Editor’s Note: This is the fourth of a six-part series leading up to Veterans Day honoring veterans of each American war from World War II through the ongoing War on Terror.
While the Gulf War was going on in Iraq, Marine Sgt. Tim Thornburgh, 58, of Columbia was providing support in Saudi Arabia.
Thornburgh was stationed at Jubail Air Field in 1991 during the end of Desert Shield and all of Desert Storm, transporting soldiers to and from the different bases. He drove a 55-passenger bus that he said was “older than dirt.”
“You had to force the doors open; when you started up the bus because everything was air powered you hear it start popping and wheezing and the bus would start raising itself up on its shocks and everything,” he said.
“It was insane; I had never driven a bus before,” he said.
Thornburgh said the nose of the bus stood out six to eight feet in front of the front wheels. He would have to make turns through gates getting in and out of different bases. He said he took out a few sand bags to the dismay of some of the soldiers.
He said he was with a landing support battalion.
“I wasn’t one of the first ones in, but I was one of the last ones out,” he said.
Once he had to deal with a full plane of about 150 personnel, everyone from majors to a full bird colonel. There were supposed to be trucks to come pick up the luggage and things with the buses to transfer the personnel to one of the camps to be disbursed to different areas. The trucks did not come, leaving officers with loads of luggage. He said he talked to a major who told Thornburgh to get a work crew together to get the bags loaded on the back of one of the buses. The major acted like the situation was of no concern for his importance. Thornburgh discussed the situation with the colonel who declared Thornburgh being in charge. The colonel asked him what needed to be done, and Thornburgh advised him luggage needed to be put on the back of the bus. The colonel immediately set it up to get everyone working to ensure the bus was loaded.
While there wasn’t any front line action, he did have to worry about Iraqi scud missile attacks during this time. After high tensions for about a month, the soldiers’ concerns eased some. If the alarm went off during the night, he said they would make sure all was safe, put on gas masks and go back to sleep.
“It’s amazing what you can adapt to,” Thornburgh said.
He said the soldiers were not scared of being killed, but rather being exposed to chemical weapons or maimed. He said the fear was worse the first month then things calmed down.
The group Thornburg was in the tent with was basically administration for the air wing. He said they thought of themselves something like the “Swamp” on the television show M.A.S.H. He said they once built a recliner out of sandbags for the front porch of their tent.
When the bombing of Baghdad began in January 1991, a lot of people were glued to CNN where news anchor Bernard Shaw and correspondents John Holliman and Peter Arnett were in a hotel reporting night after night from Baghdad. Thornburgh said where they were in Saudi Arabia, more information was coming to the U.S. than to them. He said in their camp was someone who attended high level briefings and that was how they were able to find out what was going on.
He said coming home he didn’t have problems adjusting. Thornburgh said for them the biggest adjustment was spouses learning to be a team again instead of one carrying the weight while the other was away.
Thornburgh served in the Marines for 12 years until under the Clinton’s administration when military cuts were made. Since then he has worked for Pioneer and is currently the quality control engineer at PG Technologies.
