The ground phase of Desert Storm, which ended Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1991, only lasted 100 hours. But the effects it had on some of the American servicemen and women who were involved are still being felt 33 years later.

According to the U.S. Army Center of Military History, following an aerial campaign of bombings and airstrikes that began Jan. 17, 1991, the ground war began on Feb. 24 when the XVIII Airborne Corps made an end run around the right flank of the Iraqi Army while the 1st Brigade, 2nd Armored Divison supporting Marine units drove north from Sauid Arabia. By midafternoon elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were deep in Iraq.

In 100 hours, U.S. and allied forces had decisively defeated the Iraqi Army.

Ada Tull, a resident of Robin’s Home in Butler, served in the Army from 1979 to 1992 and was involved in the run-up to Desert Storm for seven months, from February 1990 to August 1990.

Tull was flight medic with the 229th Medical Detachment based in Fort Drum, N.Y. “We would pick up and transport patients and provide in-flight care of the patient,” Tull said. While stationed in New York, she said, “We would help assist, provide Life Flight to the nearest hospital.”

While in the Middle East, Tull said her unit was stationed in Kuwait near Pipeline Alley, the road the military used for transport.

While in Kuwait, Tull said her helicopter crashed while she was on a training mission to become certified in using night-vision goggles.

“The helicopter I was in crashed,” Tull said. “The pilot was killed. The co-pilot was taken to the hospital. I don’t know if he lived. The flight chief was hanging from a strap. He had a scratch on his forehead. Another pilot riding in the back who had his arm broken in the crash cut him out.

“I was tossed out of the helicopter which was a blessing because the engine came through into my seat. I pulled every muscle in my body. I almost lost an eye due to spinal/neck compression. I had to have my left hip replaced.”

The recovery was difficult.

“I was in the hospital for two weeks. I had to have two surgeries as a result of the accident. I had neck surgery because a bone fragment was pressing against the spine,” said Tull.

“We had stopped to refuel. There was a fire in the tail rotor and it went out. We were full of fuel. We should have blown up on impact,” said Tull.

She said her unit didn’t see any combat “because the war only lasted two days.” But she remembers the 130-degree heat and having to wear protective gear in case of a gas attack.

“It was horrible having your gas mask collapse on your face,” she said.

Tull said after the accident she got back on the horse and flew more helicopter missions.

Tull served 16 years in the Army in locales ranging from New York, New Jersey, Saudi Arabia and six years in Germany.

Asked why she enlisted, Tull said, “I grew up in Pittsburgh. I just wanted to travel. I just wanted out.”

However, she said her experience in Desert Storm left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“When you are involved in a situation where your life is on line, it is extremely traumatic. The anxiety creeps up, never knowing when or if something terrible is going to happen,” said Trull. “After Saudi Arabia, I went down a rabbit hole. I got involved in some drugs and alcohol to cope with depression.”

“Why wasn’t I killed?” she asked herself.

Now she’s living Butler and has been clean and sober for 16 months.

“Living in Robin’s Home, I love it. Butler is the place to go for any woman with kids,” Tull said. Tull has two children, Natasha and Marcus and a granddaughter, Jasmine, 14, who is Natasha’s daughter.

Tull is a member of Disabled American Veterans and, despite her troubles after her service, she said she doesn’t have any regrets over enlisting.

“I never have and never will have regrets. I loved serving my country,” she said. She just wants people to have compassion for veterans.

“Veterans are people, too. They may have PTSD or grief stemming from their service. We need people to be there for us. We need compassion. We are doing our best,” she said.

Fellow veteran Jill Dettro reunited with Tull after first meeting her 30 years ago in the Middle East.

Dettro, a certified peer specialist with the VA HEART Resource Center in Butler, where Tull started in March, was a medical technologist with the Army’s 85th Evac Hospital stationed in Kuwait.

“We were a field hospital in the middle of the desert,” Dettro said. “I was in charge of the blood bank at the time. We were the first forward deployed medical unit in the Army.”

“I was in the hospital when Ada came in,” she said. “I helped out where help was needed. I helped her start walking again.”

“What are the chances of that?” she said of her reunion with Tull.

She also remembers treating members of the 14th Quartermaster reserve unit based in Greensburg, whose barracks were hit by a Scud missile. Twenty-nine solders, 13 from Greensburg, were killed.

