Airmen survive terrorist attack by being fit to fight

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Melanie Streeter
  • Air Force Print News
WASHINGTON --  In the early morning hours of May 30, an Airman lay in a dusty maintenance room of a building in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, with a tourniquet around his arm, struggling to stay alive.

The morning before, Lt. Col. James Broome III and a colleague, Lt. Col. Ed O’Neal, both assigned to the U.S. Military Training Mission in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, were in Khobar to evaluate a Saudi air force maintenance training program and provide advice and guidance. But that was not in the cards; fate dealt a different hand on this day.

Shortly after the colonels finished their breakfast, they were warned that the compound was under attack.

Colonel O'Neal said his instincts and training from his experience as a former Soldier and peacekeeper in Bosnia kicked in as he assessed the situation.

“(He) kind of guided me through the next few minutes,” Colonel Broome said. “His thoughts were that we needed to move fast and seek higher ground.”

The colonels made their way up through a building next to where they were eating breakfast. They scrambled to the third floor and used a cell phone to contact their operations desk. There, they met four contractors who were doing construction.

“We asked if there was roof access, and we made our way up to the roof,” Colonel Broome said. “We took (them) with us, along with their construction materials. Partly, we took them with us to protect them, and partly so that they wouldn’t give away our position.”

Colonel O'Neal said they were not the only ones in danger.

"I saw some people crouched on a balcony below and smoke was coming out of their house,” he said. “I cracked the window and yelled down to the woman, 'What's your villa number?' She signed back the number, and I called it in. I just wanted to make sure people knew they were there so they'd be later rescued."

The group took a cooler of water to the roof to wait out the attack. Temperatures would soar to about 120 degrees on the roof that day, Colonel Broome said. To conserve the water, rationing it among six people, they each took just one sip every hour.

Having blocked off access to the roof as best they could with a tool box and rocks, the colonels used their cell phones to pass on information between other Americans in the building and operations center people in Riyadh.

“It was nearly two hours before there was any Saudi response to the terrorist attack,” Colonel Broome said. “The terrorists appeared to have free reign for a couple of hours. Once the response activity began, that’s when the intense gunfire started -- extremely intense for several, several hours.”

“About every 20 or 30 minutes, there would be a, 'pop pop pop' and a return response of automatic weapons fire," Colonel O’Neal said. "It was progressively moving across the compound.”

Colonel O’Neal relayed the group’s information to defending forces so they would not be mistaken for terrorists, Colonel Broome said.

The colonels were also trying to figure out how to get themselves and the other Americans that they knew were in the compound safely evacuated once the opportunity arose.

“We were continually coordinating the evacuation process, going through in our heads how we would get out and what we would take with us when it was safe to evacuate,” Colonel Broome said. “I was concerned that there were other terrorists unaccounted for or car bombs that had been planted.”

Eventually, 12 hours after the ordeal started, the attempt to evacuate the group began.

The Saudi minister of interior forces called and said they had the terrorists isolated on the sixth floor of another hotel tower, and the rest of the compound was under control. At that time, the group agreed to come down.

“Finally we were told, yes, it’s OK to come down,” Colonel Broome said. “We made our way down to the third floor, then the second, then the first.”

"Colonel Broome was about 4 or 5 feet behind me," Colonel O'Neal said. "I had to go to my left to open a steel door that (went) out into the street. I had just put my hand on the door when a guy (opened) up with a machine gun.

"The bullets were whizzing over my left shoulder, and I could hear this high-pitched 'bumblebee' sound," he said. "To go from absolute quiet to a machine gun firing at you at full automatic is pretty terrifying. Frankly, it's the first time I've been shot at. … You get a lot of experience in a short period of time."

Colonel Broome said he saw his fellow Airman drop and roll in front of him. A moment later, he was hit by the gunfire.

Colonel O'Neal said he knew both of them had been shot. From where he was, he heard Colonel Broome cry out and run back up the stairs while he hit the ground, and low-crawled back down the corridor. He found an area to lodge himself between a notch in the wall and a stone post. He pulled his knees into his chest and tried to conceal himself.

While Colonel O’Neal concealed himself, Colonel Broome retreated into the building they had been hunkered down in all day.

“I made my way back to the third floor, and then contacted my operations center to inform them that I had been shot,” Colonel Broome said.

Operations center people told the colonel to apply a tourniquet to the arm using his belt and to lie down with his feet elevated. They said medics would be there in the next 10 minutes to get him out. But it did not work out that easily, and it would be nearly another five hours before the Saudi naval special forces rescued him and took him to a local hospital.

Colonel O'Neal had bullet fragments in his side, forearm and shoulder blade.

A Saudi defense official later approached the area and called out for Colonel O'Neal and took him by ambulance to a local hospital.

Eventually, Colonel Broome arrived at the hospital.

"We were both pretty relieved to see each other," he said. "We spent 11 hours out on that roof, and we both got shot at the same time. You can imagine this is the kind of experience that bonds two people."

Colonel Broome is recovering from the attack now after several surgeries to repair his shattered arm. He said he seriously doubts he would have survived the attack had it happened a mere six months earlier.

“When I first heard rumblings in early 2003 that a revised, mandatory Air Force fitness test was coming, I was concerned, but not panicked,” Colonel Broome said. “Although I knew I could certainly be in better physical shape than I was at the time, I certainly didn’t consider myself to be in poor physical condition.”

As commander of the 56th Equipment Maintenance Squadron at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., Colonel Broome found he did not have as much time to exercise as he would have liked. But when the time came for an unofficial pretest at his new assignment in Riyadh, he was surprised to find just how far he had fallen. His fitness score was 49.7, landing him squarely in the “poor” category.

“Well, there wasn’t much to think or complain about,” he said. “I simply knew what I had to do -- get back in good physical condition.”

He intensified his workout routine over the months, and even though some days it was a challenge just getting out of bed to bike or run, he pressed on. Every Friday he would put himself through the official test to chart his progress.

“When the big day arrived in late March, I was a ‘mean, lean, fighting machine,’ or at the very least I was in the best shape I’d been in for years,” the colonel said.

His hard work paid off with improvements in all categories. He shaved more than six minutes from his run time, added 20 pushups and 27 crunches and lost 5.5 inches on his abdominal measurement. He was in “good” physical shape, and was determined to make it “excellent.” That is the path he was on when the terrorist attack occurred.

“You know, I’d often heard the complaints of some of my fellow Airmen relating to why (Airmen) need to be as fit as a Marine or an Army infantry Soldier, and I have to admit that I couldn’t envision many scenarios where I would personally need to respond like a Navy Seal,” Colonel Broome said.

“Did I need to be in good, rather than poor, physical condition to survive that ordeal? What do you think?” he asked.

Colonel Broome’s doctors said he should regain 100-percent use of his arm, but he faces months of physical therapy. But after the physical training he has pushed himself through, and the grueling encounter with terrorists, he said he is well prepared to make a full recovery. (Staff Sgt. Jerome Baysmore contributed to this article.)