Mission Delay Left Him in Scud’s Path : Missile attack: A change in schedule put Californian in wrong place. He hopes to play football again.

Cpl. James Binnebose was not meant to be in that barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He was a Californian, housed by chance among Pennsylvanians. He was meant to be gone that night but his mission was canceled. So he was padding back from a shower when the Scud hit.

The Feb. 25 blast by the Iraqi missile blew off his shower shoes and threw him 20 feet from where he had been walking, along the outside wall of the barracks. He came to, seeing everything in black and red. He noticed holes in his helmet. The barrel of his rifle was bent. There was a pool of blood forming at his feet.

“I started freaking out, because I love sports,” the 21-year-old reservist from Lompoc recalled in an Army hospital south of here this week. “No! Not my feet! A guy came out of (a nearby) building. I said, ‘Hey, wrap my feet up for me.’ He came back out with T-shirts and wrapped my feet.”

Binnebose sat there watching the pandemonium. He saw a woman carried out of the wreckage, both arms missing. There was a man, seemingly unscathed but without a pulse. Boxes of rations were on fire, ammunition was exploding. A woman emerged naked from the showers, looking for clothes.

Someone loaded Binnebose into a school bus with all its windows blown out. Blocked by trucks, the driver rammed a gate to get to the hospital. People were praying. There was a guy with his lower leg blown off and his kneecap exposed. Binnebose remembers “a lot of pain, a lot of blood.”

“I was in Saudi Arabia for a week,” he said, with some bemusement. “There are guys here in my room who were there four and five months. One hit a mine, one got hit by ‘friendly fire.’ Those guys have been through serious combat. We got the fluke part.”

The fluke part of the Gulf War has left Binnebose with injuries that may prevent his return to sports. He is unable to stand, for the time being, much less run. The blast tore a large hole in his right foot and sliced up the left, but doctors say he eventually will regain complete use of his feet.

He said he’ll believe it when it happens.

The Iraqi Scud that hit the Dhahran barracks killed 28 people and wounded about 90 others. The attack proved to be the bloodiest of the war for U.S. troops, accounting for roughly a third of all U.S. combat deaths and more than a third of all combat injuries.

“I figured that I would go over, Iraq’s going to get dusted off real fast and I’d be back in no time,” Binnebose said. “The only threat was the threat of getting hit by a Scud missile. I never thought that would happen.”

Binnebose figures some people just aren’t made for the military. He, for one, finds no joy in “living in the woods for long periods of time.” The son of a truck driver, he enlisted in the Army straight out of Lompoc High School because he needed the money for college.

He did his three years, hauling ammunition around the state of Washington and engine parts in Korea. Then he got out and enrolled last fall at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria. He spent his first semester doing what he had wanted to do all along--playing football.

But Binnebose still owed the Army five years in the inactive reserve. And on Jan. 23, he was activated. He and 1,500 other drivers landed in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 19. At the airfield, someone walked off with his Nike bag, containing his Walkman and an extra pillow. It was an inauspicious start.

Then his group proved too large to be housed together. Binnebose volunteered to be transferred, then was transferred a second time. He ended up in the newly formed 477th Transportation Company, assigned to transport fuel to the Iraqi border and to live in the warehouse barracks.

Binnebose’s first mission was scheduled for the night of Feb. 25. At the last minute, it was put off until the following morning. Instead of staying up playing football, as they had planned, Binnebose and others decided to turn in early to get a good night’s rest.

The air raid siren started just as he was getting out of the shower at about 8:30 p.m. He headed back to the barracks. When he came to, his towel, soap and shampoo were gone, in addition to the shower shoes. His left hand was still locked around his M-16.

From the hospital, Binnebose tried to call his father. The line was busy so he asked the operator to interrupt. He and the operator got to talking about the Scud attack. After Binnebose and his father had talked, the operator called back to say she had paid for the call.

“I talked to my older brother,” Binnebose said this week, in a conversation with a stranger. “He don’t have no feelings at all--he’s a hard head. But when he said, ‘I love you,’ I started crying. But I didn’t let him know. He never would have let me live it down.”