She remembers going off base during her time in Desert Storm to retrieve blood from a local hospital.

“What sticks in my mind is there the men always walked in front of the women. It made me think of the freedoms we have here,” Dettro said.

After her enlistment was up, she moved to Illinois where she spent 17 years as a medical technologist.

But Dettro said she also suffered from the effects of her service.

“I do have PTSD, hypervigilance and anxiety. I was an alcoholic for many years. I was in and out of many rehabs,” she said.

“My alcoholism was caused by a lot of things I didn’t deal with,” Dettro said.

She credits a stay at the VA Domiciliary in Butler with its therapies with helping her.

“I guess I try to focus on the positive things I accomplished helping people,” she said. “It did make me appreciate the freedoms we have in this country.”

“I decided to stay in Butler,” said Dettro. “It’s a great recovery city. I’ve been here two years in July. Now I’m a certified peer specialist here in Butler.

Dettro who spent four years in the Army, said she enlisted because she came from a patriotic family in Springboro in Crawford County.

“I loved my country and wanted to serve my country,” said Dettro.

Harry Laity of East Brady, a native of Wilkes-Barre, served in Desert Storm as an electronics technician with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion. He served in the Army for four years from May 1987 to July 1, 1991.

He was in the Middle East for four months “to the day,” he said from Dec. 28, 1990, to April 28, 1991. His unit was based at the Katterbach Kaserne Army base in Ansbach, Germany, before being sent to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

“We were part of the 7th Corps, First Armored Division,” said Laity. “We went up the wadi and turned right into the Republican Guard. We were the left hook as Schwartzkopf called us.”

“My unit was sort of behind the lines. I just drove a truck. The tanks were moving so fast that we couldn’t keep up. If Butler was the front lines, I was in Morgantown, W.Va. I was at the back end of the marching line.”

“We had surveillance and jamming systems. In surveillance we could triangulate on a signal. And we could jam, miscommunicate and mislead the enemy,” said Laity. “We had linguists with us, Kuwaiti nationals who fled to the U.S. and Saudi nationals who were in the United States going to college or something like that.”

“I didn’t see any fighting,” Laity said. “We stopped one night around 8:30, 9 next to a multiple launch rocket system battery. They began launching downrange. You would hear the swoosh and you would see the white plume of smoke going up and that’s all you saw.”

“The only other live fire I saw was at 7 a.m. on the morning of the 8 a.m. cease fire. (Howitzers) of division artillery fired rounds that could travel 7 to 8 miles. I think they were shooting into a dead zone. We were sitting on the hoods of our trucks and our pants legs were swaying back and forth from the concussions,” he said.

The cease fire came while his unit was in Kuwait and the First Armored Division was ordered to head north and cut off the Republican Guard from reaching Basra.

“We drove down the ‘highway of death’ in Kuwait City,” said Laity. This is where retreating Iraqi army units were caught by American A10s and F16 aircraft.

“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” Laity said. “They strafed everything and then dropped their bombs to crater the road. There was one crater with a bus in it, a city bus.”

Laity remembers the extreme temperatures during his time in the Middle East.

“The heat inside the tents was 120 degrees. I was sick my first week in country, a stomach infection. I had three bags of IV fluid. I was under wool blankets because the IVs were right out of the refrigerator,” he said.

“It was 120 degrees in the day and 60 degrees at night. Your body couldn’t handle the temperature change,” Laity said. “We’d get up at 7 in the morning wearing parkas and trigger mittens. What would be T-shirt weather felt like extremely cold weather because your body couldn’t handle it.”

“And the darkness at night, you would see a single streetlight twinkling in the distance and you would swear it was coming at you,” he said.

Laity added, “And the sand wasn’t that dune-y, soft sand you see in the movies. Our foxholes had to be dug by backhoes. It was that hard. “

“I grew up in Wilkes-Barre and I enlisted because I was getting married. I needed a job I couldn’t quit or be fired from. I had four years of job security,” Laity said.

He moved to East Brady, he said, because “Three years ago I started dating my third wife, who I’ve known for 37 years.”

He’s the department supervisor for the garden center for the Lowes in Butler.

