THE DEFENDER

Pip: THE DEFENDER is back, and today we are going to Saudi Arabia in 1990 — cargo nets for seats, 113-degree air, and a security operation being built from scratch before anyone knew how it would end.

Mara: lonnie fulbright has been documenting Desert Shield and Desert Storm as lived experience — the arrival, the buildup, the journal entries, the waiting. That is the territory we are covering today.

Pip: Let's start with the firsthand account of what it actually felt like to be there.

Gulf War: Ground-Level Accounts of Desert Shield and Storm

Mara: The question these posts put on the table is a serious one — what did Desert Shield and Desert Storm actually look like from inside them, not from a historian's remove, but as someone living through the uncertainty day by day?

Pip: And the framing of the first post does the work immediately. The title names the author directly: "Desert Shield/Storm by Lonnie M. Fulbright (Mike)" — that parenthetical nickname signals this is personal. A human being, not a unit designation.

Mara: The post opens with Tech Sergeant Ray "Cowboy" Craig, in his own words: "I stopped what I was doing. I Put on my BDU uniform without bothering to shave or shower or anything like that (time is VERY critical during a recall). I grabbed my pre-packed Mobility Bag containing enough uniforms and personal hygiene supplies for 30 days in the field, kissed my kids and my then-wife Mary good-bye, got in my brand-new blue Chevy S-10 pickup truck I had just bought the month before, and drove to the base to report in."

Pip: What that quote captures is the gap between the life you were living thirty minutes ago and the one you just entered. A new truck, a family, a retirement plan — all of it receding in the rearview.

Mara: Craig had just returned from a year in Korea. Regulations said he was ineligible for another lengthy deployment for eighteen months. He spent four days telling everyone they were not going. Back at the Law Enforcement desk, a commercial radio was on when the news came in — and the laughter that followed, the post notes, was partly a way to hide what everyone was actually feeling.

Pip: The post is structured as a dual memoir — the narrator's morning running alongside Craig's recall. It also includes the poem "DEFENDERS," making the case that Air Force Security Police were ground soldiers — outside the wire, digging holes — not pilots, not support staff.

Mara: And it ends mid-sentence, after the warhead lands two hundred yards from Bravo 11's position. Which feels less like an oversight and more like the shape of how memory actually works.

Pip: Some stories don't resolve. They just have the concussion and the radio coming alive.

Mara: The continuing account — the post titled "Desert Shield/Storm continued" — picks up on the other side of that aircraft door. The door opens in Saudi Arabia at 113 degrees with ten percent humidity, and the first thing visible from the ramp is sand in every direction. One soldier behind Ray summed it up: "Man, this is the last place I wanna die."

Pip: Not despair exactly — the kind of dark honesty that keeps people functional when the situation is genuinely grim.

Mara: By August 9th, 116 personnel were spread across Alpha, Bravo, and eventually Charlie sectors — flight line, fighter area, command, supply, operations. The supply section's motto was already in full effect: "Nothing is too good for the troops and nothing is what they get."

Pip: A brand-new barracks building already falling apart in real time is somehow the perfect metaphor — everything assembled fast, under pressure, held together by effort rather than quality.

Mara: Episode Four of the series goes deeper into the buildup. The journal entry for August 16th records the section NCO briefing his team outside BDOC: "Alright gentlemen, suspect everything and trust nothing. If it even looks suspicious, call it in. Monitor your radios and keep a watchful eye."

Pip: That is the whole job in four sentences — delivered after almost no sleep, at 06:30, in approximately 110 degrees.

Mara: By August 18th, the official start of Desert Shield, C-5s, C-141s, and contracted commercial planes were landing around the clock. The post eventually names 484 security personnel assigned to the operation, roughly half in the anti-terrorist section. Call signs multiplied — Golf designations for the early critical posts, then a full Charlie sector chart with mobile fire teams and entry control points.

Pip: And a patrol route affectionately called "13 Miles to Nowhere," which probably deserved a better name but got the job done.

