War Stories Arrive Home Along With O.C. Warriors

Already, you can hear them in watering holes and pool halls, in base commissaries and officers’ clubs, at supper tables and in chapel services.

They are the war stories: the tales of flying shrapnel, of sand and scorpions, of endless hours of boredom and of brief, flashing moments of peril and heroism. And mostly, the tales of victory.

“They really need to talk--it’s like listening to your own kids,” said Doris Schwartz, owner of a comic book store in San Clemente and a surrogate “mother” of sorts for scores of Camp Pendleton Marines who frequent her business.

Since last week, Schwartz has listened to their coming-home stories as the Marines started filtering back to her shop from points east. And with the bulk of area troops not yet back, she knows that the war stories--still to be refined, debated, colored, put down on paper, passed down to generations--will only grow larger.

“I know that I’m going to be talking to them for months, maybe years” about the war, she says.

Here then, of the more than 7,000 Orange County military personnel who went to the Gulf, are the stories of three of those who made it into the action and have returned to talk about it.

That first Mach-1 flight into Iraq and the several dozen that followed were a rush--a wave of tension that F/A-18 Hornet pilot Capt. Tim Wilson can compare only to his first carrier landing and a near-accident on the San Diego Freeway for sheer intensity.

Not joy or pleasure, the Idaho native is quick to point out, his face turning serious--but intensity.

“You’ve got that adrenaline surge that you only get a few times in your life,” the 34-year-old El Toro-based Marine recalled this week as he arrived back on the base with the “Black Knights” of Attack Squadron 314.

But once his payload is dropped on the enemy, he said, the mood in that twin-engine, one-seat, $25-million piece of aircraft changes drastically.

The job, it is hoped, is done. The antiaircraft missiles are largely behind him and only his base a couple hundred miles away lies ahead. Now comes the ride home. For the pilot, Wilson said, that trip follows “the loneliest road there is.”

“You’re alone in your cockpit,” Wilson said. “And it’s a long way home, and you’ve just dropped your bombs on the enemy and they’re mad at you and they’re gonna try to shoot you. That’s when it really hits you . . . the loneliness.”

Like most of Orange County’s troops tied to the 3rd Aircraft Wing out of El Toro, Wilson’s perspective on the war came from the air, far removed from the faces on the ground beneath him.

Each day, the captain cruised at up to 550 m.p.h. over the enemy and made it back to his home base in Bahrain safely, his payload delivered, his mission completed.

Two pilots in the casualty-free 314th Squadron had to limp their aircraft home with only one of their two engines intact, the other a victim of enemy fire. Wilson didn’t even come that close.

There were no aerial dogfights for this Black Knight as he delivered up to 2,000 pounds of firepower in the form of MK-80 series “general-purpose” bombs--their general purpose being the destruction of enemy munitions sites, tanks, communications centers and anything else below that could pose a threat to the allied war effort.

“I just don’t think their air force really wanted to fight,” he said.

In fact, although he says the enemy fire from the ground was constant, the closest he figures he got to any antiaircraft artillery (“triple A”) was perhaps 50 feet, exploding in a white cloud. That was close enough.

“I was scared to death,” he said. “They shot everything they had.”

Wilson does not hesitate when asked about his most memorable mission.

It was early February and the allies were exchanging artillery fire at the Saudi Arabian-Kuwaiti border. But things weren’t going well, and the Marines on the ground were under heavy fire from their Iraqi counterparts.

That’s when Wilson got the call. Flying north from Bahrain with one other F/A-18 Hornet, “red lines snaking at your aircraft” from the enemy as he approached the battle zone, Wilson and the other pilot, in the span of about 15 minutes, were able to knock out the Iraqi rocket launchers being used against the Marines.

There might have been just one rocket launcher on the ground, maybe two. Wilson’s not sure. All he knows--and all that mattered--was that the Hornets got them and “as soon as we got done, nothing was left shooting at our men.”

And what of enemy casualties from his missions?

The captain grows silent. “I don’t even look at it that way. I don’t attach a body count. . . . You go up and you’ve got a mission and you accomplish it. And that’s it.”

“Daddy, did you see any killing?” Staff Sgt. Kevin Coleman’s son asked him after he returned to his home at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station earlier this month.

It’s times like this when the 29-year-old Coleman sometimes wishes that his 11-year-old namesake wouldn’t be quite so direct, so blunt. There are few ways to dodge this question.

