Service Remembered Three Soldiers Get Purple Hearts After Saudi Arabia Attack

Senior Airman Eric Eggleston was asleep that evening the blast went off in Dhahran. Staff Sgt. Mark Deinhart was reading. Tech. Sgt. Dwight Nelson was watching “Braveheart.”

None of the three Fairchild airmen knew what hit them.

Deinhart ducked and closed his eyes. When he opened them, all the windows in his room were gone and he was bleeding from numerous cuts.

Eggleston was flipped upside down onto the floor. His first thought was that a missile had hit the barracks.

“I got mad. I thought the Army didn’t do its job and a Scud had hit us,” he said.

Nelson saw a flash of light, then was thrown some 12 feet into a brick wall. His ear was almost severed and his legs cut by shrapnel; he spent three days in a hospital.

All three survived the June 25 bombing of the U.S. military compound in Saudi Arabia and returned shortly afterwards to Fairchild Air Force Base to resume their regular duties.

Friday, a four-star general dropped by to let the three airman know the Air Force hadn’t forgotten they had been injured in the terrorist attack. Gen. Walter Kross, chief of the Air Mobility Command, presented each with a Purple Heart, the military medal awarded to those wounded or killed in action.

Kross was on a quick inspection of the West Plains base. He pinned the purple and gold medal on the pocket of the three men’s neatly pressed desert camouflage uniforms, and praised them for being among the peacekeeping forces “on the tip of the sword” in Saudi Arabia.

None of the three was in the barracks that nearly was leveled by the truck bomb. But the blast was so large it shattered windows and sent shock waves through surrounding buildings.

“We didn’t know what it was,” said Deinhart, an aircraft welder who was three buildings away from the blast but was sliced by flying glass.

The medics stitched him up quickly and moved on to the next patient, he said.

Eggleston, a member of a civil engineering unit, said he got so busy helping other people out of the wreckage he forgot about his own injuries. He didn’t realize until the next morning his foot was hurting badly.

Doctors took a three-quarter-inch piece of glass out of his foot.

Nelson’s cuts kept him in a wheelchair while he was in the hospital, so he rolled from room to room to carry messages and news to the troops who were bedridden.

“They called it the morale wagon because I tried to keep everyone’s spirits up,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo