and seventy helicopters: Black Hawks, Apaches, and Kiowasâwhich make the 101st an Air Assault (AASLT) division.
The ships were late leaving the United States, and the 101st was under intense pressure. As it turned out, all of the needed gear, including humvees and artillery and ammunition, didnât reach the port of Kuwait until just a couple of days before âG-Day,â the beginning of the ground war. And as we moved out, the Strike Brigade was still receiving its battle gear up to the very last minute, and in the nick of time.
The Desert
The 2nd Brigade was assigned to a temporary staging area in the Kuwaiti desert, appropriately named Camp New York. COL Anderson, a native New Yorker, had me phone the governorâs office in New York and ask for a city flag to be mailed out to our Kuwaiti bureau ASAP.
NBC delivered the flag to Camp New York. COL Anderson carried the flag into battle in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The camp was a sprawling series of tents sheltering up to sixteen soldiers. I moved into one tent, with my team of three: producer, cameraman, and engineer Sam Sambeterro.
Samâs âbaby,â as we called it, was a six-foot portable satellite dish that would allow us to feed our video material and go live whenever NBC wanted us to. It also had six New York telephone lines.
Word quickly spread across Camp New York that we would allow free use of the phones, and soldiers who had not seen or talked to their families since leaving the United States lined up to phone home.
Right next to the phones, I had a picnic table that I used to write my stories for NBC. I will never forget those nights under a star-lit sky, listening to young men talk to wives and children and mothers and fathers. There was no way not to listen. It left me with a lump in my throat hearing one young man whose wife was just days away from giving birth to their first child, trying to calm her fears, and another whose father was sick in the hospital.
It still strikes me how wide-eyed and baby-faced the soldiers from the Screaming Eagles appeared while they phoned home.
All of them came to thank me after those calls. Many would tell me they didnât look forward to war, just the hope it would be a short conflict and they would soon be heading back to the United States.
Missiles
Dressing for war was a complicated balance between not taking enough and getting worn out from carrying too much. One little waist bag I tried never to leave behind was my gas mask. Inside it were self-injecting needles with antidotes to nerve agent (atropine) and antidotes to biological weapons.
The Velcro cover of that bag was worn out within a matter of several frightening days in Kuwait.
The first siren at Camp New York sounded at 1245 hours in the afternoon. We had already practiced the drill of getting into above-ground concrete bunkers, but nothing prepares you for the real thing. You have just nine seconds to get a gas mask out of your bag and put it on, while on the run for that bunker.
As an Iraqi missile screamed over the desert, our hearts raced, wondering if weâd be hit with deadly chemicals, or as one soldier put itââhuman insecticide.â
There was silence in the bunker as soldiers waited and wondered and feared. I donât know what they thought as I tried frantically to call NBC News, and started reporting live as we were under attack.
Over the course of the same day, there were four more Iraqi missile attacks. In one hour, three sirens.
I quickly decided that I would try to stay out of the bunker and report live, which I did, for NBC. It was a personal choice, my reasoning being that if the missile hit our bunker, which had no doors and was open to the outside, we wouldnât survive anyway. My producer hid in the bunker, and only with a bit of coaxing did I manage to get cameraman Bill Angelucci to come out.
Over the next few days, the rush of
The ships were late leaving the United States, and the 101st was under intense pressure. As it turned out, all of the needed gear, including humvees and artillery and ammunition, didnât reach the port of Kuwait until just a couple of days before âG-Day,â the beginning of the ground war. And as we moved out, the Strike Brigade was still receiving its battle gear up to the very last minute, and in the nick of time.
The Desert
The 2nd Brigade was assigned to a temporary staging area in the Kuwaiti desert, appropriately named Camp New York. COL Anderson, a native New Yorker, had me phone the governorâs office in New York and ask for a city flag to be mailed out to our Kuwaiti bureau ASAP.
NBC delivered the flag to Camp New York. COL Anderson carried the flag into battle in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The camp was a sprawling series of tents sheltering up to sixteen soldiers. I moved into one tent, with my team of three: producer, cameraman, and engineer Sam Sambeterro.
Samâs âbaby,â as we called it, was a six-foot portable satellite dish that would allow us to feed our video material and go live whenever NBC wanted us to. It also had six New York telephone lines.
Word quickly spread across Camp New York that we would allow free use of the phones, and soldiers who had not seen or talked to their families since leaving the United States lined up to phone home.
Right next to the phones, I had a picnic table that I used to write my stories for NBC. I will never forget those nights under a star-lit sky, listening to young men talk to wives and children and mothers and fathers. There was no way not to listen. It left me with a lump in my throat hearing one young man whose wife was just days away from giving birth to their first child, trying to calm her fears, and another whose father was sick in the hospital.
It still strikes me how wide-eyed and baby-faced the soldiers from the Screaming Eagles appeared while they phoned home.
All of them came to thank me after those calls. Many would tell me they didnât look forward to war, just the hope it would be a short conflict and they would soon be heading back to the United States.
Missiles
Dressing for war was a complicated balance between not taking enough and getting worn out from carrying too much. One little waist bag I tried never to leave behind was my gas mask. Inside it were self-injecting needles with antidotes to nerve agent (atropine) and antidotes to biological weapons.
The Velcro cover of that bag was worn out within a matter of several frightening days in Kuwait.
The first siren at Camp New York sounded at 1245 hours in the afternoon. We had already practiced the drill of getting into above-ground concrete bunkers, but nothing prepares you for the real thing. You have just nine seconds to get a gas mask out of your bag and put it on, while on the run for that bunker.
As an Iraqi missile screamed over the desert, our hearts raced, wondering if weâd be hit with deadly chemicals, or as one soldier put itââhuman insecticide.â
There was silence in the bunker as soldiers waited and wondered and feared. I donât know what they thought as I tried frantically to call NBC News, and started reporting live as we were under attack.
Over the course of the same day, there were four more Iraqi missile attacks. In one hour, three sirens.
I quickly decided that I would try to stay out of the bunker and report live, which I did, for NBC. It was a personal choice, my reasoning being that if the missile hit our bunker, which had no doors and was open to the outside, we wouldnât survive anyway. My producer hid in the bunker, and only with a bit of coaxing did I manage to get cameraman Bill Angelucci to come out.
Over the next few days, the rush of
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