In the Sandpile, it is always summer. So as fall spread across America, the father of Cmdr. Sue Carroll, a Navy nurse, cut some autumn leaves and sent them to her in Saudi Arabia. She hung them up in her tent. Now, each time she looks at them, she says, they remind her “that somewhere back there is a place where they lead normal lives–and love me.”
Mail call–a soldier’s story. This time the drops are Main Street and the Persian Gulf. Each week more than 75 tons of mail come scudding in from zones of danger around Kuwait. Not since Vietnam have there been deliveries like these. In millions of letters home, soldiers are writing a foxhole chronicle of America’s showdown with Iraq. Even though no one is shooting yet, the mail is full of war stories: the “Kiss ’em goodbye” alert stateside, the barf-bag trip to the gulf, the heat, the flies, the dead camels beyond the defense perimeter, scorpions big as field mice, sand vipers slithering through the dunes. Each day you dig in deeper, waiting for the balloon to go up. At night, by flashlight, you pull out your ballpoint–and wish to hell you were home.
In reply, the home front is sending barrages of moral support: anxious letters from moms, proud letters from dads, bantering letters from friends, love letters. Schoolkids adopt whole units as pen pals. A cat signs a card with his paw. And the I printed word is just the beginning. There’s the home video of missed birthdays. On an audiocassette, a little boy says “Papa.” There’s the exuberant phone call, and the familiar voice on the message machine. Even the fax has gone to war. A woman plants a perfect kiss on the machine down at AT&T’s Desert Fax center. A pregnant wife sends a sonogram of the twins growing in her womb. And there are goodies. A Massachusetts photographer opens Operation Desert Cheer, shooting free pinups of wives and girlfriends for the troops. A Maine lobsterman dreams of sending tons of lobster. Sheila Ramsey, a paratrooper’s mother, says, “It would be nice if we could send a million turkeys–all cooked and ready to chow down on Thanksgiving.”
If these demonstrations at times seem a bit giddy, they address a sober reality. When Jamie Reed-Sutton, 22, born one month after her father was killed in Vietnam, learned that her boyfriend, an ensign on the USS Ogden, was on his way to the gulf, she burst from her bedroom and sobbed to her mother, “It’s starting to happen all over. Don’t let it turn out like Dad.” For the soldier in country in the Middle East, after the fear of dying and the pang of longing for family, friends and lovers, the worst goad is the thought of being sold out like the Viet vets. More than 100 tons of mail each week says this time it’s different. At one mail call out in the Sandpile, Air Force Master Sgt. John Massengill studied the daily haul and said, “In Vietnam, you’d get one parcel a year with a note saying ‘America loves you’–signed by someone in the Salvation Army. Now all of my guys have been flooded with letters and CARE packages. I’ve never seen so much stuff.”
The grunts now on alert in the gulf are members of a volunteer army, not draftees like those who served at the peak of the Vietnam War. When orders were cut for the gulf, the first impulse of most of them was gung ho. “Remember this,” Preston Coffer, 24, a Marine corporal, wrote to friends in Texas. “We are talking about Marines, not the Boy Scouts. We all joined the service knowing full well what might be expected of us.” And he signed off"Semper Fi." Others felt similar pangs. Adrian Ingraham, 20, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, was the youngest of three Ingraham sons ordered to the Middle East. “Momma Daddy, we all have jobs to do,” he wrote home. He told them not to ask the Army to reassign him if Oswald, 34, or Irwin, 22, is killed. Then he headed out. “If something should happen to me,” he wrote, “my will is in my wall locker at Fort Bragg. Room 211. I didn’t have time to send it home.”
Few expected to face such a dangerous mission quite so abruptly. For Marine Cpl. Craig Armstrong, 22, the reality sank in when he had to follow regulations and send his wedding ring to his next of kin. “It felt as if my ring finger was naked,” he wrote his wife, Christie. “Every time I try to feel it or look down and it’s not there, I just think about you.” Explaining to the children why you had to say goodbye was the hardest. One Army colonel wrote to his young son, “Do you remember how fast you ran down the beach to get me when your cousin was hurt so badly? That showed how strong and brave you are in helping other people. Someday it may be your time to give back to life what God gave you. When that time comes, I know you will. Be good. Love, Daddy.”
