Cal Vet secretary recalls Gulf War attack
LANCASTER — Debris was falling and in the flat horizon of sand and sun that is Saudi Arabia, a large warehouse shattered in a plume of black smoke.
A Scud missile destroyed a barracks full of Americans three days before the war’s end.
To Capt. Vito Imbasciani, the scene that unfurled hovered between the unreal and the surreal. The first Persian Gulf War was almost over, but not before the missile launched by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s troops hit the barracks of dozens of National Guard troops, killing 27 and wounding 40 more.
Imbasciani was an Army Medical Corps doctor in a remote posting with four medics to assist him. More than 30 years after the events, Imbasciani recalled what happened next.
“There were two dead Americans, both females, and that has affected me to this day,” he said, addressing an audience of about 300 veterans, friends and family members gathered, Nov. 12, for the Veterans Military Ball, held at JP Eliopoulos Hellenic Center. “Then there were five dead, then 10 and then 15. Then the wounded started coming in.”
It would be 90 minutes before more doctors could be bused 17 miles from the Khobar Towers. Sirens screamed, with ambulances speeding the wounded to hospital care.
“We were there for an hour-and-a-half before that,” Imbasciani said. “I commandeered a mosque to secure the dead and posted a guard.”
The 14th Quartermaster Detachment deployed from Pennsylvania only five days earlier and had not even begun its mission. The war ended three days later, on Feb. 28, 1991. Imbasciani said of the 300 killed, he and his team personally dealt with “fully one fifth of the casualties from that war.”
Imbasciani, who retired as a full colonel, serves as secretary of the California Department of Veterans Affairs, CalVet. Dressed in immaculate officer’s “mess dress” for the ball hosted by the Coffee4Vets nonprofit, he lauded the group for putting on the only formal evening event organized “by veterans and for veterans.”
Radio personality Greg Mack emceed the event that served as a salute to two “Greatest Generation” World War II veterans, Louis Moore and William Senso, who received standing ovations. It was a night of finery, graced with gowns, dress uniforms and dinner jackets.
Imbasciani oversees the largest state veterans’ agency responsible for 1.6 million California vets. He noted that the federal VA manages health care, but California maintains eight homes for elder veterans, including the William J. “Pete” Knight Veterans Home in Lancaster.
The agency, he said, also offers generous educational benefits for veterans or their dependents. The agency writes home loans for thousands of veterans and “we don’t just guarantee the loan,” he said.
CalVet funds the loans and has the lowest foreclosure rates.
“I won’t dance around,” Imbasciani quipped. “You host the nation’s only Veterans Military Ball.”
Shortly after that, everyone danced.