“I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War

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“I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War
The Jews have an expression that we repeat every year while reading
the Passover Haggadah, or the story of the exodus from Egypt: “In
every generation someone arises to smite us, and we nonetheless prevail.”
During the Gulf War of 1990-1991, we heard another expression
from Nachman Shay, a radio announcer entrusted with keeping the
Israeli home front population informed about Scud missile attacks
in a relaxed and cool manner: “Na-avor gam et zeh,” which translated
means “we will get over this too.” This became a huge catchphrase of
the first Gulf War and it was repeated during many Israeli television
shows of the time. It was Saddam Hussein’s threat that he was going
to “burn half of Israel” that scared me the most. I think many Israelis
who had become accustomed to hearing these threats from Arab
nations took this one in stride or did not even pay attention at first.
Yet early on, I felt that this threat was different and ominous. I felt
that this threat was not like any other threat, for it was made by an
Arab leader that had already used chemical weapons on his people.
Saddam Hussein surely wanted vengeance for the Israeli Air Force
attack on the Iraqi nuclear plant in Baghdad in 1981.
Up until this point, living in Israel proper was relatively peaceful.
We had a resolute Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, who would
protect us. In spite of this, Israel still had to be concerned with the
buffered and fenced border of Lebanon to the north, the Palestinians
in the volatile West Bank and Gaza, and the PLO exiled to Tunisia.
Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, meanwhile, fortunately kept relatively
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quiet thanks to various UN negotiations, peace treaties, agreements
made behind closed doors, and an electric fence. We felt secure inside
Israel proper except for the occasional terrorist attack. These,
when foiled, gave Tza’hal (the Israeli Army) a good name, granting
Israel confidence in that she would be able to dictate the terms of a
lasting peace. With terrorist attacks down to an all-time low at the
time after the first Lebanon War and before the first Intifada, Israel
felt it had deterred Arab attacks on the whole. During this time
period, there were fewer than two dozen casualties versus hundreds
killed in an Arab war. For comparison, in 1948, a full one percent
of the population was a casualty.
When Saddam Hussein rose to power, though, he became the
fly in the ointment. He called for Tel-Aviv to “burn,” not unlike
the big mouth from Iran today. Note that Hussein used the word
“burn.” In this context, “burn” is a code name for a chemical attack;
chemicals burn the flesh down to the bone. We knew that he had
chemical weapons and missiles; he used them in his ten-year war
with Iran. Iraq also had battle experience. Israel asserted that she
could beat Egypt, Syria, and Jordan independently or collectively
in a war because Israel has “more real time battle experience” fighting
terrorism. Here, however, was a vindictive Iraq with a motive,
with battle experience, and with dangerous unconventional weapons,
vying for leadership in the Arab world. Soon, a real fear grew in
Israel – a fear that a reckless Iraq would join forces with Syria or
Jordan to form a coalition of Arab armies poised to decimate Israel’s
largest and quietest border to the east.
By December 1990, six months passed since Iraq invaded
Kuwait. Operation Desert Shield by the UN coalition had not
begun as of yet. At this time, I had just begun working as a biofeedback
practitioner for about two months in the Tel-Aviv Mental Day
Care Clinic at Ramat Chen, a suburb outside Tel- Aviv. Living in Haifa
in an apartment I purchased overlooking the coast, I traveled two
hours every day to work in Ramat-Chen by public transportation.
I had just finished my master degree in medical sciences and neurophysiology
at the Haifa Technion Technical Institute’s medical
school. I took the job position at Ramat-Chen as an opportunity
to move from medical diagnostics (sleep wake disorders and EEG)
to something more behavioral and people oriented (biofeedback). I
was drawn to biofeedback as a profession ever since I took a course
in medical hypnosis. I always loved the study of psychology and
started out in college majoring in psychology. However, my grades
on exams did not reflect the effort I put in as well as I had hoped.
In my opinion, the questions were too theoretical in nature; I needed
more substance, so I switched my major to combined physiological
psychology. In this more concrete and practical branch of
psychology, the exam questions were more clear-cut and scientific
rather than being open to interpretation. In retrospect, if I had
known what I wanted out of life at the time that I was in college,
I should have majored in clinical or research psychology. Instead,
the change I made then ended up leading me astray, deeper into the
medical diagnostics field instead of the behavioral field. Biofeedback
would later lend me a chance to come full circle and work in what
I initially wanted.
