Pringles in the Desert

By late summer of 1990 we knew we would be going to war with Iraq. Less than a year with my unit, 6/101 aviation battalion, with the 101st Airborne Division, orders were received to begin preparations for Operation Desert Shield. We spent almost no time training up for the deployment. We mostly received classified briefings on the total awesomeness of the Iraqi Army. Much time was spent (wasted) on the fearsome Republican Guard and the fact they spent ten years in a war of attrition with the Iranian Republic. We knew they had utilized chemical weapons in that war and had experienced leadership. The buildup to deployment left us feeling we were facing a tough enemy, one that had rolled over Kuwait in a day and was poised to enter Saudi Arabia at any moment.

We flew our helicopters to Camp Blanding, Florida. A skeleton crew remained there to fly them to the Port of Jacksonville, for the long sea journey to the Saudi Arabian port city of Dammam. We returned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky via Greyhound buses. Somehow, civilians got wind of of the troop movements and began posting themselves on interstate highway overpasses, cheering on the troops. I had never seen anything like the support of the American people for their troops. At one location, we stopped our bus and got off. People mobbed us, shaking our hands, patting us on the back, completely spontaneous. It would become even more overwhelming later.

We boarded our chartered Boeing 747 for the middle east. First stop Bangor, Maine. We weren't allowed off the plane. They opened the doors and we sat on the ramp for an hour or two while more service members boarded and then we were on our way. The great circle route took us way over the North Atlantic, not far from Greenland and Iceland. We flew over the lights of Dublin, which looked like a night scene right out of J. R. R. Tolkein, with it's street lights radiating out from the city like spokes of a wagon wheel. The flight continued on into Brussels, Belgium for another fuel stop. My first trip across the Atlantic, my first look at Europe. My face was glued to the window. Taking it all in, I was very impressed and mentally recording it all.

No one was allowed off the plane in Brussels, much to our dismay. We had hoped to gulp down a few pints of whatever beer they would sell us. Almost as soon as we were airborne, we had a glimpse of Paris and then the Alps as the sun rose on the 2nd day of our journey. The next few hours of the flight, I will never forget. We flew right down the boot-like eastern cost of Italy, past Rome and across the Mediterranean and onto the African continent. We flew directly over the Nile Delta, right down the Nile River, making a slow bank to the Red Sea. We crossed the Red Sea and entered the Arabian Peninsula. After flying over an endless sea of sand, we finally reached our final destination, King Fahd International Airport (KFIA).

King Fahd Intl. Airport. The parking garage is in the foreground

Nothing could have prepared me for what waited outside the main cabin door of the aircraft. Imagine the blast of heat you get when you open the door to an oven, then you start to get a sense of the heat of the Saudi Arabian desert in August. We recorded temperatures as high as 55 degrees Celsius. That's 133 degrees Fahrenheit!!! As soon as we marched off the plane, we were handed a bottle of water, and placed on a bus for the quick ride to our new accommodations, the 5 level parking garage at KFIA. Myself and Paul Abbott, a fellow Warrant Officer from Seaside, Oregon, shared a parking spot on the ground level, 25 meters from the outer wall.

Port of Dahran

No sooner than we had arrived there, I came down with dysentery. Imagine 2 weeks of diarrhea and a high fever, in 130 degree heat. I spent two weeks laying in my concrete parking spot on a poncho liner, delirious. It was probably due to the three-hole plywood toilets, with no water or way to wash your hands, that gave me the illness. Three men would be sitting inches from each other, defecating into a half sized steel barrel with hundreds of flies buzzing around your eyes and mouth, hungrily awaiting their next meal below. To this day, they were the most horrendous conditions I have ever experienced.  

After numerous immunizations, familiarization flights, and a huge range of experiences, we finally were ordered to the field. The 30 UH-1H helicopters of our battalion, after surviving several Iraqi scud missile attacks, were sent to a position very close to the Iraq border. For the next 5 months we would live in the desert, in tents, usually outside on a cot, sleeping under the glorious stars. We would take cold showers, eating only MRE's, poop in holes we dug in the ground and entertain ourselves with mail and care packages from home.

A camo net system we used

There were other forms of entertainment as well. Since this was our first time out in the great sandy desert, we set out to explore the environment. We had received numerous briefings on desert survival with special attention paid to the various vipers, scorpions and camel spiders. When I saw my first camel spider, I ran back to the camp and never went in that sector again. Scorpions were less scary to me and we took to catching them and placing them in a plastic bucket. They ranged in size from tiny to about 5 inches long. Some were jet black in color and others were a translucent green. Of course later we gathered around the bucket, 5 or 6 of us, poking and prodding the scorpions, encouraging them to fight. They seemed to shy away from each other. We finally determined they needed food to fight over. So we dropped a small lizard into the bucket and yep, sure enough, they did fight over the food, with the dominant scorpion killing and eating the lizard.

During the lizard fight, I took a sharp thorn I had found nearby, and poked John Clements, my copilot for the entire war, in the calf. He jumped and let out a terrified whimper......we almost died laughing. Notably missing from our gladiatorial scorpion fest, was Sgt Newby. Our young Texas crew chief was out on guard duty so we decided he was due for a practical joke.


Our 3 man hex tents were arranged in a circle, with a common area in between. We had built tables and chairs from debris and discarded building materials we had found in Dammam. A large camo net was suspended over our entire camp. Newby, or "Newb" as we called him, came back in the camp and threw off his protective gear. Sitting on the table in the common area, was his particular care package from home. We all received cookies and sundry items from our mothers, or snacks or Gameboys from our sweethearts; you name it. Everyone lived for these little comforts from home. We always shared these items amongst each other. In Newb's case, we had helped ourselves to his tall can of regular Pringles potato chips. Feeling bad for eating the whole can, we replaced what we had eaten with a large, live lizard. As he walked to the table, the first thing Newby picked up was the can of Pringles. He shook it and said, "You fuckers! You ate all my Pringles!" We said no we didn't, there's still some left. In the dusky light of the setting sun, Newby took the lid off and poured the lizard right into his palm. All his muscles locked in total fear, the lizard laying squarely in his palm. Staring at the lizard with his eyes bugging out, he screamed like a little girl. After what seemed like the longest and loudest scream ever, he flung the lizard into the air. We all literally fell down, holding our stomachs laughing to the point of crying.