Being Evacuated from Saudi Arabia During Gulf War, 1991, Javier Morris

From MemoryArchive

Who: Javier Morris
What: Evacuation from Saudi Arabia During Gulf War
When: Beginnng January 1991
Where: Saudi Arabia

When I was six years old my family lived in Saudi Arabia. My parents worked for Aramco, an oil company. The United States military began Operation Desert Storm, often called the Gulf War, in 1991. The authorities in my town issued my family gas masks. That is when my parents started acting differently. They put tape up on the windows and made my brother and I sleep in our furnished basement because they were afraid of the SCUD missiles that Iraq was firing over our airspace. The local TV stations, which usually had programming of all kinds had been reduced to just Public Safety Announcements about what to do if certain kinds of emergencies happened and constant, 24/7 news reports on developments with the possible invasion of Iraq. My family was first told by officials at the United States Embassy that we should remain in Saudi Arabia in our homes, but what my father told me later is that he felt betrayed by the officials who told him that, because at the same time they told our family and others like us to stay in Saudi, the consulate and state department in general was evacuating many of their own employees. My mother would make big American dinners for soldiers who were stationed near us or passing through. She fed them steak and apple pie and other comfort foods that she thought they would miss being so far from America. The soldiers gave my brother and I camo netting which we put over our beds before the war really started. Later the officials and the management of the company town we lived in decided that we did need to leave. First we were moved to the grounds of the US Consulate and then to the adjoining school’s gymnasium and then again to a huge white tent of some sort that I don’t remember particularly well. We stayed there for what seemed like forever. The adults watched CNN on the big screen TVs the consulate had provided, but as a kid too young to care about CNN and too young for my parents to be completely honest with me I remember knowing only that I didn’t know what was going on. The other kids and I played in the gymnasium in one big extended, days and days long P.E. class. After our time in the tent, we were told we would be evacuating Saudi Arabia all together. I remember moving to what seems like it was a recreation center, where I spent an hour or two under a pool table, watching the worried adult’s feet. Then to a bunker where there were little side spaces dug that looked like the spaces where bodies lie in catacombs. I was jealous of the people who got to hide in them, because I wanted to see what it was like in the little pods. Looking back, I don’t know exactly what those were. Even then I did notice that my mother was very worried because when we left our house we hadn’t brought our gas masks with us, and the SCUD missiles overhead were not comforting her. We eventually were brought to a big C-5 Galaxy cargo plane that we were to leave Saudi in. Our evacuation was delayed several times because of the missiles. We kept being run back and forth because the level of danger kept changing. A few times I remember being carried by my parents or soldiers who were our escorts. We were sent to Spain for a little while and then off to Houston in Texas. What I remember most is confusion. I was confused because no one told me what was going on honestly and everyone, even the adults, I knew were confused for some reason.