Coming February 1991, all that stood between me and the completion
of a thesis was the oral exam. Of course, living in Israel
meant that you knew a war with an Arab state could happen at any
time, without warning. Even as far back as my very first weeks of
working at the Technion in December 1984, I overheard a staff secretary
talking about the 1982 Lebanon War. Still fresh in her mind,
she lamented aloud: “all the Technion students that had died…so
many students.” Now that I was a student in Israel too and at the
Technion, any new war that might arise would naturally be the last
thing I could possibly want for obvious reasons, yet I could not hope
to control the events to be. Iraq started a war and she invaded…
Kuwait, at first. Six months later, Israel was next in Iraq’s sights.
The Gulf War was on, and Iraq threatened to use Israel as a hostage.
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If anyone attacked Iraq, she would burn Tel Aviv or Saudi Arabia–
again, not bomb, but “burn.”
Everyone, especially those in the pan-Arab society wondered why
Iraq invaded Kuwait instead of attacking Israel. “Oh Saddam”, they
wailed amongst themselves – “was it for power? Was it for money?
Was it for leadership of the Arab world?” The attack on Kuwait was
the Joker in the deck of cards for the design of pan Arabism.
In the midst of all of this, Israel was merely a decoy. Whether
she was a decoy or target made little difference, though – she was
still between a rock and a hard place. Constant wonder and fear
raced through everyone’s minds.
Will Saddam deliver the chemicals by plane or by Scud missile?
Are the Scuds accurate weapons?
Do the Scuds have a long enough range to reach Israel without
falling on Jordan first?
How will the jets attack us?
Would the Scud war heads be of chemical mustard gas, nerve
agents, biological poisons or anthrax?
The answers the public received were not entirely comforting, yet
they offered some solace since they helped us understand the threat as
best we could. We soon learned that the Scuds can hit large cities, but
they are not accurate enough to hit smaller army targets. This meant
that they also can’t hit you if they are aiming right at you, but if the
Scuds are aiming away from you, there would still be a higher chance
that they could end up swerving in your direction. On TV and in the
newspapers, we are shown photos of Israel moving anti-aircraft missiles
out in the open to the eastern border, through a mountain rift
in the desert between Jordan and Syria, of course. You would think
we would feel secure from this display, but these are the same missiles
used in the Vietnam War. These anti-aircraft missiles may be effective
against fighter planes, but not for ballistic missiles and Scuds.
The pessimists droned on about another holocaust or just left
the country, yet everyone else worked remarkably hard together to
keep Israel’s spirit and conviction strong. Engineers became instant
media experts talking about the latest in weapons technology to the
point where you could have completed engineering school if you
paid close enough attention. Psychologists discussed mental, emotional,
and spiritual casualties of war in the average person’s mind
and the need to “talk it out” to survive it all. Medical professionals
panned over what chemical and biological weapons can do to the
body, and politicians stressed being strong in the face of adversity.
Rabbis recalled miracles of the past, happening again but Nachman
Shay talked to us, the ordinary citizens, through our radios about
getting over this bridge on stormy waters.
Army officials, meanwhile, took every chance to reassure us
about modern warfare by talking to every newspaper, news radio,
and news TV station in Israel. The Israeli Army and the Civilian
Guard worked hard to give the survivors of the Holocaust generation
a sense of security and a sense that Israel can defend herself even
against unconventional weapons. While all you could hear about was
the war and its mass destruction, the Israeli Army and the Civilian
Guard stressed that the only real defense we have if we are attacked
is retaliation. The more of the population wiped out in a first strike,
the stronger the retaliation. Israelis in the know understood this as
code for “if the Scuds are conventional, Israel will destroy the Iraqi
infrastructure”…but if the Scuds kill too many people, Israel will
attack the higher echelon and even tell us which neighborhoods they
live in so the other side understands Israel is serious. If the Scuds
are unconventional, Israel will fight fire with fire, hinting it will go
nuclear if pushed to the brink. The code word for that was
“The lesson will be very, very painful and unexpected in its intensity.”
