Latest Challenge of War: Packing Up, Going Home

The roads leading to King Abdulaziz Port are clogged these days with sand-caked Humvees, rough-terrain forklifts and tanks lining up to go home.

The machines of war are being washed, inventoried and packed. Work crews are wrapping helicopters in plastic sheeting, driving armored personnel carriers into the hulls of cargo ships, tearing down field hospitals and striking tents all over the Arabian Peninsula.

With the formal conclusion of the Persian Gulf War, the herculean supply chain that funneled millions of tons of vehicles, ammunition and food--not to mention 542,000 people--onto the sands of Saudi Arabia has been slammed fully into reverse.

In the next days and weeks, the huge and complex military infrastructure built here to support the American-led rout of the Iraqi army will be dismantled.

By the time it is over, 3,000 airlifts and 400 sealifts will have transported 1,900 helicopters, 12,000 tanks and artillery pieces, 235,000 tons of unused ammunition and an endless list of supplies and materiel, in addition to more than half a million men and women.

“No one will ever comprehend the enormity of this,” said Maj. Bob Desrosiers, a spokesman for the 50,000-member Support Command staff that oversees logistics.

On average, a ship a day and at least one airlift an hour leave Saudi seaports and airports, bound for U.S. bases. Already, almost 45% of the U.S. service personnel dispatched to the Gulf have left for home; much of the equipment is en route.

Getting it all here--a feat billed as the largest airlift in history--was achieved in record time, American military officials like to boast.

Getting it all home, officials concede, could be just as complicated and will take much longer.

For one thing, sea lifts to Saudi Arabia departed from 30 ports; sea lifts out of Saudi Arabia will leave from two ports. Gridlock seems inevitable.

Further, the equipment must be thoroughly washed of desert sand to meet strict Department of Agriculture requirements. Federal officials fear the sand could contain pests such as Mediterranean fruit fly larvae.

And because the war was so much shorter than expected, not only were many stocks left over that now have to go back, but supplies were still arriving a full month after fighting ended.

The process of shipping people and equipment home, known as redeployment in military lingo, also had to be geared up considerably ahead of schedule.

Lt. Gen. William Gus Pagonis, the top logistician in charge of this epic task and the man who will replace Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. commander of Operation Desert Storm, said in an interview that he hopes to finish full withdrawal by year’s end. But he is not yet willing to bet on it.

“Who’s ever redeployed a force of this size in history?” Pagonis asked. “Never!”

The key to making it work smoothly, he said, is choreography. Logisticians, civil engineers and traffic controllers are sprinkled through the region at air bases, camps, ports and truck depots to coordinate movement of troops and cargo each step of the way along the assembly line that leads them to their flight or ship home.

“What’s mind-boggling is we do what Sears & Roebuck does--50 times over,” Pagonis said.

The Air Force alone is sending 600 tons of cargo and 1,000 people a day from 23 bases in the Gulf. The Army--the branch with the largest representation here by far--and the Marines are shipping an average of 4,800 tons and about 4,000 people a day.

Of the Army troops dispatched deepest into Iraq, most of the XVIII Airborne Corps is well on its way home, while elements of the VII Corps began withdrawing toward Saudi Arabia last week.

Pagonis and his staff keep track of planned withdrawals of ground forces and plug each unit into a schedule to see that its equipment is cleaned, inspected, driven to port and matched to appropriate cargo ships. Separately, troops are told to report to a military air terminal to catch a C-5 cargo plane or a chartered passenger jet for the flight to their home bases.

The path followed by the 1st Cavalry Division illustrates the way the Army redeploys.

The 15,000-strong division drove from its position on the eastern flank of U.S.-occupied Iraq to the port city of Dammam over a two-week period early this month. At the military equivalent of a gigantic, open-air carwash on an asphalt field in the desert, 1st Cavalry infantry used jet-stream hoses, brushes and rags to wash sand from the wheels, side panels and treads of hundreds of trucks, personnel carriers, missile launchers and trailers.

Between 200 and 300 vehicles were washed each hour, though some more stubbornly dirty items took up to 10 hours to clean, soldiers said.

“We got here at 1400 (2 p.m.) yesterday,” said Sgt. Rufus High of Dallas, “and we’ve been washing” ever since.

