They landed in Jeddah at 4:00 P.M. on Monday, August 6, and a blast of hot air hit them the minute the aircraft door came open. It was a not totally unwelcome reminder to Horner that he was in a country that he loved and among people that he loved. He was looking forward to seeing and working with his friends again.

Chuck Horner relates how his association with the Arab world first began:

Though I’d met a good many Arabs before 1981, the first senior Arab Air Force officer I got friendly with was a tall, taciturn brigadier general named Ahmed Behery, who was then the base commander at Taif.26 By 1990, Behery had become commander of the RSAF, the Saudi Air Force.

In 1981, Behery was escorting an energetic, fast-talking prince, whose name was Bandar bin Sultan (then a colonel in the Saudi Air Force and a pretty fair F-15 pilot, and more recently the Saudi ambassador to the United States and a major player in the Gulf War), on a visit to Nellis AFB. Major General Bob Kelly, the Fighter Weapons Center commander, held a garden party in their honor, and the wing commander of the tenant wing at Nellis, the 474th TFW, Colonel Chuck Horner and his wife Mary Jo, were invited. The generals and host wing commander clustered around Bandar, who is extremely charming, and so I felt it wise to converse with the equally tall and distinguished, but much quieter, commander from Taif. Mary Jo and I walked over to him and introduced ourselves.

Behery is extremely shy, but not because other people frighten him. He is just reluctant to meet and greet. We made small talk for a while, until Mary Jo, in her blunt Iowa manner, broke in with some gripes against Arab men that had long rankled her. A particular incident still burned: During the days I was the wing commander at Williams AFB, we used to go to the graduation dinners for the foreign military sales training classes in the F-5E. At one of these, Mary Jo tried to strike up a conversation with an Arab student, either Saudi or Jordanian. Mary Jo is so open and friendly, it’s hard for her to grasp how anyone can fail to respond to her overtures. So when this one did—he was off-puttingly distant, stiff, and unfriendly—she took that as a characteristic of the people. I suspect the man was more concerned that she was the wing commander’s wife than that he was talking to a woman without a veil. Nonetheless, she came away with the idea that Arab men patronize women.

When Mary Jo concluded, “So you see, General Behery, Arab men are stuck up and snooty when they talk to me, and that’s why I don’t like to talk to them,” he actually beamed with amusement. And his good humor remained as he explained to both of us why Arab men are somewhat aloof when dealing with Western women (they are not used to the aggressive behavior of strangers, especially women). Then, becoming quite serious, he gave us a nutshell lecture about the differences between the Arab and the Western view of women.