Fortunately, Saddam waited. He flinched. Maybe Israel was just
a diversion away from his invasion of oil-rich Kuwait. Maybe Israel
did not have enough oil to bother with. Maybe he expected
a weak world response and an American weakness indicative of a
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post-Vietnam mentality. It could be that he never really cared about
the Palestinians and their cause, just supplied lip service. In the end,
Saddam did not foresee the coalition of forces that joined against
him. The war was over before it started. Israel cleverly took the
unexpected defensive, with the notion this time that a good defense
makes for a good offense. Saddam failed to anticipate this strategy
as well, and it actually foiled his plans to get other Arabs on his side
to start another Arab-Israeli war with the focus away from his invasion
of Kuwait. As part of their defensive strategy, Israel decided
to supply the whole population with gas masks – Jews, Christians,
Arabs, and even pro Hussein Intifada-prone Palestinians. This is
a little known fact, that Israel supplied her then-enemy the Palestinians,
with gas masks. Even though Yassir Arafat supported and
visited with Saddam Hussein publically, the Palestinian people were
just as scared as the rest of us. They knew that the wind could blow
from Tel-Aviv to their cities only a few miles away. What if a chemical
missile from Iraq missed and landed in the Palestinian territories,
only a few minutes away by car from the Israeli green line?
Layer’s of protection was the key to Israel’s defensive strategy. In
addition to the gas masks, everyone was instructed to have a sealed
room in the house. Plastic sheets were used to cover all the windows
and openings and these were taped down. Everyone did it. It was a
hardware store field day. Can you imagine the hottest item for sale in
Israel was duct tape?
We waited in lines to get gas masks fitted for the whole family,
children included. It was the modern day family affair, like going to
a science fair. My daughter Limor was only 3 months old at the time.
Since she was just a baby and could not put on a gas mask, so she
would have to be placed in a plastic chamber that looked like the incubators
used in the neonatal ICU. The chamber was complete with
holes for hands to enter without letting in contaminated air and had
a battery operated fan ventilation system through charcoal filters.
We then had to practice drills with air raid sirens that would go off
and give us about 10 minutes to enter our sealed rooms. During the
last couple of years people of Sderot, Israel, given their proximity to
missile launches from Gaza, found themselves in an even more difficult
situation with half that time to seek protection.
The air raid sirens were perched atop schools, and one was across
the street from us. United States Navy missile cruisers began to enter
Haifa port on their way to the gulf. As a volunteer for the American
in Israel version of the USO Navy Home Hospitality Program, I
was invited with a group of other members to board a missile boat
and visit. The captain of the ship gave a speech on how the USA was
going to the gulf to protect world peace and stand by Israel…and
that’s exactly what they did. Here I was, an American in Israel, on
an American missile ship in an Israeli port, sending her off to war.
I could never have imagined that! I understood then what it meant
for America to have Israel as an ally, a friendly port halfway around
the world from American shores.
When the war began, the allies started their bombing raids on
Iraq. I was happy that Saddam was going to get his. It was night
in Israel and we all went to sleep in the designated plastic-covered
window security room, not knowing what tomorrow would bring. I
kept the radio on and it was now announced that a code word on
the radio in addition to the outdoor sirens was Nahash Tzeffa (Viper
snake).
Lo and behold, at about 2 AM – not even the light of next day
yet – we heard multiple alarms.
Oh my G-d. It’s real!
As Nena’s song “99 Red Balloons” says, “this is it boys, this is
war!”
Hurry! Get up! Put the cloth across the doorway airspace. Shut
the shutters. Turn on the lights. Get out the boxes with the gas masks.
Have them ready. Wait for the radio announcement to open the seals
over the boxes with the gas masks. Call down to the neighbors and
make sure they got out of bed. Ten minutes passed by, and I heard
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two soft and distant thuds. It did not sound like anything I have ever
heard before. Where did the thuds happen? I could not look out the
shuttered window.
The radio crackled: Nahash Tzeffa, Nahash Tzeffa, this is not a drill, open
up your mask kits and put them on. Seven scuds just landed all over Israel including
Haifa. Special armored vehicles just donated from Germany are checking the damage
sites to determine if the missiles have chemical warheads. I open the seal on
the mask kits and made sure my family did the same. My neighbor
below was a little slow in closing the blinds. Since we lived on the
Carmel Mountain above the Haifa Bay, we had a panoramic view
all the way to the Lebanon border. He witnessed Scuds landing
on a large shopping mall on the coast that was only just built and
another two Scuds landed in the sea. He called us by phone from
his downstairs apartment to notify us it’s for real. He didn’t dare
leave his plastic security room either so we communicated by
phone. The mall, Lev Hamifratz, Heart of the Haifa Bay, was later
nicknamed “Scud Mall” and became a tourist destination with
before and after photographs proudly displayed on the walls. Talk
about the Israeli way to turn a negative into a positive! Saddam was
aiming for the large Haifa oil refinery next to the mall. He missed,
but only by a half mile or so. Not bad for an inaccurate Scud missile
coming all the way from Iraq. It’s unsettling to imagine what
damage he could have done even if the missile did hit the refinery
grounds.
