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.