TWO RECALL EXPERIENCES OF 1991 WAR

Dawn Wise of Sikeston, Mo., remembers the roar of Scud missiles arcing overhead as she pulled night guard duty in the Saudi desert. The Iraqi missiles sounded like airplane engines, she said.

"You'd hear them going over," she said. "If you had the night vision goggles, you could see where we dropped bombs on the Iraqis, and you could see the oil wells burning."

Wise, now 31, was among the Southeast Missourians who joined their countrymen in the mobilization against Saddam Hussein 10 years ago.

The Missouri National Guard sent Dexter, Mo.'s 1221st Transportation Company and Kennett, Mo.'s 1137th Military Police Company across the Atlantic Ocean into the fray.

Wise, a U.S. Army light wheeled vehicle mechanic, lived in the tent city in the desert outside Dahran, Saudi Arabia.

"I spent my twenty-first birthday digging a foxhole in the sand," she recalled.

Wise said the experience showed her that she did not want to be a mechanic. She now works as a purchasing secretary for the Missouri Delta Medical Center in Sikeston -- "But I can change a tire or my own oil if I need to," she said.

U.S. Marine Christopher McNeely of Cape Girardeau, now 32, was an assistant section chief in a 155mm Howitzer unit during Desert Storm. He arrived in Saudi Arabia in August 1990 with the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines, and joined the defensive position north of the Saudi town of Jubal.

"At the end of the first day, we took some enemy artillery fire," he said. "On the third day, we took some more enemy artillery fire, and it was more accurate. Two guys in my unit were wounded. That made for a long evening."

But even during the first days of the Desert Storm offensive, he said, when his artillery unit began to advance north into Kuwait, it was clear that Coalition forces were winning.

"Even at our level, you could tell it was going well," McNeely said. "We were moving forward, not backward."

McNeely is recuperating in Quantico, Va., from a recent gunshot wound received while on embassy duty in Niger. When fit, he is to begin work as an instructor at the Marine Security Guard School in Quantico.