Some troops flew, sitting on equipment crammed into transports, others went by sea, packed like sardines. No matter how they got there, they knew the Sandpile was waiting for them. Cpl. Edward Gregoire, 19, a Marine who came from Hawaii, wrote to his parents, saying, “Hey, the Persian Gulf sounds nasty, but it’s beautiful, too. Crystal clear water. Dolphins following the boat.” Returning from a flight, Gary Porterfield, 28, an Air Force pilot, wrote: “It’s nothing but sand. One big beach. I can’t believe people actually live here.” The place had a way of bringing out the Omar Khayyam in the most prosaic grunt. “You should see the night,” Army Sp/4 Larry Campbell wrote his wife, Barbara. “The sky comes alive with a billion stars and a moon that seems as bright as a spotlight. It’s like you can see the whole galaxy.”
In sunlight, the view was harsher. During the dog hours of 11 to 4, the temperature rose to 130 degrees, then plummeted. After sweating all day, you shivered after dark when you stepped out of the cold-water showers, from buildings that looked like outhouses. Breakfast was powdered eggs and underdone bacon. Lunch was MREs, the postmodern C rations the supply sergeant called “meals-ready-to- eat.” Then could count on mystery meat for dinner. The desalinated drinking water came from the gulf and tasted like something out of a neglected swimming pool in southern California. The snakes were bad, so were the bugs: beetles armored like little tanks and scorpions of all sizes. “The big f–ers are black emperors, " Campbell wrote to his son T.J. They were the size of plump mice–and twice as mean as rattlesnakes.
Mail was slow in arriving at first, then it started coming by the plane and truckload, bringing its small consolations: cookies, candy and Sweetarts, protectively wrapped in trail mix and popcorn; Kool-Aid and Gatorade powder; dipping snuff and suntan oil laced with aloe; toothpaste, soap and jock-itch powder. The windfall put the troops in better humor. After one company started sending free sunglasses, Sergeant Massengill wrote the Buck Knives company of El Cajon, Calif., saying that if it would send a free sample of its Bowie M9 field knife ($170) he would “volunteer to test it by crawling over the border and performing open heart surgery on Saddam Hussein–without an anesthetic.” He’s still waiting. “What an advertisement,” he says with a laugh. “The blade that ended a war.”
Getting to know the Saudis wasn’t as hard as doping out the enemy, but it presented a culture shock. King Fahd made a good impression when he offered to pay $1,000 to the troops, who receive $114 a month in
imminent-danger pay, $8 a month in foreign-duty pay; but the commander in chief turned him down. “Thanks Bush,” one grunt wrote in a note stateside. “He says ‘We’re not mercenaries.’ True! But he doesn’t have all the bills we have.”
Second Lt. Robert Myers, 23, a paratrooper, wrote his father that Arabs were zipping around in Chevrolet Caprice Classics with the dealer’s stickers still on. The Saudis played golf on sand courses, carrying a small piece of green carpet for teeing off. Their temples had loudspeakers calling them to prayer five times a day. Don Hartley, 26, a Marine lance corporal, wrote a pen pal, saying, “They have dead animals everywhere and probably people, too, because I haven’t seen a graveyard yet–I think it has something to do with their religion. A car got hit by one of our vehicles and the cops said it was tfate from Allah.’ In California a million dollar lawsuit would have been filed. Nothing here.”
