Walk in My Combat Boots

by James Patterson

  Their culture values death. They have no problem killing three hundred people with one car bomb—men, women, and children. Someone there had to explain to me that when an old man dies in the Arab culture, it’s a tragedy because an old man is full of irreplaceable wisdom, knowledge, and experience. But if a child dies, their attitude is, “We’ll make more.”

  Every day while I was over there, we would ask ourselves the same question: how do we deal with this situation?

  To this day, I still don’t have an answer.

  LARRY GOMEZ

  Larry Gomez was born in Long Beach, California, and raised in the small town of San Pedro, which is known as the Port of Los Angeles. During his freshman year at Cal State Long Beach, he pledged a fraternity, did a little too much partying, and, because his grades suffered, lost his 2-S deferment. Forty-five days later, on December 22, 1965, at nineteen years old, Larry was drafted into the Army to go to Vietnam. Larry started out as a private and shortly thereafter he became an officer through the Army’s Officer Candidate School. He was commissioned as a quartermaster officer and specialized as a supply and services officer. He retired in 1993 after serving for twenty-seven years.

  I’m in the commanding general’s office at the 21st Theater Army Area Command, or TAACOM (the largest support command in the Army, located in Kaiserslautern, Germany), speaking to Lieutenant General Lewi, who is not only the commanding general of the 21st but also the quartermaster general of the Army.

  “So,” he says. “I hear you’re getting ready to leave us.”

  “Yes, sir.” After more than twenty years, I’ve decided it’s time to retire, based on a series of events that happened the previous month.

  On May 17, 1987, while I was assigned to the 21st, the Navy frigate USS Stark was struck in the Persian Gulf by two anti-ship missiles fired from an Iraqi jet aircraft. Thirty-seven sailors were killed. Their remains were going to be sent to the Army mortuary in Frankfurt. A whole team of identification experts from the States would be arriving to assist in processing the Navy remains. Fingerprint experts from the FBI, select armed forces identification lab technicians, and other contract specialists would all be dispatched to the Army mortuary.

  Colonel Shellabarger, the 21st TAACOM assistant chief of staff logistics (ACSLOG) and my immediate boss, informed me that, as chief of the supply and services division, the mortuary fell under my job responsibility and staff purview. He directed me to go to Frankfurt to oversee this joint services operation. And because the operation was being run by the Army, he needed me there to oversee and coordinate everything as the Army proponent for the mission.

  There was only one dilemma for me: I’d never had any mortuary experience, let alone handled a mass casualty disaster.

  How do I go into this and quickly get prepared? That was the question I needed to answer before I arrived. I read up on everything I could from the Beirut bombing and other after-action reports from officers tasked to run some type of mass casualty operation. Fortunately, in their reports, these officers provided detailed information and lessons learned. I noted their lessons learned, experience, and recommendations so I wouldn’t encounter the same problems. However, I found that many of those recommendations and lessons learned had not been acted upon, and as a result, I would face some of the same issues.

  Arriving at Frankfurt and subsequently seeing, for the first time, some of the open body bags and the thirty-seven Navy dead lined up for processing was a temporary shock to my system that I had to quickly overcome. It would be a sight not easily or ever forgotten. Everything from receiving the remains to the process of removing the sailors’ personal effects would become a difficult and lasting memory.

  Sitting down next to the staff, I observed the care they took in inventorying the sailors’ belongings. There were wallets filled with photographs of loved ones, of wives and kids; wedding rings; religious medals; and any number of things these sailors had on them at the time they were killed. Even more difficult was seeing the national news broadcasts with individual stories and pictures of these men and their families as their remains were being prepared to send back home.

  In the aftermath of this operation, I wrote a very detailed action report that spelled out regulations and other procedures that needed to be changed when dealing with future military mass casualty operations.

  As my years in the 21st assignment were coming to an end, I had hopes that I might be promoted from lieutenant colonel to full bird colonel. It didn’t work out that way, and I decided it was my time to retire.

  Now I’m in the CG’s office with General Lewi, who says, “What would you like to do for your final assignment? Any thoughts on where you’d like to go?”

  “Sir, my twins just graduated from high school. They’ll be going on to college, so I’m hoping to be put in an ROTC assignment on some college campus. That would be ideal.”

  “I was thinking of something else,” he says.

  “You were, sir?”

  “Yes. I need you to go to Department of Army and run casualty affairs and mortuary operations. Go in there and rewrite those procedures and regulations you outlined in your lessons learned and recommendations in the Stark after-action report you created.”

  “Sir, please don’t make me the mortuary guy. I really don’t want working mortuary operations to be the end of my career.”

  “I don’t know anybody who knows the system better than you do,” he says. “You know exactly what needs to be done, and I need you to do that for me.”

  I leave Germany and go to Washington, DC, as the new division chief of Army mortuary affairs and casualty support.

  Early in that assignment, I get involved in a World War II recovery mission that takes me to the D-Day invasion beaches in Normandy, France.

  A fisherman in Normandy files a report saying his net got hung up on a suspected sunken amphibious US tank. When he went down to unhook his net, he swore he saw skeletal remains.

