Bob Lindee was home on leave from the Army for his grandmother’s funeral when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. It wasn’t on his mind at the time the U.S. might be jumping into war.

When Lindee, a mechanized infantryman with the 3rd Armored Division at Friedburg, Germany, returned to Germany, his unit was preparing for deployment.

His unit was part of an armored division and attached to a tank division as well. “We had these vehicles that were painted green and black and brown camouflage that we all of a sudden had to turn into desert camouflage in a really, really fast amount of time. And we had to get new uniforms issued to us in a really short amount of time,” he said.

The unit ramped up. “I was in Germany for Christmas but I know I spent my 21st birthday in Saudi Arabia,” he said. That was in January 1991.

Shortly after, the unit deployed to the west side of the Kuwaiti border, Lindee said the 3rd Armored Division had the task of doing the hook called the last hook back up around the outside. “So that we could attack from above if we needed to. We stayed out in the middle of the desert for several weeks,” he said. The air war had started while they were at Khobar Towers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, waiting for their vehicles Bradley Fighting Vehicles, the tracked armored vehicles commonly known as the “Bradley,” along with tanks and Humvees to arrive by ship from Holland.

“We were sitting around listening to the radio. We didn’t have television but we could pick up Armed Forces Radio, listening to George Bush’s speech. I remember it. It was kind of surreal. We were all huddled together in our rooms,” he said, recalling that day in January 1991.

“Almost as soon as the air war started, we started getting notifications about Scud missile attacks on the complex,” Lindee said. “We were all in full chemical protective gear and we as much as nobody wanted to be had our chemical defense stuff the needles, the pills and everything ready to go in case we were chemically attacked and we just sat there. The Scud alarm went off and it got very real at that moment that something was going to happen. And then it got real calm again before they said it’s time to get in the vehicles and head north.”

“We went north and basically sat there in the same location in the middle of nowhere absolutely in the middle of nowhere waiting for our orders to go over the berm,” he said.

At night, he said they could see, hear and feel all at different times what was being pounded away on the Iraqis. “You’d see the flash and then you would kind of feel the ground shake a little bit and then you’d feel the rumble of what was going on. It was almost like a really weird thunderstorm but obviously it wasn’t. It was a pretty good feeling knowing that the Air Force was softening up that battle a bit.”

Lindee said they never knew when they would be going to war, although they were briefed every day when it might happen and what they would do. “We trained a lot because none of us had ever dealt with desert warfare before. We were used to digging foxholes in the dirt and finding cover behind trees in Germany. We were on this flat piece of wide open hard-packed dirt where you could see for miles,” he said.

At one point Lindee and a number of others went to the Saudi Arabia port city to drive trucks back to their area. He had never driven a fueler before but drove one back to the border along with 60 or 70 other guys in a giant formation across the desert.

“We knew pretty much at that time if they’re bringing fuel up to us, we’re going to be using it. At that point, we prepared ourselves for going into battle. The night before it happened, our platoon sergeant came over to us and said, ‘We’re going in tomorrow and you guys are ready. Everybody do your job and we’ll come out of this fine.”

They got the order they were going to war.

“All of us were lined up along the border,” he said indicating the various armored divisions. “Every division had a specific job that they were going to do.”

“We started our movements when we actually got into skirmishes with the enemy. The first thing that happened was several of us ran over landmines in our Bradleys, but they were very small,” he said.

He said these were extemporaneous land mines so they didn’t really do anything to the tracks. “You’d hear a bang but then you’d get out and look underneath and the whole bottom of it where you were just sitting you were just sitting on top of the ammunition that goes into the gun systems on the Bradley all of that’s just penetrated with shrapnel. You’d think if it had penetrated, we would have been done. That was the first time it really got real,” Lindee said.

In their first battle against the Iraqis, “Everything started going off around you and you’re hearing things and you’re seeing things. They were firing at us but they just didn’t have the range to reach us,” he said.

“We had the M1 Abrams (battle tank). It was a Bradley, an Abrams, a Bradley and an Abrams. The Abrams were just tearing everything up so the first real fight that we got into was only about 10 or 15 minutes, and then they all gave up. Then we spent four or five hours processing POWs (prisoners of war)’ That was my first experience actually meeting any of them,” Lindee said.

“When we first ran into them (POWs), the first guys that surrendered to us hadn’t eaten in days. They had mud in their canteens that they were trying to sift through to get water. We just fed them. We had MREs (meals ready to eat). We gave them water, fed them and waited to figure out what we were supposed to do with all these POWs. We finally got word and got them to an MP (military police) station and then they said go fight again.

Lindee and the others got back into the tracks and went farther. “We got into another 10-minute firefight and then another two hours of processing POWs.

Eventually they got farther on in the fighting where their unit the 5th Battalion, 18th Infantry ended up fighting against the Tawakalna Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. “That was kind of our biggest battle,” he said.

“After a while, it just got to a point with the POWs that we would stop, take their weapons and give them food and drive away, and tell the MPs where they were because they weren’t going anywhere. They were sitting there enjoying a meal for the first time in days and drinking water and they just weren’t going anywhere,” he said.

“We hooked back around and after our big fight, we got into the area where they lit the oil wells on fire,” he continued.

“I can’t tell you how many hours we were awake during that four or five days but it was very very little sleep.”

War wasn’t what Lindee expected. He said he expected they would be fighting all the way through. “I did because we trained that way. We trained to expect certain things, and the training certainly kicked in, but none of it happened that way, and we had to adapt really, really fast,” he said.

When Lindee joined the Army, he said the last thing on his mind was that he might go to war. He had joined the military to get college money. “The last war we had been in was Vietnam and the Middle East wasn’t on our minds like it is today

“I feel like we were certainly sort of a beta test for what it’s like to fight in a desert,” Lindee said. “I’m not exaggerating when I’m telling you I went 4 1/2 months without a shower. Before the ground war started, our only means of cleaning ourselves was when they rounded up kiddie pools, the plastic ones, and we had crates and crates and crates of bottled water that got brought in. We would literally dump hundreds of bottled water into a kiddie pool and with a bar of soap we would wash our uniforms and wash ourselves. Then you’d throw that water out and the next guy would jump in,” he said.

Lindee’s unit remained in the Middle East until June.

Then while stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, Lindee returned to Saudi Arabia in late 1991 during Operation Intrinsic Action. “Saddam Hussein was pushing toward the border again,” Lindee said. They remained in the Middle East for two months doing patrols and training. Hussein ended up backing off and they were sent home, he said.

Shortly after, Lindee was discharged from the Army. I’d done my four years by that point. It seemed like most of it was either in or training for combat,” he said.

He returned to Minot for two years, then moved to Los Angeles in 1996, met his wife there and they returned to Minot. He is the public information officer for the City of Minot.

Reflecting back on the ground war, he said, “It’s amazing it all happened in four days,” he said.