War in Iraq all too real for Gulf veterans

By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer

Frederick Sinenci Jr. is a Gulf War veteran who finds himself in front of the television every night, watching the war against Iraq.

Soldiers from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division pass a Black Hawk helicopter at Camp New Jersey in the Kuwaiti desert before the start of the war with Iraq. Advertiser library photo

She said: "I don't know what is going through your mind right now, but let me just say this: You've had your chance, and that's it. You're not leaving me home alone with four kids."

Eric Pacheco feels the pull. An Apache helicopter pilot during the first Gulf War, Pacheco now flies a rescue helicopter for the Maui Fire Department. Between missions, he watches the war on the television in the fire station. The reasons behind the new conflict are tied up in politics, he said, but he relates to the men and women in the desert far too much to join the war protests.

"Part of me feels I could do something to help those people who are there," Pacheco said. "That downed helicopter the other day? The crew members were maybe 24 years old. I've been flying now for 20 years. If I could just save one person, send one person home to his family ... "

Pacheco has seen downed helicopters before. It doesn't take much for him to see the one that occupies his mind a lot these days, playing out behind his eyelids. He walks toward the wreckage of the Black Hawk like he did before, counting and recounting the crewmen he can see, reaching out his hand to the pilot.

The pull to war is one of many emotions nearly 700,000 Gulf War veterans are likely to feel as they watch the new war on their televisions, according to Steve Molnar, a counselor and team leader for the Honolulu Vet Center.

Many of them, Molnar said, are watching two wars play out: one on television, the other in their memories. Their reactions are as varied as the men and women who served.

"I don't envy them, those young guys out there," said Quin Cardona.

Cardona, a former Marine who now sells Hondas for a living, hears about sandstorms in the Gulf and remembers how that trick of nature made a tough life even tougher.

"I remember trying to go to the bathroom during a sandstorm," he said. "Boy, you talk about sandpapering your rear end."

Long, hot days and cold nights are among Cardona's memories. He remembers hopeless, resigned looks on the emaciated faces of captured Iraqi soldiers, and food they carried in their pockets that looked and felt like rocks. It was sad, he said, to see grown men cry.

Cardona remembers fear.

"Have you seen pictures of the way people die from those nasty chemical or blood agents?" he said. "It is such a nasty way to die. When we got the signal: 'Gas! Gas! Gas!' I remember pulling my mask on so tight my head was pounding ... "

Fear, said Trina Prince, a Gulf War medic, was a condition she choked down the first night of the ground war.

"I was set up as perimeter guard," she said. "And it started pouring rain. I remember thinking to myself: Am I going to see someone coming? Will it be my fault when someone back there gets killed?"

The worries built: What if she saw her first casualties and froze?

When the rain stopped, the casualties came and Prince discovered adrenaline mixes well with military training. She didn't have time to deal with fear and worry.

"You just go," she said. "You've been trained. You know what to do and you just do it."

Pacheco, the helicopter pilot, said he also operated by the numbers when the stress levels rose. Sometimes, he said, the war just seemed like a high-tech video game played in the desert. You did what it took to get yourself to the target, and you tried not to get shot down. That was it. The only exception, he said, was the decision to abort.

When 50 percent of the helicopters on a mission were downed or crippled, someone had to make the call to abort.

Pacheco couldn't see all the crew members when he approached the Black Hawk wreckage in the desert, but he figured they were scattered about somewhere. He'd find them. First, he needed to check on the man in the pilot's seat. He put his hand out and touched the pilot's shoulder. The man swung in his seat, face turning toward Pacheco.

"Those big bombs, you know," Cardona said, his eyes drawn toward "shock and awe" scenes on the television screen at Pflueger Honda. "Those 1,500-pound bombs ... if they don't kill you with the shrapnel, just the vacuum that they create will suck the wind out of you. Collapses your lungs."

Maj. Trey Johnson, an Army Ranger, was there during the first Gulf War. While others fought to free Kuwait, Johnson's unit prepared for secret operations "deep in Iraq." They practiced endlessly, but the call never came.

He was transferred to the University of Hawai'i ROTC program, where he helped to boost enrollment. Some of his fellow Rangers were sent to Somalia, where they found themselves caught in the worst firefight since Vietnam.

Johnson, who is on a call-up list for the war, works the phones, bucking his chain of command and politicking for a second chance.

"It isn't guilt," he said recently, "and I don't want to be a cowboy."

He just gets a feeling in his gut, he said. It may be duty or obligation. It may be unfinished business.

"Patriotism," said Bob McDermott, former state legislator and Gulf War Marine who said he feels the pull, too. McDermott finds it hard to believe there are people who don't. He said the war is just and America is doing the right thing.

"Sometimes, it isn't cool to be patriotic, but my generation was proud," he said.

McDermott wanted his four children, now ages 12 to 18, to take an interest in military service. He wanted them to sign up for ROTC or junior ROTC. They wouldn't. He took them to Memorial Day services. They still didn't see the attraction. No matter.

"I love them very much," McDermott said.

The pilot who turned in his seat when Pacheco touched him wasn't exactly the man Pacheco had known, had played cards with only a few nights before. This man was dead. There were supposed to be eight people in the Black Hawk but when Pacheco counted, the number kept coming up short.

McDermott said he never saw action when he was in the desert, never fired a shot. He knew he was in a war zone by the series of alarms that were raised: Scud alerts, gas alerts, air-raid alerts.

The alerts got so old, said Emanuel Ochoa, a Gulf War veteran who recently moved to Hawai'i, that after a while he and some of the other soldiers became indifferent.

"People just said, 'Yeah, yeah, I'll go to my defensive position as soon as I finish my cigarette,' " Ochoa said. He said he couldn't see the point of the first war and has even more problems with this one. The Saudis seemed to hate Americans more than the Iraqis did, he said. He thinks the Bush administration is lying about something — or everything.

Ochoa, who joined the peace movement, writes out his views and posts them on the Internet. On the first night of the war, during a protest in Waikiki, two of the men who marched with him said they were active-duty military.

Pacheco, the Apache pilot who thinks war protests should stop when war begins, could find only five bodies near the Black Hawk wreckage in '91. The others had been taken prisoner. Pacheco remembers how his mind ran wild with thoughts of what would happen to Americans in the hands of Iraqis. When he talked to one former prisoner a few years later, he learned he was partially right.

The image of the Black Hawk wreckage, for Pacheco, is one of those war scenes that has been "burned onto the hard drive forever." He saw it again after he heard American helicopter pilots had been taken prisoner.

In a way, Pacheco said, he wished the television networks would have shown the video the Iraqis had released later: tortures, executions — all of it. It would have been horrible, he said. But maybe, for those who have always slept in warm beds, it would have made the war real.

Reach Karen Blakeman at kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2430.