  By the time the international recovery assistance request goes through all the appropriate channels and reaches me, it’s late September.

  The US lost twenty-seven amphibious tanks from the 741st Tank Battalion on D-Day. We were told this was one of the three sunken tank locations that had not been previously found.

  In October, I take a team of six with me to Normandy. The team consists of three Navy deep divers and three Army scuba divers. We head out on a small boat. The weather is bone-chilling and the conditions are terrible. For the first couple of days, the sea is so rough we can’t find the location. On the third day, we find the tank, but the conditions are still too rough to make a dive.

  We mark the location with a buoy. It takes seven days to finally get sufficiently decent weather to attempt a dive.

  The tank is, in fact, one of ours, and the deep divers go down to search for the remains. They find that the tank is filled all the way up to the turret with silt and sand. There’s no way that fisherman could have seen skeletal remains in there.

  We go home empty-handed, and I end up getting a slipped disc from the constant bouncing on the small boat in rough waters.

  While continuing on as the chief of the Army’s Mortuary Affairs and Casualty Support Division, I start hearing rumblings that we’ll be going to war with Iraq. It becomes official during the early part of 1990.

  Operation Desert Shield is the code name given to the operations leading up to the Gulf War. I begin briefing the Army deputy chief of staff personnel and attending briefings in the Joint Chiefs of Staff conference rooms deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. I’m usually the lowest-ranking officer, or one of the lowest-ranking, in the room. At one particular meeting, it seems that everyone around me is wearing stars. There are general officer representatives from each of the branches of service—Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force—and a couple of other staff proponents.

  Pentagon staffers have been analyzing multiple computer war scenario simulations: heavy attacks, heavy armament attacks, chemicals. I’m told I
can potentially expect seven thousand dead in the first seventy-two hours of the war under the heavy-armament, chemical-attack scenarios.

  Seven thousand? How the hell are we going to handle that in the middle of the desert? We don’t have enough Army units to process those kinds of remains—and we sure as hell don’t have enough equipment to put all those bodies through a chemical bath.

  I’m the chief of mortuary affairs, and the Army has been named the executive agent for Operation Desert Shield. It’s my responsibility to find a way to bring home whatever remains come out of this war.

  But it’s an impossible task. I’ve already talked to the Air Force about transporting our fallen soldiers. There’s no way they’re going to put remains that have suffered a chemical attack on their aircraft.

  I reach out to the top scientists in the country: the chemical guys based out of Fort Detrick, in Maryland. I bring them into my next briefing so we can come up with a solution.

  The Air Force’s recommendation is to put all the bodies through a chemical bath even though we don’t have the capacity to do it. One of the scientists speaks up.

  “Even if you perform a chemical bath, you’ll have the problem of what happens to these remains once they’re in the air,” he tells us. “The pores in the human body will off-gas once you get them up to twenty thousand feet. Nothing you do on the ground will get the chemicals out of their pores. If you have one hundred bodies in an aircraft and put them up at twenty thousand feet, they’ll off-gas, and everybody on the aircraft will get killed.”

  The Navy’s solution is to get these massive intermodal shipping containers made by Sealand, deep-freeze them, and bring them in frozen. Getting that done in the middle of the desert, however, is impossible.

  The one-star public affairs general officer glares at me and yells, “This is totally unacceptable.”

  “Well, sir,” I reply, “I understand that.”

  “So what’s your solution?”

  “Sir, I can tell you, but you’re not going to like it.” I take a deep breath and, with all eyes on me, say, “There’s no way we are equipped to get seven thousand remains back here. It’s impossible. We don’t even have enough body bags right now—and we certainly don’t have enough trained units and equipment to handle these kinds of numbers. We’ll be in the middle of a desert war, and the remains, I’m sorry to say, are going to rot out there in those conditions unless we decide to incinerate them in place.”

  That sets off the public affairs officer. He starts yelling at me. “Can you imagine what CNN and the press will do with that coverage?”

  “Sir, don’t shoot the messenger. You just heard our top chemical warfare scientist explain why the Air Force can’t transport these remains home. The Navy solution won’t work, and the Army doesn’t have a viable operational solution.”

  “This is totally unacceptable. It’s your job—”

  “Sir, you’re a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With all due respect, it’s JCS’s job to come up with the assets in order to complete this mission, and right now we don’t have them.”

  A few days after the briefing, a decision is made to bomb any suspected target believed to house the potential capability to launch a chemical attack against US forces. Aerial and naval bombardments continue for nearly five weeks. As a result, our casualty rate is greatly reduced, and our forces are able to use conventional wartime collection methods to recover our casualties.

  By the time the second phase of the Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, begins, I’ve coordinated and assembled some two-hundred-plus people to augment the very capable and experienced mortuary staff at the port mortuary, Dover Air Force Base. The same team of people I had become acquainted with in Frankfurt for the USS Stark mission assist with the operation at Dover and the processing of the 383 fatalities that will come out of that war.

  The whole process of bringing soldiers back home triggers distant memories of when I was drafted in 1965.

  During eight weeks of advanced individual training (AIT), one constant theme was drilled into our heads: “There are two kinds of soldiers in Vietnam: the quick and the dead. You better learn how to fire those weapons and save yourself.”

