LTC Ray G. Brueland
Commander, 32d MEDSOM
(32d Medical Supply, Optical and Maintenance Battalion)

Interview Conducted 3 March 1991 at King Khalid Military City, Saudi Arabia

Interviewer: MAJ Robert B. Honec, III

Oral History Interview DSIT AE 040

MAJ HONEC: [This is an] Operation DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM interview. My name is MAJ Robert B. Honec of the 116th Military History Detachment. We are here today, the 3d of March, 1991, at King Khalid Military City, KKMC, [at] the 32d MEDSOM [32d Medical Supply, Optical and Maintenance Battalion], talking to LTC Brueland. I spell that B-r-u-[e]-l-a-n-d.

Sir, for the record, so they recognize your voice, would you state your full name, Social Security Number, the unit, your assignment, and how long you've been in that assignment, please?

LTC BRUELAND: Okay. I'm LTC Ray G. Brueland, ***-**-****, commander of the 32d MEDSOM. I took command on the 22d of June and I deployed to Saudi Arabia on 4 August of 1990.

MAJ HONEC: Okay, sir. The first thing that I'd like to start is: starting with the alert of 32d MEDSOM (August 4th, was it?), to mobilization and movement from CONUS to Saudi Arabia. Could you please trace the unit and the issues you confronted, as commander, that might fall in ... be found in ... a negative or a positive of the "lessons-learned" category?

LTC BRUELAND: Okay. I guess where I should start is [when] we were alerted about three days after Iraq invaded Kuwait. From there, the [44th Medical] Brigade took the philosophy that we needed to infiltrate people into the theater of operations. And they actually sent myself and five people down to the airhead at Fort Bragg. We spent one night waiting for a bird of opportunity and then got on a plane the next day and were deployed here.

Prior to the deployment, we had a team working here as a classified ... under a different classified mission for frozen blood. And that team was here and was established, so when we landed here, the five of us broke away from the advance party of the brigade and fell in on our group that was already here. And we spent the first two weeks, I guess, going around the countryside, getting ... trying to get a warehouse for the MEDSOM.

The instructions I had (upon deployment) as the commander was to establish a Class VIII [medical supplies] supply point in a warehouse for a theater defense--in other words, a two to three division force in a defensive mode. I found a suitable warehouse in downtown Khobar, approximately 40,000 square feet. It had no racks. It took a lot of work to get it clean, but it was suitable. I had arranged by the 19th of August to have it rented to the United States Government.

We moved in. The unit, by that time, had deployed its second echelon, or a--what we called the--God, it's been so long--the "Corps D Package," which consisted of about thirty people, some MHE [materiel handling equipment] and other necessary supply equipment, TO&E [table of organization and equipment] equipment, to give us the capability to operate a warehouse.

That all came together on or about the--you know, prior to the 19th of August, and we moved into this warehouse, cleaned it up and started actually unloading the USNS Green Harbor and putting medical supplies in this warehouse.

MAJ HONEC: Green Harbor was the prepositioned ship that you were drawing supplies out of?

LTC BRUELAND: Yes, sir, that's correct. From there, the political arena caught us off guard, I guess, and we were forced, or MG [later LTG Gus] Pagonis directed us to move out of the warehouse. It was a political or a cultural snafu in the sense that we were not aware we were breaking any of their traditions, customs or anything. But what it ... the final outcome came ... was that the warehouse we had rented was across the street from their peace park and they did not want a military unit operating in downtown Khobar in the proximity of their shrine for peace. So, we were forced out of that.

The unit, at that point, opened a supply point at the 28th Combat Support Hospital, maintained a certain stock at the Khobar warehouse until about the--let's see--about the 28th of September, when we were allowed to move into a warehouse on the Port of Dammam.

And that Port of Dammam warehouse was a super-nice facility, completely climate-controlled. It had a four-level storage rack system in it. The automatic forklifts, electric forklifts, for the interior operation, came with the building. And we moved in there and we were quite happy--but in another sense, unhappy because it was a temporary fix. It was only ... we were only supposed to be there two weeks so that we could just recoup the lost time that we had in the Khobar incident and transition into another warehouse.

Because of that, we were not allowed to put in a telephone. We were not allowed to expand into the other available storage sites at that warehouse and as our stockage grew, we became very cramped and actually had to start warehousing stuff on the outside, right there on the port.

MAJ HONEC: So, immediately, sir, as I understand it, communication issues also came into the play because without a phone, what is a warehouse with a phone?

