That Wasn’t the Plan. Reg Sherren
he pointed to a row of bunks and said I was up on top. I rolled into the bunk, lying on my back, with a few centimetres between the tip of my nose and a big steam pipe. A curtain hung on my right. A voice on the other side said, “How’s it going?” After I said hello. the voice continued. “Hey man, I’m from the operations room. I don’t want to scare you or nothin’, but there are twice as many Iraqi planes in the air today as yesterday, and we don’t know where they’re coming from.”
For the first time on this surreal trip, I thought, “Okay, now you’ve really got yourself in the middle of something—something serious.” It was a scary thought, one the crew was no doubt having every day.
By morning the seas had calmed down. We spoke with many members of the crew, and not only people from Newfoundland. I learned that the province with the second-highest number of people in the Navy was Saskatchewan, the one province or territory farthest from the ocean! It seemed those wide-open fields were not unlike looking out over the water. But most of the young people here, and many were very young, called Newfoundland home.
I remember interviewing one nineteen-year-old from Carbonear, Newfoundland, out on the deck. He said, “Mom always told me that as soon as I signed up, something was going to happen, and sure enough, it did.” But mostly they seemed resigned to their situation, and happy to be part of it all. They did not seem to know a lot, or care, about what could be coming. I often heard, “I’m here on a need-to-know basis. What I don’t need to know, I don’t care about.”
What they did care about was enforcing the blockade. Every day they contacted ships, everything from large tankers to small Arab fishing vessels called dhows moving through the zone. If they didn’t like the radio response or if something seemed suspicious, an armed boarding team was dispatched.
And although it would still be close to two months before the coalition was ready to start pushing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the possibility of attack by Saddam Hussein’s forces was very real. So they practised, defending against a mock attack. During one drill, the big ship was slicing through the water at better than twenty-five knots while crews scrambled to get to stations. It was very realistic and more than a little unnerving.
But on October 31, there was time for a little fun. On our way back to the Protecteur from the Athabaskan, a giant pumpkin shipped from Canada was loaded into the cargo bay of the Sea King, with dozens of glow sticks packed inside. It was massive and must have weighed at least a hundred kilos. With the cargo bay open and the giant pumpkin smiling out the door, we lifted off, just after dark. The idea was to give the crew of HMCS Terra Nova a little visual treat. As we circled the warship, that huge toothy grin was glowing for those on deck to see, as they waved back to us from the high seas of the Persian Gulf.
Over the next week or so we taped Christmas greetings to be used during the holidays and for families back home, greetings from cooks and officers alike, all serving their country. We shot a little music video for a song written by one Newfoundland crew member who sang about being so far away from home. I even met one fellow from my hometown—Rob Lawrence from Wabush, Labrador. Unbelievable.
The day before we left, a Canadian officer invited me for a drink in the hotel lounge. I sat next to a Saudi businessman who had driven over the causeway because he had an appetite for gin, strictly forbidden back in the kingdom. He seemed very relaxed about the whole Iraqi situation, even smug. He said the Americans would take care of it because they wanted Saudi oil. He drank three triple gins while I sat beside him.
Across the room a British soldier was making a lot of noise, even banging his head into the wall. Quite drunk, he told me he was a paratrooper. He kept saying over and over, “Mate, do you know what my life expectancy is when I hit the ground? About six bloody hours!” He wasn’t much older than me. The whole experience left me sad and a little depressed.
Our time was up. Soon enough the coalition would be lighting up Baghdad “like a Christmas tree.” I thought about that British soldier on my trip all the way home, which included an overnight stay in London.
Cue the “It’s a Small World (After All)” theme again. I had just walked into a pub in Piccadilly Circus to get some supper and was waiting for a pint at the bar when I heard someone shout, “Hey Reg!” Standing at the bar just down from me was a fellow I knew from Brigus, Newfoundland, where Pam and I had married. Unbelievable.
We knew we had great material, and the network couldn’t get enough of it. We rolled it out in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and I like to think it not only gave Newfoundlanders and Canadians a sense of what our young men and women were doing in the Persian Gulf, but helped bring them a little closer to home for the holidays.
By January 16, 1991, the American-led coalition began pounding Baghdad, live on television around the world. CNN had somehow managed to get a cable link hard-wired into the Iraqi capital. Once the ground campaign began, it did not take long—about a hundred hours in the desert—to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, but the cost was enormous. Two years after the war a study put the cost at over US$670 billion, with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states picking up some of the tab, but the Americans shouldering most of it. The coalition lost over 290 soldiers, the British 47. I have often wondered if that British paratrooper in Bahrain was one of them. Thirteen journalists also lost their lives covering Operation Desert Storm; two more were wounded and two are still listed as missing.
And here’s the thing. Remember the young girl appearing before the US congressional committee, with tears in her eyes, to talk about seeing babies ripped from incubators by Iraqi troops? To conceal her identity, Nayirah was the only name they gave her. What they didn’t say was that she was a member of Kuwaiti royalty. Her last name was al-Sabah. Her father, Saud al-Sabah, was the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington. He sat unidentified in the room with her that morning as she wept for the cameras.
In 1992, after the war was over, Amnesty International, along with other organizations, conducted a thorough investigation. They interviewed doctors and nurses on the ground in Kuwaiti hospitals across the country. They could not document a single case of babies being ripped from incubators. It did not happen. The girl’s entire testimony—and, depending on how you chose to look at it, the war that ensued—may have been orchestrated by an American public relations firm hired by the Kuwaiti government.
The truth may set you free, but in this case, a massive lie led to war. Talk about Wag the Dog. In the movie, released in 1997, a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer fake a war. In this case the war was real—it was just the motivation to get the American people on side that was faked.
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