by David Sommerville
On August 2nd, 1990, I watched on TV as Iraq invaded Kuwait and then watched Guard and Reserve units deploy to the Persian Gulf only half-expecting the same fate, thinking it couldn’t happen to us. But as more Guard and Reserve units deployed I had come to accept the inevitable call to activate.
At the time I was working as the training non-commissioned officer for the Active Guard/Reserve in my hometown of Elkins, West Virginia. I got up and went outside the armory and wondered what it was I really felt for this town, this bantam mountain village of six thousand. I’d been here now in every kind of weather. I’d hunted ginseng, trapped game, skied trails, and walked the ridgelines, climbed rocks, plumbed caves, and camped in the surrounding wilderness, my only companion a brown dog who’d passed on. I’d returned after a long period of wanderlust and now, so soon after, I might have to go and fight a war in some foreign land.
The order to assemble came down in December 1990, expected but still a shock. Though we had no mission, rumors began to circulate. We’d stay in country and do nothing. We’d deploy to an overseas base in Turkey, or Germany and skirmish only if needed. We’d go to Baltimore to fight the drug lords. But the most popular rumor was the “primed and ready” theory: how we’d move vehicles and equipment to the mobilization station, have shots and personnel records updated, go through an intensive train up, then pre-position everything so we could deploy at a moment’s notice, then we’d return to the armory and wait, drilling two weekends a month for the entire period of our active duty, which could last up to a year. It was frustrating enough to have failed my first assignment as battery rumor control sergeant but added to that the mobilization station we had expected to deploy from changed to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to which we had no plans for moving supplies, vehicles, or equipment. The mobilization plan I’d spent hours developing for Fort Pickett, Virginia had been an unnecessary waste of time.
After assembling at the armory with no mission and a new mob station we executed the load plan, a method to get equipment properly boxed and crated then put onto trucks according to section. Unfortunately, the process broke down midway because the supply sergeant who had the most knowledge about the plan had to get his own shots and records updates, and the other leaders did not have the same knowledge to keep the process going. Sullen family members held vigil in and around the armory to steal moments with loved ones, which slowed further the process of getting through personnel stations and gear onto trucks. When we were out of time I watched pieces of equipment get chucked and slung wherever they’d fit, and what was supposed to have been a smooth process devolved into a sad and pitiful clusterfuck that resulted in our arriving at the mob station not knowing where anything was or knowing if everything had even been loaded.
We eventually learned from Headquarters 201st Field Artillery that Second Army had borrowed us, a self-propelled 155 howitzer battalion from First Army, and put us with their 621st out of Tennessee, also self-propelled along with the 181st out of Kentucky an 8-inch battalion. Together we’d be “Old Hickory,” the 196th Field Artillery Brigade. It was a relief to know who we were finally, but we still had no mission, I was thinking now about the specter of harm we might be facing beyond the mob station. That wouldn’t begin to come clear until we arrived at Fort Campbell just before Christmas.
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The Battalion advance party and main convoy of drivers, vehicles, and equipment left for Fort Campbell on the 10th and 11th of December and soon after buses arrived to convey those of us who remained. A soldier with a heart irregularity and another with a mentally afflicted family member would stay behind. In a sendoff at the armory city officials made speeches, church leaders said prayers, school kids sang songs, and they all shed tears. Snow fell and we started the slow march out of Elkins. I said goodbye to my wife Cheryl Ann, and as the busses rolled out along the parade route Chuck Daniels produced a bottle of Southern Comfort. I watched the faces of those crying and cheering and waving and clapping, and I can’t say I felt anything except that I was glad we had the Comfort and time now to myself, and over the drum of the wheels and in a state of alcohol induced lucidity I tried not to think.
The trip to Campbell was cold and gray. We stopped to eat just outside of Clarksville and I walked a long way back to a liquor store we’d passed. When I returned everyone had eaten and was back on the bus. We rolled into Fort Campbell late. I didn’t know but half-suspected what awaited us: cramped and dingy barracks, seventeen-block trips in crowded buses to personnel stations and twenty-block trips to the mess hall.
I had just begun to sort things out and settle into a routine when they told us we were going home for the holidays. West Virginia Air Guard C130’s picked up the entire battalion and flew us to Hart Field, in Morgantown, where a fleet of yellow school buses waited to take us to armories in Keyser, Fairmont, Kingwood, and Elkins. While on the way to Elkins we listened to a new recruit, George Warden, a Vietnam vet and former state trooper, tell us about the recruiter who had assured him he would never have to go to Iraq. Everyone laughed. When it was quiet I thought to myself, that was the old Guard. When I graduated high school in 1969, a young man of limited means could only wait for the draft or enter the Vietnam war voluntarily. Avoiding it meant getting into the National Guard because the Guard didn’t have to go. But the Guard was full of rich kids, and it was a poor man’s adventure I’d settled for that day when I walked into the Marine recruiter’s office. Expecting to see combat, the surprise and dismay was overwhelming when they handed me a non-combat MOS (military occupational specialty). At forty I’d returned home, my only prospect a local National Guard unit. But it was a new Guard I’d found, proficient committed people, no longer a place of impotence for rich kids to hide from war. One year became two and now there was the possibility of combat the Marine Corps denied me. But this time, finally back home, I didn’t want to leave.
