Estimated reading time – 3 minutes
Chapters 26 and 27 – Rockin' the Casbah and Dogs of War
Rocking the Casbah
Hopefully, you recognize the Clash's song, which provides the title of Chapter 25. If you don't, here is a link to a YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The actual title of the song is 'Rock the Casbah,' but I thought rockin' sounded better for the story. The video opens with an Arab in local dress, adding to its appeal.
The arrival of the coalition troops brought many new cultural items, such as the AFRS radio, new fast food outlets, not to mention Bart Simpson. We will return to Bart a little later in the story. The fast food appeared like mushrooms after a rain. The outlets included Wendy's, Taco Bell, and TCBY, but not McDonald's or Coke; those would come shortly after the end of the war.
One of the first noticeable things was the forest-green camouflage in the uniforms and the mechanized armored vehicles. The comment about seeing the tanks go by on flatbed trucks was something I saw firsthand.
The chapter's center episode was based on my encounter in Jeddah in early October 1990. I encountered a couple of soldiers who had recently arrived in the Kingdom from Texas. As related in the chapter, they had little warning of their deployment. One of the oddest encounters was seeing a couple of airmen picking up an order of over a hundred pizzas from the local Pizza Hut.
Now, let's return to the comment about Osama Bin Laden. The encounter between Bin Laden and the Saudi leaders is described in Lawrence Wright's book about 9/11, The Looming Tower. The book is one of the best I have read about the roots and politics of Al Qaeda and the players who created the group in Afghanistan. In chapter seven of the book, he goes into detail about Bin Laden's many attempts to talk the King and senior princes into using his Afghan fighters instead of the Americans. Prince Turki, head of the Saudi Intelligence Agency, whom Wright compares to J. Edgar Hoover, rejected Bin Laden's suggestion and eventually revoked Bin Laden's passport, and Osama moved to Sudan shortly afterward.
Energy, Politics, and Military
Oil Price September 1990 - $28.46 per barrel ($65.94 at 2023 rates)
Oil Price October 1990 - $30.86 per barrel ($71.50 at 2023 rates)
Source – US Energy Information Administration
October 7, 1990
230,000 American Troops are in place. The multinational force numbers over 300,000 men and women from 25 countries. The Pentagon estimates that 430,000 Iraqi troops are in the area of Kuwait. Israel killed 19 Palestinians on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Saddam threatened to use chemical weapons on Israel, and support in the Arab world wavers.
October 8, 1990
Israeli military began distributing gas masks.
October 23, 1990
Bush announced that 145,000 more US troops would be sent to the Kingdom, and on October 24, the US voted to condemn Israel's move to block a UN mission from entering the country.
October 29, 1990
The UN passed Resolution 674, calling for Iraq to cease mistreating Kuwaiti nationals.
Suggested Reading:
The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006
https://www.amazon.com/Lawrence-Wright-Looming-Tower
The Dogs of War
The title comes from Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar Act 3, Scene 1:
"Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." Mark Antony speaks these lines while he is with Caesar's body, building up a rage he will soon unleash. Antony will deliver the famous 'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’ in Scene II. His brilliant sarcasm turns the crowd against Caesar's assassins and leads the crowd to turn against Brutus and the others.
But this is a story about an actual dog of war, not a symbolic one, and it is based on a real event at the hospital. Radar is a working dog, and working dogs are acceptable in many schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Many of the ideas of the uncleanliness of dogs are attributed to the pre-Islamic period. This is the position of Captain Faraj and Marwan.
My wife and I brought a dog with us to Riyadh when we first arrived. To get a visa for the dog, we had to have a veterinary health certificate, which had to be authenticated by the State Agriculture Department to attest that the vet was real. Once this was completed, the paperwork had to be sent to the Saudi Consulate and certified with a large red ribbon across the paperwork. When we arrived at Riyadh airport, I had to take the dog and paperwork into an office at the front of the customs area, where an officer looked at the papers, uncertain about what to do with the dog after making some phone calls and looking over the papers again, he finally released me and the dog. We had to repeat this process (minus the visit to the office) each time we went in and out of the Kingdom with our dog or dogs when we added a second dog a few years later.
Dogs were used by customs in Saudi Arabia for drug screening, but finding a vet was difficult. We were lucky in Riyadh when we found the wife of a diplomatic employee who was a vet and had a practice out of her home. We still had to take her certificate to the Saudi Agricultural Ministry, which was replete with goats, to get the proper certification for the dog to leave. Once at the airport, the ticket agent insisted that the animal we wanted to bring into the cabin was a cat, not a dog, as it was a very small dog. We argued with him, but ultimately we left for the plane with our ‘cat’.
There was a synchronicity with this chapter – when I was writing it a few years ago, I was in the Seattle airport on my way to the boarding area when I saw a woman in a military uniform with a working dog. I spoke with her to ask about how she handles the dog and a few other things. She was in a hurry but did answer my questions.
You will meet Sargent Ward again in a later chapter.
Thanks for reading.