The Night the Nation Stood Still

by Guy Miller, Vice Chair Emeritus, Chennault Aviation and Military Museum

I came home from the office on January 17, 1991 and walked into the house just as I had on most work nights.  But this night was not most nights.  As I came through the door my wife rushed up to me and said we were at war.

The American attack against Iraq had started right in the middle of the national network’s evening news broadcasts.  Our TV picture alternated between newscasters and an eerie green nighttime view of Baghdad.  The live view of Baghdad was green because the video was being shot using a night vision scope.

As we realized what was happening we quickly decided 4 year-old Jon did not need to see this.  We also didn’t know how we would answer any questions he might ask.  We took him upstairs and sat him down in front of a Disney movie.  Our daughter was only 17 months old so she was more interest in toys and food.

Nancy and I just sat silently and watched the assault in real time.  We saw darkened downtown Baghdad and its fuzzy mushroom shaped TV tower in the center background.  There were quick flashes in the dark sky as anti-aircraft shells burst.  There were larger and brighter flashes on the ground where American missiles were impacting.  We had no idea of exactly what was happening and neither did the talking heads who occasionally interrupted the green and black view of the attack.  Mostly the newscasters were quiet because they had nothing more of substance to say following their first words on the situation.  The U.S. was at war and it was scary to us civilians who were learning about it via live newscasts.

Going to work the next morning was surreal.  I rode a commuter bus to work since the bus stop was conveniently at the end of our street.  That morning everyone on the bus sat silently in the dark.  There was no chatting among friends, no reading a newspaper or a book.  No one knew what to think.  All seemed dazed. The U.S. was at war.

As of that point, the onset of Desert Storm was a unique experience in my life.  I had never seen the people of our country seem to stop in their tracks and then cautiously go about silently and with unfocused eyes.  September 11 of course had a similar impact upon the public but that was a decade in the future.  The Cuban Missile Crisis had thrown the public into a state of fear much more intense than this nighttime onset of war but in 1962 the public had time to process the ongoing news and to begin to prepare for a feared nightmare situation which ultimately did not occur.  In a like fashion the war in Vietnam not start abruptly but progressed somewhat slowly and with smaller scale events before any large scale American combat.

There were various American military actions in Africa and elsewhere in the 1980s but those never registered as anything to worry about.  The 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon just made us sad and angry.  The Soviets shooting down the Korean airliner in 1983 was scary because we didn’t know if it would lead to war but it didn’t disrupt the American public in quite the same way as the later Baghdad attack.  In 1983 we worried and talked but we talked; we didn’t sit in silence.  The invasions of Grenada and Panama seemed more like military war games than real wars.  You may argue that Americans knew war with Iraq was a possibility with the prior military built up during Desert Shield.  That may be true but no one then really thought war would happen.  I guess we all felt things would de-escalate as they usually seemed to.

Maybe your recollections of the time are not the same as mine but in my experience the first night of Desert Storm was just different.  Perhaps we didn’t expect war to actually happen.  Perhaps the world had grown smaller over the years and news reporting had become more immediate, more graphic and with more live reporting.  Perhaps it was seeing it happen without warning during an otherwise everyday news cast.  Very likely a major factor was the eeriness of watching things unfold in night vision green and black with no comprehension of what we were seeing or what it meant.

Desert Storm day one was just different.  America went from playing strategic chess with Iraq to suddenly shooting missiles in preparation for a ground attack.  There was a real fear that this military action, unlike others in the past couple of decades, had the potential to go nuclear- if not against the U.S. mainland then against our Middle East bases, ships and area allies.  And once someone set off a nuke, who know where that would lead.

Desert Storm day one was just different.  But the trance-like feeling that overcame the American public would not last.  Once ground forces commencing moving against Iraq it quickly became obvious that the Iraqi opposition was neither fearsome not intense.  There was combat and there were causalities but our forces moved quickly and seemingly without great difficulties to their objectives.  We at home settled back into somewhat complacantly watching the news for updates on daily progress much as we had during the 1982 Falklands war between Britain and Argentina.  We Americans tend to move on pretty quickly after any disruption to our lives.