January 1991 was the month that the training became execution.
On January 17, thirty years ago, I was an Army captain in the 1st Cavalry Division; I was about to do the job I’d been trained to – not lead tanks into battle, as I had been trained as a lieutenant in the Army’s armor branch, but the job of division public affairs officer, which I had become six months before at Fort Hood, Texas.
Our division was in the process of moving some 300 miles northwest from its initial Saudi desert assembly area southeast, called AA Horse (after all, this was the cavalry). There, since October, we had trained for war and reequipped our tank battalions with the newest version of the M1 Abrams – the M1A1, with its big 120mm main gun.
I had commanded an M1 Abrams company only a couple years before, in the 2nd Armored Division, in the same 1st “Tiger” Brigade that was now also in the desert, about to make history fighting in Kuwait with the 2nd Marine Division.
Yes, I wanted to be back in an Abrams among tankers, but my job now was to ensure our PAO soldiers and their cameras got into the fight and recorded the division’s operations. The 1st Cavalry Division’s combat units were racing northwest from AA Horse to thwart a pre-emptive Iraqi attack on the huge logistics depots in the vicinity of King Khalid Military City and the Trans-Arabian Pipeline main supply route that intelligence indicated might be in the works.
My team had moved with the division’s combat units. I too carried a camera, and would escort news media into combat. I would send my team into war and would sample its horrors and its exhilarations.
That would all happen soon enough. But on this night of January 16-17, in my general-purpose-small “GP-tiny” tent south of the Iraq border, I’d been awakened in the wee hours by a swooshing sound. Rising from my cot, I walked out into the cold pre-dawn dark and looked up into the barely visible clouds. “Swoosh, swoosh.” I saw nothing. Thinking I’d heard 2.75-inch rockets fired by Cobra gunships in some nocturnal gunnery practice, I returned to my tent, crawled into my warm “fart sack” and fell asleep.
The next thing I knew, my sergeant was jostling me: “Sir, wake up, the war started.”
What had roused me from sleep had been the first cruise missiles flying unseen overhead from their launch sites on U.S. warships in the gulf, to explode on Iraqi positions north of us.
Operation Desert Storm had begun.
I was in my first war.
CAPTION: ROA’s executive director, Jeff Phillips, wrote this 1992 “coffee table” history of the 1st Cavalry Division in the gulf war, illustrated with photographs taken by his public affairs team.