He was technically correct. It was not important for the Army to be ready to fight on the fifteenth, it was important for them to be ready to move west, so they could fight where and when the CINC decided.

Unfortunately for Waller, his response implied that President Bush’s deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was a sham.

Needless to say, there was little joy in Washington when the headline broke: “CENTCOM DCINC ASKED, ‘WHAT’S SO IMPORTANT ABOUT THE 15TH?’ ”

Afterward, General Schwarzkopf took heavy—and hardly welcome—hits from his superiors, and Cal Waller never really regained the CINC’s confidence, or had much influence in the upper circles in Riyadh. The resulting fallout ended Waller’s shot at a fourth star.

One good result of the flap was the cancellation of media interviews. Horner had better things to do.

★ Christmas came and went—or C+140, as it was jokingly called in the desert. If C day was the first day of the Desert Shield deployment, then C+1 was the day after that, C+2 the next, and so on until C+140—December 25. In the event, it was a lonely, miserable time for American servicemen and servicewomen in the Gulf. They desperately missed their families. “Have a merry C+140” didn’t quite do it. The good news was that everyone knew the climax was coming very soon.

New Year’s Day followed. And for Horner, the rest of January was a blur.

By the end of the first week in January, people were leaving Riyadh, the normally bustling traffic-clogged streets were almost deserted, and weather over Southwest Asia was worsening. It would prove to be the hardest winter in years.

Horner reflects:

As the war drew near, I could see the change in the pilots. Now when I visited, they seemed more mature, more sober in their outlook. No more whining questions. They’d had their innocence baked out of them in the hot sun, dulled by the night combat air patrols, scared out of them by night practices and by large-scale rehearsal missions in the increasingly bad weather. They knew now they were going to war—an event they’d trained for all their professional lives and feared they’d never experience. They were going from the practice field to the Super Bowl. Some would not make it, yet they were not afraid. Neither was there much joy (though there was laughter)—a condition caused not by the threat of war but by loneliness and separation from loved ones.

No longer were we carefree, fun-loving fighter pilots.

On 15 January, I wrote my wife,