After a couple of months of 24/7 convoy operations, moving fuel from the port to a bladder farm at Log Base Echo, we were told to move from our home at TAA Henry up to Echo. We knew that this was the signal that the ground war was going to get underway. We struck our camp at Henry and made the move in one lift. At our new site, we set up our tents and equipment, but we knew we weren't going to be there very long. We put in hasty perimeter positions, didn't spend a lot of time improving our tents; did the minimum, in other words.
We had been at Echo a day or two when SFC Wade came into operations and told me he had a serious problem. PVT Bee was sitting in a foxhole with an Iraqi bayonet and was threatening to kill himself. Now, in all honesty, my first thought was, "Cool!" But officially I leaped into action...finished my lunch, had a cold Dr Pepper, then strolled over to the perimeter to visit with Bee. He was still in the hole. He hadn't bled out yet...hadn't even made the first hesitation strokes. I got down in the foxhole with him. There was not much spare space in there with the two of us. I admired the bayonet and asked him where he got it. He had paid twentyfive bucks for it...to some guy. I asked him why he wanted to kill himself. He explained, and I am not making this up, that he was afraid that if he went to war he would be killed. I went over the logic with him for a few minutes to make sure I understood. He was afraid he would be killed if he went to war so he was going to kill himself if we made him go. I reviewed with him all of the different schemes he had tried - to get out of the war - none of them had worked. I told him that we were within a day or two of crossing the berm (Saddam had a six foot tall berm of sand put up all along the border) and once that happened I expected that many of our soldiers would be killed. He could very well be one of them. I also expected that the majority of our soldiers would not be killed and he could very well be one of those.
He was inconsolable; he just could not be in a shooting war where he might be killed. I explained to him that his reasoning wasn't reasonable. I suggested he might want to go to the medics for a mental evaluation. If he was dinky-dao, he wouldn't have to go to war. He jumped at the chance to explain his thinking to a shrink. We agreed that he should go right away. He traded me the bayonet for a trip to the psych ward.
A week or so prior to this visit to the foxhole, I had been in a conversation with one of the other First Sergeants who had a nut-job in his unit who was an obvious faker. He had taken him to the Psych ward at the field hospital for evaluation. He had met and made friends with the NCOIC there who told him that they had a process for psych evals. The entire field hospital was made up of inflatable tents connected with huge plastic tubes and kept very cool by a huge air conditioning unit. All but the psych tent. They had a single GP Medium tent for their ward, a tent whose normal capacity was about twelve. They regularly had thirty to forty souls waiting for eval. And the sides of the psych tent had to be kept down to keep dust under control. They signed in new patients and told them that it would be a week or so before they could be seen by a doc, but once they are signed in, they couldn't leave the tent. The eval process usually took at least a week. It was amazing how quickly some of their patients began to feel better and actually looked forward to getting back to their units. I couldn't wait to get Bee over to the psych ward.
When all the drama was over and Bee was safely tucked away in the Psych Ward tent, I was in operations kicking back. Wade and a couple other NCOs came in and told me I was crazy. They said that in all the world, I was the one person that Bee held responsible for all his woes...he HATED me. And I crawled into a two man foxhole with him and his nine-inch bayonet. They asked me what I would have done if he decided to "take me out". I put on my best modest hard-guy look and told them I would have made him eat it.
The reality was that I had known that the possibility was there. It wasn't a matter of bravery or macho or anything like that on my part. I just felt that Bee was too much of a coward to try anything like that. Attacking me would get him back to Germany, then on to Leavenworth. He wasn't nuts; he was just a calculating slicky-boy who was running low on options. None of his schemes had come close to working out for him. This one was a last-ditch effort and it wasn't going to work, either. I could tell his heart wasn't in it; he was just going through the motions. And as I am not a moron, I watched him closely and I liked my chances pretty well.
It only took a couple of days to before we had Bee back in the unit. And right on time, we lined up that night and struck our tents and moved to our jump-off point. Early the next day, in the midst of a sand storm, our DESERT STORM kicked off for real. Finally all the posturing and threats were over and we were going to settle this thing for good...we thought.
At this point I should remind you that history plays cruel tricks on the memory. The night before we moved through the berm, I sat up quite a while wondering if I had covered all the bases, if we had made all the right preparations, and if I had trained my soldiers well enough for them to survive what lay ahead. That night I fully expected DESERT STORM to last no less than six months and maybe as long as a year. I knew that Saddam had 500 Hind gunships. I knew that I had about a hundred 5000 gallon tankers full of JP-8. Not a good match-up. We didn't know it would be over in four days. I will never forget the sensation I had when I received the radio message that we were under a cease-fire. It was the most mixed of emotions. I couldn't believe we were stopping. But we did...or at least the shooters stopped. We kept moving fuel forward in the event that everything cranked up again. But it was over. We hadn't lost any soldiers, we only lost one tanker to fire, and we had done a hard job better than anyone had done it before.
We set up in southern Iraq at a Log Base called Nellingen. We regrouped, gathering our platoons back from the various task forces, released the augmentation tankers from other units, and kept running fuel; but the urgency was relaxed considerably. We stayed in the desert until May, and then went back to Germany.
I didn't have any more problems with PVT Bee...until much later when he stole the unit Guidon... but that is another story. He had caused me a lot of trouble and used up a lot of my time, but believe it or not, I don't even recall anything else about him. I know that we sent him home; I don't think he did any jail time, but I do know that somehow he became identified to some very angy dudes as the snitch that had dumped on them. No...it wasn't me. It is kind of funny that a person who had figured so prominently in some parts of my experience as a First Sergeant has just faded from my memory. He turned out to be so much less important than he thought he was.