'Are you all right?'
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait nearly 17 years ago sparked a family's concern and a writer's emotions
Article and photos
by Ted Simmons
In August 1990, I was awakened in the middle of the night with a phone call. My son-in-law called from Tallahassee to inquire if I was all right.
"Why wouldn't I? I'm sound asleep."
He went on to tell me Kuwait was being invaded. "It's all over CNN."
I told him it was just Iraqi posturing over some disputed oilfield straddling the border between the two countries. I hung up the phone and went back to sleep.
Up to this point, my wife Diane and I had lived a rather uneventful life in the tiny desert country. I worked for an American oil company that served as contractor for the Saudi Arabian government in an area called the Neutral Zone that was shared by Kuwait and the Saudis.
We lived in a compound, Mina Saud, on a small promontory jutting into the Persian Gulf. We were about an hour's drive south of Kuwait City, and far from groceries or toothpaste. While I could escape the tedium of camp life by taking my company car to the oilfields or to meetings with Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), Diane was entirely dependent on me to drive her anywhere.
For a self-reliant American woman, this confinement was oppressive. We entertained ourselves by giving and attending dinner parties with the same small group of colleagues.
We did have a TV that received broadcasts from Arabic-language stations, but our sanity was maintained through a videotape player to give us our fix on American films. All the tapes were bootlegged. We had to pretend otherwise or watch a blank screen.
When I received my nighttime call from Tallahassee, Diane was away visiting family, so she missed what happened next. About dawn, I got a phone call from my boss, who asked all senior staff to hotfoot it down to the office.
He confirmed Kuwait was being invaded. When I reiterated the relatively benign scenario I'd given my son-in-law, my boss filled me in.
"There are Iraqi vehicles in the city, and Iraqi helicopters overhead. Soldiers are going door to door, kicking some of them in and going into the buildings."
Mid-afternoon, one of our Saudi employees came in to report Iraqi soldiers at the gate of our compound. They had blitzed through the entire country in half a day!
Though they'd impounded everything in Kuwait, the Iraqis remained outside the gates of our camp for the strangest reason: Although we were physically on the Kuwaiti side of the border bisecting the Neutral Zone, our company was Saudi Arabian, and flew the Saudi flag. You can imagine the confusion of the Iraqi troops coming across a Saudi flag flying a full ten miles from where they were expecting the border.
The following day, Saudi wives and children, and all Americans, evacuated Kuwait. This was against the advice of our embassy that didn't want us to signal the Kuwaitis that Americans were going to "cut and run." Of course, the Kuwaiti Emir had, himself, wisely fled the county during those first overnight hours.
Our decision to leave turned out to be prescient, as a few days later the United States government announced it would send troops to Saudi Arabia to stop the Iraqi advance.
I left Kuwait hunkered down in the back of a bus filled with women and crying children. The temperature was over 110 degrees and the Iraqi troops we encountered at numerous roadblocks were suffering. They seemed like kids, conscripted right off the farm, and they had blitzed well in advance of their supplies.
We eased our way out of the country by distributing cases of bottled water. Americans who didn't get out when they could had to go into hiding. There were reports of people secreting themselves in air conditioning ducts.
Those who didn't hide successfully were rounded up and sent to camps in Iraq for use as human shields at strategic military sites. The American embassy people who had advised us not to leave were themselves trapped in what became a fortress under siege.
Five months later, coalition forces led by the U.S. drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait with relative ease. We elected not to pursue them into Iraq proper and depose the Saddam Hussein government as we didn't want to be seen as foreign occupiers of a hostile populace. Today, the irony is inescapable.
After the liberation, I returned briefly to Kuwait, to a scene right out of Dante's Inferno. In one last act of defiance, the Iraqis set fire to many of Kuwait's oil wells, resulting in towering orange flames beneath oil-smoke-filled skies that made noon seem like midnight.
The land was littered with both anti-tank and anti-personnel land mines. Although we employed scores of anti-explosive personnel to locate and destroy them, some were missed and Kuwaiti children were still being blown up years later.
There was much more evidence of war. My own house had been totally gutted. Twisted Iraqi tanks lay half-buried. Unexploded American ordinance (cluster bombs) could be seen nose down in the sand. My most disturbing sight came during a visit to a road north of the city, which came to be dubbed the "highway of death." An entire convoy of Iraqi troops, attempting to flee Kuwait, were totally annihilated by American air strikes.
To this day I fail to understand either the strategic or moral purpose in this act. As I poked gingerly about the carnage, I came across a small fire-blackened doll some Iraqi soldier had likely taken from a Kuwaiti shop to carry back to his little girl.
I keep that doll on a shelf in my bedroom. Whenever I consider the true cost of war, I look at that doll and think of the child who never had a chance to see it, or the father who was bringing it home.
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