Army veteran from Santa Rosa campaigns for Desert Storm memorial

A quarter-century ago, Eric Henderson of Santa Rosa was in the heat of the last battle of the Gulf War, furiously loading ammunition and missiles onto Apache attack helicopters that demolished the Iraqi Republican Guard’s elite Hammurabi Division at a bridge over a branch of the Euphrates River.

“We were at the tip of the spear,” said Henderson, then a 24-year-old sergeant in the Army’s 24th Infantry Division, engaged in driving Saddam Hussein’s Army from Kuwait in 1991.

“There was a lot of crazy stuff going on in the dark. Things were blowing up,” Henderson said, recalling the five-hour battle, which broke out after he and his fellow soldiers had been on the move across open desert and without sleep for five days.

Today, Henderson, 49, will be part of a 500-member contingent of Gulf War veterans who will march along six blocks of Constitution Avenue in the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington, D.C.

On the holiday set aside to honor the more than 1.1 million Americans killed in war, these veterans want to draw special attention to the 383 men and women who died in the Gulf War, also known as Operation Desert Storm, in which about 678,000 U.S. service members led an international coalition that routed the Iraqi army, then the world’s fourth largest military force.

During the 25th anniversary of Desert Storm, Henderson and the other veterans are promoting a campaign to build a National Desert Storm War Memorial close by the memorials for World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars.

“We can never let it be lost that these men and women so selflessly were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice,” said Henderson, a principal solutions engineer for Salesforce, the San Francisco-based cloud computing company.

Two of the Desert Storm casualties - Spc. Michael D. Daniels and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Hal “Hooper” Reichle - served with Henderson in the 24th Infantry’s “Vipers” Apache attack helicopter battalion. He calls them brothers and wears a black band bearing Daniels’ name on his right wrist.

Fred Wellman, a helicopter pilot for the battalion, is a board member of the National Desert Storm War Memorial Association, which gained congressional approval for the memorial in 2014 and is now launching a campaign to raise the money - $25 million to $40 million - to build it on or near the National Mall.

All war memorials are built with private funds, and Wellman said he expects contributions from U.S. residents, as well as some of the 34 nations of the Desert Storm coalition, including Germany, France, England, Hungary and especially Kuwait, whose citizens were brutalized during Iraq’s seven-month occupation.

“The appreciation of the Kuwaiti people is palpable,” he said. “They went through hell.”

The memorial envisioned by the foundation would be a massive, elegantly curved wall of Kuwaiti limestone, matching the color of the country’s desert sand, with the flags and names of the dead from the coalition nations, a chronology of the war and - in an inner sanctum - the names of America’s fallen engraved beneath the heading, “Here We Mark the Price of Freedom.”

Henderson, a lean man with short blond hair, grew up in a Salinas ranching family and was a rodeo saddle bronc rider in high school and at Hartnell College. He joined the Army in 1987 and trained in helicopter maintenance. His battalion was deployed to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, the month Iraqi forces invaded and quickly took over Kuwait, its tiny Persian Gulf neighbor with vast oil reserves.

During the buildup to the war, known as Operation Desert Shield, Henderson’s 220-member battalion was based far out in the Saudi Arabian desert, amid camels and Bedouins, poised for the famous “left hook” maneuver into Iraq intended to cut off the Iraqi forces escaping from Kuwait.

Desert Storm, begun on Jan. 17, 1991, opened with an aerial campaign that dropped ?88,500 tons of bombs on Iraqi military and civilian facilities. The ground assault, launched on Feb. 24, was over in ?100 hours, when President George H. W. Bush announced a unilateral cease-fire.

The 24th Infantry Division had penetrated 250 miles into Iraq and was primed for an attack on Basra, when the order came from the Pentagon on Feb. 28 to “stand down,” Henderson said.

What happened two days later, on March 2, is controversial. The division, commanded by Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, engaged the Republican Guard near the Rumaylah oil field, where a five-mile-long convoy was crossing a causeway on one of the few exit routes toward Baghdad.

“We blew up the first couple of tanks and they couldn’t move,” Henderson said. After allowing Iraqi troops to abandon their equipment, he said, the Apache helicopters poured cannon fire, rockets and Hellfire missiles on the trapped column.

Video from a helicopter camera shows one target after another exploding.

The assault destroyed 32 Soviet-made Iraqi tanks, 49 fighting vehicles, 37 trucks, six missile launchers and other equipment, and five of the 24th Infantry’s companies received a valorous unit award for the attack that “assured the destruction” of the Republican Guard division.

Critics, including other ?U.S. generals, said the attack was unnecessary in the wake of the cease-fire, according to an account by journalist Seymour Hersh. McCaffrey maintained the Iraqis had fired on his troops and his decision was justified.

Henderson said the cease-fire was unilateral, and that “no one told the Republican Guard to stop (fighting).” Thousands of Iraqi troops were captured that day, he said.

American casualties in the Gulf War were comparatively low. Henderson attributed it to the doctrine of “overwhelming force” espoused by top commanders, including Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the Allied forces, and Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The generals, including McCaffrey, had served in Vietnam and were determined to gain a better result in the Gulf War, Henderson said. “They all wanted to go in quickly and win.”

Henderson, a fifth-generation Californian, left the Army in 1992 and earned a bachelor’s degree in professional aeronautics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University two years later. He joined Salesforce two years ago.

Accompanying him on the trip to Washington is his fiancee, Santa Rosa attorney Kathleen Mullins Henderson.

On Friday, Henderson made a personal Memorial Day visit to the grave at Arlington National Cemetery of his uncle, John B. Lyttle, who served in the Marine regiment involved in the iconic World War II flag raising at Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945. Lyttle died in 2011.

“They put him to rest under a nice oak tree in shade,” Henderson said.

About 6,800 Americans died in the five-week campaign to capture Iwo Jima in some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest fighting.

“It is extremely important to remember what those boys did on that volcanic island in the Pacific,” Henderson said.