Photo By Darriel Swatts | Chief Warrant officer 5 Richard Huber says goodbye to his wife Lisanne in Fresno prior...... read more read more
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CAMP TAJI, Iraq – Chief Warrant Officer 5 Richard Huber was driving across a desolate Kuwaiti desert in February when he noticed that the number 20 was displayed on numerous banners that lined the roadside.
His companion told him that the banners were part of a national celebration to commemorate the Feb. 26, 1991 liberation of Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War.
“That’s when the light bulb went off,” Huber said. “I’m here for the 20th anniversary and I was here for the liberation.”
Like many soldiers in theater for Operation New Dawn, this is not Huber’s first rodeo.
The Iraq War enters its eighth year on March 20 and soldiers with multiple deployments here are commonplace.
But for some soldiers, such as Huber, their first combat patches were earned in the region long before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
The Persian Gulf War
Huber has vivid memories of being a 22-year-old helicopter pilot sent to fly the hostile skies of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War—a full 12 years before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
At that time, Huber was a young Warrant Officer 1 trained to fight Soviet tank divisions if they invaded West Germany through the Fulda Gap.
Instead, it was Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard that invaded Kuwait, and Huber found himself flying his EH-60 Black Hawk electronic warfare helicopter over unfamiliar desert terrain where sand and dust played havoc with his aircraft and illumination at night fell to nearly zero, reducing the effectiveness of his night vision goggles.
“There were a lot of unknowns then,” Huber said. “We didn’t know what we were up against, how we were going to fight. We didn’t know how long we were going to be gone. This was a completely different ballgame for us and there were a lot of things to learn as we went.”
In February 1991, coalition forces advanced from Saudi Arabia into Iraq and then made a right turn into Kuwait, cutting off fleeing Iraqi forces. Huber’s helicopter witnessed the action from above, intercepting radio transmissions from the Iraqi leadership.
The war quickly turned into a rout as Iraqi forces surrendered en masse or fled for their lives out of Kuwait.
Three Kuwaitis were riding along in Huber’s Black Hawk monitoring radio intercepts for military intelligence analysts. The U.S. government had recruited the Kuwaitis from American colleges to serve as interpreters.
“Right at the end when they said the war was over and Kuwait City had been liberated, we were in the western edge of Kuwait,” Huber recalled. “The interpreters heard on the radio that the conflict was over and the three guys that we had with us put their M16s down and started walking across the desert to Kuwait City. It took us a while to convince them to come back, that it would be a few days, but we would get them into Kuwait City. They had families there so they wanted to go to them.”
With Kuwait liberated, coalition forces halted their advance and pulled out of Iraq.
“I remember when we were leaving Kuwait in 1991; we landed at the port where the helicopter blades would be folded back before the aircraft would be loaded onto a ship bound back to Germany. We landed, and I looked over at my co-pilot and said, ‘Thank God we’re out of here and we’ll never have to fly in this place again.’ I’ve had to eat my words twice now.”
Operation Iraqi Freedom
Huber left the Army in 2000 and turned his attention to the restaurant business, becoming a part-owner of three restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area.
After three years of busing tables, bartending, covering costs and making payroll, he realized that he would rather be flying.
“The restaurant business wasn’t for me,” he said. “I was not doing what I wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to fly, so I went back to aviation.”
In 2004, he rejoined the military, flying helicopters one weekend a month and two weeks a year for the California Army National Guard.
In September of that year, he was called up to deploy to Iraq with the California Army National Guard’s 1-140th Aviation Battalion based out of Los Alamitos, Calif.
Nearly 15 years after the end of the Persian Gulf War, he again found himself in the Middle East, this time at Forward Operating Base Speicher near the city of Tikrit, flying the skies of Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Unlike the Persian Gulf War, which was full of unknowns for Huber, Operation Iraqi Freedom became about routines.
“We had a set pattern of what the mission was, what our jobs were and where we would be flying,” he said. “We fell into an ongoing mission and pretty much knew what we had to do once we got there.”
As a maintenance test pilot for the unit, he got plenty of flying time.
“I was probably doing three troubleshooting test flights a day,” Huber recalled. “I’d get in an aircraft, check it out, go fly it, bring it back, sign it off, release it, go to the next aircraft, figure out what was wrong with it, pre-flight it, go fly it, bring it back, close it out. It was a lot of short flights in a short amount of time.”
In 2005, Huber returned from Iraq unscathed and took a job as a civilian test pilot for the Aeroflightdynamics Directorate at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif. When not at work, he spent time at home in San Jose with his young son and daughter from a previous marriage while continuing to attend National Guard drills one weekend a month.
In May 2010, he married his sweetheart Lisanne shortly before he was called up to return to the Middle East in support of Operation New Dawn.
Operation New Dawn
On Nov. 28, 2010, the 40th Combat Aviation Brigade was mobilized for a year-long tour in Iraq.
The 40th CAB is made up of units from the National Guard, Army Reserve and active-duty Army, with elements from 22 states, all led by a California Army National Guard headquarters company based out of Fresno, Calif. The CAB has been tasked to perform “full-spectrum aviation operations” in the skies of Iraq for much of 2011—performing all manner of aviation missions, from evacuating sick and wounded personnel to transporting high-level government officials to force protection.
Huber, now a chief warrant officer 5, is a maintenance test pilot for the CAB and serves as the brigade aviation maintenance officer—a job that entails overseeing the maintenance of the brigade’s helicopters and ensuring that the aircraft have the parts they need to stay in the air.
With about 200 helicopters and 3,600 personnel spread across Iraq, the CAB has a big job during a critical year in the country—a year that could close the book on the war in Iraq.
American forces in Iraq have fallen from a high of about 170,000 in 2007 to fewer than 50,000 now. If current trends continue, nearly all American military forces could be out of Iraq by December, leaving only a handful of advisors.
Depending on how events unfold over the next several months, the 40th CAB could be one of the last American units in the country.
For several weeks in February, Huber lived in a tent city at Camp Buerhing, Kuwait, 15 miles from the Iraqi border, shuttling to and from the camp and Kuwaiti ports to supervise the arrival of the CAB’s aircraft.
On a hazy afternoon at Camp Buehring, Huber sat on his cot in his 70-man tent and wondered how his current mission would compare to the two in his past.
“This deployment is going to be a lot more challenging because our mission is going to literally change daily,” Huber said. “Every day could be a very dull day. Every day could be a very exciting or terrifying day, if you want to look at it that way. I feel like we are on a fence where things could go either way.
“What we did here and the people that have died here and the people who have sacrificed years of their lives for our country and for Iraq and Kuwait—my hope is that the timing is right, that we get out safely—and being the last ones out, that it’s been a success.”
| Date Taken: | 02.24.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 03.18.2011 10:02 |
| Story ID: | 67289 |
| Location: | CAMP TAJI, IQ |
| Web Views: | 540 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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