LTC BRUELAND: It makes life very difficult, not only for the command structure in controlling the unit but, more importantly, for the unit ... the units we support, because they cannot communicate with us. We took up a name, because of this, as the "Stealth MEDSOM," because our customers couldn't find where we were. The other difficulty is communications with our source of supply. From the very beginning, even at the warehouse at Khobar, we had no communications with our source of supply.

And we did such extravagant things as go downtown to a civilian establishment and pay for FAXes [facsimiles] back to Pirmasens just to get them back there. Several times we paid for an AUTODIN [defense data transmission network] transfer of electronic files to a civilian firm, simply to get the job done.

MAJ HONEC: Pirmasens are?

LTC BRUELAND: Pirmasens, German--USAESCE--is our source of supply and has been from the very beginning, and we had no communications capability with them up until the CTAS-2 became operational which was in late November.

MAJ HONEC: Okay.

LTC BRUELAND: Okay. By the 11th of October, the Saudi Catering Company contract was let and we were allowed to move into the Saudi Catering Company [facilities] and that was a big benefit to us at that point, because we were still in the defensive posture. And we were not ... we had no concept of going from a one-floor operation to the two-floor operation. And so that building was big enough and it had a five-tier system, had about a 20,000 square foot climate-controlled warehouse that we moved in, and we were quite glad to get into it. The problems with that were that the Saudi Catering Company in the--I want to say cultural aspects of how people move here--did not move out.

And so I believe, still, today, there are still some foodstuffs of Saudi Catering in the warehouse at Saudi Catering. We have never gotten complete occupancy of that warehouse, but we, kind of being the ugly Americans we are, as we moved over in a two-week time frame, literally pushed Saudi Catering up against the last three aisles of the warehouse, so that we took occupancy of what we needed. And then as we grew, we took more and more, and they've had less and less.

The warehouse facility was adequate for the mission when we rented the warehouse. When the mission changed to a two-corps offensive plan, [a] let's go to war sort of thing, of course everything doubled. Everything except the size of the warehouse doubled. And so we once again went to an outside storage arrangement for some stocks. About the middle of November it became very apparent that we needed a new place, so we once again went looking for a new place. About that time period, also, the new mission came along where we had to go to the ... had to move or relocate the 32d up to King Khalid Military City, and so we left Saudi Catering in the hands of the 47th MEDSOM, which was a MEDSOM from Fort Hood that came and joined us in early November.

MAJ HONEC: Okay.

LTC BRUELAND: They took over the EAC [echelons above corps] or the ARCENT [US Army Central Command] mission in Dammam and we followed the [XVIII Airborne] Corps up to KKMC and we established a location here.

Now, when I moved up here, the arrangement here was that we could have this quadrant of land and everything that we have done here, we have literally had to make. That brings up all the structural flaws in the TO&E: the lack of equipment, the lack of an S-staff to do the planning, the lack of communication that we've already talked about.

Let's talk about the equipment for a moment. According to the MEDSOM TO&E, I have four rough-terrain forklifts and three commercial forklifts. That's a total of seven forklifts to do a job that we probably need fourteen forklifts--on this one location--to do adequately. Not only that, due to the dusty air [and] austere environment, the forklifts simply have not lasted up here and we probably have had a very poor operational readiness rate with the forklifts. As a matter of fact, at one point, I had four forklifts down and only one operational, and so we've gone through periods where the shortage of forklifts have actually slowed the operation and our ability to do the work.

The yard storage area is very large. It's 200 meters by 600 meters and pulling stock without a vehicle or a forklift is virtually impossible. Of course, it's a yard storage area where it's subject to damage by rain, by wind, and by all the other elements of being outside. [It is] amazing to me [that] the supplies that held up well, the actual, you know, 4-by-4 expungers or the needles or anything that are packaged in an outer box that had been destroyed by the elements, but the inner sterile container is still intact and it's usable, so we have destroyed very little, as a loss due to the elements.

MAJ HONEC: Okay. Please point out that it's been the heaviest rainfall here in quite some time.

LTC BRUELAND: I would like to say that it's a historical rainfall in the sense that prior to our coming up here, we were told that it would rain on us three times. We were told to expect about two and a half inches of rain, and that was it. Well, it has rained [on] ten separate occasions and on three of those occasions, I would say it rained two inches on each one of those occasions. We've had some heavy downpours, so bad, in fact, that some of the other sister units in the area have actually been flooded out of their land site. We were blessed or lucky or whatever in that we are kind of on high ground and everything drained off relatively well.

