Tapline Road: February 26, 1991

Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

Tue 26 Feb

Up at 0430, loaded by 0500. No breakfast, because of our early departure time. Then we waited for an hour for the 431st and 352nd, who are late; they did have breakfast.

It took until 1430 to get to KKMC. We had MRE's for breakfast and lunch on the bus. The other bus got a broken fan belt, so we had to stop to fix it. We stopped just outside a town called Al-Qaysumah that seemed to subsist entirely on auto salvage. Since the route we took was the infamous Tapline Road, they had lots of business. There was an overturned bulldozer, evidently fallen off an equipment transporter, on the edge of town. The buses had scarcely stopped when a tow truck came by to see if he could drum up a little more business. While we were waiting, I was looking off at the town when CPT Haney remarked that it looked almost Biblical. I replied that I didn't recall any mention of auto junkyards in the Bible!

We arrived at KKMC and waited until 1700 in a driving rain with wind gusts of 40 MPH that shook the bus. The radio was giving bulletins about the rapid ground advance into Kuwait. We grumbled that we were going to spend the liberation of Kuwait in a parking lot at KKMC. Actually, the snafu at KKMC wasn't really anyone's fault; the sergeant we were supposed to see about the paperwork had been sent off on an errand by his CO, and the vehicles at KKMC were in such bad shape that it would have been asking for real trouble to try to return that day. There really was no choice but to spend the night. We went to chow and slept in a dorm building. We had thunderstorms that evening.

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