Certainly, we let people with special circumstances go home, and we had to let some of the reserve forces rotate their people, because they were on active duty for only a limited time. As for everyone else, morale was sky-high; people understood the contract and they had a stake in the outcome. They were committed to it, so let’s get on with it. A far cry from Vietnam.

THE AGONY OF KUWAIT AND THE HOME FRONT

Every day, the commanders in Riyadh and their staffs received reports of the Kuwaitis trapped in their occupied country—firsthand accounts of brutal acts of murder, torture, rape, and looting. At their best, the Iraqis in Kuwait City were a gang of thugs, stripping cars and houses. At their worst, they were beasts, executing children in front of their parents, decapitating with power saws men suspected of being resistance fighters, gang-raping foreign women once employed as domestic servants in wealthy homes.

Meanwhile, there was governmental and U.N. uncertainty about how best to remove Iraq from Kuwait, including considerable talk of alternatives to fighting. Most Americans wanted to avoid war, while many in and out of government—highly respected people such as Senator Sam Nunn and General Colin Powell—were counting on diplomatic initiatives and the U.N. embargo imposed soon after the invasion of Kuwait.

Others felt that the United States should not rush into a war where thousands of Americans might be killed, simply to secure Kuwait’s oil—or as some op-ed wag put it: Would the United States have risked so much of its wealth and so many of its young warriors if the chief export of Kuwait had been broccoli? (President Bush famously disliked broccoli.)

The view in the Gulf was vastly different. Proximity to the suffering in Kuwait made war seem increasingly better than waiting for the always doubtful success of the embargo or other initiatives.

All the talk of delay, along with the confusion of aims among their leaders, disheartened the families of those who were deployed, and left them in a conceptual bind. Without the appreciation of events in the Gulf afforded by firsthand knowledge, they were reduced to whatever information was provided by the U.S. media—a perplexing variety of views about what should be done to end the crisis in the Gulf. The families at home saw at best a vague end in sight to the crisis—and what appeared to be an ever-longer separation from their loved ones.

Yet—as always with service families—they bore up under the stress of separation in always inventive and heartening ways.

The spouses, most often wives, began to call themselves “the left-behinds.” The support they gave and received was a lifesaver, not only for their overall morale but also for their success in coping with everyday problems.

The yards in Sumter, South Carolina, near Shaw AFB, never looked so good, as neighbors turned out to mow and edge the lawns of families whose husbands had deployed to the desert.