★ 0625 I walk down the basement corridor—bare cement with guard posts roughly every hundred yards—past the computer room. Things are quiet there for now. A few airmen are sitting at consoles typing in the routine events that appear in the ATO; technicians are working on terminals that need fixing. After that comes a room that is used in peacetime as the RSAF command post but has now become the area where they do administrative communications with their bases. Next there’s a small makeshift plywood and curtained shelter in the hall where the airlifters have a small office that’s used to coordinate the TACC with the Airlift TACC, which is still upstairs in tents on the parking lot. There just isn’t enough room to collocate them together. Upstairs, they plan and publish the ATO for airlift—primarily those C-130s that are now busy moving the XVIIIth and VIIth Corps to the west, landing on desert strips and highway—an untold story.

I enter the TACC and stop at the Air Rescue Coordination Center to check on downed pilots. No bad news. In fact, the news is almost good: an A-10 pilot previously listed as MIA has turned up in Iraq, as shown on CNN. It’s not good that he’s a POW, but it’s better than being MIA.

I stop to talk with people along the way to my place, to see how things are going. Nothing much to report.

When I reach the commander’s table at the front of the room facing the big-screen display, Tom Olsen is sitting in my chair, and Mike Reavy and Charley Harr are to his left. They are probably discussing a request to divert an F-16 package to another target.

I stop by Intel, but there is nothing exciting on their displays. I don’t stay long there, as they are working feverishly to finish some viewgraphs they will use in the changeover briefing at 0700.

Meanwhile, the room is full, because both shifts are there. People are explaining what has been going on and what needs to be taken care of as the day progresses. The night-shift people, who will be back in eleven-plus hours, are looking forward to getting out of the basement and into the open air and riding the bus back to Eskan Village and bed. They will probably stop for breakfast at either the RSAF or the village mess hall before they turn in.