50th Anniversary Issue — October 1, 1995

By Rob Jagodzinski

The phone jangled me awake from a dead sleep sometime after midnight on Jan. 17, 1991.

I stumbled across the room to answer it, and the message I got drove the sleep from my head like an adrenalin burst.

"They're bombing Baghdad,'' it said.

After a six-month standoff, war had arrived between the United States and Iraq, and people were dying.

The caller on the phone, a Stars and Stripes reporter like myself at the time, had spent the night of Jan. 17 at an Army press center -- across the Saudi Arabian city of Dhahran -- where he learned of the invasion soon after it began.

He relayed what little he knew of the war's opening minutes as I listened in dazed disbelief. Though I'd spent five months in the Mideast preparing for the war, its arrival stunned me.

The days leading up to the fighting had seemed surreal, a waking dream.

The United Nations' deadline for Iraq to leave Kuwait had passed earlier that week without incident. Saudis on the street went through the motions of normal life, but tension had filled the air as they waited for their world to explode.

Announcements on Arab TV had instructed children in the proper way to wear gas masks.

In a nearby market, shoppers haggled over canned food, bottled water and jerry cans for extra gasoline, while storekeepers boarded their windows against possible blast damage.

At Dhahran Airport, dour Arab wives and children had departed for safer havens even as military transport planes disgorged fresh troops and gear.

Then the storm struck.

After the phone call, I banged on all the doors in the Stars and Stripes apartment -- shared with European Stars and Stripes -- and roused our six other reporters.

War jets hurtled through the night sky on their way from nearby Dhahran Air Base to bomb targets in Iraq. Shortwave radio broadcasts spoke of aircraft swarming Baghdad, of massive bombings, and of possible retaliatory strikes.

Then air-raid sirens sounded outside our door. We donned gas masks and milled around nervously, awaiting explosions from missiles that never struck.

I felt as though I'd swallowed a rock.

Finally, all-clear air horns wailed; we removed our masks and took off to gather war news.

An odd scene awaited me when I arrived at the press center that morning. Dozens of reporters crowded around a large-screen TV and scribbled away on their notebooks, watching CNN's coverage of the air strikes a few hundred miles north of us.

I decided I couldn't do the war justice by covering it from television reports, so I forced my way onto a list of reporters chosen to go into the field that morning.

Later, I sat on a bus with other reporters rolling north across a desert highway toward an Army camp near the Saudi Arabian border with Iraq.

We traveled six hours through a wilderness of sand whose subtle dunes gave way to an immense, dead plain that stretched beyond sight, flat as a parking lot.

We passed serpentine truck convoys carrying men and armor toward the border. The drivers shot hard grins out the window, like, "Man, can you believe this is happening?''

Further north, we passed silent, abandoned towns evacuated weeks earlier.

The first night of the war -- and many that followed -- offered no sleep.

In a tent at our desert outpost, I stood in a huddle of reporters and GIs around a tiny shortwave radio, hanging on every word of a British newscast.

At once, triple blasts from truck horns sounded outside -- the signal of a chemical attack.

We put on gas masks and chemical suits and filed into a sandbagged bunker.

Packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark, we listened for shell bursts. None came. The missiles hit a town south of us.

Somewhere miles north, allied planes dropped strings of bombs that struck the earth in faint drum rolls.

We went through the same kind of alert several times that night. By morning, sweat soaked everyone, and chemical-suit charcoal colored our skin corpse-gray.

I moved in with an armored cavalry regiment a few days later.

The troopers had arrived in Saudi Arabia straight from the West German-Czech border. Their desert mission was to scout ahead of large armored units to "engage and crush the enemy'' and clear an assault path. They expected a big fight.

Some of the troopers seemed to have walked right right out of a Wild West script.

"I'm extremely relieved there will be hostilities,'' one eager staff officer confided. "Besides, we'll do anything to get out of this ashtray.''

Not everyone was so brash.

"I can see death from here,'' a solemn corporal told me one day as he looked north.

He and other cavalrymen lived in small tents beside their 65-ton Abrams tanks or Bradley fighting vehicles, which were painted the color of baked earth.

They ate, smoked, slept, played cards, wrote letters, cleaned their weapons, listened to shortwave, and tried not to think about what the next days might bring.

Barbed wire ringed the outposts where they lived, and miles of emptiness separated them. From above, the small bases looked like flyspecks in a sandbox.

In late January, cold, heavy rains turned the northern Saudi desert to swamp, and cloud cover hampered the air campaign.

When the rain stopped, windstorms blew. The brown blizzards reduced sight to a few feet and covered everying with a fine coating of earth.

Afterward, on clear, moonless nights, temperatures dipped to freezing, and the desert turned nightmare black.

Jets crisscrossed the sky.

Sometimes, rockets' orange trails arched toward the stars from bases south.

On the ground, the rattle of tanks broke the dark silence as heavy armor crept north.

But the war seemed distant.

The regiment's only excitement had been a few artillery duels and one lopsided firefight that wounded two cavalrymen and killed two Iraqis, with six others captured.

But the war was never far from anyone's thoughts. One staff officer said he expected the regiment to lose up to 10 percent of its men in the initial invasion.

Weeks later, in the ground assault, when much of the cavalry's opposition either fled or surrendered, the regiment suffered few casualties.

But I didn't get a chance to witness the ground assault. I'd earlier promised the editors back in Tokyo to stay in the desert for a month, then swap out with another reporter.

So I returned south, cursing my fate.

Two days later, the ground campaign started. I watched it on TV.