In his words: An interview with local veteran Brent Herdina

__Name:__ Brent Herdina

__Born:__ May 21, 1968 -- age 47

__Enlisted:__ February 1986

__Branch:__ U.S. Air Force

__Rank:__ Tech Sergeant, E6

Brent Herdina (submitted photo)

__Units:__ 58th Tac-Fighter Wing, England; 131st Tac-Fighter Wing, St. Louis

__Status:__ 131st disbanded, separated

__City of residence:__ Gordonville

I joined the military because I wanted to do something of greater importance with my life rather than do something just for me. The motivation for my joining the military was my mother. She worked in a nursing home caring for others her whole career, and I found that admirable, so I enlisted in February 1986 with the Air Force. I was six years active duty Air Force and later did five years with the National Guard.

In 1990, at age 22, I got a call to be deployed to Operation Desert Shield in Iraq. They were going to take 100 people from our base, and I was one of them. We got to the base theater, and our commander said we were going to an undisclosed location in the Middle East. He said, "I'm not going to lie to you, but Iraq is claiming they have the third-largest army in the world, and we're going to war. This could be the mother of all battles."

Brent Herdina (submitted photo)

The war broke out, and it went from Desert Shield to Desert Storm. We were stationed at a Forward Operating Location near King Khalid Military City and about 60 miles south of the Iraq/Kuwait border. Kuwait was the city under attack, and Iraq drove all the Kurdish refugees who lived in Kuwait up into the mountains.

Day one, we were there at night. We saw flashes in the distance, and it looked almost like lightning. There was a long pause, and 15 to 20 seconds later you could hear "fooom," that real low thud from the Persian Gulf. That's when Desert Storm started. They were bombing in Kuwait to get Iraqis out of there and the Navy was hammering the coast with their 16-inch guns.

During Desert Storm, I was with the 58th Tac-Fighter Wing out of Bentwaters, England. We got deployed to Kuwait because of our A10 aircraft, which were used to help get rid of Iraqi tanks, excessive ground units and buildings that were providing crossfire to our ground troops in the Army and Marines.

At the beginning of their day, the A10 pilot got his information from an Army or Marine Corps combat controller saying what kind of resistance they were getting. They would fly from Saudi Arabia to their targets, drop their munitions, come to our FOL and we would do In-Combat Turnaround, or ICT. We'd reload them, refuel them and get them back in the action in about 15 minutes. That way one pilot could do three missions within a flying day. We had one pilot on three missions who took out 21 tanks.

On A10s, we loaded 1,175, 30 mm rounds per aircraft. That's a complete upload of a spent gun system. We loaded MK 82, 84s, general purpose bombs. MK20 and CBU 87s. Those are cluster bombs. We loaded a lot of TV-guided AGM65s. Those are anti-tank missiles. One A10 can drop nearly 25 or 30 large explosive bombs and have AIM 9 (Sidewinder) missiles for air-to-air defense and have a gun. Basically, if you're the enemy and you see an A10 coming, you're in trouble.

Brent Herdina (submitted photo)

Our job at the FOL was to load only American aircraft. A hundred feet down the way, the French were doing their Mirages. British troops were doing Tornadoes and F4s. We had a lot of Apache and Cobra helicopters there in the Army, and they loaded their own.

Another important part of our FOL was we had the first armored cav from the Army with hundreds of tanks and dozens of Patriot missile sites. The Patriot missile was used to try to shoot down the Iraqi Scud missiles. So you'd hear a very large explosion, and the Patriot would go off, and it would explode and send shrapnel to try to knock the Scud down. All that noise was really unnerving.

The reason that Scud missile thing stands out for me is, if I'm in close combat and have to fire at someone, I have some control over that, but when you have a giant missile flying over your head, you have no control over where that thing's going to crash, and you can't get away from it. If you're close enough to see it hit the ground, you're probably going to die. And they would launch dozens of them damn things.

So the Iraqi ground and tank troops, approximately 10,000 of them, pushed toward us and made it to within 28 miles of us. We were preparing for a fire fight, a ground battle. They had no choice but to start coming south toward us. As they did, they met an impenetrable wall of Army and Marine Corps troops with tanks. And those guys just started hammering.

Iraq completely withdrew, and we went as far as to push them to Baghdad and beyond. A cease-fire was called. The Iraqi leadership said, "We're done." And we disbanded and pulled out a month later. I was home for about a month and went back for Operation Provide Comfort.

We were there for the liberation of Kuwait. Kuwait had been taken over by force, driven out of their country, and they were taking refuge, including their leadership, in the mountains. And I feel that liberation was accomplished.

When I left the military, I was still an E6 Technical Sergeant and was a crew chief on a weapons loading crew on the B2s at Whiteman, and that's all I can say about that. But I'll never regret my time in the military, and I recommend it to anybody who is undecided on a career path, because you learn about yourself and you'll come out a much better, stronger person with meaning and purpose in your life.