Grant Sharp did most of the Navy work. Since he already had a standing command afloat in the Gulf, the initial actions were to expand that command. Air tasking for the carriers would come out of the RSAF headquarters, while surface actions would come out of Rear Admiral Bill Fogerty (until Vice Admiral Hank Mauz arrived to take over at NAVCENT).

John Yeosock was in charge of the land forces, with Lieutenant General Walt Boomer, the Marine commander, and Lieutenant General Gary Luck, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps commander, working together immediately under him.

The 82d Airborne Division was the first on the ground, but there was no way to move them around except in the limited vehicles they had brought with them and the trucks and rental cars that could be scrounged from civilians. Owing to their lack of mobility, not much else could be done with them except to move them out from Dhahran into the desert near the air base, though some elements moved up toward the Kuwait border in position to fight delaying actions.

Defenses were dreadfully thin.

In those days, just in case, John Yeosock and Chuck Horner always kept their staff cars filled with gas, with a case of water in the trunk, and in the glove compartment a map of the road to Jeddah—if all else failed, the last-ditch fallback.

Most of the direst predictions did not envision a retreat that far, instead projecting the loss of the east coast down to Qatar or the UAE borders. In that event, the plan was to take refuge in Bahrain by blowing the causeway to Dhahran, an island.

There would eventually be bright spots, like the arrival of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division with its M1A1 heavy tanks and M ⅔ Bradley fighting vehicles, or the rapid movement of the French ground forces from the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea across Saudi Arabia to the eastern province. But those events were weeks ahead, at the end of August and early September. For most of August, things were really hairy.

In the event of an invasion, the plan was for the 82d Airborne to act as “speed bumps.” They’d move forward and blow the bridges through the sepkas and then fight until dislodged. Sepkas were swamplike low spots near the coast, where the salt water lay just under the desert crust, making them impassable for vehicles. The 82d would then melt into the desert, escape down the highway . . . or be captured or killed. They’d do this over and over.

If the Iraqis tried an attack down the Wadi al Batin, the Saudi forces in King Khalid Military City would place a large roadblock across it and try to halt the invaders. If they failed, not much lay between the Iraqis and Riyadh, except some very difficult terrain and airpower.