Nothing Like the Movies

Written by B. L. Jilek, Aug. 20 2003

My dreams have always been vivid, like movies in a theater. But this one was extreme. The crashing noises and violent shaking were so real they were going to wake me up. The shaking felt like the choppy, bouncing motion of riding a speeding boat over rough water. I was literally being bounced into the air. Irritated that this dream threatened to wake me, I curled up and tried to keep myself from being bounced off the bed. Frightening realization came to me that this was not a dream and I urgently started to fight my way to consciousness, suddenly aware that something was very wrong. “The building was collapsing!” my mind screamed at me.

My slowly returning consciousness was going over what I heard and felt, trying to get ready to react to whatever the situation turned out to be. The crashing noises sounded like glass shattering and metal rattling on concrete. But that was all. There was no rumbling, cracking of concrete or screeching of metal under stress that should come from the collapse of a structure such as this. And the shaking--I have been through numerous earth quakes but none of them had been violent enough to bounce me into the air. They had all been horizontal shaking, not vertical. The building had to be coming down. But how could this sturdy seven story building collapse?

Struggling to sit up was made a monumental effort by the bouncing bed but everything was still and quiet by the time I was upright. I looked out the window. The bright, moonlit sky contrasted sharply with the dark shadow of the building across the street. With a mental double-take I saw what looked like fireworks coming from the top of the darkened building in the window. But it was all wrong. It looked like my favorite kind of pyrotechnics, the ones that exploded into a golden ball then glittering tendrils drifted down forming a huge, beautiful weeping willow. Only this one was spreading upward from the top of the building to form a flower of red and gold. It was suspended there, not moving, like it had been burned into the night sky. My mind registered somewhere that it was impossible to be seeing this. I have never seen outside this window until now. I had never bothered to open the thick curtains and aluminum shutters, content to leave them to ward off the blistering desert sun. Still trying to fight my way from sleep induced fog, I struggled with the confusing images.

I had barely started trying to ascertain what I was seeing when the sound hit. Like a brick wall, it hit me with the force of a thousand thunderclaps. I have never heard a sound like it before or since. It was a simple bang. A bang made not so simple by the unfathomable, frightening loudness of it. A bang that seemed to go on forever. My mind went instantly blank as the sound filled every recess of my mind and every pore of my body. I convulsed, my heart stopped and I heard a scream. It was a scream that seemed to have been forced from the very depths of the soul. It was my screaming. “Stop screaming!” I told myself. “Someone is going to hear!” Was all I could think. I struggled to stop but could not. It continued like a live thing, until it had used up every ounce of breath, finally dying as if running out of fuel. I gasped for air, trying to recover. “What the hell was that!” I screamed, mentally this time.

I crawled out of the bed, still trying to catch my breath, and walked to the door that led to the living area of our four bedroom suite. Something crunched under my feet like gravel but I ignored it. I noticed in passing that there was a second window in the wall, smaller and high in the corner, strange, but I had no time to investigate. I had to get out of the room and find out what was going on.

“It must have been a mortar,” I thought, as the images, sounds and shaking finally came together into one, semi-clear picture. I had never seen a mortar explosion except in the movies but I could think of nothing else that would arc so as to land on top of a seven story building. “They must have used a mortar on us,” I repeated to myself. It was the only conclusion I could come to.

I heard noises like people talking and moving about outside the door. Someone was trying to open it. “Sergeant Jilek?” I heard as the doorknob rattled.

“Yeah!” Was all I could get out. I unlocked the door and tried to open it. It wouldn't budge. I put my shoulder to it and after a few hard hits and tugs from the other side it burst open. I stumbled into the living room, nearly blinded by the light. I looked around quickly. The room was in total chaos. The furniture looked like someone had taken a knife to every square inch of the upholstery. Stuffing was sticking out and some was floating in the air like the chair cushions had actually exploded. The wood on the coffee table and chair legs was scarred and in some places had shards of glass piercing the wood. There had been a sliding glass door leading to the balcony, covered with the same heavy draperies that had been covering my bedroom window. Now there was only a huge opening in the wall. The draperies were shredded bits of cloth that had blown all over the room. The glass was gone and the aluminum frame for the door and windows was twisted wreckage on the floor.

