The sorting of all these requests for exemption was made simple...the Army issued a "Stop Loss" policy and cancelled all administrative separations and movements. In short: Lottie, Dottie, and everybody was going...period. Well, the one exception was that pregnant soldiers would not deploy. Once that word came out, well...there was a mass effort to become disqualified.

I still had a stream of young'uns coming to me with their various excuses: they didn't sign up for war...they only wanted to travel some...they just wanted the education benefits...just joined to learn a job...had become a Conciencious Objector...they had a wife/husband/kids/dogs/etc. I listened to them all, then told them I sympathized with them and we were all going. And we all went, with the exception of two or three female soldiers who were pregnant (we had to send two females back when we got to Saudi because they had become pregnant after the notification...the commander wouldn't let me charge them with dereliction of duty).

PVT Bee, the hero of the mailroom, came to my office no less than three times with some serious requests. He confided in me that he couldn't be in a war, that he just wasn't cut out for it. I don't remember what the other excuses were. Finally I told him that, like the rest of us, he was going. And despite his best efforts, he went, like the rest of us.

I was kind of busy for the first couple of days at our new home in the middle of the Saudi desert. But it didn't take PVT Bee long to continue his compaign to return to Germany. The first thing was the asthma. There was something in the Saudi sand that had an effect on a small percentage of the soldiers. A very few had to be med-evaced out. Bee was sure he was one of the the ones who would be seriously affected by the something-in-the-sand. Even though he wasn't exactly sure what the symptoms were like, yet. His asthma didn't keep him from other activities...like the walk to the outer perimeter to the four-holers. It would have been great to have a doctor pronounce him non-something-in-the-sand, but we had a problem there. We didn't have any medical support anywhere around us. We had visited an Air Force aid station at King Kahlid Military City where the lady medics helped us out. They gave us some anti-histamines and eye drops and lip balm and the like, to treat the most common ailments they were seeing in the desert. They gave us a pretty potent decongestant for the seriously gummed-up soldiers. One of the things they gave us was apparently a prescription-only med; they told us to limit it to the very worst cases and only give them three tabs to see if it would work.

After a few days, we had a number of soldiers who were having congestion and sandy eyes and chapped lips. They came to operations looking for a trip to "sick call". The problem was, we didn't have anyplace to take them. If someone had cut off a leg or impaled themselves on a tent pole, we could call in a medevac and ship them to KKMC hospital...but non-emergency stuff was in limbo...no one was allowed to be sick until we got all the support in the desert we needed. I gave some of them the cures the medic gals gave us, the worst cases. We had gotten some of the "To Any GI" boxes at Christmas (the Air Force ladies, again) and they had aspirin and chapstick and things like that, too. We were careful to ensure we took care of the guys as best we could; fortunately no one was seriously sick or injured...except Bee. He had every major ailment that anyone could think of. I was tempted to give him one of the heavy duty pills but one of the side-effects was lower GI distress...inconvenient for a trucker in a fast- moving convoy.

In a couple of weeks the other units in our new battalion began arriving from the States and setting up their company areas. A medical unit moved into our neighborhood a little later and began a limited sick call operation. Bee spent as much time in their area as he did in ours.

One morning I was summoned to the Sergeant Major's tent. He greeted me with a huge smile and an electronic message from the military liaison office of the US Congress. I had been named in an inquiry. This wasn't a first for me, but it was kind of surprising that while we couldn't get all the info and material we needed to operate in the desert, a congressional inquiry could find me. What ususally happens is that some constituant will call their congressman and complain because their little boy was treated unfairly by his chain of command, or he was passed over for promotion unfairly...whatever the complaint was, it was not fair. The congressman takes the complaint to the military liaison and asks them to look into it. A message is generated containing all the details and sent to the major command involved. The inquiry is logged into the major command then passed down to the next lower command, and so on until it reaches the company level. At company level, no matter what the complaint or who was named in it, the message appears on the First Sergeant's desk with a note from the commander that says, "Handle it". Since my name was on the complaint, the Sergeant Major said he would "handle it". He "handled it" to me and told me to write out what he was going to say. So I did. The complaint was that I was not allowing soldiers to go on sick call. My first reaction was to write, "True" on top of it and hand it back. But I wrote up a response the way they like to see them, explaining the difficulties of waging a war, or at least the ramp-up to a war, with a sniffly nose...but them was the noses we had and now that the medics lived down the street, we were sick calling again as we should. Sergeant Major looked it over, signed it, and said, "Hey, I did a pretty good job on that". I agreed that he had.

The next inquiry followed in few days; this one was more serious. I was accused of handing out prescription meds without authority. Sergeant Major asked if it was true. I said that it was not exactly true; the medic ladies had given me authority to hand them out to the most needy patients. He responded, "Sounds good to me!" He wrote it up and sent it off. As I was leaving, he commented that we would probably be seeing more of these, wouldn't we? I thought that maybe we might. He asked if I wanted him to speak to the young man and explain what a sparkling example of a First Sergeant he was fortunate enough to work for. I declined at that time, but reserved to right to recall him as witness should the need arise.

This was the first war I had experienced with direct telephone access to our families back in Germany. A wonderful innovation. Except where PVT Bee was concerned. He kept feeding his wife a string of my offenses so she could get the other wives upset and complaining...as if we would have to send everyone home because of upset spouses.

I called PVT Bee into the operations tent for a little heart-to-heart. I explained how the inquiries worked. That somewhere in each level of command there was an entry in the Congressional Inquiry log that had his name on it and the comment that said something like, "Satisfactorily addressed". I told him that after all the logs and transmissions, each of the inquiries landed on my desk and I answered them and sent them back. I suggested that life would be easier on all those paper-pushers up and down the chain of command if he just brought his concerns to me in person next time. I would tell him what I would tell the congressman. Easy. I don't know how well my little talk went over; shortly after that conversation we got the word to strike camp and prepare to move to Log Base Echo in anticipation of moving into Iraq.

In all, I am pretty sure there were three Congressionals (I just don't recall what heinous crime I was accused of in the third), a couple of IG visits generated by complaints by Bee, and just a whole slew of sick calls and whines from this lad. At one point I told him that we were all afraid but that we had to do what we had to do. He exploded and insisted he wasn't afraid...he just wasn't cut out for war. I had really thought that when we got to the desert, got involved in convoy operations, and started getting busy, that he and some of the others who were displaying some jitters would calm down some. Most of them did. Moving to Echo meant that the ground phase of the war was close at hand and we would be too busy to mess with all the drama Bee brought into our lives. I wasn't sure what to do with him...I should have known he would force the issue...why couldn't we have a nice simple little war without all that crap?