The troops then waited in tents until their homebound ship docked and was ready to receive them. Then, convoys drove to King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam, where they joined a sea of pallets and packed materiel waiting to be loaded onto the ship.

The whole process, from the time a division begins to move until it is packed and dispatched, can take weeks, officials say.

Stevedores work as many as 10 ships at a time, Pagonis said. Vehicles can drive onto the “roll-on, roll-off” ships, while huge cranes load other vessels. Military shipments often require unique, time-consuming handling. To load 10,000 tons of ammunition onto a ship, workers must first build racks in the hull, using green lumber to cushion the volatile cargo. To protect expensive Apache helicopters from ocean spray, the craft are wrapped in plastic sheeting and sealed with a blowtorch.

The Army and Marines are using dozens of sites in northern Saudi Arabia for staging and cleaning equipment. Sea lifts are departing from both Dammam and a port at Jubayl.

For the Air Force, the task is eased somewhat because its warplanes fly back under their own power; much of a fighter squadron’s combat-related support equipment, from tow trucks to lights, also is airlifted.

As many as 20 loads on a C-141 transport plane are needed to move a single fighter squadron, said Col. James Windham, Air Force logistician. About 10% of the Air Force equipment--40,000 tons--will be dispatched on cargo planes.

The rest, like the Army and Marine cargo, will be shipped. The Air Force must dismantle its 23 bases or installations from the Gulf War; work at four of the smallest bases is complete. At the largest base, Al Kharj in central Saudi Arabia, the job involves tearing down a veritable city of tents, mess halls, latrines and hangars.

“People were over here for seven months (so) you have a large supply network you’ve built up, from toothpaste to toilet paper. . . .” Windham said. “We’ll just stuff (the) stuff back in the containers and ship it back the same way” it came.

Some Air Force equipment and personnel may ultimately remain in Saudi Arabia as part of a regional defense mechanism, but no decision on such a plan has been announced.

Although Saudi Arabia had well-built airfields before the war, its infrastructure could not accommodate an influx of half a million people. For that reason, allied troops brought with them virtually everything they needed.

On any given day at the height of the war, 4,500 trucks drove through the desert to distribute supplies, Pagonis said. And to achieve the devastating level of firepower used to wipe out parts of the Iraqi army, U.S. forces arrived with tons of munitions. The Air Force alone dropped 70,000 tons of bombs during the air war, with a large stockpile left over. Similarly, the Army has 235,000 tons of ammunition to take home.

There are advantages built into the job of sending everything and everyone home. One is the absence of the pressure of combat. Another is motivation.

“Once you tell people it’s their turn to go, you gotta get out of their way. . . . They’ll run you over,” Windham said. “It’s a little different when they’re coming over here.”

While the Navy can transport all its own people and equipment, the Air Force, Army and Marines must share the same fleet of sea vessels and the 200 to 300 cargo planes that belong to the U.S. Military Airlift Command.

For that reason, delays and gridlock are bound to happen as thousands of vehicles jostle for a place in line to the two Saudi ports enlisted for this operation. Service personnel are having to wait for flights home, too, but most seem able to board a plane in reasonable time. U.S. military passengers are flying out of five airports.

Windham said the system got clogged when, a month after the war’s end, supplies continued to arrive and the first shipments back to the United States began.

Pagonis said he hopes to avoid gridlock or undue delays for troops already eager to leave by carefully juggling schedules. For example, with the XVIII Airborne Corps still filtering out, Pagonis said he would send the next unit scheduled to move out of Iraq, the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, into King Khaled Military City, a Saudi town farther west. There, the troops would wash their vehicles, rest, take inventory and wait until Dammam is clear.

“Our game plan is not to have gridlock,” said Pagonis, a man of boundless optimism and energy. “We’re going to try to make sure that (gridlock) doesn’t happen.”

He said the build-down is going “extremely well” but that it may start to bog down as more cumbersome cargo must be moved. The initial phases--sending people and track vehicles, such as tanks--tend to proceed quickly, he said.

“Anybody that’s been involved in any kind of logistics operation understands it’s going to take time to get this stuff out,” he said. “And the American taxpayer understands, too, you can’t just throw this stuff away.”

The bulk of the U.S. troops are expected to reach home in the next few months. But a core staff of logisticians and support crews, many reservists, will remain here to oversee the gradual recovery and removal of U.S.-owned equipment.