The banter made everyone feel better in the early phases of the military buildup; but as the psy-war in the gulf threatened to become the real thing, the mood changed. David Martin, 19, of the 101st Airborne, wrote his sister Kelley that he and his buddy Ray were the two forward-most Americans at the front: nothing but Saudis ahead of them. Mail arrived every three days, by truck and by chopper. As time passed, David told Kelley, he began to feel “a sense of momentum toward a clash . . . lots of movement, lots of equipment.” He was an easy-going guy–he wrote his letters on Garfield the Cat stationery imprinted “If life is a bridge to be crossed, let’s dawdle all we can”-but he confessed to his sister that he got “more and more nervous every day. "
Others felt the same way. Herbert Plummer, 21, a para-trooper, wrote his mother to say that some nights he couldn’t sleep “because of my fear of this place.” He didn’t know why,, but “being in this country makes me so jumpy I can almost feel as if someone was watching me. No lie!” At other outposts, dead camels beyond the defense perimeters made the desert stink. A fire incinerated one unit’s mail-room. Nerves tautened. Even friends grew edgy. Then, each evening just after dark, Baghdad Betty, Saddam Hussein’s answer to Tokyo Rose, got on the radio to work on them. “She tells us we’re going to die and Iraqi worms are going to eat us,” Army Sgt. Eric Petersen reported to his wife, Mary-ann. “Pretty awful, huh?”
The phony war before a real one can get dangerous soon enough. Glen Bullock, 20, a Marine corporal, wrote his mother, apologizing for not finishing one of her letters because “itjust so happened that one ofthe Marines accidentally fired off two rounds out of the Mk 19 [a grenade launcher] and almost hit the Marines guarding the road block.” An angry CO sent Bullock and some buddies to replace the shaken jarheads. Other near misses came right out of “Catch-22.” Cpl. Jason Day, 20, wrote his family that a jittery captain on a caffeine binge from too many Pepsis had mistaken a shooting star for an incoming Scud missile hitting the atmosphere and sounded a nuclear-missile alert. “Holy Idiotic Stupid Batman!” Day exploded. “He got his ass reamed for that one.”
Coming off a routine watch one day, Michael N. (Chip) Manns Jr., 23, a machinist’s mate third class aboard the USS Iwo Jima, wrote his father about the frustrations aboard a ship jammed with sailors: “men in my workspace, men in the chowline, men in the showers, men all around when I’m sleeping, men, men, men.” He told his mother he stood eight hours of watch a day, worked eight, then slept four to six hours each night in the jammed quarters. “Everything is pretty routine,” he wrote. “Actually, being over here doesn’t bother me that much. It’s just the waiting. If we are going to war. I wish we would get the show on the road.” Two weeks later a steam pipe on the Iwo Jima ruptured. The blast killed Chip Manns.
Somewhere south of Kuwait, the Third Battalion of the 11th Marines is dug into desert trenches, its 165-mm howitzers ready to deliver supporting fire for a tank assault or amphibious invasion. At sunup, Marines crowd around the tailgate of a truck for mail call. In the heat and dust of the outpost, letters become tattered and stained. Capt. Jerry Sneed carries in his pocket a creased sheet from his son. It has a drawing of the Marine Corps War Memorial–the flag raising on Iwo Jima–and the words “To Dad. You make me proud Dad. Jeremy.” Offto the side, Pfc. John Duggan hopes for word from his fiancee Kathryn Redman. They were engaged three days before he was sent to Saudi Arabia. “I’m in love, I can’t think about anything else,” he says. “I feel totally empty. I live in a hole in the ground and the only thing that helps me pass the time is her letters,” he says. He writes her constantly. One time he pulled some hair oflf his chest and sent it to her. She sent him back a strand of her hair. Then he sent her those desert weeds and an impassioned audiotape. “It was like he was right here,” she says. “At the end of the tape I was hugging the speaker next to me. "
The mail coming from home to the troops is less vivid, but in some ways far more important. The top brass in the gulf understands that a soldier’s best friend, next to his rifle, is the postman. “Mail is critically important,” says Lt. Gen. Walt Boomer who learned its potency as a morale builder in Vietnam. If anything, Saudi Arabia is even more remote culturally than Southeast Asia, where it was possible to strike up friendships with locals and easier to go on leave. Troops are warned not to fraternize with the Saudis. In the desert, on the flight lines, on the ships, in the military hospitals, there are no movies, nobars, nogirls. Mail is the link between the man isolated in the country and the real world outside. “What I am delivering here is more important than gold–literally,” says Air Force Maj. Wally Vaughn, one of the 380 men and women now handling mail in Saudi Arabia.
