[Music] motans served in America's two conflicts in the Gulf region The 1991 Gulf War and the Iraq war that followed in 2003 Over the course of 30 years thousands of veterans participated in these military campaigns The long deployment was gut-wrenching in so many ways for so many reasons but it was also a very proud moment for all of us I mean we achieved a lot We had all our artillery firing and that was one of the loudest things that I had ever experienced [Music] Those sort of missions were door guns blazing everywhere we went Now hear Minnesota veterans tell the stories of these two conflicts and of the history they live through The Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum is the archive of the state's military history It houses papers and artifacts from over 150 years of military activity stretching back to Minnesota's role in the Union Army during the Civil War Museum staff continue to collect material documenting the military actions of recent decades including the involvement of Minnesota veterans in the 1991 Gulf War The Gulf War was the first of two M East conflicts that the United States found themselves involved in after the Cold War This artifact from Desert Storm was donated to us by James Moser a Minnesota veteran And this is his helmet from being a tank commander in Operation Desert Storm Just you know an incredible artifact that he shared with us that will make its way into our exhibit galleries and is here for visitors to see and appreciate In August of 1990 Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait sending in armored units to occupy that nation's oil fields More than 500,000 US troops then deployed to Saudi Arabia as part of an international coalition After negotiations failed to remove Iraqi forces the coalition undertook military action Minnesota veteran James Moer participated in the ground war against Iraq as a tank commander in the armored units infantry units You basically kind of knew that we were going to deploy based upon the the president's comments the UN Security Council you know resolutions and and everything politically that was going on We basically knew that we were going to have to uh liberate Kuwait Veteran Mark Wis began his military career as part of the ground forces in the Gulf War For us it was "Okay this is this is the big show This is the game we're deploying."

And uh we went down to uh Saudi Arabia had all our tanks uh on ships and they had to they had to sail down there where we flew in and we were getting ready to go The Iraqi army had just completed 8 years of desert warfare against Iran and was equipped with Soviet military hardware US military commanders anticipated substantial Iraqi resistance We felt we were incredibly highly trained We were confident but yet when you're told "Hey you're facing the big guys on the block at the time in the Middle East," you had confidence but a little bit of a little bit of hesitation was kind of built in by the pure numbers and also the amount of time that he had to prepare defenses During the Cold War there was so many efforts to find out what the Soviets were making and what the capabilities were And we were under the impression that their equipment was almost as good as ours The planners uh thought this was going to be you know take a month or or multiple weeks to fight and that we would probably have a thousand maybe 10,000 casualties And so you see the body bags come in and everything and and that's sort of a sobering aspect We were brought in by platoon and we were told we anticipate 25% casualties So as you look around with 16 guys and you look at well which four of us in advance of the ground war the US-led coalition launched the largest air campaign since the Vietnam War directed at military targets in Iraq and Kuwait The first thing on the air war they want to get rid of anything that can shoot down aircraft whether it's fast movers or it's a rotary wing They want to denude that and then go after the command and control so that degrades their their ability to communicate with with their troops And it was all very successful to set the conditions for the ground war As coalition forces prepared to repel Iraqi troops military commanders signaled their intention to attack defenses that Iraq had built up in southern Kuwait However a different plan was underway in secret a ground maneuver that would come to be known as the left hook the way Saddam set up thinking that we would not invade Iraq that we would just go to liberate Kuwait all the battle positions that the Iraqis had were pretty much facing south That's when we did sort of a security halt with every everybody and briefed them hey we're we're going to uh conduct a deception operation This is a huge left hook where from where we were staying and where we had been training and presenting ourselves so that the the Iraqis could detect us Uh we shot to the um to the west It was called the left hook maneuver cuz when you look at it you know a two-dimensional map it's to the left to the west around the defenses that he had built up in southern Kuwait and along that coastline And that was primarily to go into Iraq to the northern part of Kuwait And a series of engagements took place with with objectives And then the the last big engagement a meeting engagement on the northern side of Kuwait when they were trying to exit So that's kind of what is referred to as the left hook Ground combat began on the 24th of February with armored forces moving into Iraq itself just west of Kuwait in a surprise assault Before you actually experience combat the typical behavior is you want I want to go right i want to go I want to experience it Of course if you're on if you're on the football team you you want to go to the Super Bowl And then after you experience combat it's something you don't want to do right it's a it's an emotionally draining thing Driving on a Minnesota gravel road in the summer is nothing compared to eating the dust of hundreds of vehicles in front of you It was a miserable experience And uh got to be a little anxious right you got the you're in Iraq We had a primary objective There was a unit that was on the border Not a frontline unit It would be probably something like a reserve component unit that was just called up out of the streets of Baghdad Go down there give them a bunch of equipment And those guys were just eating rotted tomatoes and they were out of communication and they gave up right away as soon as soon as they they