Wind has done us a large amount of damage. We, the brigade--the 44th Med[ical] Brigade--purchased two large warehouse tents from Egypt and they were constructed and erected. They stood for about four days before the wind blew them down. It was a really windy, bad day, but the tents were just not designed to take the rain or the wind, and it rained a day before and then it got real windy and the steel structures were bent and the tent literally collapsed. And so we had to clear that away and just do without.

LTG Pagonis or ARCENT has purchased a "fest tent" [German civilian tent used for festivals] which we still have standing, which was smaller than the two Egyptian warehouse tents, but has withstood the elements. And it's a good fest tent and I would recommend that become part of our TO&E. Because it gives us the capability to have some vertical storage of supplies and it does not need or require a floor. It can be put out anywhere that you can put it. It's about 60 by 200 meter square footage area. It's a really good tent.

Getting back to the equipment shortfalls in the MEDSOM. The MEDSOM was designed as a "depot activity," where we would fall in on a fixed facility or a structure that would support warehousing activity. And we have, in fact, done that three times in our stay at Saudi Arabia. This last time, we've been out in the field and if we didn't bring it, it didn't exist. We were short tents. We were short a warehouse tent of some sort. We were short the forklifts, of course. We were short all of the shelving, if you will, the things that make a warehouse work; the automated systems for--not automated, but the materiel handling systems inside buildings that make the job easier. We have built wooden shelves.

Everything that we have here, we either brought with us or built once we got here, and that's created several lessons learned in the area that the Army could do a much better job if they would have pre-positioned buildings or structures or shelves that a unit such as ours could go in and fabricate over the course of a two-week period to put the stock in. The AMED [Army Medical Command] had no concept of this because we thought all along that surely every place we would go to war would have a warehouse. And it's not true. In this austere desert environment, the AMED has put in CAT scanners and some really sophisticated equipment, but they have not provided any storage capability for any of it and it's very difficult to work with.

We, right now, are in a sea-land container that we're using as the best configuration we could come up with at the time for an office space. We operate a rather sophisticated--not CTAS--but ATAX computer system that's in another 40-foot van simply because that's the cleanest environment we could provide for it. And I think that's a real equipment shortfall that needs to be addressed--and that is the wherewithal or the warehousing capability to go where the Army wants us to go. The assumption that there will always be a building there just did not hold true.

We've talked about equipment, commo ... .

MAJ HONEC: Let's talk about transportation issues, too.

LTC BRUELAND: Transportation. A real shortfall for the unit in transportation and being able to service its customers.

One of the best stories I like to talk about is that in the States, medical logistics is an invisible science. The end user is not aware of how the logistics system works. In our hospitals in the United States, the nurse does not stock her ward anymore. She just goes to a shelf, pulls it off, and somebody from the bowels of the organization, the logistics division, comes up and replaces it. And there are automated systems, the CAPTAN system, and all of these automated systems in fixed facilities that provide this service for the nursing staff and for the physicians in our fixed facilities in CONUS.

In the field, it's a totally different environment. If the nurse doesn't order it, it doesn't appear. It's not there. And so, therefore, there was a whole educational process that was necessary for the nursing staff up at the hospitals, as well as the professional staffs, to understand that now, once again, they had to step back and ask for what they wanted before they needed it.

MAJ HONEC: Okay, you're talking about combat support, MASH [mobile army surgical] hospitals, those types of hospitals, sir?

LTC BRUELAND: All the way up through the evac[uation hospital]s.

MAJ HONEC: All of the hospitals?

LTC BRUELAND: Yes. The evacs, the CSHs, the MASHs, all of those. One of our weakest links was our lack of logistical training at the hospital, and then that compounded itself as they did not know how to ask the MEDSOM for the supplies that they so dearly needed. They just didn't know how to ask. Once they did ask, I usually--I shouldn't say usually--frequently, I did not have them on hand. There has always been a very large time lag between what was requested and the ability to provide it to the customer.

MAJ HONEC: Is the time lag due to shortages of special or just generic things that are ... ?

LTC BRUELAND: In the beginning, it was a very generic problem. Unknown to anybody, I think, the biggest used item in Saudi Arabia is hydrogen peroxide. I don't know why. I mean, I really don't have the foggiest idea, but for the last seven months, I sell more hydrogen peroxide than I have sold anything else. In the beginning, it was on the Green Harbor. I mean, I had 320 bottles or something like that of hydrogen peroxide on the Green Harbor. I went through that in two orders. I have--we doubled our ROs in August. We doubled our ROs in September. We tripled our ROs in October and then we went six times our ROs in November and we still could not keep up with the build up or the demand for hydrogen peroxide.