About 85 percent of Major Vaughn’s letters and packages are addressed to individuals. He gives those marked “To any service personnel” to people who get nothing from home. It is not uncommon to find a battle-hardened Viet vet like Massengill carrying on earnest correspondence with 7- and 8-year-old kids and dusty grunts laughing over lines from tiny pen pals like “If you guys can’t end it, then my Dad might have to come.” Kids not much younger than Pfc. Hosi Johnson, 19, of the 101st Airborne, who was in high school in Chicago only a year ago, write to ask if he feels scared. He tells them, “Yes, it’s always at the back of my mind. I told one kid that I joined the Army to pay my way through school and I said I might not make it through–but I tell them I live in hope.”
Mail alone cannot neutralize the Vietnam syndrome, but it helps. Marine Staff Sgt. William Fitzgerald, 30, was too young for Vietnam. When he joined the corps 11 years ago, he heard Viet vets telling horror stories all the time. “They’d get letters from home, sure,” he says. “But the media, the war protesters, even some of the politicians were telling them they were doing the wrong thing, they were murderers, they were on their own.” Now he gets letters from a nun in Philadelphia who had eight brothers in World War II. “She told me she was proud of what we were doing, and cared for us and–with a name like Fitzgerald to say a rosary if I was Catholic.” He heard his son say “Papa” for the first time when his wife, Carole, sent him an audiotape. Determined that the American soldier won’t be forgotten this time, she has distributed 2.000 aluminum bracelets marked “1990–‘Til our Fighting Forces Return.” She has also written to President Bush, saying, “We want people to remember when they start complaining about the price of gas to think of the people who are putting their lives on the line.”
That includes women, who share the alternating currents of boredom and pain that now course through daily life in the gulf. At the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Hospital Five in Jubail, where tents with 500 beds, intensive care and X-ray units are pitched and ready for casualties, Lt. Carla Tolbert says, “Life gets strange here–something like a prison, something like a girl’s school.” Husbands write that the house is too big; they feel lonely. The pressure builds. Some mail is therapeutic. One day a package with bubble soap arrived. “All 10 of us in the tent started blowing bubbles like little kids, and the whole patio was covered in froth,” Tolbert remembers. Other mail calls are tougher. Capt. April Gauthier, a nurse practitioner in a MASH unit, received a letter from her husband, Richard, saying he felt helpless, frustrated and guilty for bringing up his worries. She soothed him. Then she asked about reports that her daughter Carmen was getting “her mommy hugs” from a friend’s wife: “That went through me like a spear!”
The mail is a bridge, however rickety, between duty and love. Out on the line, Marine Lance Cpl. Frank Gudmundson, 22, a fire team leader who will see sharp fighting if war breaks out, logs his letters and thoughts in a journal. He has entitled his little notebook “Total (1990) Recall.” “My mind and my heart belong at home with my wife, but my ass belongs to the Marine Corps,” he writes in one passage. The next sentence is “I will stand by patiently for mail call.” When his mother sent a photo of him and his brothers as little kids, he wrote in his diary, “It seems like yesterday we were out playing army with our plastic machine guns, building bunkers out of hay bales and counting to fifty when we had gotten shot. Now it’s the real thing today. And I don’t think counting to fifty will bring us back alive.”
Gudmundson’s wife, Danelle, sent him a letter telling him she missed him at her Lamaze natural-childbirth classes, where she was the only woman without a husband. She is due to have the baby any day. He has been writing a long poem for Danelle and his unborn child: “Here it is, another starry night, I reach for her, but she is far out of sight … I try to take this war day by day, but the loneliness and heartache will never go away.” He hasn’t mailed the poem. He wants to deliver it in person.
Something about these letters in the sand subverts the conventional wisdom about what is at risk in the gulf Presidents and kings, diplomats and generals speak the language of geopolitics and global economics. To them, the flow of oil is more important than the flow of mail. After listening to so much martial rhetoric from the top, it is a relief to read things like, “Hello, Devil Dog Family,” the salutation of a dusty Marine. You worry about what could happen to these pen pals if war does come, and very little that the top dogs have to say helps much. “I wish I could help,” writes Salome Welliver, a fourth grader from Kansas City. “But I’m just a nine-year-old. I pray for you and peace. If a war starts you can win. God bless you.” Every one of you.