On the news, the adults were told to put the gas masks on even
before the children so that we could help them. Limor was a baby
that had a very loud colicky scream, but as our first miracle of the
Gulf War, Limor became suddenly quiet in the Mamat (the neonatal
gas protection chamber). She quit crying and acted as if she liked
the closed space. I took off a sealer used to keep the charcoal in the
filters fresh then I put on the mask myself. Outside and above in the
sky, I heard what must have been dozens and dozens of jet fighters
fly overhead towards Jordan on the way to Iraq for retaliation.
Suddenly, I was hit by a strong stench of something that smelled
like ammonia. Was it coming from inside the mask, or was it coming
from the room? I was trapped, for I could not take off the mask to
hunt down the source of the stench.
Was I breathing in gas?
Since I did not shave my beard, did I have a poor gas mask seal?
Does poison gas have an ammonia smell?
How did the gas get into the sealed room so fast?
If this is real gas, I would have little time to act.
Wearing my gas mask, I checked the windows and found them
unbroken. Adrenaline pumping, I cursed the whole idea of the sealed
room. Saddam could shoot two missiles at once – one to break the
windows, and one to launch the poison gas. What a waste of time!
I glanced at Limor, safe and sound in the closed-off mamat, and
asked my wife and daughter Shanee if they smelled ammonia. You
could talk with the mask on. They did not smell anything. I was
the only one!
What was I going to do? The smell was real and I was breathing
it, and I use to have asthma. I began to worry that this would trigger
an asthma attack while I am wearing the mask. I was supposed to
be the leader of the sealed room. What if it really was poison gas?
What else could it be? I had to survive, didn’t I?
There was a syringe in the gas mask kit with epinephrine used
to accelerate the body’s immune system in case of poison. Unfortunately,
there was no attachment for testing room air. I rifled through
the kit and found instructions on how to inject yourself but the
instructions were written in Hebrew only with a few visuals. I spoke
Hebrew well, but these were not common day-to-day Hebrew words,
so I had to improvise. I looked at the syringe and it had one color on
top and another on the bottom, one side green, and the other red.
When you press on one of the sides, the needle is suppose to eject
out into your thick thigh muscle.
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It was a fifty-fifty shot, but I had to survive to help my family.
I held the syringe up high, thumb on one end and brought it down
briskly into my thigh. Fifty-fifty, green or red…and I got the wrong
fifty. A sharp and serious needle shot right through my thumb,
somehow missing the bone. Pain coursed through my hand as some
of the epinephrine blasted through my thumb muscle, kicking my
heartbeat into hyperactive mode for what would become a good few
hours.
I ripped off the mask and breathed the dreaded room air, it was
better than choking to death. Israel was at war for less than 20 minutes,
and I was already a casualty, a causality of self induced chemicals,
and a statistic. The bright red blood dripping from my thumb
was my red badge of courage.
Unfortunately, there were about 20 deaths in the Gulf War, with
only one as a result of a direct rocket hit. It was sadly from friendly
fire from an exploding Patriot Missile that crashed into a house. The
other casualties ended up being from stress and gas mask related
injuries. People did not follow the instructions to take off the new
mask sealer before wearing their masks and choked to death. Others
died from the injections due to the shock to the body. I was lucky
then that I muddled up the injection, sending a smaller dose into my
body via my thumb instead of my thigh. Finally, years later, I would
find out that the ammonia smell in the mask was a cleaning agent
for sterilizing any masks that were used and not new. There was no
warning about the smell. In my hose hold only my mask was previously
used.
The Israeli fighters were already over Jordan when they were called
back to base. The Scuds then were fitted with conventional warheads.
It turned out that Saddam did have chemical weapons with the ability
to deliver them by Scuds, but he never did use them. He still kept
us guessing the whole war, even up to the very last missile barrage.
He saved that option in case he was going to be captured. The brave
infamous Arab leader, found hiding in a rat hole after the second
Gulf War, never used his card to attack Israel, the so-called “Zionist
Enemy”. In the end, we saw that Saddam was more interested in
surviving than in “burning half of Israel”. Each Israeli family that
strapped gas masks on that first night, was braver than he was.
