-
22 Kuwait International Airport
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Captain Joseph Molofsky, Liaison to the Saudi Brigade They went into Kuwait International. Americans, Task Force Taro, was held outside the city. The Saudis liberated the city. The Force Reconnaissance Platoon leader that was with me, Brian Knolls, drove up there the night before , linked up with some Kuwaiti resistance, drove to the American embassy , and actually raised the ¤rst ®ag at the American embassy. It was unoccupied . He beat out a special operations Delta Force SEAL team operation that was out on a boat with millions of dollars worth of equipment that was going to be used to justify next year’s Special Op budget. Young Lieutenant Knolls and ¤ve of his ¤lthy, dirty kids preempted Delta Force. That was fun. I’ll never forget riding into the city with the Arabs and the reception we got. It must have been kind of like Paris in World War II. People dancing in the streets. Arabs ¤ring weapons in the air. People crying. Old Arab women running up to you and grabbing you. Unheard of. Children screaming. Intersections blocked. When you’d drive up, these militiamen would run out in the middle of the intersection and move everybody aside and let our vehicle pass. People grabbing you. Old men crying and kissing you. I’ll never forget it—never! Captain Mark Davis, Battalion Logistics Officer We waited about a day or two. The word comes that we’re going to go to Kuwait International Airport. “Holy shit! We’re going that far that fast?” “Yes, we are!” 22 / Kuwait International Airport We ordered everybody up and we started driving north. We drove to a breach where one of our task forces had gone through. As we’re driving through, I see one American vehicle and it was a tank, one of our tanks that had one of its threads blown off. No other American vehicle was anywhere to be seen. There’s numerous tanks, Russian tanks, on either side of the breach, smoked out, burned out. You could see where one of the task forces came through and dropped their mine plows and their rakes and their wheels and kept going. Now it’s starting to get dark at nine or ten o’clock in the morning. We¤nally get through all this and we’re right in the oil ¤elds and the smoke. It’s twelve o’clock noon and it’s pitch black, black as midnight. We stopped for a piss call. We put on the headlights. It was almost blackout driving conditions. We drove a little bit further. I look and there’s ¤fteen, twenty oil wells just spewing burning oil just as fast as it could come out of the hole and burn. I looked at this and I said, “That son of a bitch. Now he’s not just ruining Kuwait. Now we’re talking about the world environment.” We got back in the vehicles and drove forward. We drive through this smoke. There must have been over 150 or 200 folks in some sort of quasimilitary formation. These guys just walked out of the smoke and gave themselves up. Just south of Kuwait International Airport, we stop again for another halt. The wind is blowing from the north. In a 180-degree arc, I counted no less than forty-seven oil wells, on ¤re. It was just as black as pitch. We go to Kuwait City through the airport. They’re trying to ¤gure out where we’re supposed to go. I’m thinking that we should just follow the signs, so we did. We stopped along the side of the road. As we drive in, there’s some Iraqi APCs with a body or two lying beside them. There are M60 tanks over there. It looks like they had a ¤ght at one time. There were hulks [burned-out vehicles] over here but none from our forces. We stopped before we got right into Kuwait International Airport proper. People started driving by, waving Kuwait ®ags. Girls, men, women, children, everybody. They were saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” as they drove by. I looked and thought about how this scene had been played before. They freed France. They freed this and that. I am in the midst of history right here, and all I can think about is where I am going to get water for the battalion. I ¤nally started checking on chow, on ammunition. 202 Kuwait International Airport [52.55...