Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [70]
“[The] game ought to be canceled as a grand and grave gesture of concern, of a spreading war in an age of nuclear weapons,” St. Petersburg Times columnist Mary Jo Melone wrote. “Maybe if we halted this thing America loves so, just once, the world could stop and ponder what it was doing to itself.”
Virtually anyone asked, at least by the press, whole-heartedly disagreed. Especially the principles: fans, players, coaches, league officials, even the president of the United States.
“Somebody asked me a while back about the Super Bowl. You think we ought to cancel the Super Bowl because of this situation?” President George H. W. Bush said at a White House press briefing four days before the game.
One, the war is a serious business and the nation is focused on it. But two, life goes on.
[The] boys and men and women in the gulf, they want to see this game go on . . . and this is priority: getting this war concluded properly. But we are not going to screech everything to a halt in terms of our domestic agenda. We’re not going to screech everything to a halt in terms of the recreational activities, and I cite the Super Bowl and I am not going to screech my life to a halt out of some fear about Saddam Hussein.
American soldiers and sailors serving in the Gulf wanted the game to continue as well.
“I don’t think at all that it was inappropriate to play the game,” said Air Force Master Sergeant Rick Fuller, who watched the kickoff from a military base at Dhahran International Airport in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. “A lot of people over there saw it as a real morale booster because it was something they could identify with—something that they were very familiar with and they were used to doing at that particular time of year.”
Many vowed to watch the game. And those few thousand soldiers and sailors would be doing so—as ABC News’ Judd Rose noted—into early morning, January 28, 1991: in the Arabia standard time zone (several hours ahead of eastern standard time), Super Bowl XXV kicked off Monday at 2:18 a.m. local time.
“Saddam has a history of hitting us right in the middle of something good,” one solider told Judd Rose at Camp Jack, an air base in Saudi Arabia.
“What happens if that happens?” Rose asked during a taped segment aired during halftime.
“Oh, put on our [gas] masks and hopefully just keep watching if it’s not too bad.”
By the time soldiers at Camp Jack or troops on patrol throughout the desert tuned in to the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network to hear the game, such threats had become commonplace. On Tuesday, one of Iraq’s Scud missiles slipped past the American Patriot missile system and hit an apartment building in Tel Aviv. Three Israelis died from heart attacks. American fighter jets shot down Iraqi planes and knocked out several bridges in Iraq, cutting off supplies. A few days later, Patriots intercepted seven Scuds launched at Tel Aviv and Haifa. It was the fifth attack in eight days.
Hussein’s strategy expanded beyond random, isolated Scud launchings. In the Kuwaiti city of Mina Ahmadi, Iraqi soldiers began pumping oil into the Persian Gulf. By game day, more than one hundred million gallons of oil filled the Gulf: the goal was to shut down Saudi Arabian desalinization plants and thereby ruin the American ally’s drinking water. The ten-mile-wide, thirty-five-mile-long oil-covered water also hindered U.S. naval operations in the region. During a conflict between the Iraqi patrol boats and U.S. vessels, the oil caught on fire. On Friday, American F-111s bombed the supply pipes in order to cut off the flow.
A ground war was not expected to commence for weeks, but U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers fired at one another along the Saudi Arabian–Kuwait border. Given that Hussein’s military owned more land mines than any other military in history