Regional Outlook : Supplying America's Desert Warriors : GIs at the front hope that the mirage in the distance is an advancing beer truck from home.

By KIM MURPHY

Aug. 28, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia —

Cpl. Christopher C. and Pfc. Norman M. sit companionably on the roof of an all-terrain vehicle they’ve christened Sarah Jane, tending to a TOW anti-tank missile launcher between them and waiting for the ration box in front of the truck to turn into a swimming pool. You know. The way it does in the beer commercial. The one where the leggy woman walks out holding two frosty beer bottles, and somebody says, “Where did that come from?”

In fact, they’d be happy if the pizza would just get there. “We ordered Domino’s three weeks ago,” Norman deadpanned. “It ain’t got here yet.”

But as the mercury crawls past 113 degrees, the only hint of water is a distant mirage hovering out across the miles of scrub and hot sand, out past a line of high-voltage electrical lines and a gray ribbon of road they’ve stared at so long it’s starting to dance on the desert floor. That’s the road the Iraqi tanks would come speeding down from the north. That’s the road where the missile goes.

They play poker for swallows of water out of their canteens to pass the hours until lunch--a lukewarm, vacuum-packed, mass-produced, field-issue tray of beef stew and assorted bland accompaniments known as an MRE--”meal, ready-to-eat.” They’re carefully calculated at 3,600 calories per serving. The water in the canteens is the temperature of hot tea.

“I’m fixin’ on goin’ for a swim in that manage,” says Norman.

“Mirage,” grunts Christopher.

“Whatever.”

In the Saudi Arabian desert, which has become an inhospitable home away from home for the largest American troop deployment since the Vietnam War, comfort is where you find it. A patch of shade near the radiator grill of a truck. A stolen splash of water rubbed furtively across the face. A foxhole in the sand with a spread-out bedroll.

Supporting the troops in the field has become a round-the-clock proposition for several central logistics centers, responsible for dispensing the more than 1 billion pounds of ammunition, weapons, food, uniforms and other supplies being shipped and airlifted into Saudi Arabia for a troop force that soon could reach 100,000.

U.S. military logistics experts on the ground in Saudi Arabia only last weekend went on a new work schedule that is merely punishing instead of debilitating. They now work 20 hours and get four hours off; before it was 36 hours on and four off.

Their goal is to build a 30 day supply of food, ammunition, and any other materiel the troops in the field will need, according to Maj. Gen. William G. Pagonis, who is overseeing the supply operation as commanding general of the army’s central support command.

Camped in tent cities, prefabricated housing and occasional empty buildings across the desert, simple things--things like breakfast and showers, laundry and toilet paper--have become major undertakings for the first wave of American soldiers setting down on Saudi soil.

The initial field kitchen designed to feed 250 soldiers from the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing was actually serving more than 1,000 by the time the second and finally a third opened up. Army personnel on the Air Force base have been shepherded into the enlisted men’s club, quickly dubbed “Mission Inn.” A few divisions contracted with local Hardee’s fast-food branches to supply thousands of burgers and fries for daily lunch. For soldiers on exercises in the field, sometimes for three days at a stretch, it’s MRE.

Water has been an even more formidable obstacle. In the searing desert heat, each soldier must drink anywhere from 4 to 6 gallons a day depending on how long he’s out in the sun. Each also consumes up to 14 more gallons daily--shaving, brushing teeth, showering, cooking. In places where there’s potable water, canteens filled out of the faucet do the trick. Otherwise, it’s bottled mineral water hauled in by truck, or 5,000-gallon “water buffalo” storage tanks pulled on trailers out to the troops.

In the most remote locations, reverse-osmosis water purification units trucked in with the troops can take brackish well water, saltwater, stagnant water, even muddy water and make it drinkable--at a rate of up to 3,000 gallons an hour. Over lunch at a desert mess hall one day, a question about how the soldiers’ water tasted elicited a host of responses, of which only one was printable: “It tastes like pool water,” said a corporal from Virginia.

At many camps, troops are now limited to three-minute showers, three times a week, and no running water while shaving.

The 82nd Airborne Division, the first unit to hit the ground in Saudi Arabia, at first set up camp in tents and used Saudi military bathroom facilities, where the showers do double duty as toilets. Breakfast at first was fruit bread, water and perhaps an orange. Lunch and dinner were provided by Saudis under contract with the U.S. military, and cases of “Saddam’s Revenge” became almost as frequent as heat exhaustion complaints.

“You can get enough to eat. It’s just that some of the guys are scared to eat some of it,” a 21-year-old private said.