Mara: The post is candid about command friction — machine gun positions placed on the wrong side of a divided road, Hummer doors removed for tactical egress, ordered back on, eventually removed again. Decisions the NCOs questioned but could not override. And then on September 29th, out on the far perimeter, two men on patrol have a conversation about faith — right after being briefed on an expected attack window of October first through fifth.

Pip: The journal format makes that land differently than any history book would. The writing here is the archive — and the people who were there are the primary sources.

Mara: What stays across all of these entries is the texture: earplugs, cargo nets, a pallet of sleeping bags nobody would give up, and one NCO keeping track of all of it.

Pip: The waiting, the heat, the improvisation — Desert Shield gets equal billing with the combat phase in these posts, and that ordering tells you something about what the writer thought mattered.

Mara: Firsthand accounts carry weight that secondary sources cannot replicate. More of the record next time.

Pip: THE DEFENDER — where the desert is hot, the MREs are deeply suspect, and the duty roster never sleeps.

Mara: Today we're following one security patrol's firsthand account of Operation Desert Shield and Storm — from bunker construction and bomb threats through the final countdown to January 15th. This is lonnie fulbright's account, written from inside the wire.

Pip: Let's start with the gates, the sandbags, and the so-called Rangers guarding the pool.

Gates, Bunkers, and the Long Wait for War

Pip: These journal entries span roughly four months — late September 1990 through the eve of war — and the question running through all of them is what it actually feels like to watch a deployment shift from tense routine into something with a deadline attached.

Mara: Episode five sets the baseline. Intelligence in early October reported expected attacks between the first and fifth, and the response was concrete and immediate: "Defense just got intensified. We started building bunkers on every gate and setting up additional 60 machine gun pits at Strategic points. We also placed a four-man fire team behind the Pilot's quarters. Intel has it that Terrorist, have been seen in and around the base with some possible Shootings."

Pip: So this isn't ambient unease — it's sandbags, machine gun positions, and credible intelligence about people already inside the perimeter.

Mara: And yet the journal holds both registers at once. The same entries logging bunker construction also describe the MRE game — "Win, Lose, or Draw" — where you pick from a fresh box, keep it or gamble on the old one, knowing the Chicken-a-la-King, nicknamed "Chicken-a-la-THING," is somewhere in the pile.

Pip: Morale management disguised as a game show. Respect.

Mara: Episode five also gives us the self-described Air Force Rangers — a unit deactivated after Vietnam — whose commander assigned them pool guard duty and interior recon despite, as the journal notes, an inability to read a grid map or compass. They missed their own pickup point by four hundred meters.

Pip: The pool. They were guarding the pool.

Mara: Episode six, covering October through November, picks up that same pattern of routine and genuine danger running side by side. A suspicious bundle at Tent City gets EOD called out. A British soldier is nervous about breaking the Humvee. A bomb threat evacuates the barracks at 20:00 and is cleared by 22:15 — and command's response is to ban radios on post.

Pip: Out of that friction comes the BROC — the Bureau of Rock Operations Command — when Sgt Twiggs picks up a rock and argues it has more decision-making intelligence than the base operations center. Which is a very portable grievance.

Mara: Episode six is also direct about what that command distrust looks like from the field: "The commander and his officers don't trust the NCOs, and the NCOs don't trust the officers and those who are in the field. The ones in the field are the ones who know what's going on and should at least be consulted about what will work."

Pip: That tension never resolves — it just gets overtaken by events. November 30th, the UN Security Council votes unanimously, and Saddam has until January 15th to vacate Kuwait.

Mara: And episode six closes on what had become the unit's greatest fear going into whatever came next: "We have heard and it has become our biggest fear was that of Chemical use. We don't know to what extent."

Pip: That's where October and November leave things — mid-preparation, mid-dread.

