I was fortunate enough to be a cadet in the audience at the US Air Force Academy when (then) Brigadier General Mark Welsh, the Commandant of Cadets, gave a sobering and deeply personal account of his combat experience in the Gulf War.
He was the commander of an F-16 Fighter Squadron at the time and, being a full two years before 9/11, few service members (and none of us cadets) had any insight into real combat. General Welsh brought it into focus with this speech.
Here is the text of the speech, posted by the US Naval Academy.
The YouTube video is broken into 5 parts, all included in this post, along with some worthwhile excerpts. I recommend watching them all.
It’s important before I start for you to remember that combat, any kind of combat, is different for everybody. You know aerial combat happens at about a 1000 miles an hour of closure. It’s hot fire, cold steel, its instant death, big destruction, it happens like this and it’s over. Ground combat’s not that way as you can imagine. Those of you who’ve heard infantry soldiers talk about it know it’s kinda endless time, and soaking fear, and big noises and darkness. It’s a different game. You need different training to do it, and different types of people to handle it well and to provide leadership in that environment. So it’s different. But it doesn’t matter how many people you have standing beside you in the trench, or how many people you have flying beside you in the formation – combat, especially your first combat, is an intensely personal experience.
Now if you haven’t had the pleasure of sitting down and thinking about your family, …if you haven’t tried to tell your children that you’re sorry you won’t be there to see their next ballet recital or watch them play little league baseball, or high school football, or graduate from college, or meet their future spouse, or get to know your grandkids, or if you hadn’t had the pleasure of telling your parents how important they were to you, and trying to do it on a piece of paper at midnight, 9000 miles away from them, or try to tell your spouse how the sun rises and sets in her eyes, then you haven’t lived. I’d recommend it. I won’t forget writing that letter.
From about 25 miles to the target till we got to the power plant, I bet I saw 100 SAMs in the air. And I remember screaming and cussing to myself all the way to the target until it came time to roll in and drop the bombs at which point your training takes over and you kinda go quiet. Until you drop your bombs, and then you start screaming and cussing again.
12 hours after Ed hung up that phone, he was the cell leader for a 12 ship of F-16s that hit those bunkers at Allamaya barracks. It was the best battle damage assessment we had in our squadron during the war. They hit every target and a lot of them, as you saw on that photo, dang near dead center. Ed went from caring, concerned, loving, father and husband, to cold-blooded, calculated killing-machine in 12 hours. Only in combat folks. I’ll never forget watching the transformation.
I’ve killed people before during this war, but this time I saw ’em. I saw the vehicles moving before the bombs hit. I saw people getting out and running and then I aimed at ’em with CBU, and dropped hundreds of bomblets on their head to make sure they wouldn’t get away. War is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing. There is nothing good about it. But it is sometimes necessary. So somebody better be good at it. I am. Trapper Carpenter is. Corkie Vonkessel is. I guarantee General Oelstrom is. He didn’t get to be a 3 star general and do the things he’s done by not being good at this business. You better be.