MAJ HONEC: ROs are requests?

LTC BRUELAND: Requisition Objectives, how we base our level. Our Requisition Objective for hydrogen peroxide was never established correctly through probably late October. I mean, we were just always at a zero balance. We couldn't keep it on hand. And that's one of the staples of our--it's a common item.

You know our difficulty with maintaining common items created a bad reputation for us. Then, of course, the sophisticated items, like the external fixators and all of that, we have had a very difficult time getting, and maybe justifiably so, but that has compounded the allusion or the statement that we have not been able to support the theater.

And I would like to say, with the amount of supplies that we have brought in here and that we have made the hospitals operational to a rather significant level, that we have been able to support them and we have filled the bill, if you will, and given them the required days of supply they need to do their job. So, I feel quite comfortable that through it all, we were able to do our job. But it was only because we were given the time to do that. I think if we would have gone to war on the 15th of August [rather] than on the 15th of January, it might have been a different story. It might have been a different medical supply story because we did not have, at that time, what we have today in any shape or imagination. The hospitals were not at the level they are today.

MAJ HONEC: Okay. Mission. You got into the theater; you were going to be theater stockage?

LTC BRUELAND: Yes.

MAJ HONEC: And you have remained that way from that particular point?

LTC BRUELAND: Well, our mission has changed several times. When I deployed, I was to come over here and set up the Class VIII supply point for the theater and I was told that I would be accepting the quad-service [joint] mission. And at that point, it was just going to be the 32d MEDSOM, one corps, and we were going to be a small-time operation.

Sometime in the mid-November time frame, that defensive posture mission changed and the VII Corps was brought in. And we were ... by that time, we had already accepted the quad-service mission, so we had that, but our mission was broadened to support two corps. Five additional ... or a total of five MEDSOMs were going to be TPFDed [time-phased force deployment] into the theater to support the enlarged mission. The 32d's role in that was to maintain the quad-service mission up until the time we redeployed north to KKMC; at which time it went to the 47th or to an organization that they call USAMMCSA or United States Army Medical Materiel Center, Saudi Arabia.

And we did that through December and then in December, our mission was simply to support the corps as it went through its offensive operations.

MAJ HONEC: For preparation.

LTC BRUELAND: Then we took on an additional mission to support the evacs here at KKMC--because we were here--as a EAC mission to support the five evacs on KKMC.

MAJ HONEC: I see. Okay, so you really have a dual role now. You are theater and corps-specific support.

LTC BRUELAND: Right. In support of the corps, how we supported the offensive operation is we developed a total of eighteen different preconfigured skid packages. And then we made over 1,300 skids worth of supplies, totalling about seventeen million--well, I don't want to say 17 million--I want to say it's closer to $11 million worth of supplies. We prepositioned that in ROMEO--I'm sorry, at CHARLIE.

MAJ HONEC: At Log Base CHARLIE.

LTC BRUELAND: At Log Base CHARLIE for eventual movement to ROMEO as the war progressed. Of course, it didn't happen that way and so we literally have over a thousand skids of medical supplies at Log Base CHARLIE that have not been used, that were taken out of their intermediate packages, broken down and configured for a specific use and, thankfully, have not been used. So we are going to have to recover all of that, and that retrograde operation, it's not been decided on how we're going to do that.

It took us 48 flatbeds or 40-foot tractor trailers to move it from KKMC to Log Base CHARLIE, and now we're going to have to move it all back. One of the operational considerations to get it from Log Base CHARLIE to Log Base ROMEO was that we were going to do that by CH-47s [Chinooks] which meant putting them all in 20-foot containers, 20-foot sea vans. So, we have 40 20-foot sea vans up at Log Base CHARLIE that were going to be flown to Log Base ROMEO. And, of course, that did not happen, so those containers have created another transportation requirement for us to retrograde.

The concept of designing and building preconfigured skids or packages, if you will, the corps liked that. The corps units, the infantry divisions, the armored divisions, all played a role in that process of developing what went on those skids, and that gave them the sense that it was actually their resupply sets, not something that came from the Academy of Health Science or somebody else, but it was something locally developed here, and it had on there the items that they wanted to have on it.

The same goes for the MASHs and CSHs that went north of Tapline [Trans-Arabian Pipeline] Road. Those facilities had their own preconfigured resupply packages made for them. They had a committee that designed those packages, and we built them for them and that was what we sent to Log Base CHARLIE. The evacs never went off of line item management. We made the management decision that they would stay with line item management throughout the conflict because they were not going to move or, if they did move, they were going to be allowed to physically close down, move and then re-establish themselves because of their size and the enormity of trying to move an evac hospital.

