El Toro General Led by Example in Gulf Air War

It was nearly two months after the cease-fire and weeks after the top Marine aviator in the Gulf War had returned home when his wife finally confronted him.

“I am mad at you for flying those missions,” Pat Moore told her husband, Maj. Gen. Royal N. Moore Jr. “What would have happened if you had been killed?”

Moore, commander of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at El Toro, flew more than a dozen combat missions during the war--a decision he made, he said, because “you lead from the front.”

As the commander of more than 16,000 Marine aviators and support crews and 450 jet fighters, transport planes and helicopters, Moore could have opted to stay in Bahrain instead of risking combat.

But instead, he periodically left the command center to strap himself into F/A-18 Hornets and A-6 Intruders with full bomb loads and head north toward Kuwait and Iraq.

“I didn’t go off and do that (fly combat missions) as a lark,” Moore, 56, said. “The way I choose to know my pilots is to fly with them. There is no way I could send those guys out unless I did it myself. I had to look them in the eye and tell them I had already been north.”

In an interview last week, Moore said some of his fondest memories were the times just before taking off for a mission when a crew member would tap him lightly on the shoulder and say, “Good luck, general. Bring this thing back alive,” or “Get us a kill, general.”

“In combat you draw closer,” Moore explained. “Everyone is part of the team and they want to know how well they did putting the machine together. After a while you get as close as you possibly can get. You get to the stage of almost being a brother to those kids. You know almost every one of them.”

Moore was out front again Saturday, leading the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing in the county’s biggest parade honoring the military.

Flying missions over enemy territory was not a new experience for Moore. He flew 287 combat sorties in the F-4 Phantoms and F-8U Crusaders during two tours in Vietnam, and the 18 missions in the Persian Gulf put his total combat missions at just over 300.

After Vietnam, the Pasadena-born Moore served as an assistant wing commander at Cherry Point, N.C., an assistant deputy chief of staff for aviation at Marine Headquarters in Washington, and director of operations for the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii before taking command of the air wing at El Toro in 1989.

He took the 3rd Air Wing to the Persian Gulf in August, shortly after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Moore compared setting up a new wing headquarters halfway around the world to packing up the office for a picnic and “then trying to buy everything you forgot at the nearby 7-Eleven.”

The airfield was crowded with C-5A and C-141 transports as he landed in Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia. Moore and his small staff then hopped a ride to the nearby country of Bahrain, where much of the Marine aircraft was based.

Home became a base designed for two fighter squadrons, or 24 airplanes. In the end, the single-runway air station had 177 airplanes, more than 100 of them Marine aircraft. The remainder were from the U.S. Air Force.

For five months the aviators prepared, trained and patrolled.

They bombed and strafed for 38 days.

Moore’s F/A-18s, AV-8 Harriers and A-6 Intruders were among the first aircraft to pound Iraqi positions on the Jan. 17 predawn allied attacks that marked the beginning of the war.

The 100-hour ground war was over almost as fast as it began.

“The day after the cease-fire I jumped up and said, ‘Let’s go, when’s our next meeting?’ ” Moore said his staff looked dumbfounded, telling him that the war was over. “It took three or four days to come down off the high.”

Courting a no-nonsense image of a warrior, Moore was predicting a quick end even before the war started. He told reporters in Bahrain that he wanted a few minutes with Saddam Hussein’s troops and pledged: “We’re going to give them the most violent three to five minutes they’ve ever seen.” After the war he called the enemy a “bunch of thugs” who deserved “everything they got.”

According to sources in Washington, Moore will receive a third star and be promoted to the rank of lieutenant general shortly. But he is not looking forward to the desk duties that come with the rank.

“If I can’t get out and wrestle, than I probably need to go off someplace and retire,” he said.

When it came time to return home, Moore said he wanted to arrive in style--at the controls of an F/A-18 Hornet.

During a three-day trip and 18 aerial refuelings that took him over Spain and across the Atlantic Ocean, Moore said he will not forget the emotion he felt as his small group of fighters passed commercial airliners and listened to the pilot explaining to passengers that the fighters were returning from the Gulf War. He was overcome with emotion when he caught the first glimpse of the U.S. coast, just south of Norfolk, Va.

At Beaufort, S.C., a crowd of people welcomed the Hornets back to the United States--a much different reception than what Moore experienced when he returned from Vietnam almost two decades earlier.

“Everyone just kind of looked at you with great disdain,” he remembered of his return from Vietnam. “I thought I had done what the country had asked me to do. I knew the anti-war sentiment was high . . . but at one point I thought I might have to fight my way through the crowd.”

Now, he said, he hopes some of the support for Desert Storm is felt by those who served so faithfully in Vietnam.

“They surely deserve it,” he said.

When Moore’s blue-gray F/A-18 arrived at El Toro, the group of four jets peeled off one by one and then landed. The general’s wife rushed to his plane.

“Knowing him the way I do,” said Pat Moore, “I should have known he would be flying combat missions in the Persian Gulf. He’s the best aviator in the world as far as I’m concerned. If I had to go up in one of of those airplanes, he would be my pilot.”