Memorial Day in Israel 2012- my memory of the Gulf War

http://usa-israel-usa.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-am-not-hero-gulf-war.html “I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War “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 Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home 114 “I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War 115 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. Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home 116 “I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War 117 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 Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home 118 “I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War 119 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 Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home 120 “I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War 121 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. Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home 122 “I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War 123 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, Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home 124 “I Am Not A Hero!” - The Gulf War 125 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.