Since then, a large portion of the division has moved into prefab barracks, four bunk beds stacked nose to nose in a series of tiny ill-lit--but air-conditioned--rooms. The Hardee’s beef sandwiches have started arriving for lunch, and there’s meat and chicken with canned vegetables and pudding for dinner. Even better, the Red Cross came through last week with a box of luxuries like razors, shaving cream, lip balm, hard candy, chewing gum, soap and shower shoes.

All of which might make life pretty bearable if it weren’t for the fact that much of the 82nd right now is miles from nowhere, and figures to stay there for quite some time. With Saudi concerns about American soldiers mixing in their strict Islamic society, off-camp leaves are out of the question for now and on-camp there’s precious little to do. The boredom already has become excruciating.

Some play cards. A few soldiers last week managed to make a volleyball out of some tape and scrap material. Gradually, copies of USA Today and videos of CNN coverage of the Persian Gulf crisis have begun filtering in. But most of the day is spent attending training classes and--a few hours at a time, gradually increasing every day--moving around in the blistering desert heat outside the barracks in an attempt to adjust to the punishing climate.

“Gotta give them time to go back, write a letter and think,” said Col. Ron Rokosz, a brigade commander for the 82nd from Chicago. “But you’ve gotta balance that. You leave ‘em alone too long, they start feeling sorry for themselves. It’s a problem. If we give ‘em a day off, what would they do?”

Also, according to Pagonis, too much air conditioning can be bad. “You don’t want them to live in an air conditioned environment and then expect them to go out in the desert and fight or train or do anything. Once they arrive in country, and get used to the weather, the worst thing you can do is dump them in an air conditioned building and then expect them to go out and train or do an exercise.”

A young private in the mortar brigade, setting up a camouflage net over his weapon, talked about the food, and the diarrhea, and the heat, and shrugged. “We’re always told we’re just soldiers,” he said, “and we’re here to do what we’re told to do, no matter what it takes. So that’s what we’re gonna do. No matter how long it takes.”

The 82nd Airborne prides itself on being able to touch down, combat-ready, anywhere in the world in 18 hours, often by parachute. It was the 82nd that led the way into Panama and, a couple of generations before that, Normandy. It trains in Alaska, and the tropics, and in the California desert at Ft. Erwin and Twentynine Palms, to be ready for any kind of warfare in any kind of climate.

“It’s basically the same as the Mojave Desert,” a sergeant major said on the way out to exercises last week. “Ft. Erwin was maybe a little more hilly. But let’s face it, there are five different deserts, and they all look the same. This one’s got oil under it.”

One day last week, in the largest such exercise since American troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia, a unit from the 82nd launched out into the desert, simulating what might happen if a column of Iraqi tanks suddenly churned down from the Kuwaiti border.

One officer unofficially dubbed the operation “Sweat in the Sun”--an apt description considering that rivulets of perspiration were pouring down the sergeant major’s cheeks when the first of hundreds of all-terrain vehicles set off just before 7 a.m.

“Thank you, sarj major!” a flag boy screamed as the sergeant major’s vehicle roared away. “Air-BORNE, you’re welcome!” he replied, wiping the first dust off his goggles before turning good-naturedly to a reporter and pointing to a nest of rocks nearby. “They get here, we’ll kill ‘em. Kill ‘em easy,” he declared, and then launched into an oration on the virtues of the TOW missile. “When they first came out, Israel used ‘em in the war against Egypt,” he said.

How did they perform, the reporter wanted to know.

“They won.” The sergeant major wasn’t the only one feeling the heat by midmorning. Every soldier was wearing heavy camouflage fatigues, a helmet and heavy combat boots, and carrying on his body an ammunition pouch, two one-quart canteens of water, a bayonet and a chemical gas mask. Rucksacks weighing anywhere from 60 to 80 pounds had eight more quarts of water, a chemical weapons protective suit, socks, a T-shirt and bedroll.

Most of the day would be spent scouting out firing, communications and first-aid stations, setting up guns and mortar launchers, practicing putting the guns into firing positions, figuring out how to keep the dust out of the weapons and how to keep the radios running in temperatures that would exceed 120 degrees by midafternoon.

Moving out into the desert in a long column of trucks, the sergeant major stopped inside a ring of low dunes that would become the unit’s headquarters for the day’s operations. Radios would be set up there, but the sergeant major simply looked blankly at someone who wanted to know if the 82nd would have access to photographic or satellite communications facilities in the field.

“We ain’t got none of that ‘hooby gooby’ stuff,” he said finally. “We’re soldiers.”