Mara: Episode seven picks up December into January, and the register shifts. By day 117 in country, Iraq is test-firing Scud missiles, and the base has quietly forgotten it's in a potential combat zone: "Everyone had gotten set into a routine and seemed to forget that we were in a potential combat zone and stopped expecting anything to happen. So as the weeks went by and into one month then two, all of their protective gear got pushed farther and farther back, they stopped carting it and finally no one had any idea where it was."

Pip: So when the Scud report came in, the base essentially had to rediscover that it was deployed to a war zone.

Mara: People in tent city panicked, ran for a back fence, found a single-person gate, and began trying to tear the fence down. Security Police arrived, confirmed the missiles weren't aimed at them, and immediately ordered all gear carried at all times from that point forward.

Pip: The entries through late December track the texture of waiting — a Christmas tree in the bunk room that made homesickness worse, a false alarm air raid siren on the 21st, another Scud test on the 26th, which happened to be his son Andy's birthday.

Mara: By New Year's Eve, LP/OP positions are being added and random vehicle searches run every two hours. Then the January entries count down explicitly: six days, five days, four. AT&T cuts phone service on the 14th. The last call home is logged at 3:46 in the morning.

Pip: And January 14th closes the entry plainly.

Mara: "War starts tomorrow. Ready or not here it comes. On this day Dhahran went from a hazardous duty zone to a combat zone."

Pip: Four months of log entries, and that's where they land — at the edge of something the next entry will have to describe differently.

Mara: What makes this account worth following is exactly that: it was written down as it happened, in real time, before anyone knew how it ended.

Pip: Bunkers going up, a rock with more authority than command, and a last phone call at 3:46 a.m. — that's a deployment in miniature.

Mara: The next entries pick up on the other side of January 15th. The diary doesn't stop there.

Pip: We'll be here when it does.

Pip: THE DEFENDER — where the desert is hot, the MREs are questionable, and the duty roster never sleeps.

Mara: Today we're in the middle of Operation Desert Shield, following one security patrol's daily grind through late September and early October 1990 — the threat assessments, the small absurdities, and the moments that turned serious fast. This is lonnie fulbright's account, written from the inside.

Pip: Let's start with the gates, the bunkers, and the so-called Rangers guarding the pool.

Desert Shield: Gates, Bunkers, and the Pool Detail

Mara: Episode five of this Desert Shield journal covers roughly two weeks of night-shift security patrols — late September into mid-October 1990 — and the picture it builds is one of escalating threat alongside the ordinary friction of military life.

Pip: The threat escalation is real and specific. Intelligence reports expected attacks between October first and fifth, and the response was immediate and concrete.

Mara: The post puts it plainly: "Defense just got intensified. We started building bunkers on every gate and setting up additional 60 machine gun pits at Strategic points. We also placed a four-man fire team behind the Pilot's quarters. Intel has it that Terrorist, have been seen in and around the base with some possible Shootings."

Pip: So this isn't abstract tension — it's sandbags, machine gun positions, and credible intelligence about people inside the perimeter. The stakes are physical and immediate.

Mara: And yet the journal holds both registers at once. The same entries that log bunker construction also describe the MRE game — "Win, Lose, or Draw" — where you pick from a fresh box, keep it or gamble on the old box, knowing the Chicken-a-la-King, nicknamed "Chicken-a-la-THING," is lurking somewhere in the pile.

Pip: Morale management disguised as a game show. Respect.

Mara: The October sixth through seventh entry logs a vehicle stop — a car matching a BOLO description, detained near key locations, with OSI and bomb dogs responding. Nothing came of it, but the machinery of a real security response is all there.

Pip: Then there's Captain Hopper, who dismantled a bunker that A1C Wagner and Rogers spent five days building — rather than have his own people fill sandbags. Wagner and Rogers responded by building a better one.

Mara: The October eleventh entry closes with a genuine incident: a lone individual carrying an AK-47 enters a bank on base. The patrol responds, establishes a 360 perimeter, and waits for Saudi Police who never arrive. Command calls it off — the bank was closed, the person was probably police.

Pip: Probably. Very reassuring.

