For most Americans, terrorism is something experienced at a distance — through television images, newspaper headlines, casualty reports, and political speeches. For me, it became personal.
On the night of May 12, 2003, I was participating in a training exercise with the Saudi Arabian National Guard approximately 40 kilometers east of Riyadh. At about 23:24, I heard a distant explosion, followed by several more.
At first, we assumed Saudi artillery units were conducting night training. We soon learned otherwise.
IT COULD HAVE BEEN ISRAEL’S 9/11. THE MEDIA CALLED IT A ‘MIDAIR ALTERCATION’
Terrorists had launched coordinated attacks against three Western residential compounds in Riyadh. One of them was ours — the Vinnell-Arabia compound where American trainers and their families lived. Peter Berg’s 2007 movie, The Kingdom, was based on terrorist events at my compound.
The attackers came prepared.
They used automatic weapons and grenades to penetrate the entrance. A second vehicle carrying a massive explosive charge then entered the compound and detonated near the principal American living quarters, High Rise No. 1.
I was fortunate. I was in the desert when the terrorists attacked. Others were not.
When my training team and I returned at daylight, the destruction was devastating. No building in our six-block compound had escaped damage. Windows were shattered. Walls and roofs had collapsed. My own living quarters were badly damaged, and my roof had collapsed, my front door had been blown across the room and was lying on top of my bed, while my window was impaled in the wall above my bed.
My office, only a block from the center of the explosion, had been gutted.
Incidentally, the Vinnell Compound was originally built by the Saudi Binladin Group, which was founded by the al Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden’s father.
But buildings can be replaced. People cannot.
Seven Americans and two Filipinos working with Vinnell were killed, and more than 100 people were wounded. Among the dead was retired Marine Master Sergeant Herman Diaz, with whom I had served decades earlier in Vietnam with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion.
That made the attack particularly personal.
This was not some random explosion caused by a handful of disorganized fanatics. The attackers appeared to know the compound. They knew where and how to penetrate its security. Most importantly, they knew where to strike to inflict maximum casualties.
That distinction matters.
Successful terrorism is rarely simply a matter of fanaticism. It requires intelligence, reconnaissance, planning, training, and preparation. In this case, it was obviously a matter of inside information. And frequently, it succeeds because terrorists identify something else: Complacency.
They look for the gate that isn’t adequately protected. The security procedure has become routine. The reaction force that hasn’t been rehearsed. The warning that wasn’t taken seriously.
The assumption that because nothing happened yesterday, nothing will happen tomorrow. The Riyadh attack changed the way I thought about security.
Afterward, it became my responsibility to help ensure that our new Vinnell compound would not suffer the same fate. We reconsidered security arrangements, reaction forces, and defenses intended to stop attackers before they could reach their primary targets. With $4.6 million and months of work, my team and I made our compound impenetrable.
The lesson was painfully simple: Security measures that look impressive are meaningless if they cannot stop the enemy.
I had already experienced war firsthand. I had served two combat tours in Vietnam, first as an infantry and reconnaissance platoon commander and later as an aerial observer during the 1972 Easter Offensive. I would eventually fly 190 combat missions.
But Riyadh was different. The enemy wasn’t on some distant battlefield. He came to where we lived.
Terrorism deliberately attacks that distinction between battlefield and home. Its purpose is not necessarily to defeat a conventional military force. It is to create fear, demonstrate vulnerability, and convince people that resistance carries an unacceptable price.
FLYDUBAI DIDN’T SUFFER A RANDOM ACT OF TERRORISM. IT SCHEDULED ONE
The morning after the attack, standing amid the wreckage of the place I called home, terrorism was no longer an abstract national-security problem. It had a face. I had seen what determined terrorists could accomplish when they found an opening. I thought about that night many times afterward.
I certainly did not imagine that six years later, in another country, I would awaken shortly after midnight to an explosion and, for one terrifying instant, think: I’m back in Riyadh.
Tom Williams is a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel with 28 years of active-duty service, including two tours in Vietnam, evacuation of Americans from Beirut in 1976, and the liberation of Kuwait in 1990-91, followed by 11 years of contract training and mentoring in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan and is the author of Heart of a Marine book series; www.heartofamarineseries.com
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
