"I'm the guy taking the picture. In the pit, it's Lcpl's Olmstead, Elie and Mackenzie (Mackenzie is sitting down in the pit).

We were in the Mortar Section, Weapons Platoon, Lima Co. 3rd Bn 7th Marines. Our section leader was Cpl Mendenhall, our platoon commander was Lt. Robison, and the company commander was Capt. Conger. There were 2 other gun teams in our section.

3/7 were latecomers, arriving at Al Jubayl airfield on Jan. 13, 1991, and were trucked up to Camp 15 the same day.

After our arrival, the next couple of weeks was a series of training and forced marches north, to get into position for the assault across the border into Kuwait. We were foot-mobile, with a full combat load almost all the way up.

On the day that the ground war kicked off, we moved right up against the first minefield, which was then breached with a line-charge. We immediately punched through, and moved a few kilometers north of the minefield and berms on the border.The only thing we'd seen up to this point was burnt out tanks sitting in their revetments. Just before full daylight broke, we came under fire from Task Force Ripper, who had instructions to punch through right behind us. Ripper was mechanized, a whole lot faster than us, and we were supposed to be long gone by the time they moved up.  This was the only time that me and my buddies came under serious fire. Ripper realized it's mistake pretty quickly, but one 3/7 Marine had been killed.The rest of us were just scared half to death. At any rate, our task force moved quickly out of the area.The smoke and fire from the burning oil wells really turned everything into totally surreal bombed-out landscape. We didn't get a good look at the sun the entire time we were in Kuwait. After a nice long hike, we moved onto trucks, and were trucked up to Al Jabar airfield, which was in the middle of being captured and cleared. At the moment we debarked from the trucks (still out of sight of the airfield), a crowd of Iraqi soldiers materialized out of nowhere. Lucky for us, they were all giving up.There were about 270 of them, and the best I can figure, they were probably the soldiers that were supposed to be back at Al Jabar putting up some resistance.

At the airfield, during the night and into morning, there was a lot of sporadic mortar and artillery fire. Our gun was aimed at some buildings at the edge of the airfield, in preparation for an assault (which was never needed). At one point in the morning, we gathered up our gear and moved cautiously into the airbase. After a day or two of searching and clearing things, we took over some of the barracks that had not been blown up. At first, we were just waiting for the orders to move north again (hopefully all the way to Baghdad). But those orders never came, after a couple of days, the ground war was declared over, and we started our move back to Camp 15, then eventually home.

When everything was over and done with, we flew back to Norton AFB in California, on March 4, 1991, and had quite a stimulating bus ride back to 29 Palms."