery cases. When we sent stool samples to the laboratory, the laboratory was reporting out the results as E. histolytica, which is an infection caused by amoebas. We were treating the condition with Metronidazole with good effect. We went from about 5 cases on our first day of operation to days where we were treating up to 50 cases. It didn't take long and we started running low on the medication used in treatment of the infection; so MSgt Goldman got on the horn, and started to round up additional supplies. It appeared to our team we had a full blown epidemic on our hands.

It took a while for our doctors to go from treating the condition to an investigational mode. Nobody on our team had been trained in public health, and it was obvious that the 'bug' was coming from either food or water sources. The Doc's contacted the Wing Commander and put out an advisory that people were to only drink bottled water until we figured out the source of the infection. Nobody was drinking local water anyway, so it was a wasted effort.

We were able to locate an Environmental Health team, EH, located in Sharjah that was a small city north of Dubai; they agreed to come down and evaluate our situation. While we waited for their arrival, we even had a couple folks on our team come down with dysentery. Friendly old SSgt Nicklesby was the first of the medics to get the bug. The next one was much worse for our situation, Capt Hershel was infected a day after the SSgt. With him sick, we debated on whether he should be seeing patients or not. We decided that as long as he used proper hand washing that he wasn't considered 'contagious'. As I indicated, E. histolytica was pretty much food and water borne pathogen.

So, after almost 2 weeks post arrival, we finally got a team in to evaluate the situation. It ended up that the expats hired from India to do the cooking were sitting on the floor cutting up the lettuce for the salad that was served at every meal. They also weren't all that diligent in hand washing. Those who ate salad had about a 25% risk of getting the parasite. The EH team immediately stopped food preparations and our Air Base went on MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, for the next day and a half while the food workers were put through a food handler's course. This was the same training required by restaurants back in the US. The folks up at MAJCOM (Major Command), in our case ACC, hunted up a food service specialist and sent him on the first aircraft eastbound from the states to supervise the kitchen. By the end of the week the epidemic was over.

The next bit of excitement was an automobile pedestrian accident. During the daytime we would get temperatures routinely in the mid to upper 120 degrees Fahrenheit range. At night it would drop down to a cool 90 to 95 degrees. In doing so, we had an interesting phenomenon in that really humid air would blow in off the Persian Gulf at night, which was only about 10 miles away, and we would get zero visibility fog. Yes, that's what I said, thick fog with it being 90+ degrees out.

During one of these fogged in nights we had one of our enlisted folks, I don't know what his specialty was, cross the main boulevard. Little did he know there was a UAE pilot, an individual related to the Sheik of Dubai, driving his Porsche at a high rate of speed relative to the lack of visibility and he struck the individual doing about 30 to 35 miles per hour.

One of victim's buddy's came running into my tent and seeing me yelled, "There is a guy hit by a car! We need you!" I grabbed my medical kit, which was designed for EMTs and I took off running to the accident site with the messenger leading the way. The base was around 2 miles long even though it was less than a half mile wide. The accident scene was about a half mile away. Carrying a 25 lb. medical kit at a dead run got me winded really quickly.

We finally arrived and the bystanders had given the guy buddy care. Buddy care was basic first aid taught to all Air Force personnel. I quickly assessed his ABCs, Airway, Breathing, and Circulation and found he was alive. He was conscious, but not very coherent, so I did what I was trained to do and that was stabilize him and get him ready to be transported. The biggest thing I had to do was get an IV started so we could keep him from going into deeper state of shock, which could kill a person as quickly as any other life threatening condition. The Sergeant had several fractures that I could determine and wasn't in a good way; I was pretty sure that he had some internal injuries which I couldn't treat.

Not too long afterwards, Doctor McDunough showed up with his larger doctor's kit and he informed me that they were ramping up a helicopter flight to fly the victim to Dubai and the medical center there. The nice thing about the fog was that it only hugged the ground. At 20 feet up it was clear as could be.

Someone rounded up a backboard and we loaded the injured Sergeant into one of the maintenance vans and drove him to the North end of the runway where the helicopter parking was. Doc and I supervised him being loaded into one of the litter stanchions on the UH-1, Huey, and we climbed onboard for the 15 minute flight to Dubai.

On the way, Doc was going to give the man an injection of Morphine. His kit contained auto injectors that gave measured doses of the pain killer. So Doc took the caps off both ends of the injector and with his thumb on one end of the injector he jammed the injector pen into the man's thigh. Well, there was a slight problem. Doc was holding the injector backwards, and he proceeded to inject morphine into his own thumb. I have to give the Doc a little credit, he had never used one of the injectors before and it was a reasonable mistake. But, you would think that if you were being deployed to a war zone that you would have at least familiarized yourself with your equipment. Us unenlightened enlisted swine trained with our kits at least once a month, and we knew every piece of equipment intimately, you would think that a highly trained doctor might have done the same thing. Go figure.

We were close enough to the hospital by then that we didn't attempt another injection. I'm sure Doc's thumb was feeling no pain. The chopper came in low and slow and landed on the helipad and a medical team was standing by to wheel our wounded sergeant to the emergency room.

With the patient accepted into the medical system of the hospital, Doc went in to assess the man's condition and I flew back to the base with the helicopter crew. It was well past 11:00pm by the time I got back and I ended up hiking almost a mile and a half back to my tent barracks. I was a content individual; I had done everything I was supposed to do and if the patient didn't make it, it wasn't due to any mistake that I had made.

