1230 Grr and I jump in the car and head back to the USMTM compound to eat at the club. Before the crisis, it used to serve maybe thirty people at lunchtime and had a good menu at reasonable prices, hamburger and fries with a diet Coke being a good choice. Now it serves two thousand people with a buffet [chow] line set up in the entrance, and you eat chili or spaghetti or beef stew off a paper plate and get a paper cup of Kool-Aid. There are not enough tables, and I’ve made sure there are no longer reserved tables for the general officers, as was the case before the crisis. All are equal and first come first serve, so you either stand holding your food until someone leaves, or you find a place to sit on the floor or in the small movie theater where the USMTM families used to go for entertainment. People are considerate and eat fast, and they give up their seats ASAP.

Troops I run into at lunch ask me what is going on, and I pretend to know and give them the best update I can.

1300 I go to my apartment, take the elevator up to the fifth floor, and lie down for a twenty-minute power nap. After I wake up, I change into my flight suit from desert fatigues. Grr is waiting downstairs. We head out to Riyadh Air Base five blocks to the north along Airport Boulevard to go flying.

1345 We arrive at the jets, two F-16s parked together with the RSAF PC-9 trainer aircraft on the east ramp, about seven hundred yards from where our AWACS are parked. The jets are from Al Dhafra in the UAE; the crews come up to work a duty shift of a week in the TACC, and the pilots they replace will take the jets home after Grr and I get our flight in.

1400 Grr and I take off for Dhahran AB in the eastern province. We check in with AWACS (the normal thing to do), and they provide air traffic control services for us. Though we may fly a low-level navigation mission, we’ll probably do Dissimilar Air Combat Tactics against F-15Cs. The mission will have been planned by Grr while I was at work that morning. After about an hour in the air, we land at Dhahran. We taxi up to the ramp where the 1st Wing has their jets parked, where we are met by Colonel John McBroom, the wing commander, who may have been in the flight we fought coming in.

1515 After a short debriefing on the training flight, I get in a car with Boomer McBroom to go visit the troops.