America eventually sent Patriot missiles to Israel so that Israel
would feel secure and not retaliate, which would threaten the cohesion
of the allied coalition. This maneuver would allow America to
build a coalition against Iraq that included other Arab nations – even
with Syria, which was technically at war with Israel. The Patriot missiles
were set up on mountain tops and by the Tel-Aviv coast. One
of these missile posts set up on the Carmel Mountain ridge outside
Haifa University was a five minute ride from my home. Manned
with joint American and Israeli crews, it was the first time Israel allowed
foreign troops, American soldiers, in defense of Israel on her
soil. I passed by a missile battery on my way to work in Tel-Aviv. By
a twist of fate, my father worked for a company called Anderson
Laboratories just outside Hartford, Connecticut that was involved in
the manufacturing of the Patriot missile. My Dad told me by phone
that the Patriot missile is a very good system that will lend us protection.
That conversation gave me a sort of peace of mind and a false
sense of security. The missiles were more effective against fighter jets
than Scuds, but thankfully Saddam did not know that. I wondered
how my father felt speaking to his son far off in a foreign land and
at war, having a conversation like this.
About 40 missiles in 19 different volleys fell only during the
nights in a period of a month. That’s because the Iraqis were afraid
the American air force would detect the missile launchers, so we
were told. During the day, I traveled from Haifa to my workplace in
Tel-Aviv. The war was still raging, and I had to take my master thesis
oral. I completed a study comparing the sleep waves in the EEG of a
comatose patient to normal sleep, which I entitled “Density Spectral
Array, Evoked Potentials, and Temperature Rhythms in the Prognosis
of The Comatose Patient.” The exam, by hospital neurosurgeons,
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would be early in the morning at the Rambam Medical Centre in
Haifa. Driving from my house in Nesher, and out in the open, was a
very uncomfortable feeling. I had my traveling gas mask kit with me,
and wore a long sleeve shirt and jacket in case of a chemical attack.
It was 6: AM and the morning news came on. It always started with
the well-known Jewish prayer: Shema Yisrael, Hashem Eloheynu, Hashem
Ehchad. “Hear Oh Israel the Lord is our G-d, the Lord is one.” This
prayer, brought down through the ages from the Bible, is said when
awakening in the morning, before bed, and before death. I recited
the Shema that morning driving to the medical center, praying that I
would be able to complete my degree. When I arrived, I found it surreal
that inside the labs, it was business as usual for the doctors. They
did not even ask me how I was holding up; it was naturally expected
that I would put on a face of doing just fine. In the midst of that
bizarre calm, I passed the exam. The research I conducted on coma
and sleep later won the International Carskadon Award for Excellence
in Sleep Research by a technologist. I guess that good things
do come out of hard places, if they only knew.
At the biofeedback lab, we used relaxation techniques to help
people suffering from anxiety to prepare to wear their masks when
the alarms may sound. School-age children would bring in their
parents to the clinic to have them instructed on how to put on the
masks. One night, a Scud missile collided with Patriot right above
Ramat-Chen, bringing about the friendly fire casualty mentioned
earlier while damaging the biofeedback lab. A television news crew
raced to the scene and also visited the biofeedback lab to report
on the psychological terror and counter-psychology measures of the
biofeedback lab! Sometimes, fate knocks when you least expect it.
On site, the news crew filmed me using biofeedback relaxation machines
for the Ramat-Chen anxiety patients. The news story came on
late that same night. I was to be on Israeli television! Most people
were now staying home nights and watching the high-quality programs
Israeli TV was just now providing. The movie The Deep was to
follow the nightly news with the alluring, bikini-clad Jacqueline Bisset.
Needless to say, a lot of people were looking forward to that
night’s film. As fate would have it, my segment would end up having
quite a large audience since it was the last news feature introduced just
before the station screened The Deep. The Israeli anchorman boomed
about a new psychological “secret weapon” being introduced to
fight a psychological war: it was biofeedback. I was now using the
“secret weapon” in a psychological war, teaching people to control
their anxieties. The next day, every person I met, mentioned seeing
my segment on the news. Once the war concluded, a documentary
named Nahash Tzeffa (Viper Snake) was compiled of the news stories
of the war, and my news segment made the final cut.
Psychologists were considered the heroes of this psychological
warfare, and I was the TV example used for a new secret weapon,
biofeedback.