And that was how we were going to support the offensive operation with Class VIII. And that went all the way from the battalion aid station--line medic--all the way through our hospital system, through the corps level, to the EAC level. We had medical resupply packages available for people to pick up at certain points on the battlefield. And that was worked out by several liaison or coordination meetings during the months of November and December. It was felt that the doctrinal role of resupplying units by back haul would just not work because there wasn't going to be a back haul. The ambulances that picked the patient up and brought him to a hospital were not the ambulances going back to the front line. They were different, because of how we were arrayed on the battlefield, and so there was no back haul for the normal medical resupply to the small customers. And so we had to develop new doctrine, if you will, on all of that. And I think the consensus was that the idea of a preconfigured skid or a preconfigured ...

MAJ HONEC: Combat load?

LTC BRUELAND: ... combat load or wherever you want to call it, was a good concept and what we should go to, and we should develop those and then supplement those with line item management as soon as practical after that capability exists. But during a fast-moving non-linear battlefield, we need preconfigured loads, and that's all they have and that's all they need. And to my knowledge, there was nothing called for. Of course, it was a very short war and we took very few casualties, but nothing was called for that wasn't in the packages or that the hospitals didn't take with them in their basic loads.

MAJ HONEC: Okay, okay. Which brings us to the medical planning that went on each step of the way. You had to plan for the lay-out, obviously, to plan for the warehouse lay-out. Is there anything innovative that perhaps you want to talk about that you had to do in Saudi Arabia that maybe perhaps wouldn't be found in Europe or anything like that, in the warehousing operation? In your operation, you set out here for control of materiel moving through the compound of ...

LTC BRUELAND: Well, I would say that when you're going into a fixed facility, the warehousing techniques are the same no matter where you're at. There are some absolutely state-of-the-art warehouses in Saudi Arabia, that if we would have been fortunate enough to get, like [the] Al Kashobi Cold Storage, it would have answered a lot of our problems, would have solved most of them and, actually, we would have had more people than we would have required to do the job. That's because that's the state-of-the-art.

MAJ HONEC: They have overhead cranes to move ... ?

LTC BRUELAND: They have an internal ... it's not a conveyor system, but they have electric forklifts that take the stock from the dock to where it goes. They have a vertical lift system that keeps the stock where it's located and keeps the stock available for issuing. So, I think it would have been a wonderful facility, but we didn't get that. What we got was what we got and we made that work, and we basically used the same technology and the same procedures that you'd use in any warehouse.

When you come out to an open warehouse like we have here, the rules really change.

MAJ HONEC: How?

LTC BRUELAND: Well, simply, there is no vertical storage, so everything is spread out. So you need a vehicle of some sort to pick stock. The stock pickers have to pick the stock and put it in the aisle, and your aisles have to be big enough for a truck to go down and negotiate. And then you have other people come by and pick the stock up, put it on a vehicle and take it around to shipping. And then you repack it into a shipping container and ship it out of here.

MAJ HONEC: Okay.

LTC BRUELAND: The initial thoughts were that we had much too large of an area, but as you'll see, as we walk around, we have filled up the area. And I'll remind you that half of our stock is at another storage site at the moment and is going to come back here. So the immense size of this is because there is no vertical growth potential. It all has to go out horizontally on the ground. The desire for covered storage and temperature control is a requirement. We were very fortunate in the timing of this operation because the weather has been kind to us in one sense, that it hasn't had the extreme heat that was here in July and August and September when we got here at first. The supplies will not last in that sort of heat.

MAJ HONEC: You would experience a lot of shrinkage in your supplies, then, due to weather if it got very hot?

LTC BRUELAND: Yes, due to the exposure. Simple things like: Bacitracin become a liquid at 90 degrees and so you have to maintain it at room temperature or it's just not usable. It doesn't really hurt it. It just becomes a liquid. And there's a lot of medical items that are like that.

MAJ HONEC: Like Ringers [Lactate solution]: would that last in 100 and ... ?

LTC BRUELAND: Well, after it gets over 100 degrees, the filament, it starts to ... the particulate separates and it becomes non-user. It destroys it.

The design of the warehouse here is, I think, very unique. It's because of some of the lessons we learned while we were here. When we got to KKMC, we laid out the groundwork of where everything was going to be and the relationships of receiving to issuing to storage, and the traffic flow. The traffic flow was probably the biggest thing that needs to be resolved when you're building your own warehouse complex, and that's what we did here. Is that we built it from ... if we didn't bring it, it doesn't exist, so everything here, we put here. And it was like a clean slate.

