N.C. Must Prepare for Worst Case

UNC senior Laura Bonifacio has a brother, Al, who's a nurse at Pitt County Memorial Hospital in Greenville. Al's also a reserve medic in the 805th Military Police, a part of Ft. Bragg's 82nd Airborne Corp. and one of the military units mobilized last weekend.

Al hasn't been activated yet, but Laura says the call is likely to come any day. When it does she'll have 72 hours to say her goodbyes before her brother leaves, possibly for the Persian Gulf and potential war with Iraq. Even worse, Pitt County Memorial loses a crucial member of its emergency medical staff.

The crisis in the Middle East is coming rapidly to a head. Roughly 60,000 U.S. troops are already in the Gulf region, with another 67,000 due any time.

President Bush is pressuring Iraqi officials to disclose and disarm their weapons of mass destruction, and U.N. weapons inspectors are begging for more time to conduct investigations.

But military experts are predicting that some kind of decisive action isn't far off. U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Thursday that investigations teams have discovered at least 11 empty chemical warheads, and military officials already have started repositioning troops around the Middle East to protect our allies. Our soldiers are ready.

But can we say the same about the people of North Carolina?

In the six months between the mid-August 1990 buildup of Operation Desert Shield and the Jan. 15, 1991, launch of Operation Desert Storm, North Carolina contributed more than 80 percent of the troops in the Gulf and lived in fear.

Forty-seven N.C. hospitals set aside space for casualties, schools offered psychological counseling for children in military families, and churches prepared for mass numbers of funeral services as casualty predictions ranged from as low as 500 to as high as 20,000.

In hindsight the domestic buildup of support seems a bit excessive -- not counting those suffering from Gulf War syndrome, only 127 U.S. soldiers were confirmed dead in Desert Storm. But the country, at the time, was preparing for an honest-to-goodness war.

The headlines from January 1991 are frighteningly similar to those we're seeing today. The clock is ticking, and the time for peace is quickly running out.

But with more and more troops leaving from Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg every day, news of domestic preparation for war is sparse.

The fear -- the need to be prepared for the worst -- seems to be absent in the public this time around. The feeling in the air is that, because of our success last time, the upcoming conflict will be quick, painless and decisive.

But renewed conflict with Iraq will lead to domestic hardship. In the first Gulf War, oil and gas prices shot through the roof, which in turn drove transportation costs, like airfare, up by more than 10 percent. And as military personnel depart their home bases, military-dependent cities such as Fayetteville, Goldsboro, Havelock and others could stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue.

Prolonged conflict, which might be necessary to completely remove Saddam Hussein from power, would make matters worse. The longer the war, the more reservists the military will need for support. Many reservists, such as Al, often leave important business- and health-related jobs, leaving their co-workers to juggle the workload. During the Gulf War the spouses of activated reservists often were forced to take second jobs to make up for the significant drop in income.

Neither the government nor the major news outlets have broached many of these issues. But people with military ties, such as Laura, are forced to confront the danger that the public is unwilling to face.

People seem confident that a conflict with Iraq will be quick and decisive -- with luck it will be. But organizations around the state would do well to take a cue from the first Gulf War and at least formulate preliminary worst-case-scenario plans. If war comes, we don't want to be caught off guard.

Mike Gorman can be reached at jhgorman@email.unc.edu.