At Logistic Base Alpha one compound had oil drums stacked three high on top of each other, on pallets six feet by six, with lines between them the width of a forklift truck. The compound was forty kilometers by forty.
And that was just for fuel. Other compounds at Log Alpha had shells, rockets, mortars, caissons of machine-gun rounds, armor-piercing antitank warheads, and grenades. Others contained food and water, machinery and spares, tank batteries and mobile workshops.
At that time the Coalition forces were confined by General Schwarzkopf to the portion of desert due south of Kuwait. What Baghdad could not know was that before he attacked, the American general intended to send more forces across the Wadi al Batin and another hundred miles farther west into the desert, to invade Iraq itself, pushing due north and then east to take the Republican Guard in flank and destroy it.
On December 13 the Rocketeers, the 336th Squadron of the USAF Tactical Air Command, left their base at Thumrait in Oman and transferred to Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia. It was a decision that had been made on December 1.
Al Kharz was a bare-bones airfield, constructed with runways and taxi tracks but nothing else. No control tower, no hangars, no workshops, no accommodations for anyone—just a flat sheet in the desert with strips of concrete.
But it was an airfield. With amazing foresight, the Saudi government had commissioned and built enough air bases to host an air power totaling more than five times the Royal Saudi Air Force.
After December 1 the American construction teams moved in. In just thirty days a tented city capable of housing five thousand people and five fighter squadrons had been built.
Principal among the builders were the heavy engineers, the Red Horse teams, backed by forty huge elec
tric generators from the Air Force. Some of the equipment came by road on low-loaders, but most by air. They built the clamshell hangars, workshops, fuel stores, ordnance depots, flight and briefing rooms, operations rooms, control towers, store tents, and garages.
For the aircrew and ground crew they erected streets of tents with roadways between, latrines, bathhouses, kitchens, mess halls, and a water tower to be replenished by convoys of trucks from the nearest water source.
Al Kharz lies fifty miles southeast of Riyadh, which turned out to be just three miles beyond the maximum range of the Scud missiles in Iraq’s possession. It would be home for three months to five squadrons: two of F-15E Strike Eagles—the 336th Rocketeers and the Chiefs, the 335th Squadron out of Seymour Johnson, who joined at this point; one of F-15C pure-fighter Eagles; and two of F-16
Falcon fighters.
There was a special street for the 250 female personnel in the wing; these included the lawyer, ground-crew chiefs, truck drivers, clerks, nurses, and two squadron intelligence officers.
The aircrew flew themselves up from Thumrait; the ground crew and other staff came by cargo airplane.
The entire transshipment took two days, and when they arrived, the engineers were still at work and would remain so until Christmas.
Don Walker had enjoyed his time in Thumrait. Living conditions were modern and excellent, and in the relaxed atmosphere of Oman, alcoholic drinks were permitted within the base.
For the first time, he had met the British SAS, who have a permanent training base there, and other
“contract officers” serving with the Omani forces of Sultan Qaboos. Some memorable parties were held, members of the opposite sex were eminently datable, and flying the Eagles on feint missions up to the Iraqi border had been great.
Of the SAS, after a trip into the desert with them in light scout cars, Walker had remarked to the newly appointed squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner:
“These guys are certifiably insane.”
Al Kharz would turn out to be different from Thumrait. As the home of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia enforces strict teetotalism, as well as any exposure of the female form below the chin, excluding hands and feet.
In his General Order Number, One, General Schwarzkopf had banned all alcohol for the entire Coalition forces under his command. All American units abided by that order, and it strictly applied at Al Kharz.
At the port of Dammam, however, the American off-loaders were bemused by the amount of shampoo destined for the British Royal Air Force. Crate after crate of the stuff was unloaded, put onto trucks or C-130 Hercules air-freighters, and brought to the RAF squadrons. They remained puzzled that in a largely waterless environment, the British aircrew could spend so much time washing their hair. It was an enigma that would continue to puzzle them until the end of the war.
At the other side of the peninsula, on the desert base of Tabuq, which British Tornados shared with American Falcons, the USAF pilots were even more intrigued to see the British at sundown, seated beneath their awnings, decanting a small portion of shampoo into a glass and topping it up with bottled water.
At Al Kharz the problem did not arise—there was no shampoo. Conditions, moreover, were more cramped than at Thumrait. Apart from the wing commander, who had a tent to himself, the others from colonel on down shared on the basis of two, four, six, eight, or twelve to a tent, according to rank.
Even worse, the female personnel were out of bounds, a problem made even more frustrating by the fact that the American women, true to their culture and with no Saudi Mutawa—religious police—to see them, took to sun-bathing in bikinis behind low fences that they erected around their tents.
This led to a rush by the aircrew to commandeer all the hilux trucks on the base, vehicles with their chassis set high above the wheels. Only from the top of these, standing on tiptoe, could a real patriot proceed from his tent to the flight lines, passing through an enormous diversion to drive down the street between the female tents, and check that the women were in good shape.
Apart from these civic obligations, for most it was back to a creaking cot and the “happy sock.”
There was also a new mood for another reason. The United Nations had issued its January 15 deadline to Saddam Hussein. The declarations coming out of Baghdad remained defiant. For the first time it became clear that they were going to go to war. The training missions took on a new and urgent edge.
For some reason, December 15 in Vienna was quite warm. The sun shone, and the temperature rose. At the lunch hour Fräulein Hardenberg left the bank as usual for her modest lunch and decided on a whim to buy sandwiches and eat them in the Stadtpark a few blocks away from the Ballgasse.