Desert Storm(part 5)

 The Oil Fires

Flying Through Hell

Nothing prepares you for flying through the Kuwaiti oil fires — and doing it at night, under night-vision goggles, in a flight of three aircraft in formation. We’d flown challenging missions before, but this was something entirely different. This was the kind of mission where every second felt like a coin toss between making it through and disappearing into the darkness forever. Why the pilot in command decided to fly through the Kuwaiti oil fires, I will never understand.

As we hit the worst of it, the radios started lighting up with something you never want to hear on night nvg ops:
“Come up day position lights!”
“Everyone come up night strobes!”
Then, louder, more urgent:
“COME UP DAY STROBES!”

That call alone told us everything.
We couldn’t see each other.
Not even the aircraft flying right beside us.

Using day strobes with night-vision goggles is unheard of. It’s dangerous as hell. Day strobes are bright enough to shut the goggles down completely. Nobody does that. Nobody even thinks about it.

But that night, we didn’t have a choice.
The smoke was so thick it swallowed every bit of light — IR, position lights, strobes, all of it. The only way to keep track of each other was to risk blinding ourselves. You don’t forget a moment like that. For a second — maybe more than a second — every one of us thought, “We could die right here, right now.”

The sky didn’t just turn black — it turned into this heavy, suffocating wall that pressed in on the aircraft from every direction. The NVGs were practically useless. The smoke was too dense, too alive, too thick to see through. It felt like flying through wet cement in the middle of the night. Up, down, speed, distance — none of it looked right.

The heat hit next. Even with the cold desert air outside, the fires blasted us with waves of furnace-hot air. You could smell it — the burning oil, chemicals, plastic, whatever else was in those fires — and it stuck in your throat like you were breathing through a dirty rag soaked in fuel.

We couldn’t see the ground.
We couldn’t see the horizon.
We couldn’t see the other aircraft, even with the strobes.
We were basically flying blind through hell, with nothing but instruments, trust, and hope holding it all together.

The world outside the aircraft disappeared. The only things that felt real were the engine, the rotor noise, the static on the radio, and the fact that one wrong move — one — and that would’ve been it.

The smell stayed with me. The taste stayed with me. The memory stayed with me in a way that doesn’t fade, not even decades later. When someone mentions the oil fires, I don’t picture flames or news footage. I remember flying through a night that felt like it wanted to swallow us whole. And every time I drive past the roof shingle plant in Garden City and that nasty tar smell hits me, it takes me straight back to that night.