On the traffic flow, I think we've done a very good job of channelling people to where they need to go, so they're not lost. With the size of this place, if they go to the wrong place, it's not as if they could yell across the room and get more directions, so that's very important.

The storage aisles: we chose (managerial decision) to make each federal supply class have its own row. The 6505 and 6510 rows have 180 storage locations going 600 meters across the field. That's an immense amount of walking to get from one end to the other. It's just large.

MAJ HONEC: Okay. Well, that's really all the particular areas: your transportation, security--you had to supply your own security?

LTC BRUELAND: Security was a ... from the DSU [direct support unit] or from the logistical mission point of view, it was a pain in the butt. But I will tell you that our unit's always handled it as a cost of doing business, and that it has done us very well in the sense that it made the soldiers understand that they weren't here solely to do their medical resupply mission. They were also here to be soldiers, and there was a real threat.

The compound has four [SS-1C] SCUD bunkers, and when we were having SCUD attacks, we went to them. The soldiers really got quite proficient at that. The drain on the resources is a real drain. We have four people on guard duty at all times and, of course, those four people come from the DSU, the motor pool, the mess hall or wherever, and it's a cost of doing business out here in this environment. And that's how the unit looks at it.

But it is an actual cost of ... in our productivity. When the threat goes up, it's a larger cost. When the threat goes down, it's less of a cost. So, that's how we've handled the security issue. It's been a pain, but I think it's actually helped the soldiers remember why they were here.

MAJ HONEC: Okay. The soldiers--what's their day like? What is their workday like and what sort of activities do they do on their own time for morale purposes? Perhaps we could talk about the mail, if you've had problems. But start with what's the work week like?

LTC BRUELAND: That's one of the interesting things. We have been supplemented by other staff, and everybody that comes here really doesn't like it here. The reason they don't like it here is we work seven days a week. We work twelve hours on and twelve hours off and there are no days off. Now, up until two days ago, that's how everybody had been working almost since August simply because that's the only way that we could hope to keep up with the level of activity.

MAJ HONEC: How many people did you start with?

LTC BRUELAND: Well, the first contingent was only four people. We became operational with 30. We worked with 30 for about 40 days and then the rest of the unit flowed in. The main body flowed in at one time, bringing us up to 120 people.

MAJ HONEC: Okay.

LTC BRUELAND: We've been bouncing between 120 people and 140 people up until the middle ... the second ... well, the 10th of January or thereabouts when ARCENT gave us our ... staffed us with twenty additional people because of the ARCENT mission here with the evac. So, at that point, we went up to 140. Plus the blood people came in and were supplemented to us, and so that brought us up to a total of about 165 and that's the largest we've ever been, as a single unit.

MAJ HONEC: What do they do in the time, the 12 hours off?

LTC BRUELAND: Up here at KKMC, we have been very fortunate in that there's a phone center and in that they're allowed to call, so we have bus runs to the phone center. We have a PX on KKMC and so they can go to the PX, although it doesn't have a whole heck of a lot. Other than that, they'd washed their clothes, written letters and rested. I think it's a very common and almost everybody will tell you this, that their tour in Saudi Arabia was nothing but work. When we were down in Dammam, we were never allowed to go downtown. We were never allowed to have any entertainment, per se.

We have a ... the only good thing that the unit has been able to provide for the soldier is a large screen TV, so we do have a lot of tapes and they do watch TV. But other than that, there is no other social expression that they have. Of course, we have our own church group by members of the unit that are of that persuasion have their own church and their own meetings, if you will. Other than that, there's not much going on. Just yesterday, we set up a volleyball net, and we're getting back into volleyball.

MAJ HONEC: Okay.

LTC BRUELAND: On the volleyball ... down in Dammam, we played volleyball with the 147th [i.e., 47th MEDSOM] and amongst ourselves and it was a great release. But all of the troops complained about not having enough free time. And that's just something that has been very hard on the unit, because there hasn't been that free time.

We tried everything from, you know, trying to give a ... making sure every soldier had a day off at least once a week. And that just got ... that was just unsuccessful. We were unsuccessful in doing that, because we needed the soldier at the job site. We just needed the work force at work, and so most of my soldiers, I think, would tell you that they'd spent their time in Saudi Arabia at work or asleep resting or taking care of their personal stuff.

MAJ HONEC: The Armed Forces Network has been here. That's part of the morale picture?