Mara: But the entry that lands hardest involves the self-described Air Force Rangers — a unit deactivated after Vietnam — whose commander assigned them pool guard duty and interior recon patrol despite, as the journal notes, an inability to read a grid map or compass. They missed their own pickup point by four hundred meters.

Pip: The pool. They were guarding the pool.

Mara: The journal's tone throughout is dry and precise — the kind of account that trusts the facts to carry the weight, and mostly they do. What's remarkable is how naturally the serious and the mundane sit side by side in the same shift log.

Pip: Bunkers going up, Rangers who can't read a compass, and an MRE nobody wanted — that's a deployment in miniature.

Mara: The next entries will keep moving through October. There's more perimeter to walk.

Pip: THE DEFENDER — where the history that usually stays in a footlocker gets its own RSS feed.

Mara: This episode covers lonnie fulbright's ongoing firsthand account of Operation Desert Shield and Storm — a diary from Dhahran as the January 15th deadline closes in. Let's start with the final weeks before war.

Desert Shield/Storm Ep 7

Pip: This entry covers roughly six weeks — December into January — when the question stopped being "will war happen" and started being "how many days until it does."

Mara: The entry opens on December 3rd, day 117 in country, with Iraq test-firing Scud missiles. The diary captures what that moment revealed about the base's readiness: "Everyone had gotten set into a routine and seemed to forget that we were in a potential combat zone and stopped expecting anything to happen. So as the weeks went by and into one month then two, all of their protective gear got pushed farther and farther back, they stopped carting it and finally no one had any idea where it was."

Pip: So when the Scud report came in, the base essentially had to rediscover that it was deployed to a war zone.

Mara: That's exactly what the entry describes. People in tent city panicked, ran for a back fence, found a single-person gate, and began trying to tear the fence down. Security Police arrived, confirmed the missiles weren't aimed at them, and Boomer immediately ordered that all gear would be carried at all times from that point forward.

Pip: Nothing sharpens a gear-accountability policy like a fence that won't cooperate.

Mara: The December 5th entry adds another layer — an official announcement that the 1st TFW would stay six months unless war started, at which point they'd stay until it ended. The Security Police response to that was direct: "We knew that if war were to start we would fight to the last man, the last bullet, our last breath and we would make the enemy pay dearly for his actions."

Pip: That's not bravado. That's a unit that has done the math and accepted the answer.

Mara: The entries through late December track the texture of waiting — a Christmas tree in the bunk room that made homesickness worse, not better, an air raid siren on December 21st that turned out to be a false alarm, another Scud test on December 26th, which happened to be his son Andy's birthday.

Mara: By New Year's Eve, defensive posture is expanding — LP/OP positions added, random vehicle searches every two hours. The January entries count down explicitly: six days to war, five days and counting, four days.

Pip: The January 12th entry notes that AT&T cut phone service on the 14th. The last call home, logged in a diary, at 3:46 in the morning.

Mara: And January 14th closes the entry plainly: "War starts tomorrow. Ready or not here it comes. On this day Dhahran went from a hazardous duty zone to a combat zone."

Pip: The next episode is going to be a different kind of diary entry entirely.

Mara: Six weeks of a countdown, written down as it happened — that's what makes this account worth following.

Pip: The next installment picks up on the other side of January 15th. We'll be here.

Pip: THE DEFENDER — where history gets written one patrol log at a time, sometimes in the dark, sometimes three hours after a bomb threat cut your sleep short.

Mara: Today we're in the middle of lonnie fulbright's firsthand account of Desert Shield, covering October through November 1990 — command friction, field-level ingenuity, and the moment war stopped being hypothetical.

Pip: Let's start with the log entries themselves.

Desert Shield/Storm: October–November 1990

Mara: This episode of the series drops us into a stretch of weeks where routine and genuine danger run side by side — suspicious bundles, bomb threats, battle plan rumors, and a command structure that the people on the ground have very little faith in.

Pip: The suspicious bundle at Tent City sets the tone early. EOD gets called, the scene gets locked down, and a TSgt on site apparently just wanted to walk over and pick the thing up.

