Life in Kuwait Became Nightmare for Basketball Coach From U.S.

By the time Iraqi troops overran Kuwait in the early hours of Aug. 2, Jim Calvin had been the coach of the Kuwaiti national basketball team for 1 1/2 years and was living in Kuwait city with his wife, Phyllis, and their three poodles.

Calvin, 50, was walking the dogs at 4:30 a.m. Thursday--”It’s bright sunshine in Kuwait at that hour”--when he saw transport trucks clattering past his apartment building on the main highway between Iraq and Kuwait.

It was to be his introduction to a harrowing week during which he watched soldiers kill and loot, drove hours across the desert in a car with a leaky radiator to flee the country, coped with American bureaucracy and, finally, arrived penniless back in the United States with no idea of what the future might hold.

In the days before the invasion, Calvin said he had heard news reports of an Iraqi troop buildup at the Kuwaiti border. But his Kuwaiti acquaintances, such as his assistant coach, believed it to be “no problem.” The assistant coach had even teased Calvin that the buildup was his fault because under Calvin’s tutelage, the Kuwaiti basketball team last year won the “Saddam Championship.”

“Saddam Hussein had set this up, and it was kind of wired they’d win their own championship,” Calvin said in a telephone interview from San Antonio. “They played on their ‘War Day,’ the day they won their war with Iran, and we beat them, 105 to 96.”

Calvin, an Indiana native, had spent his career as a high school and college basketball coach in Kentucky, Texas and Arkansas before deciding to accept a job “with foreign basketball, to see some places we could never see otherwise.”

At the time of the invasion, Calvin had been planning to take the team to Germany for practice.

He was so confident, in fact, that Wednesday night--”the night before it all happened”--he called his 80-year-old mother in the United States to assure her that “nobody’s dropping bombs; don’t worry.”

“But in the middle of the night, at 2 a.m., they bombed the airport. . . .,” he said. The situation did not become clear, however, until about 6:30 a.m., when his assistant coach called to say, “Iraqi troops are invading!”

“We’re on the seventh floor, so I walk out on the balcony and look out and, sure enough, there are rows and rows of tanks heading up Fourth Ring Road for Kuwait city,” Calvin said. “No shots were being fired, though.”

He called the American Embassy and told them, “There are tanks, transport trucks, troops, all kinds of movement toward Kuwait city.”

He added: “They weren’t aware of anything going on. So, every five to 10 minutes I’d go up on the roof, look over the rail and give them troop positions.”

Over the next several hours, the invading troops took over downtown Kuwait, bombed the palace of the emir, and then moved to surround the army base, which was about 500 yards from Calvin’s apartment.

“Now, the shells start going. You can sit there and have a ringside seat to war, is what it is,” he said. “We’re watching a lot of cannons, tanks and so forth. And there are people actually driving around all these tanks and so forth, going to work! They don’t think anything’s going on.”

But then, soldiers and civilians began to die before his eyes, the civilians caught in the cross-fire between Kuwaiti and Iraqi troops. He watched them jump from their cars in vain attempts to take cover behind a concrete road divider when “troops just killed them. . . . My wife and I could see the bullets hitting the asphalt, popping up, dirt and sand. There are four of them dead, three or four Iraqi soldiers dead. “

The shelling continued throughout the day, “and I’m running from one side of the top of the building to the other” reporting vehicle and troop movements back to the embassy, Calvin recalled.

Then, he said, he was spotted by Iraqi soldiers. “They shelled the roof just after I left.”

Calvin, his wife and other tenants took shelter in the basement for about 5 1/2 hours. When they peered out they saw “destruction and smoke everywhere.”

A 10 p.m. curfew was imposed, and things seemed to quiet down.

“Then, they (Iraqi soldiers) flagged down a car,” Calvin said. “The lights go off in the car and there’s machine gun fire and we never see any doors open. We’re assuming they’ve shot whoever was in the car. . . . This happens to five consecutive cars. The next day, there were transport trucks, tanks plus normal traffic, driving around these cars, for the remaining four days we were there.”

Over the weekend of Aug. 4-5, Calvin heard Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s promise on Kuwaiti television to withdraw his troops. But, he added: “Not one individual or mechanical thing moved out of Kuwait. More troops came in, more tanks came in. Nothing left.”

Hussein appeared on television last Monday and said foreigners could leave between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

But there was a hitch: “The only route available will be through Baghdad,” Calvin quoted the television as reporting. Fearful of becoming a hostage, he decided, “I’m not about to go that way.”

Calvin then learned through the Saudi Arabian Embassy that the Saudi border at Salmi, a desert checkpoint, would remain open an extra two hours Monday. He and his wife decided to make a run for it, even though it was a 4 1/2-hour drive.

Their cross-desert journey started. “I’d been having trouble with my radiator, a little pinhole in it. It’s 135-degree heat. I’m driving as hard and as fast as I can, and I’m afraid that thing’s going to heat up and we’ll die in the desert.”

They passed “soldiers, tanks, missile launchers everywhere. . . . Every time we come to an overpass, soldiers in the shade walk out and try to flag us down. . . .

“I told my wife to get on the floorboards with the dogs, that I’m going to drive as hard as I can. Any son of a gun gets in front of me is going to go flying. So, they never shot at me that I know of, but we drove past two different checkpoints with people jumping out of the way.”

They finally reached the border--without passports, identification or entry visas. They found thousands of Kuwaitis massed there in the same predicament.

“We left with no money,” he said. “I’ve got $50 in traveler’s checks, two $1 bills. I managed to pull 599 (Kuwaiti dinars) out of the bank, but it’s no good, nobody will accept that. . . . I don’t have a job. Everything we own is in the bank in Kuwait. We left all our clothes, personal items, stereos, everything’s there. I’ve got two sons I’m putting through college.”

Now he is back in San Antonio.

“We’re safe, we’re happy, we’re having fun with our family. But now reality’s set in. We haven’t got anything,” he said.