So, the ammunitions supplier and weapons-repair specialist answered the boy as best he could, telling him that fortunately, he never had to fire his weapon; that few looked forward to battle, and that killing was not a source of “joy” for the troops.

In fact, Coleman had seen killing--or bodies, at least, dozens of them--as he rode in jeeps, cargo trucks and planes around Saudi Arabia and the region to ensure that 16 squadrons of “grunts” were prepared for their next round of fire.

Coleman, who logged 200 miles or more a day in a jeep, enjoyed charting his own paths in the barren sand on his journeys. He could almost forget for a time that he was in a war. Almost--until he had to grab his gas mask for the next Scud missile attack at his base, or arrive at the carnage of the most recent battle to begin resupplying soldiers.

So mesmerizing was the image of death that Coleman, flying a few hundred feet up in a cargo plane over Kuwait city one day, made sure to take a few camera shots of the dozens of bodies and wreckage below him. These were the last vestiges of battle a few hours before.

The pictures haven’t been developed yet. If the photos do come out, he says, they will be “a souvenir-type deal. . . . They would definitely go in my scrapbook.”

Photographable or not, the image is already ingrained in Coleman’s memory: “It was the first time for me even being in that kind of environment. It looked like a salvage yard to me--a bunch of unserviceable equipment.”

Before joining the military at age 17, Coleman had carried a gun and had grown up fast on the streets of Detroit. He knew violence there.

Yet he says of the war region: “I don’t think there’s any place in the world that can prepare you for anything like that. . . . How do you prepare yourself for mines, and missiles coming out of the air? There’s nothing in the city that comes close to that.”

When Dave Lemley left his pregnant wife and his comfortable Mission Viejo home in August to face the perils of the unknown in a region turned upside down by Saddam Hussein, the captain’s biggest fear was, quite naturally, the enemy.

The pilot of a slow, bulky KC-130 aircraft used to ferry troops and cargo in and out of battle zones, the captain could almost picture the nightmare: an Iraqi F-1 Mirage slices through the Marines’ “cap”--combat air patrol--and takes dead aim at Lemley’s nearly 100-foot-long craft, weighted down with equipment for the allied war effort.

And the KC-130, a Volkswagen bus in a sea of fleet Porsches, is the perennial sitting duck.

As it turned out, Lemley now says after his return last Saturday from the Gulf, “That wasn’t even really a threat. . . . It wasn’t so much the guys shooting at us--we weren’t afraid of that. . . .

“The real threat,” he said, “was just the sheer number of our own aircraft in the air space. That was what we were really worried about.”

It was more crowded in the skies of the Gulf than LAX on a busy day.

The 30-year-old pilot from Tacoma, Wash., offers a case in point:

The most dangerous experience he had, Lemley said, came within a few dozen miles of the Kuwaiti border as his and four other KC-130s flew in their customary formation, each separated vertically by 500 feet as two F/A-18 jets sucked fuel from each of them to complete their missions.

The refuelers had run the mission two, sometimes three times a day, so many times that Lemley almost lost count. But this time, complications hit.

“All of the sudden,” Lemley recalled, “we went into the clouds and everybody lost track of everybody--and all I remember seeing was strobe lights. We never knew what it was--from another plane or something. But it was close enough to see (the lights) real clear.”

There was no collision. But Lemley said: “That scared the pants off of us.”

Lemley made it back--not just to safety, but to the biggest cheering section at the El Toro Marine base for his return last week, courtesy of his wife, Janie, and members of their Mission Viejo church.

There, too, was Lemley’s infant son, Kevin. The infant didn’t seem to show much sign of recognition of the man in uniform holding him, as his mother pointed and repeated “Daaa-da! Daaa-da!” But Lemley didn’t seem to care; he was home.

And when Kevin is old enough to understand talk of wars and tanks and planes, what then will Lemley tell him about the last seven months?

He will tell him, Lemley begins, about the flash of the bombs as they blew up spectacularly in the night air of the desert. And, armed with videotape, he will tell him about the raucous crowds that welcomed the troops home in victory.

And most of all, he says, he will tell him about the lesson to be learned from the war, a lesson that he draws from the U.S. policy in Vietnam.

“This was just one of those things that was necessary to be done, one of those necessary evils,” he said. “If we’re going to go in and fight a war, we better go in and win the thing. If we’re going to fight, we better be willing to fight. We were. And it showed.”