Tyrone M. Brooks, 19, of Detroit, Mich., died Oct. 30 in a boiler accident aboard the USS Iwo Jima. From a letter to his fiancee, Juanita Smith:
I am just fine. I miss you and the baby a lot. I wish I could be there to hold both you and her or him. Did l tell you we haue gone halfway around the world? I talked to my division officer the other day, and he said if we are back before you have the baby he will make sure that I am home for the birth of our child. You know how he knows I am having a child is that he saw you when you came aboard the ship Have you talked to my mother since the last time you wrote? If not, you better call her so she can know how her daughter-in-law and grandbaby are doing. lf lam not home when you go into labor, call so my brother can come to the hospital Have you picked out a baby bed yet? Are you going to have a baby shower so all your friends can buy my baby all those nice gifts? If you need the money to have one, just tell me how much and when to send it Well, I have to go now but remember! love you and the baby. Write me back as soon as you get this letter. Let’s see if we can keep a steady flow of mail to each other. That’s all. P.S. I will buy the baby what you pick out when I get home.
Lt. Col. David Wood of the 101st Airborne got no mail–except two bills-until teacher Charlotte Waller had her fifth-grade class write to him. From his reply:
I’ve been in Saudi Arabia almost 40 days. We got here by flying in big AirForce planes or on Navy boats. My unit is an infantry organization. We move around the battlefield in Army Blackhawk helicopters. We do most of our flying at night when it’s very dark.
The desert is huge. The country is about one half the size of America and it’s all desert. In every direction, there’s only sand and hills. We have to be very careful because if we get lost it can be very dangerous. There are all kinds of desert creatures–pit and horned vipers (snakes), cobras, camel spiders, scorpions (black, greene and red). Some of our soldiers catch the spiders and scorpions and keep them for pets. They name them–“Spike the Scorpion” or “Clyde the Camel Spider.”
Right now we are living near an oasis. There is a small deserted village here and it’s over 300 years old. Camels, wild and goats come to drink water from the well and eat the dates that fad from the trees.
Even though our soldiers and pilots, men and women, train very hard to go to war, all of us here DON’T WANT that to happen. War is not what you see at the movies; it’s ugly and painful. We’re here to protect other people [and] because this part of the world is very imporgant to our economy and businesses. Hopefully, our actions will make a difference.
Donnita Cole of Odessa, Texas, is twice troubled: her husband, John Henry, is a hostage in Iraq; her son John Edward is on duhy in the gulf. From her to both men:
If you possibly can [she writes hostage John Henry Cole], listen to VoA every moming between 7 a. m. and 10 a. m. your time. Once a week for 30 seconds you will hear me. Nothing special, just o brief message to you, about the thing I keep telling you in my letters to you. Just how much I do love you. Have no idea how long the program will lost, but I will be in there recording just as long as they are broadcasting But cannot alert you to what day, will never know that in advance. Later, offer the first flush of collers are through, I am going to try to get in more than one week So if you possibly can, listen for this old busky West Texas twang over the airways. I don’t mind in the least bit telling you with the whole world listening that I love you . . .
I only hope thot some of these letters ore moking their way to you I won’t know if you ore or if you ore not receiving them until I get a letter from you or you get home and tell me. Of course l definitely would prefer you sitting in your choir and reading the [copies] I hove kept. We will make the best of a bad situation and do the best we can. My best is to continue writing you every week just as if I knew that you ore really receiving the letters . . .
Darling son [she cobles John Edward Cole], yesterday, Sunday, Oct. 28, received some news of your dad. French hostage returnee told American Embassy of ficial [in BagAdad] thot John works twenty kilometers daily. Is in good health. Is in good spirits. Is suffering from insect bites. Will let you know more as I receive more. I love you.
“What I am delivering here is more important than gold–literally.”
To Write or Send Parcels to Army or Air Force Personnel: ..CN.-Any Soldier/Airman Operation Desert Shield APO New York, NY 09848
To Write or Send Parcels to Any Sailor or Marine: ..CN.-Any Sailor/Marine Operation Desert Shield FPO New York, NY 09866