At the start of the New Year, we arrived back at the mob station. For many the trip home was a blessing, but for me it had been hard to say goodbye a second time and there seemed no longer any doubt that we were preparing to deploy to a war zone. As I got off the plane and walked the length of the runway I was thinking how events had pointed to it all along. Confirming my thoughts was an initial field exercise in the numbing cold and ass-deep mud. We couldn’t keep water out of anything or anything out of the water. Amidst thunder and lightning under a red-tinged and cloud-swollen sky, our howitzers concussed the landscape day and night with hundreds of hundred-pound projectiles. During a week of the heaviest rain on record at the time, a validation of our shooting skills had had excellent results.
The validation of our basic soldier skills mostly meant standing around shooting the shit and enduring the icy snow that came down after the rain because conflicts had to be resolved constantly regarding ranges, instructors, and resources. If we arrived on any given range by 0800, ammunition would not be there until 1100, and instructors would not be prepared to instruct until 1300. On Grenade, LAW/AT4 (Light Anti-Tank Weapon/Anti-Tank 4), and Claymore mine ranges there was never enough live weaponry available for everyone to get hands-on. On the M16 range computer-operated pop-up targets did not function. The validation team scrapped the bayonet course and gas chamber without explanation. But to say all training was slapdash would be wrong. For me land navigation and M16 night-fire were two exceptions.
Throughout all of this, I had three jobs: prepping ammunition, fuses, and powder for Gun 2, conducting battery physical fitness training, and making training schedules, which was impossible the way everything changed. Higher headquarters was not able to provide us with certain items of equipment such as desert camouflage, flack-jackets, and rucksack frames, updated NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) auto-injectors, or prescription eye-lens inserts for gas masks. We all had assigned “Battle Buddies,” mine was SPC (Specialist) Chuck Suloff, from Coalton. I’d taught him to fall on grenades and encouraged him to keep perfecting his technique. Finally, they told us to tell families not to put return addresses on mail or bait terrorists by hanging yellow ribbons.
When I wasn’t dealing with training or equipment issues, I wandered Fort Campbell and tried to stay out of trouble. By the time we arrived, twenty-five thousand men of the 101st Airborne Division were already gone, which had left numerous spouses home alone, and I saw men of the 196th undertake liaisons with some of these women. Local girls of post-high school age also frequented the Gardner Lanes Bowling Alley, a block from our billets, where it became easy for young soldiers to find companionship. I only heard of one young soldier promising marriage. I knew a young soldier who’d gotten a part-time job in a strip club as a bouncer and while at Campbell had had a long-running affair with one of its strippers. I was also aware of several soldiers who’d attended an X-rated hot tub party sponsored by the wife of a deployed SF (Special Forces) Sergeant, a party to which she’d run a shuttle. I listened to soldiers tell stories about these women, about their loneliness and boredom, wanting companionship and being tired of waiting for the war to end.
The strip outside Fort Campbell featured the usual array of pawnshops, tattoo parlors, bars, and strip clubs where men driven by unfaithful women back home or soldiers who simply loved to go clubbing threw themselves into whatever affairs they could muster with what little time they had. One evening at the bowling alley, amidst the scattering of pins the occasional thunk of a gutter ball, I sat to reflect. To be sure I’d seen men and women engage in promiscuity and excess at Fort Campbell, but they were a minority. I saw the majority of National Guard soldiers stay true to the task despite the hardships, weep in unguarded moments but never lose their sense of humor or devotion to one another, stand valiantly against fear and not lose faith or forsake allegiance to the mission or their families. At the end of January, we chained our trucks, howitzers and track vehicles onto rail cars and they rolled out for a port off the coast of South Carolina, the largest deployment of equipment to ever go out of Fort Campbell. With whatever preparedness we had to fight the war, we boarded L-1011 Tristar airliners and lifted off from Ft. Campbell.
Leaving behind the chaos of mobilization, my thoughts turned to the combat to come, and the hope of returning home again one day.
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David Sommerville is a veteran of Desert Storm. He has two pieces of short fiction due to appear in Rind and New Square literary magazines.
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