Watching television reports last week about the first American bombs dropped on Iraq, Darrell BlueBack’s thoughts were about the ground troops waiting to go into battle from Kuwait.

He knows what they were going through.

In February 1991, the Lawrence man was with the 1st Marine Division waiting in the Saudi Arabian desert to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqis. BlueBack knew his unit would be going on the offensive in a couple of hours.

“I was sitting there, watching and listening to the B-52s carpet bombing the Iraqis,” BlueBack recalled. “It was pretty nerve-racking. But I also was glad, because I thought that was going to clear the way for us.”

At the same time, Wayne Thompson, another Lawrence resident, was with an 18th Airborne artillery unit waiting to go in.

“The first thing is you’re scared,” recalled Thompson, who works in facilities management at Haskell Indian Nations University. “Then when things start happening you get busy, and you don’t have time to think. Your training kicks in.”

Mark Johnson, a former Green Beret, described the waiting before going into battle as “controlled boredom.” In 1991 he hunted for Scud missile launchers and fought alongside Egyptian forces.

“You have a sense of rush and excitement and then boredom,” the Eudora man said. “It goes up and down.”

Johnson, a motivational speaker and instructor on special operations with the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, said he didn’t think back then the United States would be fighting Saddam Hussein’s forces again 12 years later.

“I thought he’d disappear into the woodwork, but he didn’t,” Johnson said. “He’s a survivor.”

Lawrence native Mark Johnson, Eudora, is a retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel who fought in the first Gulf War in Kuwait. Johnson is now a special operations instructor at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.

BlueBack, who works in Haskell’s food service department, said he wasn’t surprised, because the job was left unfinished in 1991.

“We thought we were going to go on and finish him off then,” BlueBack said. “I thought we would be back again.”

It would have been easier to kill Saddam in 1991 than it will be now, Johnson said. The Iraqi leader was easier to track and Special Forces units could have marked his location with a laser designator used to guide bombs dropped by planes.

“We had him in the crosshairs then but nobody gave the word,” Johnson said. “Since that time he’s become more skilled at hiding. He uses body doubles. It’s very tough to get a human source close enough to find him.”

But after the missile and bomb attacks Wednesday night on one of Saddam’s hideouts, Johnson wondered if maybe Saddam was killed or injured.

“After something like that we would usually see him out walking around with his chest all puffed out and shooting off his gun,” Johnson said.

Neither BlueBack nor Johnson think Saddam will be captured.

“I sure hope so, but I don’t think that will happen,” BlueBack said.

Thompson, who still serves in the Kansas National Guard, said he couldn’t comment on what might happen in the war.

Mark Johnson, right, a Green Beret/Special Forces soldier is shown in this February 1991 photo on the outskirts of Kuwait City after the city's liberation.

Johnson said he thought that if Saddam was still alive he would eventually flee the country. Whatever is left of his ground troops around Baghdad will then surrender.

“Once they realize Saddam isn’t waiting to shoot them in the back of the head, I think they will give up,” Johnson said.

Memories of the 1991 atrocities he saw in Kuwait still haunt Johnson. He remembers seeing the body of a beheaded Kuwaiti woman.

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“It took me a long time to get over that,” Johnson said.

The days of the U.S. being a reactive nation, as it was after Pearl Harbor in World War II and after 9-11 are over, Johnson said.

“Now, with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, we can’t wait for another terrorist attack and lose four or five thousand people before we react,” he said.