Chapter SEVEN
The Gulf War
January 1S, 1991.
Every Riyadh McDonnell Douglas Services employee no subcontractors was told to be at the dining hall of the ROC Compound at 8:00 p.m. for an important announcement It was as if management didn t think that we were following CNN every night, anticipating the start of the war that had been building up in Saudi Arabia for the past several months.
The previous August, I had been tasked with ensuring that all McDonnell Douglas Services dependents from Dhahran and Riyadh were evacuated from Saudi Arabia through King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh. Riyadh dependents were preparing to depart after the hurried decision by our St. Louis corporate headquarters to evacuate them from the Kingdom. McDonnell Douglas Services Emergency Evacuation Plan had been in place since the inception of the Peace Sun Program back in 1980 but had not needed to be implemented until now.
A few days after arrangements were completed; a two-bus caravan left our three housing compounds in Dhahran in the sweltering heat of the morning, followed by several cars filled with husbands of the dependents. The Emergency Evacuation Plan called for Lufthansa Airlines to provide one or two large-capacity airplanes for the evacuation. A contract had been established with a designated price, but when it came time to use it, I was told that Lufthansa doubled the price ͞because of safety considerations not necessarily the safety of our dependents, but for the safety of their airplanes. They had McDonnell Douglas Corporation by the balls, and they used the leverage.
In Riyadh and Dhahran, McDonnell Douglas Services had paid hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in blood money to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get our Exit/Reentry visas issued within two days. Normally this process took weeks, but MDS management and the U S Embassy weren t going to wait on the niceties of diplomatic relations to secure the visas. McDonnell Douglas Corporation had been hammered by bad press and the indignation of families and relatives in the United States over its slow response regarding the evacuation of the dependents and its lack of concern regarding the safety of its American employees working in the Kingdom.
Boeing Corporation (before they absorbed McDonnell Douglas Corporation) had created the panic to evacuate immediately when their representatives at the United States Embassy Warden Briefing elected not to wait for the Embassy s evacuation plan. They chose instead to send a commercial airliner to evacuate their small continge