Reality of Getting to War

In the back of everybody’s mind is there is always the thought of, “When is it going to be time to pay the fiddler? ” So when I got posted to Germany, that was my third posting, I had about twelve or thirteen years in at the time so I had been around the block a little bit along with a lot of friends of mine that were there. So around August we started hearing about the activities going on in the Persian Gulf with Saddam Hussein and that sort of thing but the news was all sketchy and whatnot and all of a sudden the base really ramped up with a lot of activity and planning going on in the background and all of a sudden, you know, there’s a big activity afoot and we’re heading off to the Persian Gulf and we’re getting ready and doing all our briefings and medical requirements and gearing up with our equipment and, you know, there’s a lot of logistics that happen behind the scenes to make a move like that out of Germany to the Middle East so it was quite interesting.

Interviewer: And what about the culture shock itself?

Well that was interesting in itself. When we even got there, I mean going from late August, early September weather in Central Europe to, you know, 45 degrees plus hot in the Middle East at the time and then just the whole culture shock about the Arab lifestyle and that sort of thing was something totally, totally different to pretty well all of us I guess. So it was just a matter of being respectful and trying to understand the bounds or the boundaries of what was involved in it and that sort of thing because what made sense to us didn’t make sense to other people and vice versa right so we had to try and figure out how to respect that.