My war. In a museum. And that’s not the whole story
A couple of months ago, on a visit to Central Texas, I stood staring at a forlorn mannequin wearing desert camouflage. At the 3rd Cavalry Regiment’s museum at Fort Hood, a card affixed to the mannequin’s glass box described the regiment’s actions during the 1990-1991 Gulf War.
That was my war. I was a platoon leader in the 3rd Cavalry. I wore a uniform like that one.
Though the 3rd Cavalry Regiment museum is no bigger than a couple of high school classrooms, it does a commendable job recounting the long and storied history of the 3rd Cavalry. Walk down the aisle, and you’ll come across a respectable cache of weapons and Army artifacts acquired over more than 170 years of battle, from the U.S. war with Mexico to World War II, where the regiment was the lead element of Gen. George S. Patton’s forces.
Then you come to that forlorn mannequin. A card affixed to the glass gives a short account of the regiment’s actions during the Gulf War. We deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1990 to take part in the liberation of Kuwait, advanced more than 350 miles into Iraq, destroyed a couple of Iraqi tank battalions, and so on.
Everything on the 3x5 card was technically correct. But those bare facts felt nothing like the war I remember.
People today don’t realize how the Gulf War was. When Saddam Hussein’s forces rolled into Kuwait, many of us in the regiment knew little to nothing about Iraq.
I needed to explain the region to my troopers, so I went to the library at the University of Texas at El Paso and “borrowed” a map of the area from a National Geographic magazine. (Sorry, UTEP, but it came in handy.)
After our tanks finally arrived at the port of al Jubayl in Saudi Arabia, the regiment was rushed to the border with occupied Kuwait. Then it became apparent we’d remain on that border for weeks. The men started cobbling pieces of wood together to make latrines and showers.
McDonald’s and Wendy’s weren’t available, so logistics chief Lt. Gen. Gus Pagonis had a fleet of 150 mobile “Wolf Burger” food trucks knocked together. After weeks of choking down bland chicken patties coated in a mucus-colored gravy, the occasional Wolf Burger hit the spot. The museum card doesn’t mention those.
The card also leaves out our fear that Hussein might drop a nerve agent on us. The brass passed out boxes of anti-nerve agent pills, called PB, for pyridostigmine bromide, and told the leaders to make sure our troops took them. I had no interest in being a guinea pig testing mysterious government-issued tablets. I told my platoon I would assume they were taking them — but frankly, wouldn’t notice if they kicked them into a hole, like I intended to do.
Today, even in the most austere environment, soldiers can carry around hundreds of hours of movies and TV shows on their iPads or laptops. In the Gulf War, our troop had a couple of VHS tapes and a video cassette player that sometimes worked. Still lodged today in my brain is the treacly dialogue from “Can’t Buy Me Love,” starring Patrick Dempsey as a nerdy outcast who hires the most popular girl on campus to pretend to his sweetheart.
A fellow platoon leader and I got into a long and passionate debate over whether any living actor could hold a candle to George Dzundza — a fine character actor who was in “The Deer Hunter” and a star in the first season of “Law and Order.” After weeks of debate, we determined that though Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando were skilled thespians, neither was on par with Dzundza. To this day I don’t know why we suddenly became such Dzundza fanatics — only that people in combat theaters sometimes obsess over bizarre things.
Like the card on the glass case said, the entire war lasted only a few months. The regiment return to Fort Bliss, near El Paso. About a year later, I left the Army.
The 3rd Cavalry rolled on without me. Its troopers were involved in peace keeping operations in Bosnia. After 9/11, they made several deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Other cards at the little museum tell the bare facts of those stories, too. This is how history is made. And now I know my place in it: inside a glass box with a mannequin wearing desert camouflage.