Though Barth had no clue, he did his best to explain. Finally, it was decided. They would just stay put, and someone would come and get them in the morning. Without a word, the Arab (just somebody from the UAE who was told to find the lost Americans) retrieved the phone, closed the tinted window, and drove off into the night, never knowing how close he came to being kneecapped by a terrified American Air Force lieutenant.

The next few hours passed slowly. There were complaints about how fucked up things were—and questions about where the women could go to the bathroom, because not all the bottled water turned into sweat. But then daybreak came, and all of a sudden, up drove the bus and the hugely smiling driver that had left them there the night before. He took the hearty band to a huge air base farther out in the desert, where they would spend the next few days sleeping on a hangar floor and eating MREs until Bill Rider could send tents and field kitchens to them.

They had plenty to do, as the F-16s from Shaw AFB needed to be turned around for combat air patrols or put on alert with air-to-ground munitions.

Everywhere it was the same—chaos—with everyone pitching in to help each other survive, build housing, and somehow come up with all the necessary comforts that Americans normally take for granted.

In those early days, only the locals—such as the Ethiopian bus driver—seemed to know what they were doing, though their reasons often mystified the Americans. Faced with the end of a long day and a craving to go home, he’d simply dropped his passengers off in the desert where he knew they couldn’t get hurt or in trouble. When his duty day had ended—at midnight, in this case—he’d gone home to get a good night’s sleep, picked them up the next morning, and taken them to the air base as instructed. He really didn’t understand those strange Americans.

★ Most of the arriving troops came into Dhahran, a huge Saudi Air Force base on the eastern coast. Its commander, Brigadier General Turki bin Nassar, an RSAF F-15 fighter pilot, held a master’s degree in business administration from Troy State University, and was a graduate from the USAF Air University at Maxwell AFB. Prince Turki had hosted a small detachment of Chuck Horner’s people from CENTAF during ELF-1 and EARNEST WILL. Turki was also responsible for the air defense of Saudi Arabia’s vital eastern province, with its vast oil refineries, oil storage, and transshipment points. And then, in August 1990, he had a huge additional job dumped on him.

The 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, commanded by Colonel (later Major General) “Boomer” McBroom, arrived first. Even before all of the forty-eight F-15C fighters had arrived, they were moving to help out Turki’s force of RSAF F-15Cs and Tornado F-2 Air Defense Variant (ADV) fighters in patrolling the skies along the Iraqi and Kuwaiti borders.