LTC BRUELAND: Yes, I think the radio and the constant bombardment of news has really helped people do well here. We oftentimes ... and we have a unit at Log Base CHARLIE that can't received Armed Forces Radio, and they really do complain about that, in the sense that they don't know what's going on; whereas, knowing what's going on on the world scene really puts in perspective what we're doing here. It became almost comical that we could hear the SCUD alerts or the sirens on the radio as we were hearing them here, so the radio really has kept us in tune with the world.

MAJ HONEC: Okay. The mail: has the mail been a problem?

LTC BRUELAND: The mail system has been broke since the very beginning. I guess in September it was taking about 30 days to get a letter. And today I got a letter today dated December the 28th, so it has not gotten better and, in most troop's opinions, I think it's gotten worse. The ... but it is the biggest morale issue. Just getting something, even if it is two months old, is well worth getting it.

And I think that's been a real boost from the word go as far as the support that the country has given to its soldiers in their "any soldier" mail. People seem to write the soldiers. I mean, I don't think I have ... I was kind of concerned, because it's such a big issue, that I'd have soldiers not getting mail. I don't think I have a soldier that's not getting some mail some time. Now, we have a few dry spells and people bitch that they haven't gotten a letter in, you know, a week or two weeks. But the lack of mail has not been a problem other than it's so old.

MAJ HONEC: Okay.

LTC BRUELAND: And when we moved up here, there was a two-week, three-week period where, because the unit moved, we got lost in the system and nobody got mail. And that was a very difficult time for everybody, but we kind of pulled together and just got through it.

MAJ HONEC: Okay. Equipment ... I understand that you're under a different TO&E, but we'll go back to, real quick, and touch upon the fact you're under a ... you explained that you would be able to accomplish your mission better if you had a different TO&E?

LTC BRUELAND: Well, I guess ... let me address the TO&E and then I'd like to address something else.

MAJ HONEC: Sure.

LTC BRUELAND: The TO&E portion, as you're probably aware, MEDFORCE 2000 was approved two years ago. And we were supposed to convert to a different TO&E called the MEDLOG Battalion Forward probably August or September of [19]91. So, we had put into motion those things to get a new TO&E. That new TO&E would have done a much better job of providing the structure necessary to support the missions that we were given here in Saudi Arabia. We would have, if we were organized under that TO&E, we would have had five flatbeds to deliver supplies so we could maintain a level of satisfaction with our customers. We would have had more ...

MAJ HONEC: Let's go over to the next tape.

MAJ HONEC: Please go ahead about the MEDFORCE 2000.

LTC BRUELAND: Okay. We would have had the 40 forklifts that we so desperately needed. But, more importantly, we would have had the structure that we've been asked to perform here. We have a blood mission and in the MEDSOM there is no blood detachment, so we have been augmented by blood detachments, but the command structure is not there.

MAJ HONEC: Okay, oxygen?

LTC BRUELAND: We have a liquid oxygen [LOX] mission, and we have maintained that mission, but there's no structure for that, and so we had another log team [attached] to us. The MEDSOM is not organized with a battalion staff. There's not an S-3 officer or an S-1 or any of those staff functions, so there's no planning cell or no planning capability with how the structure is organized. To get around that ...

MAJ HONEC: Yes, how do you ... ?

LTC BRUELAND: We just appointed ... we went to the Log Battalion. I have an S-3 who thinks he's the S-3, who is going to get rated as the S-3, although I have no position for him as the S-3. I have an S-1. I created an S-staff so that I could have that planning capability and that ... the support for the other missions that we have had.

We have brought the blood team in. He is MAJ Friedle (who is the Commander of one of the blood detachments that are attached to us) as a member of my staff. The same with the LOX person, Mr. Callaghan, CW2 Callaghan. I have made them a member of my planning staff and they act, and I believe that if you asked them, that they would say that they are a member of our staff. Although each of them are commanders of their own detachments. We have made it work, but the structure, the TO&E structure, is not there. And that's a real shortfall.

How I like to think about that, and this probably sounds critical, but the AMED, the reason medical logistics looked for, took so long to come up and be as good as it should have been all along, was that the AMED made a conscious decision over the last ten years that it was not going to go to war; that it had no intent of going to war. Those decisions led to the piecemeal fielding of DEPMEDs [Deployable Medical System]; the fielding of complete hospital sets without a laboratory or X-ray; the fielding of a MEDSOM that was a Vietnam-era TO&E structure made for a depot (non-moveable, very limited on personnel, commo and equipment to do the job). With that sort of decision making from the very top, from the OTSG [Office of the Surgeon General] on down, it permeated the system to where we were convinced we were never going to war.

