America's Battalion: Marines in the First Gulf War

5 The Chemical Threat

Lieutenant Dan Henderson, Platoon Commander, Kilo Company For once the Marines took NBC warfare as a serious threat. Chemical warfare hung over our heads. We didn’t know if the Scuds would have chemical warheads on them or not. We’d tell our Marines that they had better learn to use the gear. Their lives could depend on it. MOPP4 [mission-oriented protective posture, level 4] is full chemical gear. You have on your gas mask, hood, gloves, rubber booties, and full chemical protection suit. MOPP level 1 is just with the suit on—no booties, no gloves. MOPP level 2 is with the boots on too. MOPP3 is with the boots, suit, and hood, but without gloves and mask. We trained all the time. We worked in the chemical suits. We did a lot of alerts and sent out monitor teams and set up decontamination sites. Captain Kevin Scott, CO, Lima Company We knew Saddam had chemical and biological capability because of what he had done to his own Kurd population. We had to remember what the symptoms are for a particular agent, when to use atropine, and all this other stuff. There wasn’t really an antidote for his biological weapons. We practiced a lot with the NBC gear. The corpsmen did many classes on NBC defense, the treating of NBC casualties, donning the gas mask. We inspected the gear constantly. When we went forward to Al Mishab, we got more intensive with it, because we knew we were in the center of the bull’s eye. 5 / The Chemical Threat The ¤rst time I came across the border into Khafji we had to go to MOPP4. It took about three or four minutes of straining to get into this gear. Then it took about ¤ve minutes to report back that everyone’s got it. It could take longer if you haven’t packed your pack to make it easily accessible. First you stop breathing until you get the mask on. Then you put on the trousers and then the blouse. The blouse zips up and then snaps with a ®ap. There are three snaps in the back that snap on the trousers. It has an elastic waist with a drawstring. You tighten that. Then you have rubber gloves you pull on. The sleeves of the blouse come over the gloves. There is a Velcro thing that you can use to tighten up on the cuffs. Then there are these big rubber boots, just like cow-manure boots—big enough to slip our regular boot into. You tie them up with shoestrings, lace them up your leg. The legs of the trousers are split and have a zipper to zip down over the boot. There is a tie to tie it off. The hood goes on when you put on your gas mask, and it protects the head and neck. So if you get a mist or spray of some type of chemical that hits you, you want it to be able to roll down off your head, down off your body and back off your gloves or boots onto the ground. We’d check each other once we were done. Captain Mark A. Davis, Battalion Logistics Officer Water for decontamination of chemical agents was a problem. The simple thing was the battalion did not possess any tanker support, none of the 5,000-gallon refuelers or 1,500-gallon water tankers. If we needed water we would have to call and have it sent out in 900-gallon tanks. I could get an initial load, a drop, but then the nature of the beast is that if the colonel wants to go somewhere, he is going to have to make a hard call—abandon that water and go without, or hold tight to where the source is? That doesn’t mean we couldn’t have gone on and done things like hasty decontamination and use 5-gallon water buckets and just wash guys off like that. We could have done that, and we were prepared to do so. We had chemical decontamination teams back at the battalion aid station . We had the corpsmen ready to perform the many steps where you start on one side of the facility and you’re fully contaminated, and you walk through the decontamination process and start losing bits and pieces of Chemical Threat 47 clothing as you come through...