Part 3 of 3. (Aren't you glad it wasn't a longer war?)
A couple weeks after returning home from my ‘adventure’ watching TV at Little Rissington, Shadow and I were at home – it was Sunday. And the phone rang and it was my boss, Satan’s daughter.
I’m not a severely religious person but there must be a God because I worked for the Devil’s progeny. There’s no doubt in my mind. I mean, I can’t prove it, but all the signs were there – her head spun around in complete circles, Bibles spontaneously combusted near her. But that’s not the point and I don’t want to go down that particular rabbit trail, because there was work to be done in Turkey.
You see, when 500,000 coalition members made scrap metal out of most of Iraq’s army, thousands upon thousands of Kurdish-Iraqis ran into the hills of Northern Iraq. These weren’t peasants who didn’t understand – many were well-educated people. Doctors, accountants – people from all professional walks of life – even lawyers. And they did understand. They understood that Saddam Hussein had used poison gas on them several years back and he was not in a terribly good mood with just one pizza delivery place left standing in Baghdad. They had to get out of town.
And this is what they did. They drove. They literally drove north until their cars ran out of gas and then they got out and walked – into some really big mountains. It was the first week of April. They didn’t have food, much in the way of clothing or anything else.
It seems kind of odd to us looking at a seething mass of humanity walking into the wilderness like that, but at some point, fear and the recognition of who the really bad people are will drive everyone to the lowest rung of Maslow’s hierarchy. They needed to survive. A chance in the wilderness was better than fat chance in their homes and towns.
Here’s the kicker though – they were heading toward Turkey. If there is a population on this planet that dislikes the Kurds as much as Saddam Hussein, it’s the Turks.
First a little history/geography lesson. Kurdistan, historically, is made up of bits of northern Iraq and Syria and quite a good chunk of eastern/central Turkey. In fact, a little town called Diyarbakir was the capital of Kurdistan. At least this is what I was told by a British Ministry of Defence official I hung out with for a while as we were standing on the walled city of Diyarbakir overlooking a bridge built in 1065 that spans the Tigres and one of the four potential spots Biblical Scholars think the Garden of Eden may have been. It is a land of some contrast. But I digress.
So, about 2 days after this phone call, I’m in Turkey, near Ankara, watching one of my co-workers very slowly win several thousand dollars at roulette in the hotel’s basement casino. And my boss tells me to get on a helicopter because I’m heading east.
If you ever have a chance to fly on a Chinook helicopter – go get dental surgery or something. It’s really not comfortable – especially on the floor, for two hours.
When they dropped me off, I wasn’t at the small American Air Base 15 miles away. No, they had sent me to the Turkish Air Base in Diyarbakir itself. From there, the army was launching helicopters loaded with food and other supplies brought in by aircraft from dozens of countries to the airfield at Diyarbakir. On any given day you could find Saudi, American, British, Russian, Dutch, German – any one of a number of countries’ aircraft on the ramp. I know all this because the tent I worked out of was, and I am being very literal about this – about 10 yards from the edge of the parking apron.
For entertainment we’d watch Turkish pilots flying F-104 Starfighters (aircraft we hadn’t flown since the ‘60s). Our tent was on a strip of grass about 50 meters or so wide from the parking apron to the perimeter road around the base. About another 50 meters or so on the other side of the fence near the perimeter road was the Turkish bombing/gunnery range. We would watch the rockets detach from the airplanes and shoot toward their targets. Note, I didn’t say hit their targets. They didn’t seem to be very good shots but we enjoyed the show and dutifully held up signs to score their bombing runs.
We were lucky in that we had a Turkish fighter pilot help us out as an interpreter and such. In the couple months I was there I taught him to play cribbage, which he got quite good at. He was helping us because he was no longer allowed to fly.
“I got married to a Romanian girl,” he explained, taking out his wallet to show me a picture. “In Turkish Air Force, if you marry a foreigner, you lose your security clearance and they kick you out.” He leaned in to me and whispered, “It cost me $400 (US) to get married. When I’m out of Air Force, I pay her another $400 for divorce. I’ve got a job lined up with Turkish airline which pays much better.”
What I really learned from this deployment, then, was that people really aren’t so different no matter where you go. For him, he told me Diyarbakir was the TAF’s ‘shit base’ that no one wants to go to. Fantastic. And he also explained a little about the Turkish conscripts. Mandatory service was part of the deal then and conscripts were essentially third class citizens. I had heard stories of conscripts being shot out of hand.
“Well, if they do something really bad, like sleep on guard duty, then yes, I can just shoot them,” the officer told me. “But it’s not something you want to do too often because eventually they’ll start asking questions and there’s paperwork…”
And here’s the thing … he was not joking. This was a guy I’d spent a lot of time teaching to play cribbage and I had a pretty good sense of when he was or was not joking. In this case, he wasn’t.
So as part of my job here, other than providing media credentials to the more than 700 international media who moved through the place in about 3 weeks, we got to go on C-130 flights to deliver food and on helicopter flights where we’d stop at various places and watch Iraqi POWs playing soccer and really behaving like they were in absolutely no hurry to go south again.
The whole process of providing for the Kurds was a logistical nightmare and while I’m not one to get into the ‘we’re number one’ nonsense that so many Americans seem fond of, I’m quite sure no other country in the world could have pulled off what we did.
The sheer amount of tents, blankets, food, water, baby food and other supplies that we airlifted over some pretty big mountains and to some pretty remote places was astounding. The US Army was doing serious work herding all those people together.
I know ‘herding’ doesn’t sound good, but it’s true. As pallets of food and water were dropped (with parachutes obviously) some younger (and dumber) Kurds would race out to where the pallets were falling. Inevitably…well, do the math. It’s not likely you’re going to catch a two-ton pallet. Even with a parachute. The flight crews were devastated by this – I mean, they’re trying to help folks, not kill them.
So they started herding people up in groups and dropping the supplies several miles away. This made for more orderly distribution and people weren’t grabbing and hoarding everything. At the same time all this is going on, we’re trying to figure out how to get these people back home – because let’s face it, the Turks don’t want them. So there were dozens of soldiers essentially being auto mechanics. Going south and fixing and refueling all these cars that had been left there on the sides of the roads.
Aside from the human drama of it all – I think what amazed me most was that despite their condition – half starving – many Kurds refused to eat Chicken A La King MREs. If you don’t know MREs are Meals Ready to Eat. (non politically-correctly referred to in Desert Storm as “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians”) They were fairly new to the US forces in 1991. They’d only replaced C-rations about 5-7 years before. And they were awful. No amount of Tobasco sauce (which they all had in them in little tiny bottles) would make them better.
The British RAF officers and NCOs in the tent next to ours would gag when we tore into them. “Gad, man, if you’re going to eat that at least you could heat it,” they’d say as they opened up a 10 pound box of British rations that had tea, good chocolate, bacon and real food that required cooking utensils and fire.
An MRE packet contained a spork.
So on the hillsides of northern Iraq, where thousands of Kurds waited to be fed there were hundreds if not thousands, of unopened Chicken ala king packages. I think there were more than a few Cherry Nut Cake as well.
It was kind of ironic that the same military force that could unleash such devastation and just as quickly turn around and launch what amounted to an enormous rescue mission, was subsisting on food the rescued wouldn’t eat.
I often wonder if they laughed about that in their tents at night.
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