“Turn off the lights!” I said, regaining some of my composure and finally mostly awake. “And get down!” I was thinking about snipers or rocket attacks. Senior Airman Henry Powers, holding a towel around his waist, quickly flipped the lights off. Airman First Class Steven Crowley knelt on the floor next to me, in his usual shorts and T-shirt.

“What the hell happened?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I replied. “I think a mortar hit the building across the street. He looked out toward the building. We could see no damage.

“I saw a flash and the windows bowed out.” Crowley said. “I jumped behind the couch and all hell broke loose.” Amazing that these two had escaped injury after seeing the condition of the room. Powers had disappeared into his room to get dressed. I had to get everyone out of the building.

“Where is Brad?” I asked. He was our fourth suite mate.

“I don't know,” Crowley replied. “He left a couple of hours ago.”

“OK,” I said, trying to think. “Grab your blanket and some water and let's get downstairs. Don't use the elevators and stay clear of the windows.”

“I'll tell Henry,” he answered and moved down the hallway towards his room. I crouch walked to my room and retrieved my shoes. I sleep in shorts and a T-shirt so I didn't need to dress. I noticed that the floor was covered in glass. I had been walking on shattered glass. Looking at the bottoms of my feet I was surprised that there was not even a scratch. Grabbing my blanket off the bed I notice that the other “window” in the wall was the hole that used to be occupied by the air conditioner. The unit had been blown out of the wall to land at the foot of my bed.

I left the room and grabbed a few bottles of water from the kitchen. The other two were waiting at the door. After checking the condition of the stairwell we joined the other building occupants on the ground floor.

The rest of the night is a cloudy, surrealistic nightmare. All blood and destruction. The only sound came from the litter bearers as they transported wounded with makshift litters to the small medical office, sometimes knocking people over in their rush to get their bleeding comrades to help. Everyone else worked and suffered in silence. I remember seeing one of the only two Medical Technicians on duty desperately trying to sow up hundreds of gaping lacerations, not having the time to worry about embedded glass. The bleeding had to be stopped. I remember seeing a man sitting on the ground in a pool of his own blood with a huge shard of glass protruding from his eye.

Everyone always had the threat of terrorist attacks in their thoughts but had not considered it was a serious threat. Not here with the fences and many checkpoints and barricades. With the security forces patrolling the gates and perimeter. With Para-Rescue on the rooftops. We had all joked about how someone could stand outside the fence and fire rockets at the buildings. The fence surrounding the compound was only the width of a two-lane road from the outside buildings. But we had not taken the threat seriously.

The ten-foot chain link fence was little protection from the tanker that was parked just on the other side. The tanker filled with petroleum and fertilizer. A Para-Rescue trooper had seen the truck pull up, the driver get out and escape in a waiting car. He had run downstairs knocking on doors and yelling for people to get out of the building. He could do nothing else. There was no warning system set up. He had only four minutes before the truck blasted a forty foot deep crater in the ground and tore the face off of the building he was trying to evacuate. The truck took nineteen of our heroes from us and scarred hundreds more for life.

My unit was lucky. We had no major injuries. We had two buildings between us and the bomb, far enough away for the blast to come in stages. First a flash of light. Then the shock wave carrying with it the horrendous shaking and glass that blew through anything in it's path. Then the sound, that awful bang that has since replaced the werewolf howl in my dreams.

Talking with others I came to realize that these three stages were milliseconds apart but they seemed to have taken an eternity. An eternity that I will remember for the rest of my life. I'll never look at another explosion the same way. It's nothing like the movies. Movies can't do justice to the unbelievable, humbling, terrifying, mind numbing, violent reality that is a bomb. I learned this reality at the Kobar Towers complex, Dhahran, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996.