Ten years have passed since terrorists detonated a massive truck bomb parked just outside the north perimeter fence of the Khobar Towers military billet in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The force of the blast, which could be heard 20 miles away, sheared off the face of Building 131 and killed 19 Air Force airmen. Hundreds more were injured, many of them grievously.
Americans now are no strangers to terrorism, having lived through subsequent terror strikes against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the US Navy destroyer Cole in Aden harbor, and the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers in the United States. These and other outrages have left America deeply engaged in a global war against terrorists, which Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has dubbed â??the Long War.â?
For airmen, the Long War, in many ways, began on a specific nightâ??June 25, 1996, a decade ago this month. (See â??Khobar Towers,â? June 1998, p. 41.)
Most of the terrorists who attacked that night were Saudi nationals. They had military and intelligence connections with Iran, and some had ties to a shadowy group known as the Islamic Movement for Change. They shared with al Qaeda, Osama bin Ladenâ??s terrorist organization, a desire to cleanse the Saudi kingdom of the American military presence.
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