GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STARBULLETIN.COM
A mountain of paperwork greeted Hickam-based military policemen Staff Sgt. Martin Lapuente, left, Staff Sgt. Radford Higa, Staff Sgt. Alvin Kahawaii, Tech. Sgt. Clarence Kealoha and Senior Airman Raymond Castillo upon their return from the Middle East.
Isle Air Guard’s return
answers families’ prayersNearly 18 months of active
duty included security details
in the Persian Gulf area
Nine-year-old Kamana Kealoha was worried that his father, Air National Guard Tech. Sgt. Clarence Kealoha, wouldn't be home from the war in time for his Little League baseball season. Before he was deployed, Kealoha had guided the Makakilo Rangers to their first district championship in 27 years.
His 13-year-old daughter, Kalei, not only prayed that her dad would return safely from the U.S. war with Iraq, but also included the welfare of his fellow soldiers and others in her thoughts.
"It was neat to know that she felt that way," Clarence Kealoha said, "since I didn't know she felt like that. I think she was appreciative of what I was doing. She could understand why I was there, even if she wasn't happy with it."
For nearly five months Kealoha and 25 other members of the Hawaii Air National Guard's 154th Security Forces Squadron were assigned to the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. That meant the 26 men and women missed every holiday beginning with Thanksgiving after leaving Hickam Air Force Base. They returned to Hawaii two weeks ago.
They and 10 other 154th personnel have been on active duty for nearly 18 months, leaving their civilian jobs following the terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Another 13 members from the Air Guard's security forces have been sent to Honduras.
Many like Kealoha were first sent to Qatar, on the west coast of the Persian Gulf, in June and stayed there until September.
"We were home for about a month," Kealoha recalls, "and then we were sent to Saudi."
Tech. Sgt. Dawn Marie Tafaoa, a member of both the Air Guard and the Honolulu Police Department for nearly 12 years, said her last couple of months in Saudi Arabia were the hardest. "I was good for the first three months. We were almost done when we were told we were not going anywhere ... and that really hit me."
Once the war started, duty hours stretched to as long as 15 hours, added Tafaoa, who normally patrols the Pearl City area.
She and Senior Airman Renise Reyes, a 1992 Castle High School graduate, were members of the Air Force's search teams that inspected every vehicle and non-U.S. personnel that entered the 80-square-mile U.S. portion of the base 70 miles southeast of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital city.
The Prince Sultan Air Base encompasses more than 256 square miles and has been described as basically an immense 15,000-foot runway with an equally large parking area. Although the Saudis did not allow the U.S. to launch strike aircraft from the air base, it is the headquarters of the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center, which controlled air operations over Iraq.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon said it would stop all U.S. flights from Prince Sultan Air Base and move its headquarters to Al Udeid air base in Qatar by the end of the summer. At the height of the Iraq war, 10,000 U.S. military personnel and 200 fighters, tankers and surveillance aircraft were based there.
Before the war, Prince Sultan Air Base was the staging area for U.S. warplanes that patrolled the no-fly zones over southern Iraq.
Tafaoa said her job in Saudi Arabia wasn't anything like being a cop in Honolulu.
"It was like the movie, 'Groundhog Day.' Everyday you get up, put on the same uniform and do the some thing you did the day before. You searched the same vehicles. You searched the same people."
But Tafaoa said no one let down their guard because of the threat of suicide bombers. "The entry points, which we guarded, were the most vital links to the outside."
"We were always on high alert," Kealoha added, noting that everyone was aware the 13 of the 21 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center came from nearby villages.
Staff Sgt. Ulysses Saromines says he was more fortunate than some of his colleagues.
He worked with the Saudi Air Force police force, patrolling either by truck or by air the miles of fence line that ring the base.
The U.S. military personnel and an undisclosed amount of aircraft are assigned to the Saudi air base. The airmen and women split their time between the operations center and a housing facility -- similar to a college dormitory complex with community dining halls, gymnasium, recreation center, library and a pool. "There wasn't much to see during the 20-minute drive between where we slept and where we worked," said Kealoha, "except for those two fake light trees that reminded us of coconut trees."
Besides contending with the desert dust and sand storms, the reservists from Hawaii say the weather was hard to take. Temperatures would range from 30 to 40 degrees at night to more than 100 degrees in the day.
Reyes said both e-mails and calls home were cut off and not restored until about week before they left. She said she hardly talked about the war with her three daughters during the 30 minutes she was allowed to call home each week.
Kealoha, a 1979 Farrington High School graduate, said "all the wives, husbands, fathers, mothers and other friends here made their work there much easier.
"At least for me I felt safer since I knew someone was taking care of the bills and other business back home and I could focus on what I had to do."