I would man the clinic during the day and we would try to find something to do in the evenings. If anything, we were all bored shitless. They had set up a rec center, which consisted of a large television, a VCR, and a boatload of movies. All old movies that everyone had already seen. So there were a lot of card games and a few smart people, yours truly was one of them, brought a few board games to help break up the monotony.

After 2 weeks, we moved from the portable building we were holding clinic in to the base's medical dispensary. The main UAE Flight Surgeon, Dr. Muqset who was a Pakistani Expat, invited us to occupy one of the big bays they had available inside the brick and cement building. What I liked best about our move was that they had a much better air conditioning system than the one in the little portable building we had been using.

One did not go outside unless you had too. It was just too damn hot. The nicest thing about being in the UAE clinic was that it was only located about 2 to 3 hundred yards from the enlisted quarters. My tent had been erected in the huge field between the recreation center, the enlisted barracks, and the clinic. Better yet, the BX, or Base Exchange, was just about 50 yards to the north of the clinic. All the services that I needed routinely were all in a tight little area.

Being in the UAE Clinic was nice, because we were collocated with our laboratory, x-ray, and pharmacological resources. We had access to an EKG machine as well as equipment for respiratory therapy.

Soon after getting settled in, we got news that they were sending an Air Transportable Hospital to join us from Davis-Monthan AFB, located in Tucson, Arizona. They arrived the next week and after pouring a series of cement pads they erected their tent hospital. We went from 6 medical personnel to over 50 overnight. We also went from a couple of the large tents like I was living in, to a tent city almost overnight too.

We had new arrivals coming in all the time. We got an A-10 unit in from Moody AFB, in Georgia, who had their own SMEs, and later we got a squadron of KC-135 refuelers that belonged to the Tennessee Air National Guard.

Life got to be pretty routine on the base. Two months after our arrival, they issued us all Desert BDUs, which were in lighter cloth and had a tan camo pattern. They were just in time for the COOL season to start setting in. Wouldn't you know it? It was such a relief to be able to pack away the forest green uniforms. The temperature inside the light colored desert BDUs was much cooler and they were much more enjoyable to wear.

The enlisted people found out really fast that the UAE Exchange sold phone cards. And once I learned about them, I quickly went and secured enough cards that I could call home for 15 minutes. Since we had an 11 hour time zone difference between the UAE and Utah, I scheduled a call on one of the 'phone booths' located by the BX that took the cards.

I had to wait my turn, but I was able to call home to talk with Terri when it was about 6 in the morning Utah time. I was so happy and relieved to hear her sleepy voice answer the telephone after several agonizing rings. I heard my lovely wife, "Um, uh, hello."

I was grinning and my heart was racing. It had been almost 4 weeks since I saw her last and I was missing her horribly. I said, "Morning sunshine."

Then she almost screamed into the phone, "NICK! Nick is that you! Oh my gawd, Nick how are you calling me?"

I chuckled, "Ah, the wonders of the modern telephone age! They sell telephone cards here, so I bought enough so we could talk. Gawd girl, I miss you so much!"

I asked her how the pregnancy was going. There were no complications. I asked her if she was getting by okay, she told me she missed me terribly. Then she told me that she was going to give up the apartment and move back in with her folks. The cost of the apartment was beyond what my low salary would cover. Let me explain.

The US Air Force in all their infinite wisdom, which wasn't much, decided since we were deployed and they were taking care of all our needs that we didn't need to be paid BAS and BAQ (allowances). So my pay had been cut back almost $400.00 a month. It just wasn't enough for Theresa to maintain an apartment on and still eat and pay the few meager bills we had. MSgt Goldman's wife, using his power of attorney, actually filed for chapter 13 bankruptcy for them because of the same reason. Being a MSgt, it was a much larger pay cut for the Goldmans. The Air Force really fucked over a lot of people with their little war.

At the end of the 15 minute phone call, I didn't want to hang-up. Hearing my sweet wife's voice was such a balm during troubled times. Theresa was crying when we had to hang-up. I promised her that I would call her again the following week.

It was Penny Alderman who made a wonderful discovery, between her and Scott, they discovered that Scott could call her at the clinic for about 1/3 the cost of the calling cards. So they set up a time for Scott to make an international call to the phone in Dr. Muqset's office. The UAE Flight Surgeon was more than gracious allowing them to used his office for the calls. Penny passed on the information to me, and before long, Terri was calling me twice a week. We were almost ½ way around the world from each other, but we were able to stay in close contact. Thinking back on the poor sods in earlier wars, I was grateful as could be for the modern age that I could be 'at war' and talk to my wife twice a week.

Being able to talk lasted up until the actual war started in January, when the security people banned all phone calls during the opening salvos of the 'shooting' war. Those were tough times for everyone, and was probably the time we needed to talk with family the most, but they didn't want anyone giving out 'secrets'.

From the end of September, through the start of the real war in January, life was pretty routine. I had been able to take a couple R&R trips into Dubai where we were able to get away from the base and relax a bit. The first one was where a group of American Expat families who worked for ARAMACO hosted dinners for groups of Airmen out on the base. It was so nice to go somewhere and do something 'normal'. I found a little shop in the ARAMACO compound that sold meat. Not only meat, but ham! I bought 3 lbs. of the forbidden meat, and gorged myself on it.