Mara: The post puts it plainly: "If he did, and it was a bomb, then we would have sent his pieces back home in a plastic bag."

Pip: That is the entire case for EOD protocol, delivered in one sentence.

Mara: What follows across October is a pattern — short, clipped log entries where nothing happened, then entries where quite a lot happened. A British soldier gets to drive the Humvee and is nervous about breaking it. Captain Christian briefs the unit on a proposed battle plan to let Saddam's forces advance to within 110 miles before cutting supply lines. The troops on the ground think that's a mistake.

Pip: Then on the 19th, a bomb threat evacuates the barracks at 20:00, and by 22:15 it's over — and somehow BDOC's response to all of this is to ban radios on post.

Mara: The post is direct about what that friction looks like from the field: "The commander and his officers don't trust the NCOs, and the NCOs don't trust the officers and those who are in the field. The ones in the field are the ones who know what's going on and should at least be consulted about what will work."

Pip: Out of that frustration comes the BROC — the Bureau of Rock Operations Command, essentially — when Sgt Twiggs picks up a rock and argues it has more decision-making intelligence than BDOC. Which, to be fair, is a very portable grievance.

Mara: The rock makes it all the way to a post check with Captain Christian and SMSgt Green, who are not amused. Repercussions are expected.

Pip: November shifts the register. Mobile Reserve duty is boring — sitting in tents, engine noise from a test cell out back — but Thanksgiving week brings real training: PRC-77 tactical radio, calling fire from an AC-130, NVGs, LAW rockets, claymores.

Mara: And then November 30th. The shift schedule had just changed to eight-hour rotations — a rare good call from command — when Washington made it official. The post records the deadline: Saddam has until January 15, 1991 to vacate Kuwait, with the UN Security Council voting unanimously that military force would be used if necessary.

Pip: The entry doesn't pretend the stakes are simple. It names oil as the real driver, alongside the stated rationale, and closes on what had become the unit's greatest fear going into whatever came next.

Mara: "We have heard and it has become our biggest fear was that of Chemical use. We don't know to what extent."

Pip: That's where the log stops — mid-preparation, mid-dread, waiting for January.

Mara: Thirty-five years on, these log entries still carry the texture of what waiting for war actually felt like — the boredom, the friction, the specific fear.

Pip: Next time, the deadline gets closer. We'll see what the log says when it does.

Pip: THE DEFENDER — where the past isn't buried, it's still on patrol.

Mara: Today we're in lonnie fulbright's journal from the early days of Desert Shield, following one NCO as a small anti-terrorist section grows into a full sector security operation across August and September of 1990.

Pip: Logistics, heat, command friction, a Hummer stuck on sand with all four wheels spinning. The full spectrum.

Mara: Let's start with how that section stood up — and what it actually cost to run it day to day.

Standing Up the Anti-Terrorist Section

Pip: The post drops us into a moment of transition — one NCO moving from routine security duties into something being built from scratch, under real threat, in real heat.

Mara: The entry for August 16th sets the tone early. Before briefing his team outside BDOC, the post records his words directly: "Alright gentlemen, suspect everything and trust nothing. If it even looks suspicious, call it in. Monitor your radios and keep a watchful eye."

Pip: That's the whole job in four sentences. And it's being delivered after a night with almost no sleep, at 06:30, in what the post records as approximately 110 degrees.

Mara: The operation was scaling fast. By August 17th, the threat level had risen enough that an MSgt replaced the author as section NCO, pushing him into a fire team leader role. By August 18th — the official start of Desert Shield — C-5s, C-141s, and contracted commercial planes were landing around the clock.

Pip: And the roster kept growing. The post eventually names 484 security personnel assigned to the operation, with roughly half in the anti-terrorist section.

Mara: The call sign structure tells that story in miniature. The early Golf designations — pilots' quarters, the Army chow hall, the hospital — gave way to a full Charlie sector chart with mobile fire teams, entry control points, and a sector control element.

