An Inside Perspective on the Gulf War

I’ve been back in Saudi a bit more than a week now. Not much has changed except the heat is greater and we have a few new pilots. The first four or five days averaged a high of around 113. Now it has settled down to around 105 or so. On one particular day I got out of the plane and was walking to the terminal with my crew and there was something I felt that I’ve never felt outside before and it was probably the result of a combination of the heat (about 117 that day) and it’s reflection off of the concrete, and the northerly wind that faced me at the time. It was almost identical to the feeling you get when you open an oven door to pull out something that has just finished cooking. It’s a sort of stinging sensation mostly on your cheeks. The only difference was I couldn’t close the oven door to stop it.

Enough about the heat. I knew it was going to be hot before I came here, so there is no sense in complaining about it. What I did want to capture in this entry was a fascinating conversation I had with one of our new pilots I’ve been helping to train. I was assigned an added new role of “training captain” soon after I came back, which I gratefully accepted. All that this means is that alongside my normal duties as line captain, I will also occasionally train the new guys that come in, and will check the standardization of those already here. I’ve always liked training and am glad to get back into it a bit. I’m pretty sure I will enjoy it.

This new pilot, Bander, is a very nice guy and already showing great aptitude. He’s a Saudi by nationality but grew up in the northern part of Kuwait. His citizenship is Saudi Arabian because his father is Saudi, but his mother is Kuwaiti and he feels more Kuwaiti than anything else. After high school he went to Louisiana and got an accounting degree, and then went to North Dakota to learn how to fly, using an company scholarship. When he told me about his Kuwaiti upbringing, I immediately thought of the Gulf War. I asked him if he was in Kuwait at the time, and he said yes and proceeded to tell me about it. He was 8 years old at the time and remembers his father being captured by the Iraqi forces at the beginning of the 8 month invasion of Kuwait. His father was a pretty important lieutenant in the Kuwaiti army and was posted near the Iraqi border. The frustration of the Kuwaiti forces at the beginning stages was that they were not given any orders to fight back. The Iraqis capitalized on this and seized everyone over 18 years of age that they could find. After about 3 months, Bander’s dad was released (due to his high position, apparently) and he immediately smuggled his wife and 10 kids into Saudi Arabia for their protection. I asked if there were a lot of Kuwaiti refugees in Saudi at that time and he said yes. He also said that he remembers the incredible hospitality of the Saudi Arabian people. Almost without exception every Saudi home was opened up to the refugees to live in, and for the most part their dignity and comfort was preserved. I gather that the family soon returned back to Kuwait and he spent the rest of his childhood there. I’m itching to ask him more about this. He seems open to talk about it…