Twenty minutes of “What the hell is going on?” follow, until we realize that it is some of our troops who went sightseeing into Kuwait to check out the wire and mine fields and decided to come home another way (which is code for they got scared and lost, but managed to find a way out).

Event Three: Intel shows a Scud en route to western launch boxes. “Get F-15Es on that.”

They attack four large vehicles with 500-pound bombs and CBUs, and the targets blaze in the night sky. It all probably means that four Jordanian families have lost their fuel-truck-driving fathers on the highway between Baghdad and Amman. Sorry, but they need to stay off the road. It’s dangerous out there.

Event Four: AWACS calls out that an Iraqi helicopter is in the west near the Saudi border and headed west. Two F-15Cs call tally and are cleared to fire by AWACS, since there is no friendly traffic fragged for that area.

Reavy is skeptical, because the Iraqis have pretty much shown good sense about where and when they fly. Thinking it is probably a Special Ops mission, he calls the Special Ops liaison and tells him to get his ass into the TACC (Special Ops had a little private room of their own just outside the TACC).

When the guy comes out, he says the helicopters are not his, and they can die as far as he cares.

Mike Reavy still thinks something is wrong here and tells the major to get his ass back into his secret room to check.

He comes out minutes later, pale as a ghost. They are Special Ops choppers, inbound to a drop zone.

Event Five: The young lady on my left has stopped reading her romance novel and announces a Scud attack in a very loud but controlled voice. The room stirs, but holds off a response. I pick up the master attack list and look at the clock: 1235. Then I scan the TOT listings. Sure enough, there is a flight of three B-52s dropping on the Tawalkana Republican Guard. At 1236, there they are on the AWACS display.

Fifty seconds later, the same young lady in the same very loud but controlled voice announces, “Disregard the Scud alert. False alarm.” (The DSP IR satellites had seen the intense heat across the earth made by a string of bombs and duly reported it to the ground station in Colorado. However, when the watts per steradian did not match the Scud profile loaded into the computer, the event was reported as an “anomaly,” which is space-geek talk for “hell if I know.”)

In between events, I read my mail, lots of it, and I love it all—from Mary Jo, from friends, from people I’ve never met and probably never will. It is a lifesaver for all of us and a great source of energy.