Military life has a way of rapidly and unexpectedly changing. On Jan. 16, 1991, Air Force Tech Sgt. Chris Johnsen was stationed in Germany with the 23rd Fighter Squadron, assigned to a NATO training exercise, loading training missiles onto F-16s.
He and his fellow airmen worked the night shift, loading the planes with AGM-88 missiles. These weapons seek and destroy radar systems for enemy surface-to-air missiles, flying over Mach 2 and bursting shortly before impact to release a spray of steel cubes to shred the target.
As midnight turned the 16th to the 17th, the maintenance operations center called. “Stop all operations. Go to code book.”
The radio man checked the codes and cursed. “Forget training. We’re going to war. We need to prep the planes for real combat.” The Persian Gulf War had begun.
Live missiles rolled out. Johnsen and his fellow aircraft maintainers were told they’d be on an advance team to a deployed location. Back home, at about 4 a.m., he told his wife he was going to war. Johnsen slept a little, waking to someone pounding on his front door. “I’m here to pick you up. Time to go.”
By that time, his family was away for the day, so he wrote to his wife. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again, but know that I love you and I love the kids. Goodbye.” Not the send-off he’d imagined.
Fortunately, his wife drove to the flight line with the children shortly before Chris and his fellow airmen boarded their C-130. “It was like a romantic movie,” Chris told me. “You run into each other’s arms.”
It was a long flight from Germany to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Upon arrival, he and his fellow maintenance guys were surprised to be handed M-16 rifles. These weapons were still in the original shrink wrap from 1969 and coated in yellow-orange Vaseline-like stuff. No bullets. Ammunition shipped separately. Classic military logic.
By then, Johnsen and his men had been on the go for days. Forget sleep. They were hungry. Finding a pizza place, they eagerly awaited a slice, until a captain came in with a radio. It squawked. He listened and then shouted “Alarm red! Alarm red!”
“Can I get that to go?” Chris asked.
Weather had delayed the rest of the squadron, so it was up to Johnsen’s team. They prepped their planes and then guided them to take off, watching them fly away toward Iraq to go blast the hell out of the forces of Saddam Hussein.
Johnsen’s first 36 hours in the Persian Gulf War were intense. One moment he was training. Hours later, he was helping fight the war.
Eventually, they settled into a routine. Someone finally figured out that aircraft maintenance technicians on a fortified air base in a friendly country don’t require weapons, and so they were all happy to turn in their new, never-fired M-16s. Three months later, Johnsen was sent back to Germany about as abruptly as he’d been shipped to Turkey.
“Landed in Germany. Wife wasn’t at the airfield. Nobody was there.” Nobody answered when he called home. After a long wait, his wife pulled up, furious. She and the other spouses had been told the airmen would return the day before. They’d had a big reception but no plane. Nobody told anyone the airmen would return the next day. More military logic.
They were thrilled to be reunited.
The Gulf War was brief, but Johnsen and his fellow airmen did their duty to help crush the enemy. Was it worth it?
“I believe that if the United States is asked to help, we should. We should be the ones who help and save people,” Chris said. “Yeah, I felt it was pretty righteous.”
I couldn’t agree more.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