Laity said he doesn’t belong to any veterans groups nor does he suffer any lingering effects or ailments from his service in Desert Storm. He keeps up with some of his old platoon mates on Facebook.

Asked if Desert Storm was worth it, Laity said, “Yes it was worth it because we had the coalition in place. When 9/11 happened, if we hadn’t destroyed the Republican Guard in Desert Storm, they would have been better trained and more resilient when we went after Bin Laden.

“Saddam Hussein had 47 divisions. We left him with the remnants of less than 10. He didn’t have a fully functioning division.”

Still Desert Storm left him with the decision it was time to leave the Army.

Laity said, “When we were there, we had the green, woodland camo, not the desert camo. When we put up our tents in the middle of the desert there were these big green globes.”

“We got the desert camo after, so when we got off the plane they could do the parades and all that stuff,” he said,

“We shouldn’t have been there. We are supposed to be intelligence gathering ahead of the tanks, and we were 90 miles behind them. With our equipment, we need hills, big elevations for signal gathering, and we were in a desert,” he said.

In Germany, he said, “We were told if the balloon goes up, we were to die in a loud, grotesque, military manner. We were the speed bump until our tanks could get at the Russians.“

Melvin Smith, an Akron, Ohio, native, currently enrolled in an addiction recovery program at VA Butler Healthcare, served in the Navy from 1989 to 1993. During Desert Storm, Smith served as a petty officer third class aboard the U.S.S. Fanning, a fast frigate, where he was in charge of medical records.

Smith said the Fanning was sent to the Middle East during Desert Storm.

“My command prepared the way to get our aircraft carriers closer,” said Smith. “Basically, we were targets so we could get aircraft carriers closer so they could release their jets. We paved the way for the aircraft carriers.”

Smith said while the Fanning wasn’t fired upon, the frigate spent a nine-month tour in the Middle East.

Smith said he joined the Navy to support his family despite having a fear of the ocean. “It was courageous of me to face my fears of deep water,” he said.

But service in Desert Storm left him with PTSD and anxiety issues that didn’t end when Smith left the service.

“I was drinking during my service. It got worse when I got out,” he said. He later turned to drugs and got in trouble with the law.

“It was being shipped out to war not knowing if I was going to make it back or if I was going to die,” said Smith.

His addiction issues eventually brought him to the VA Butler Healthcare program for a six-month stint.

“I was dealing with issues for a long time,” he said. “Just knowing what I know now, anybody should seek professional help right away.”

Still, Smith said he doesn’t regret his service.

“I guess I could say it was a sense of pride being in that era, being enlisted in that era,” he said.

Fellow VA Butler Healthcare patient, Francis Howard, who’s in the domiciliary program, also served on a ship during the conflict.

A Marine sergeant and aviation support equipment technician for fixed wing aircraft, Howard was attached to the Marine Aviation and Logistic Support Squad in Cherry Point, N.C., before the start of Desert Storm.

“Tension was rising in the area. Everybody was activated on the East Coast,” he said. In December 1990 Howard was deployed to Naval Station Rota in Spain where he helped maintain 12 Harrier jets that were assigned to supply air support.

After the Desert Storm hostilities were mostly ended, he was assigned to the amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Wasp.

“There were still some contingencies. We ran some aftermath type of initiatives,” Howard said. “While on ship we were deployed to Kuwait. We ran some ops for a while.”

“What I remember most, me personally, was not a physical memory. It was very psychological, emotional. Psychologically it was very intense. There was a high degree of alert. The atmosphere was profound, almost like an action-packed movie,” he said.

In February 1993, Howard said, the Wasp was sent to Somalia where he witnessed ground-to-air combat.

“It was a humanitarian effort, but the Marine Expeditionary Unit had altercations with the rebels. The rebels shot at us from the beach,” he said.

Howard was discharged from the Maines in 1996 during a general drawdown of U.S. forces.

Howard said he returned to civilian life, but later realized he was suffering from PTSD

“Right around this time I suffered significant personal trauma, aggravated by military trauma,” Howard said. “I don’t do well in crowds or with unexpected loud noises.”

“I didn’t know what to do about PTSD. I self-medicated with alcohol and other substances,” he said.

It wasn’t until 2012 he was diagnosed with the disorder.

He said, “Desert Storm was quickly covered up and forgotten. I don’t have any regrets about serving in the military period.”