TechIntersect

I was up early this morning in the wee hours. Couldn’t sleep. Then I remembered I was also up early on this day eighteen years ago.

On January 17, 1991, I was aboard the USS Missouri, steaming somewhere in the Persian Gulf. The evening before, we were advised to get some sleep because we would have an early start the next day. With Saddam Hussein’s deadline for withdrawal from Kuwait expired, we knew something big was going to happen.

At 23, I was already an old-timer compared to many of my shipmates. When reveille was played early that morning, the captain announced that we would soon be going to General Quarters (battle stations) in preparation for a Tomahawk cruise missile attack on Iraq.

Words cannot really describe that gnawing feeling in your gut that comes when you come to the realization that you are about to participate in causing the deaths of other human beings. I distinctly remember thinking of and praying for the innocent people that would inevitably be killed in our soon to be starting war.

I also remember a certain uneasiness. We had no way of knowing if there would be an immediate retaliation, or if we would simply launch our cruise missles and go about our business. But one thing was certain, we were going to war, and our country had not been at war for nearly twenty years. To all but the most experienced veterans, this was all brand new.

Certainly we were well trained and we knew how to do our jobs, but there is a huge difference between training for combat and actually entering into it. Now it was time to put our countless hours of training to the test. So we hurriedly got dressed and waited for the GQ alarm to sound.

I recall one young sailor who kept saying, “we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die!” I told him to shut up and be a man. If there ever was a good place to be in a war, it is aboard the battleship Missouri. Secretly, inside, I felt his pain and wondered to myself if we would ever make it home again.

My battle station was in the forward main battery plotting room- the control center for the 16″ guns which wouldn’t be needed that day. I remember one of the hardest things to do was to sit in silence, our equipment not even energized, waiting for the inevitable. Soon, we would hear the roar of the tomahawks, and though our particular services weren’t needed just then, as the crew of that famous battleship, we would all have blood on our hands.

When you enlist in the service, you are only vaguely aware of the duties which you may be called upon to perform. As a young person without much life experience, it is difficult to consider the life or death situations you might soon find yourself in. But here I was, nearly six years after joining, about to participate in a war.

We sat in silence as the Tomahawks launched one by one. Somewhere I have a journal I kept, which says exactly how many we fired and at what time, but I wasn’t able to locate it for today’s entry. I’ll keep looking. As the missiles flew, with nothing else for me to do, I just prayed.

We had a CNN radio feed piped into the plotting room. It was surreal. Our missiles were on the way to Baghdad, but the reporter on the other end didn’t yet know it. For nearly an hour we waited in near silence, as the missiles lurched ahead toward targets in Iraq some 500 miles away.

Then, all of a sudden pandemonium struck. Explosions began to rock the city as the handiwork of the coalition forces took its toll. We listened for some time, and we waited to respond to any impending counter-attack, but none happened, so we went and ate a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs.

I can identify a little with the survivors of the US Airways crash that happened this week. The feeling that you have somehow cheated death is so euphoric. I remember the breakfast that morning 18 years ago was extra delicious in knowing that we had survived the first act of a very dangerous undertaking.

This is a phase of my life that I do not often spend a great deal of time thinking about, but it is especially hard to forget every time January 17th rolls around. However, I will plan to continue sharing about some of my experiences in the Gulf over the next several weeks

Tags: battleship, gulf war, iraq, USS Missouri

I just found these old photos I made in 1989. If I could turn back time, I would have had more film in my camera on the day Cher came to make her infamous music video on the USS Missouri. I was the duty Master-At-Arms that evening. Almost everyone who did not have duty left the ship because they knew they would probably be recruited into being in the video. And they were right! I had the dubious task of going around the ship that night and waking up every sailor I could find to order them to put on their whites and get up on deck to be in the video. There were some grumpy sailors that night.

You would think that there would be a lot of sailors wanting to be in a music video, but that wasn’t really the case. In fact, there were so few of us, they had to herd us around from shot to shot, just to make it look like we were a big crowd

The sailors who did participate wound up having a pretty good time with it, but making videos is tedious, hard work. We listened to that song over and over and over, filming take after take after take! Little did we know that the Navy would catch a lot of flack over the whole thing. See why by viewing it here if you like; just remember that MTV wound up airing it only after 9pm since it’s pretty racy. One good thing that came from it was the Mighty Mo always had a perfect breakaway song for underway replenishment that was used until the ship was decommissioned.

I know what you are thinking, and no I never could see my face in the final video. The only thing I have to prove I was there that night are these few photographs, and since I was behind the lens instead of in front of it, even they don’t even prove anything either. But you still believe me, don’t you? Remind me and some time I’ll tell you about the time I was cast as an extra in the Hunt for the Red October movie.

Tags: cher, MTV, music, USS Missouri, video