saw us as we crossed the border What ended up happening was we drove up so fast we blew through that first division because they all uh surrendered and then we drove right on to that that prime that first objective We had all our artillery firing on it and that was one of the loudest things I had ever experienced Coalition forces pushed on and encountered Republican Guard units near the port city of Bosan where a major engagement took place There were a number of Republican Guard divisions They were trying to exit Kuwait and into Iraq That last day if you will that last 12 hours was kind of a a rolling off and on where we would we would experience a lot of bunkers a lot of small arms fire I distinctly remember probably I could see him So maybe 50 m away um a guy had stood up from be he who was in a burm behind a burm and he had he had stood up and he fired an RPG and I remember watching the RPG come in and went between myself and my wingman And at the time I thought how did he miss me this battle went on for what I remember probably about a half hour And it was as if you took a baseball bat and hit a hornet's nest They were launching everything they had and it probably took 10 minutes And I've never seen so many people waving whatever they had that was white in the air And there was hundreds of them that surrendered Ground combat operations ended after 100 hours The Iraqi military including most of Saddam's elite Republican Guard units had been neutralized Coalition forces stopped short of Baghdad Peace negotiations left Saddam Hussein in power but the settlement required his government to eliminate chemical and biological weapons You know these these these wars they've they've happened periodically They'll continue to happen right i think it was Plato that said only the dead have seen the end of war And you look back in our history every 10 every 20 years whatever it may be but it's all timing The whole Desert Storm experience to me is uh it's it was all timing It was uh looking back on it um none of my men were injured or killed Um you know we all came home safely Um and I was extremely fortunate to experience that Just over a decade later America would find itself engaged in a second war in the Middle East over disputes about Iraqi weapons Thousands of motans would become involved in the second Iraq conflict which involved the largest American troop deployment in decades Less than 10 years later under somewhat different circumstances we decide to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 Some of those same troops that fought in that first Gulf War find themselves fighting in that second Gulf War in Iraq This is the flight suit worn by Major Patricia Baker as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom flying combat helicopters into Iraq in support of ground forces To have this artifact in our collection is a real testament to the men and women from Minnesota who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom [Music] The Iraq War began in 2003 US and coalition forces masked on the Kuwaiti border to invade Iraq with the goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power Veteran Patricia Baker was a helicopter pilot who participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom In March of 2003 she flew into combat in Iraq in support of American ground forces You look at Iraq on a flat map in briefing after briefing after briefing and it gives no real insights into what what the assault on your senses is going to be in the spring of 2003 as you're actually flying a helicopter over that terrain We landed at Baghdad International Airport and it was deserted It was absolutely deserted We landed our helicopters there and there was nobody on the other end of the radio to even talk to We thought there'd be more of a fight We thought there would be more fight in the war zone that we just entered But everywhere that we landed things were abandoned We thought it was going to be a very short war We were very convinced if the Iraqi military hadn't shown up to fight then we were going to sweep through the country and it would be a lot like Persian Gulf War I We were quite convinced Didn't unfold that way The fight came just not at first Fighting between coalition forces and Iraqi troops became concentrated in Baghdad and other cities Most formal Iraqi military resistance collapsed by midappril President George W Bush declared major combat operations over in May of 2003 However fighting by regime loyalists and others continued on and attacks on US forces began to build once again During the summer it went from just flying from location to location in country to prepping for and executing large scale aerosols It it it's shifted to kinetic Now we were in a war fight was about clearing towns and villages sweeping out insurgents Every aircraft was filled with my fellow soldiers that needed to be time on target at a certain location in a military grid a 10digit grid sometimes that I had to hit with my GPS with every airframe in my company at an exact time because another wave of helicopters and another wave of helicopters and another wave of helicopters was going to be bringing in more and more soldiers to conduct that assault Those sort of missions were door guns blazing everywhere we went I came back off of RNR It's a short respit leave that they give you from the war zone And it was the day we caught Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein was captured in December of 2003 putting an end to what remained of his regime Despite his capture the insurgency within Iraq continued to grow leading to a chaotic security environment throughout the country The insurgency was made up of a number of forces Uh some of them were sectarian particularly Shiite clerics ran things but it was also former Iraqi military who had set up their own sort of organized crime u units So there was there was a lot of fighting that needed to be done on a number of different fronts There's a lot of security work being done a lot of patrols It was much more dangerous in terms of improvised explosive devices snipers bombings and it was it was not like you were fighting on the front and move forward Uh the conflict was everywhere at that point Thousands of motans ended up serving in Iraq particularly through the Minnesota National Guard which deployed over 8,000 troops over the course of the war One Minnesota National Guard combat team ended up being the longest serving military unit in the