Pip: A patrol route affectionately called "13 Miles to Nowhere" probably deserved a better name, but it got the job done.

Mara: The post is candid about command friction too. A machine gun position placed on the wrong side of a divided road. Hummer doors removed for tactical egress, then ordered back on, then eventually removed again. Decisions the NCOs questioned but couldn't override.

Pip: And then there's the night of September 29th, out on the far end of the perimeter, when the post records a conversation about faith between two men on patrol — which lands differently once you know they'd just been briefed on an expected attack window of October first through fifth.

Mara: Bunkers going up at every gate, additional machine gun pits, a four-man fire team placed behind the pilots' quarters. The post notes: "Intel has it that terrorists have been seen in and around the base with some possible shootings."

Pip: The Hummer stuck on sand — all four wheels off the ground and spinning — is the one moment in the post that breathes before the weight comes back down.

Mara: What stays with you is the scale of the buildup measured in people — names, call signs, shift rosters — and one NCO keeping track of all of it.

Pip: The journal format makes it land. Next time, more of the same desert, more of the same stakes.

Pip: THE DEFENDER covers a lot of ground — sometimes literally, as in sand, sand, and more sand at Dhahran Air Base in the summer of 1990.

Mara: This episode follows lonnie fulbright's continuing account of Desert Shield and Storm — the logistics, the heat, the improvisation, and the first days of standing up a real security operation on foreign soil. Let's start with the flight in and what waited on the other side of that aircraft door.

Desert Shield/Storm: Arrival and the First Days of Operations

Pip: The question this post is really asking is what it actually took — physically, logistically, mentally — to land in a place you've never been, in conditions you can barely describe, and immediately start defending it.

Mara: Ray's account of the flight sets the tone early. Before the aircraft even started engines, the calculus was already survival-oriented: "He who gets on a military aircraft without earplugs is a fool; he who gets off a military aircraft without earplugs is a deaf fool."

Pip: So the comfort bar was on the floor before wheels-up, and it kept dropping — cargo netting for seats, a refueling stop at Ramstein where nothing was open, and then the door opens in Saudi Arabia at 113 degrees with ten percent humidity.

Mara: The post describes it as stepping into an oven. The first thing visible from the aircraft ramp was sand in every direction — no buildings, no people, no trees. One soldier behind Ray summed it up: "Man, this is the last place I wanna die."

Pip: That line does a lot of work. It's not despair exactly — it's the kind of dark honesty that keeps people functional when the situation is genuinely grim.

Mara: And then they got to work. The security personnel were billeted in a newly finished Saudi barracks — two floors, open bays, window AC units, running water. Better than the tent city going up nearby for other units. The post notes the building was already falling apart, keeping Civil Engineers constantly busy.

Pip: A brand-new building disintegrating in real time is a detail that somehow captures the whole operation — everything assembled fast, under pressure, held together by effort rather than quality.

Mara: By August 9th, with both teams on the ground, the commander divided the area of operations into Alpha, Bravo, and eventually Charlie sectors. The post is specific: 116 personnel total, spread across flight line, fighter area, command, supply, and operations.

Pip: Thin coverage for an active base — though the post makes clear no one was under any illusion about that, and no one was losing sleep over confidence.

Mara: By August 13th, the Anti-Terrorist section was being organized, with the first critical posts assigned — pilots quarters, the hospital, senior officers quarters, the Army chow hall — each with designated call signs, all noted as temporary pending official Desert Shield implementation.

Pip: The supply section's motto, meanwhile, was already in full effect: "Nothing is too good for the troops and nothing is what they get."

Mara: The post covers a lot of ground across those first five days — and the throughline is that the people doing this work were improvising constantly, at speed, in extreme heat, on no sleep, and still building something that held.

Pip: What stays with you is the texture of it — earplugs, cargo nets, a pallet of sleeping bags nobody would give up.

Mara: The next installment will have more to add. There's a lot of operation still ahead.