I was in the middle of a body of water east of China\/Russia, west of Alaska, when we got the news posted on the Forward Compartment Middle Level saying that the day before, Saddam Hussein had crossed over the border into Kuwait.<\/p>\n
The thing to know about boats, especially fast attacks, is that there’s no real means of contact with the outside world, or at least not at that time. Mail followed us from port to port, and any notifications from family were in 50-word “familygrams” that were the Navy equivalent of a postcard, with their words having been read upwards of a half-dozen times before finding their intended recipient. So even though all we got on Iraq invading Kuwait was about two sentences, we all knew it was serious.<\/p>\n
The day we got word (August 3rd), US Naval forces were committed to the Gulf region. While I never went to the Gulf for Desert Shield\/Storm, there were a few guys on a few of the boats I knew who did (a couple of my buddies from the nuke pipeline were on the USS Chicago) make it there.<\/p>\n
Where were you when you got word troops were being committed to the Gulf in 1990?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"