Basik Instincts

The Middle East was a different place when former Marco Islander Keith Basik, fresh out of West Point and Ranger school, was part of the advance party sent to Saudi Arabia to prepare for the Gulf War.  

As a procurement officer, Basik mingled with the locals as he purchased everything from computers to urinals to toilet paper for the upcoming war. At the time, the natives were happy to see him. He said that would never happen today. 

Basik was in a mechanized infantry company, working with Bradley fighting vehicles.  

 "It's kind of a tank,” Basik said, “kind of an armored personnel carrier, kind of a hybrid.” 

The first-generation Bradley did not perform well in the desert. 

“We had the original version Bradley A1’s,” Basik said, “and we were breaking down, big time, out there. The sand and stuff was getting in it, and the fuel system wasn't really good. I'm going, ‘Man, this is not good,' because the fuel system was getting clogged all the time. We were having real problems.” 

The initial Bradley’s problems led to a turnaround that amazed Basik. 

“All of a sudden in December they send all of us back to the port,” Basik said. “We're in the middle of the desert and they send us back to the port and we've got all new second generation Bradleys. They figured out the problems, got it stockpiled and got it out. I mean, think about the logistics. And that's where you really appreciated what America could do. To go into port and they have all new Bradleys. Unbelievable! To be able to not only fix the issues that we were having, then to go ahead and mobilize them, to get them out there and then have coordination so people would rotate in and get all the new vehicles. And it was night and day. All of a sudden, we didn't have the problems that we had.” 

Basik remembers Saddam Hussein talking in the days leading up to the beginning of the Gulf War. 

"Saddam was very verbose and bombastic,” Basik said, "and he's talking about we can do this and that. We've got this wall of fire that will devastate them.” 

Basik said that Saddam’s purported wall of fire was far from it. 

“We go up there and you see some fire here, some fire there. And you're going, no way! We're going into Iraq. The Republican Guard was on the east side of Iraq and before Kuwait, they're kind of in there, and we're supposed to hit them. And so, the night before we get our orders that we're doing this big flanking movement and that we're going to hit the Republican Guard about 10:00 the next morning. So, then you start really thinking, you know, this is pretty wild.” 

Basik said there was an aerial assault that softened things up for the ground troops. 

“What typically happens is your air people come in first,” he said. “You've got your B-52s, you've got your F-16s. They come in higher altitudes, bomb, and prep the area. And then you usually have your Apache helicopters come in and they prep them. And then when we come in at that point, you realize how ill-prepared they were and how well-prepared we were.” 

“When you go conventional warfare, you're dealing with tanks and mobilization and stuff on a larger scale. You just actually felt sorry for them. We're going through there and we're picking up enemy soldiers, and we had a place where we could stockpile them. These guys didn't know what hit them. Saddam just basically took his soldiers and left them out in the middle of nowhere. You could tell that they did not know how to take care of vehicles. They didn't know how to take care of munitions. They were not good at logistics in terms of food, in terms of stuff. So, we would go through there and these guys, had we not come by and picked them up, they were going to be left to die. So, we pick them up. You looked at them and you looked at the way they were treating the ammunition. When we put rounds into our guns, we wipe them down. You don't want any dust, any sand. And they had these things laying out in the middle of the desert. They had no knowledge of how to do this end of it. Maybe they had knowledge, but they weren't prepared, or they just weren't skilled and knowledgeable enough in this area or ill-prepared to really fight in that kind of mechanized context.” 

Basik said the enemy was fighting with old Russian equipment. 

“They bought everything from Russia,” he said, "all older Russian tanks. Their armament on the different vehicles was nothing and they never really fought back. And that's whyall of a sudden it stopped because we were starting to go towards the Republican Guard. We already have visuals on them. They called a ceasefire. And it was like, boom, it’s over.” 

Basik supports President George H. W. Bush’s decision to stop, even though it wasn’t a popular decision with many - including many of Basik’s men.  

“Everyone goes, 'Bush should have continued on and that he stopped too soon,'” Basik said. "But, you know, he did a great job relative to making sure that the alliance stayed together because Saddam was trying to bring in Israel. He was hitting them with missiles and stuff. Bush said the Arab brothers or other nations were going to need to stop. You proved your point. Everyone's going, ‘No, you need to finish this off.' And I think Bush at the time says, you know, we've held it together thus far, and I don't want them to think we're overdoing it. People were upset out in the desert. All my troops were going, ‘Oh, this is BS. This is what we're made to do. And we've got to stop. I'd go, ‘Guys, you should be grateful at this point. You're going to go back home. Not that we want to stop early, but if that's what we've got to do, that's what we've got to do and we've just got to deal with it.' But for the first several days, at least, all the sergeants and a lot of people were going, ‘This is BS.' The next month I'm out there and just dealing with taking munitions that were out there from the Iraqis and blowing them up. We spent about a month out there just blowing up whatever stockpiles that we could find." 

Basik said Gulf War veterans felt very appreciated by their country. 

"I was very fortunate,” he said. "If there's a war to be in, that was an okay one because it was quick. People were still behind it. You know, as Americans get into war, the longer you go, our patience runs out. I had piles and piles of letters from schools, kids in middle schools from all these different places thanking me for my service and stuff like that. So that's my war deal. When I came back, we picked a couple people and representatives to go to the New York City ticker tape parade that they had for us. And also, they had a parade in Washington, D.C.” 

Basik got a surprise from a colleague who saw his picture on the cover of the DAV magazine, walking in the ticker tape parade. 

“A buddy of mine years later calls me up,” Basik said. "He said, ‘Did you go to one of those parades after the Gulf War?' I said, ‘Yeah, why?' He said, 'I think you're on the cover of this magazine.' And he sent it to me. I said, ‘That's me." 

In Basik Instincts Part Three, coming in the September 19th edition of the Coastal Breeze News, Basik leaves the Army and joins his father as a local entrepreneur and developer in the Marco Island-Naples area with some surprising project ups and downs.