Desert Storm Journal site. We were never permitted to see Vietnam’s cabalistic horror in the Gulf.

Wow! It’s serious hammer time out there somewhere relatively near us. I don’t feel overly anxious, nervous, pumped, or fearful. I should say not yet, at least. I'm sure it’ll be one hell-of-a rush when we get in there. Damn! Now I hear C-130s flying, and low too. Can’t see them but they’re out there. Can’t imagine why. The Cobras, F-15s, and F-18s have been buzzing around constantly. I guess the C-130 pilots want some too! I’m sure there is enough to go around. Estimating, it sounds like all the thick shelling is to the NW about five to eight miles. The Cobras and C-130s are flying to our immediate front. Again we can’t see over this damn dune line. Ah...CH-53s are in the mix too (loud fuckers).”

Marine sergeant Don Waybright II made this entry in his diary on February 24, 1991, or G-Day (Ground Offense Day), four days before the Gulf War ended. You can find Sgt. Waybright’s chronicles of the war at his website, the Desert Storm Journal & Photo Gallery (www.geocities.com/SoHo/9782). In addition to photographs and excerpts from his informative journal, Waybright’s site includes a list of Marines killed or wounded in the war, a Persian Gulf veteran locator page, a gun line diagram for his battery of M-198 Medium Towed Howitzers, stories submitted by other Gulf vets, and links to other Desert Storm sites.

Sgt. Waybright explains that because the media covered the Gulf War so completely, when “I returned home friends and family showed me countless numbers of tapes they made of the war. It was odd seeing the events unfold from the ’home front’ vantage point. What I saw and what I had lived through were, for the most part, two different worlds.... [The media] portrayed American personnel as being in relatively safe zones. Many back home feel all we did was fly over and bomb everything. That is not the case. There was a ground war and as with any war there is no way you can ‘win..without having ground units physically walk/roll/fly in and occupy it.”

Soldiers once returned home to family and friends who were ignorant of what they had experienced. Waybright, by contrast, reacted to the estranging effect of returning home and being told, “I know what you went through because I saw it on CNN.” The ease with which this country covered and consumed the Gulf War alienated many veterans: the smug belief we have as members of a postmodern, media-savvy society that no experience or emotion is beyond our reach has never impressed veterans. Marine Fred Matson, for instance, sent a message to the site in which he records a discomfort similar to Waybright’s: “I had some friends (who) gave me a set of Desert Storm videos less than a month after I got back. That was really fucking weird, and I wanted to say, ‘Look, dumbfucks, I just came back from a freakin’ war, don’t you understand that? Why in the hell would I want to watch it on TV?’ I didn’t say that though, because as you said, it was portrayed (even to this day) as a ‘clean war’...an ‘easy victory.’ They could not have understood.” To emphasize that final point, Matson tags on the following anecdote: “The morning of the assault, we were all putting on our MOPP gear, and one of the guys in my unit, LCPL Borka, caught his suit on a piece of concertina wire...and ripped a hole in his trousers. Our gunny had a brilliant idea.... We’d repair his suit with duct tape. So here we are starting a betting pool on how long it would take Borka to die when we got hit with chems. People always think I’m weird after that story, it’s hard for them to understand our lives at the time.”

These soldiers’ stories sound like ones we’ve heard before in hundreds of movies and books, only most of those are by or about Vietnam vets. The Gulf War will never sustain a film industry like Vietnam did. Those of us who watched the Gulf War unfold on TV or who listened to it on the radio (as I did, on Voice of America radio, while living in Italy) were given a decontaminated war, we were never permitted to see Vietnam’s cabalistic horror in the Gulf. The bright desert, with its low dunes and long horizons, holds no secrets: “See,” they told us, “there’s no heart of darkness hiding here.” But can we even compare wars? Is one war — more efficient, lightning-quick, and one-sided—any different from one that’s less so?

You’ll find none of the overwhelming terror in Waybright’s journal that we expect from war narratives. Instead, Waybright concentrates his fear into miniature flashes; in this one-month war, fear was measured by the minute rather than the day. “I will not try to offer my experiences in the desert as a universal one for all the line personnel,” Waybright says. “I will not even offer mine as a representation of my unit’s or my team’s experience. What I have to share is just mine. We all have our own stories. Mine is but a small piece of the overall big picture.... They say the war only lasted one hundred hours. It was longer than that. And when the shooting began, we lived our lives one minute at a time.” Fifteen minutes or 365 days, both are a long time to be scared — longer than most of us know.