Charles Hale in the Gulf War

00:02 My name is Charles Hale and I was in the Gulf War. I have a bunch of stories, but I'll just tell one. We were stationed in Iraq and we were doing counter reconnaissance patrols. We were doing those patrols based out of a shared area with air defense artillery platoon and they had hawk missiles.

00:43 If you're familiar with the patriots, these.

00:46 Are very similar type of missile, but it's just a. They fly at a different altitude than the patriots. They're high altitude.

00:57 So if we weren't doing patrols, we.

01:00 Would be just hanging around that area of operation on our bunk, listening to music, doing whatever.

01:11 And on this particular day, it was.

01:13 The first day of the ceasefire in Iraq. And like I said, we're just laying around listening to music and talking, that kind of stuff. And we hear three explosions, one right behind the other. And we all, the infantry guys all thought it was mortar fire. It sounded like we were being attacked. So we all jumped up, grabbed our weapons, gas masks, that kind of stuff, and ran outside.

01:50 Well, one of our guys, Corporal Brewer.

01:54 Was outside brushing his teeth and he saw the entire thing happen every day at a certain time. These, uh, air defense artillery guys, they roll these cables out and they hook.

02:10 Them up to these, uh, these missile launchers.

02:15 And they run through these test procedures on them. And I don't know, it's tests all kinds of different parameters on the missiles to make sure they're, they're ready to fire if they have to. And they fired one by accident on the first day of the ceasefire in Iraq.

02:37 And the explosions we heard.

02:38 The first explosion was the missile being launched off of the launcher and then the second one was the rockets kicking in on that. And then the third explosion was the missile breaking the sound barrier as it left. And it was only about 20ft over our tent, so that's why it sounded like indirect fire.

03:09 So this missile goes straight up in.

03:13 The air and I don't know how high it went. It went as high as you could see and then faded out of sight. And then they detonated it. And so we're all milling around outside like, what in the heck is going on? And an AWACS plane flies over.

03:37 Maybe.

03:38 Five minutes after this.

03:40 I'd never even seen one except on tv, so that knew something big was happening. We're, I mean, we're setting off missiles on the first day of a ceasefire.

03:53 And I.

03:56 So soon after the AWACS plane flies.

03:59 Over, some fighter jets go by and.

04:03 Then three.

04:07 Blackhawk helicopters land outside of our perimeter and there's a bunch of.

04:15 Kernels and top brass and they come and they get the lieutenant that was in charge of that missile battery and take him away.

04:25 And we never saw him again. So.

04:30 Strange things happened.

04:33 That was just one of them.