  The life expectancy of a mortarman in Vietnam wasn’t very good. I quickly realized I’d have a better chance of staying alive if I was an officer. Midway through AIT, I applied to OCS and was then selected. After AIT, I was sent to Fort Lee, in Virginia, where I graduated and became a quartermaster (logistics) officer. As a second lieutenant, I was shipped to Germany and assigned to a supply and services battalion.

  I completed my required three years of service and got out of the Army as a captain, went back to school, and met my reserve requirement by joining a unit in Los Angeles. I missed the camaraderie of being a soldier. I’d listen to all my old buddies telling their war stories, and it bothered me, not having had their experience.

  In 1972, I decided to accept an invitation to return to active duty—but, as I told the quartermaster assignments officer, the only way I’d go back in is if I went to Vietnam.

  He made it happen, and I was assigned as the operations officer, Logistical Support Activity (LSA), in Pleiku.

  Within weeks of arriving, a day came when we got word that one of our radio repairmen had been killed during a mission to a small remote firebase. His transport helicopter had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile, and the firebase had been overrun and captured by the enemy. We were on hold and waited for six long days until we got a call saying that a South Vietnamese Ranger unit had taken back the firebase and we’d have a brief window to recover the man’s remains. I accompanied my two young grave registration soldiers on the mission. We hopped on a helicopter accompanied by two gunships and two attack helicopters assigned to watch over us.

  Along the way—and a surprise to me—we picked up a full bird colonel, the senior Army advisor to the South Vietnamese Ranger unit that had just taken back the firebase. He wanted to congratulate the Rangers and had just gotten an update. Our mission had changed. We were to recover not one but two sets of remains.

  He looked at me and said, “That means, Captain, that you and I will have to help your men. We’ll have to get in and out of there fast, as I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to hold on to the firebase.”

  Then he turned his attention to my two young grave registration soldiers. “We’re going to land on the outside of the perimeter of the fence line because everything’s going to be booby-trapped. Don’t touch anything. Don’t try to pick up a war souvenir. The gunships will protect us as we retrieve the remains.”

  It seemed as though we were in the air for an hour or so before we were dropped off outside a war-torn barbed wire perimeter. Black smoke billowed from smoldering vehicles, and charred remains had been hung up in the concertina wire along the perimeter fence.

  We took on mortar and rocket fire almost immediately. We headed for cover, leapfrogging to the main bunker, hitting the ground several times when we heard the whistle of incoming mortar and rock rounds coming at us. Once in the bunker, we came up with our plan to team up, locate and bag the two casualties, and get out.

  As we made our way to the downed aircraft, the rocket and mortar fire intensified. Then came small arms fire. South Vietnamese rangers were running and retreating everywhere. Some had rockets. I thought, Oh, shit, we’re not going to get out of here alive.

  On the radio, the colonel screamed at the gunships and Cobras above that they had to take out that enemy fire. He motioned us to head back to the main bunker.

  As I retreated, I heard that whistle sound overhead, and a rocket exploded at the base of a Conex container directly behind me. The explosion knocked me to the ground.

  Dazed from the blast, images of my life flashed through my mind. I thought I was dead. I could see that the metal Conex container had been ripped open from the blast and I figured I’d been hit. I felt my legs to see if they were soaked with blood, but they weren’t. I was okay.

&n
bsp; I pulled myself together, got back up, and headed for the bunker. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a retreating Ranger go down as small arms and machine-gun fire continued to come down on us.

  While we were huddled in the bunker, our attack choppers eventually radioed the colonel and told him that they were running out of fuel and couldn’t wait any longer. They had to leave. We were left sitting in the middle of nowhere, mortars and rockets coming after us and our South Vietnamese Rangers fighting to hold back an enemy just outside the perimeter.

  Somehow we were able to make it through the night.

  Two Air Force close air support jets arrived and were in radio communication with the colonel. They colored the sky with green tracer rounds to target the location where they unloaded their bombs.

  Their first tracer pass was way off. The colonel redirected their fire and instructed them to come way back in and lay their payload right on top of our perimeter fence line.

  Their second tracer pass pinpointed a location just outside our perimeter. They cautioned us to get as deep as we could in that bunker.

  They lit up the night with their bombs.

  Things got quiet after that. But it was decided that it was still too dangerous to send in a helicopter to pick us up. The enemy was still out there.

  A new plan was created. We were advised that there were friendly tanks not too far away that would come pick us up. It would be the safest way to get us out of there.

  We held fast until daylight and then got the radio call telling us the tanks couldn’t make it; they’d been intercepted. The colonel, realizing we couldn’t afford to stay much longer, made the decision to send in a chopper. It was our only way out.

  “Okay, but once we’re overhead, we have to go radio silent,” the chopper guy advised. “Flash me with your survivor mirror so I can pinpoint exactly where you’re located.”

  In the distance we could see a lone chopper. It flew way past us. The colonel radioed the chopper pilot. The pilot assured the colonel that he had us and began dropping below tree level a few miles up. We had been instructed to get on either side of the dirt road outside the firebase and watch for the chopper.