Iraq War during the 22-month long deployment The long deployment was gut-wrenching and and in so many ways for so many reasons but it was also a very proud moment for all of us I mean we achieved a lot We're the only brigade that I'm aware of that figured out that EFP explosive form projectile was the most lethal weapon in the war in Iraq from 03 until 2011 And if you look at the statistics what killed the most Americans it was the EFP It's an Iranian weapon that was employed in the Shia parts of Iraq And uh it had a 90ome% casualty rate It was a big problem And it scared the hell out of everybody cuz there was no armor It would go through an M1 tank I mean you couldn't protect MRAP Wouldn't stop it All the up armored doors wouldn't stop it The only defense about against an EFP was to not not get hit by one Minnesota soldiers eventually devised a method to counteract EFP attacks They maneuvered their convoys to avoid lethal hits to the passenger compartments Vehicles might be damaged but soldiers survived In the long deployment we figured it out and our guys defeated it through using pencil and ruler and engineering paper It was a bunch of smart kids bringing their civilian skills to the battlefield and figuring out really tough problems by not accepting the army answer That's what the That's what saved those [Music] lives By 2011 American military forces had been withdrawn from Iraq The US continued to support the new Iraqi government as it was challenged by an ongoing insurgency That support included operation inherent resolve which aided the Iraqi military in its fight against the Islamic State During that operation Joseph Scraa deployed to Iraq in support of Defense Department communications Operation Resolve That was the response to the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant As ISIS you know took over Raqqa and Syria and then Mosul and kept coming south all the way down to to just north of Baghdad Iraq requested US support to defend Baghdad and eventually start pushing them back north But our job was to support the Iraqis in them retaking their nation from ISIS And we were not doing the fighting on the ground Our job was to um to support them advise accompany them on missions but not to do their actual fighting We'd support them in the air with air support artillery and close air support but we were not doing the fighting on the ground And that was fairly unique And I think uh by the time we left in October of 2017 uh both Mosul and Raqqa had been liberated Um and it was fantastic because I got to see that progress for the year that I was [Music] there My tour as part of Operation Parent Resolve was extremely rewarding for me professionally but at the same time I had two young boys and a wife that I loved very much that I had to leave in the United States My wife was pregnant at the time that I deployed You know I try to talk with her and my boys by Skype They were I think four and two at the time um very young and um you know that was difficult for me I was just getting to know them as they were growing up and then um you know I had to leave them for what ended up being a pretty extended deployment um of 14 or 15 months I got back to Fort Hood Texas in the third week of March 2004 And I was changed after that many months not sleeping in a bed uh eight months sleeping in a tent after eating that many MREs and flying that many combat missions I was different I wasn't the mother of a a 2-year-old and a eager young captain like like before I left I came back and all of a sudden my son was three Zach was three How did how did that happen oh that's right I just spent the year in combat [Music] So uh you know I missed my son's sophomore and junior year in high school I missed my daughter's seventh and eighth Yeah saying goodbye to your family is never easy for anybody I got to do that a few times Um but I got unlike many I got to say hello again too So my kids paid a price My wife paid a price No doubt about it But you know they served their country too Thousands of Minnesota veterans served in America's two Gulf Wars In the years that followed they went on to become teachers firefighters lawmakers and neighbors Today many stay involved in educating their fellow motans about the value of service to the nation in all the forms that takes You know looking back on Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom it's clear that motans in large numbers fought in both wars And often times those were National Guard members from Minnesota citizen soldiers that are called upon and deployed to conduct themselves in in hostile environments in war situations And at the same time a credit to them and their families and the communities that they live in because they've returned home uh after these conflicts uh resumed their life their jobs their families and you know they walk amongst us today and to come home again and continue to enrich their community uh and our state is really a tribute to them uh their families and the communities in which they live So today at Camp Ripley was amazing I came back to Camp Ripley I was invited back by the museum to do an uplose tank talk and I do it you know I do it to share I do this in hopes of just building awareness that you know just because a significant event happened 30 years in the past It doesn't make it insignificant to the people that were there or the families that were involved I'm just trying to to spark interest and awareness So I primarily teach the seniors at Kraton Durham Hall JTC program and our curriculum is focused on leadership It's preparing um these students to be ready for the next chapter in their lives as American citizens and teaching them the importance of service At this point we're going to do a change of command Teaches leadership to young people teaches them the values of the army that will serve young people well whether they go into the military or they go into business or anything that they do throughout their life I really feel honored to be able to pass that on Opening attention Bring your units to present arms Present arms I grew up in a community where there were so many veterans the impact of veterans in communities whether you're still in public service or you're starting a business or you're taking care of your family it's that sense of building a team uh having a mission and doing doing what's best for for the entire group It's been the privilege of my life to serve the United States [Music] Heat Heat [Music] [Music]