MAJ HONEC: DEPMEDS are basically ... had been shipped short. Are the items picked up in England or in Europe that are just not complete?

LTC BRUELAND: They weren't complete. The concept was that we could get well after we got there, and we were very fortunate that we had two months when we got here to get well. But it took a Herculean effort to do that, and it's not the right way to go to war.

[When] you compare that with how the Air Force deployed into here, they made a conscious decision of what their hospital would look like. They made the hospital. They bought the hospital. They bought the month's worth of supplies for the hospital. They told the professional staff, "This is what you have. Make it work. This is all you're going to get. Like it, leave it, do what you want to, but that's it."

The Army, on the other hand, came over here and said, "Here it is. Oh, by the way, you don't have power. You don't have water. You don't have medical supplies, but you make it work and you can have anything you want." And that has created more trauma with the supply system and with the personnel system than you can imagine. The people, the physicians, want to do a good job. They want to take care of patients. You ask a physician what he needs and he will tell you what he needs to do the very best job, not what he can live with and not what he can get away with, but the very best, state-of-the-art job, and that has created a supply system with no discipline.

We never asked any hospital or any medical unit, to include the divisions, to live within their UL [unit load]. We never asked them once to make their TO&E, sets, kits, outfits or hospital assemblages work. We said, "Well, what does it take? Do you want a CAT Scan? Here's a CAT Scan. Do you want to do open heart surgery? Here, let's do open heart surgery. Do you want liver sutures? Here, let's go get liver sutures." There are things that I have bought here that I don't think they use at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center], but we have them here as individual sets. External fixators.

MAJ HONEC: Yes, please.

LTC BRUELAND: We ... somebody, somewhere, made a decision that the Army would use small bone external fixators and that's what we would put in the assemblages, and then we would have casting material and splints for the large bone fractures. That never happened here. We decided, all by ourselves, I guess, or the professional staff here, that we wanted the large bone external fixators. To this date, we still don't have more than fifteen of them in country because they simply aren't available. There was a tremendous uproar when casualties on the MSR [main supply route] started to be taken because there would be fractures and we wouldn't have the large bone external fixator and the physicians would claim they didn't know how to treat them.

MAJ HONEC: Didn't know how to splint them?

LTC BRUELAND: Didn't know how to splint them, didn't know how to put them in casts and treat them. You know, I personally was told that I was responsible for somebody's death because I didn't provide him a large bone external fixator. The trauma that that creates through the system is unnecessary. It's an undisciplined supply system and it's created from the very top not making a commitment to deliver a whole package.

Every physician here was told that DEPMEDs fielding would take care of their wants and desires and needs, and they could operate from the DEPMEDs fielding. DEPMEDs fielding is not complete today. After the war, it's still not complete. We are still short major assemblages; still short some awfully sophisticated stuff that we said we would provide. If we say we're going to provide it, it ought to be bought for, stored and put on the shelf so that if we ever need it, we have it. Otherwise, we're going to go through the same thing over again in other ... . And the risk is that we don't get the two months to get ready. The risk is we ... in August, we would have looked probably just as bad as the Iraqi Army looks today if they would have came south, because we had no medical super-[structure], infrastructure to support the theater. My Class VIII supply point was woefully lacking the things that people wanted.

MAJ HONEC: Which were? Can you call to mind anything?

LTC BRUELAND: The easiest example that comes to mind is the wire ladder splint.

MAJ HONEC: Okay.

LTC BRUELAND: Mesh wire was what was used in World War II and Korea. That's what was on the Green Harbor. Mesh wire is no longer used. We use a wire ladder splint or we splint with poles and straps and cravats. We don't use the mesh wire. I've probably had 2,000 rolls off of the Green Harbor that I've never received a request for. It was the wrong item. Things like that.

MAJ HONEC: You said sophisticated assemblages are lacking in the DEPMEDs. Can you call to mind some common ones, perhaps, for anyone ... ?

LTC BRUELAND: I think the ones I received the most complaints over is the suction ... the suction apparatuses and the EKG monitors.

MAJ HONEC: The suction apparatus: the apparatus is there. Is it missing something like the suction hose? Is that it?

LTC BRUELAND: From what I've been told, it just doesn't work, okay? It's not the appropriate piece of equipment for what it's supposed to be used for. Now, I have to tell you that you have to take all of that with a grain of salt because I have seen physicians complain and complain and complain that something won't work, and then when it comes time ...