ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                         121

[Lieutenant General] Wills [director of Marine aviation] turned into a three-star
ordnance officer.
   General Schwarzkopf became an ordnance officer himself, because he
allocated it within theater.  So we got some ordnance from the Air Force, and
we got some ordnance from the Navy.       They were told to cough it up.     We
dropped more than 29 million tons of ordnance during the war.

Proceedings: The Navy said there were never enough tankers to go around.
We've heard it may not be tankers so much as hoses.  How well did the Marine
tankers work?   Did you use Air Force tankers much, or did you stay with the
KC-130s?

Moore: Tankers are very rare.      You've got to be careful how you use them.
All in all, I would give General Homer high marks on the use of tankers.     We
did use a lot of Air Force tankers.     Plugging on the KC-135 in any of the
airplanes is no thrill at all, and I did it. I came home with them.  But doing it
in combat when it's a must-pump night-time evolution is really no fun.
   For example, on the CAP, working up to the war, the Air Force provided
us tankers during the day.      They were either KC-135s or KC-10s, probably
KC-135s about 90% of the time.       At night we used all our KC-130s, because
plugging on a KC-13S at night is just too damn hard, too high risk, and I didn't
want to lose an airplane because of that evolution.
   I had 18 KC-130s.   On any battlefield, you're tied to your shortest asset--
FA~Bs, KC-130s, OV-lOs, F/A-i8Ds--and you depend on those assets.            I've
run out of tankers during stateside exercises because of over-commitment, and
that's a very painful process.   I wasn't going to do it again.
   So what we did do was offer to the Navy emergency tanking anytime they
needed it.  They could get to our airborne tanker and divert to Shaik Isa, where
we had a complete Marine aircraft group to help them, and we did help them.
We got a lot of airplanes through there and changed engines for them and so
forth. It worked out. But I didn't volunteer a lot of airplanes out there, because
I needed them.  We needed to keep EA~Bs and FIA-t8Ds on station, so I set
up two separate Marine~nly KC-130 tanker orbits--and General Homer let me
do this, in the great tanker scheme--that were available 24 hours-aday, seven
days-a-week to give us flexibility.   When those tankers got down to a 24,000--
pound giveaway and somebody [who needed fuel] was on the way to them, we
scrambled the alert tanker and put it into the system.

Proceedings: A Navy pilot told us that a Marine KC-130 saved his bacon once
when a control agency vectored him to a tanker he didn't realize was available.

Moore: We did an awful lot of that.    Especially for the first 36 hours, I wanted
to make sure we had enough emergency tankers so anybody who was coming
south could get a drink of gas and kind of cool off a little bit and think about
things before he had to come in.     We put an awful lot of tankers up there and
they did a magnificent job.