For the current exercise, field commanders figured they’d have anywhere from 24 to 48 hours’ warning after enemy tanks cross the border before the armored units reached their positions, their numbers perhaps depleted by more than 30% by bombing runs from the Air Force’s A-10s, F-16s and F-15s and, even further down the line, the Army’s Apache attack helicopters.

To ambush the tanks along their routes and lure them into designated “kill zones” nearby, the division has an anti-tank arsenal of TOW missiles, Dragons and AT-4s, along with assorted mortars, artillery and rifles. Even so, it will not be the 82nd’s job to stop the invaders, but merely to delay them until they can be stopped at some undisclosed point farther south, probably because their supply lines from Kuwait will have been cut.

Precisely how the tanks will deploy for combat once they have been ambushed from the road cannot be absolutely anticipated, said Col. Rokosz, speaking in response to repeated, detailed questions. “I’ve been attacked by Iraqi tanks about as often as you have,” he said finally.

In the end, what the ground forces of the 82nd can do against a huge line of tanks may be limited, he said. “If they mass 40 divisions on the border, they could put the whole goddamn army here and we couldn’t stop ‘em. The air war’s gonna be real, real essential.”

The TOWs, with a range greater than the firing range of the tanks, can probably pick off a large proportion of the leaders as they lumber in, and artillery and mortar rounds are capable of knocking out fuel tanks and antennas on many of the rest. But it is the infantry that will be the first physical line of defense against any armament that proceeds into the engagement area--a line of young men, their bodies dug in the sand behind an occasional scrub brush, holding AT-4 anti-tank weapons and rifles to their shoulders, a human shield against the oncoming tanks until the artillery platoon can move into final defensive positions.

New infantrymen must combat the inevitable fear that arises from the idea of an enemy tank bearing down on them, and to do that, they are often placed in foxholes during training exercises with tanks repeatedly driving over them. They are reminded that they will be extremely difficult to see from the tank, where visibility is likely to be limited to a periscope.

“As I sit here, I look at what I have at my disposal,” said a young Rosebud, Tex., infantryman dug into the sand with two weapons, one of them capable of halting a tank if it scores a hit in the side or the rear. “It doesn’t look like much, but I have a lot of confidence in my equipment,” he said. “Most of their equipment is Russian-made, and they say the quality of the Russian-made equipment isn’t very high, and they can’t get more when they need it. On the other hand, we’re getting a lot of support.”

“It’s always like that. Some guys may get caught behind on their own,” said one of the platoon commanders. “They may have to take out some tanks on their own. But that’s the way war is.”

Up on a low ridge of sand that passes for a hill, Norman and Christopher are looking out over the searing fields of flat sand stretching out in every direction, interrupted only by an occasional scrub brush. They can see all the way out to the road, and past it. “This right here is TOW heaven,” says Christopher. “We could fire a ways on down there, and there’s no place for them to hide. We can spot them coming from miles away. You could practically hit anything out there you wanted to, and probably before they came within firing range of you.”

Like most of their colleagues in the field that day, the primary enemy for Christopher and Norman is not the Iraqi army but the baking heat and the boredom, sitting atop Sarah Jane for hours at a stretch, their elbows on the TOW launcher.

“It’s a pretty dismal place,” Christopher says, gazing out across the featureless sand. “It does get kind of depressing, so we have to try and pull together and cheer each other up. We signed the papers and took the oath that we’d defend it to the death, and so here we are.”

“I’ve been worse places, I guess,” Norman says, and then their supervisor, Staff Sgt. Kent, walks up.

“Where else can you stand out in the middle of nowhere? There’s absolutely nothing out here. Except camels,” he says.

The three of them are silent for a minute. “I think most of the guys would just like to go home,” Kent says finally. “But if the only way to go home is through Kuwait, then we’ll go through Kuwait.”

The Things They Carry To Keep Going Each combat U.S. infantryman on duty in Saudi Arabia carries more than $2,000 worth of clothing and equipment, according to the Department of the Army. Much of it is standard issue, although some, starting with a sand-colored camouflage uniform, is tailored to the desert environment.

Officials estimate that troops need 20 gallons of water per day per soldier, including six gallons for drinking in the 100-degree-plus temperature and fourteen gallons more for cooking, personal hygiene, and washing clothes. In all, the infantryman either wears or carries around 100 pounds of gear when fully outfitted. Including:

DESERT UNIFORM

Day shirt

Day and night trousers

Night parka with liner

Underwear

Wide-brimmed hat

Hot-weather (canvas-topped) boots

Kevlar bulletproof helmet and camouflage cover

Combat vest

Webbed belt

Tinted goggles

Poncho and liner