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CNN SHOWDOWN: IRAQ
Air Base Gets Missile Alert
Aired March 26, 2003 - 12:26 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: And welcome back. Twenty-six minutes after the hour on this Wednesday.
Our embedded reporters continue to give us a very good idea of what's going on in this campaign. Our own Gary Tuchman is with the Air Force. He joins us now by videophone from an air base in the Persian gulf -- Gary. I don't know if you can hear me, but you can start your report now.
GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Paula, hello. OK. Paula, hello to you.
And just like in Kuwait City, we just, a short time ago, had a missile alert. The sirens went off at these military bases where the coalition troops are and the airmen are and the Marines and the sailors. They immediately make you put on your chemical suits and your masks. And you go into the bunker.
It took five minutes, and then we got the all clear. But as we speak, people are just coming out to the flight line behind me. These are the A-10 attack aircraft.
And you can see right now that man on top is a maintenance worker. He's getting that A-10 plane ready for flight tonight. The A-10 provides air support to the ground troops. And that, according to highly placed Air Force officials, is a main goal of the sorties taking place this evening.
We are told that 1,600 sorties will be flying in the next 24-hour period between now and tomorrow morning. Now that's not the peak. The peak was 2,000 sorties.
According to these Air Force officials, the reason for the lower number is because many of the preplanned targets before the war have now been destroyed. So there is not a necessity anymore to have as many sorties going out. There are still emerging targets. There are still some preplanned targets. But many of the preplanned targets have been destroyed. So it's not likely we'll see as many sorties now and in the future as we saw in the past.
We had very bad weather in much of the Gulf region yesterday. Tropical storm-forced winds. We had rain lightning and thunder.
So at this particular base we're at right now, they had 40 percent fewer flights yesterday than they did the day before. But it's expected to pick up today. We can tell you this base -- talking about the alerts and the sirens we just heard, I was expecting to tell you when we knew we were coming on the air with you, Paula, that we hadn't had a siren for 30 hours. And that's certainly increasing the morale of the airmen who are at this base. Well now that siren has come back, so they realize what reality is.
A lot of the people we've been talking to here -- and there's more than 8,000 servicemen and women -- are saying they feel more relaxed now than they did in the first few days of the war. But many of them are anticipating what might happen when U.S. ground troops get into Baghdad. That, many of them say, they're concerned about.
But either way, lots of planes are flying out again, but not as many as the first few nights of the war. Paula, back to you.
ZAHN: I know these members of the Air Force are trained to deal with what you just did when the sirens went off. But describe to us what you saw when you see the sirens sounding.
TUCHMAN: What's really interesting, Paula, is we've gotten to know these people quite well because we've now been here for five days. And they were just a few minutes ago just all sitting around talking to us, talking about their day, talking about their experiences, talking about their families back home, talking about watching the news coverage of the war. And then all of a sudden we heard the siren blaring and the conversation just stops in mid sentence.
They get up, they start running. They put on their chemical suits. And a few days ago they didn't have to put on the chemical suits because it was mandatory to always wear the chemical suits. Two days ago they stopped having to wear them all the time. But they started running, putting them on, putting on their masks, and then jumping into bunkers that are constructed all over this air base.
ZAHN: I guess that all clear signal couldn't have come soon enough. Gary Tuchman, thanks so much for that report.
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