Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 27, 1991 TAG: 9102270203
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Medium
Or out cruising - or meeting their friends at McDonald's.
Anything but fighting in Kuwait.
"I really think they ought to be home going to school and asking if it's OK if they go out at night," said Bob Davis of his twin sons, both with the Army in the Middle East. "It seems like they grow up so fast."
The Davis twins, born a minute apart, are 19. They joined the Army after graduating from Pulaski County High School in 1989.
Keith Davis - far from the days when he and his brother met their buddies after school to shoot baskets or play touch football - is believed to be part of the military police force watching over captured Iraqi troops. Kevin Davis' current duty is unknown to his family.
As allied troops finally marched into combat last weekend, worry took over the Davises' one-story home in Dublin. News that Iraqi troops are leaving Kuwait and that allied forces seem to be engineering a rout does not make it easier to face.
"I'm just going to wait and see how it all comes out," said the twins' mother, Wilma, when asked Tuesday about the first reports on the battle.
She added that Saddam Hussein can't be trusted. "He's so crazy, you just don't know what he might or might not do."
Davis also said the news accounts of poorly fed and clad Iraqi troops had made her cry. "I've been watching some of these Iraqi soldiers and how they've been treated," she said, "and my heart goes out to them. I think it's sad."
The Davises have dreaded the land war for weeks, for fear it would directly involve the twins.
Though the allied bomb and missile campaign that preceded the ground war had slowly produced a numbness, the Davises - Bob, Wilma, and Kevin's recent bride, Gabriele - have had their private moments of anxiety and grief all along, they said.
They still attended Thursday night meetings of the Mid East Support Group at St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital.
"I normally sleep like a log," said Bob Davis, a telephone line repairman. Recently, he said, he has slept lightly and had disturbing dreams.
"They say dreams are either wishes or fears. [Mine] weren't wishes; I'll say that." His wife said he also talks in his sleep.
Once the ground war started, the stress quickly returned to the surface. "I watched the news all night long," Wilma Davis told a reporter Sunday afternoon.
As the television news told and retold the story of the attack Sunday, the Davises sat in the same back room where they watched the first reports of the war more than a month ago.
This time, the television images were of Iraqi troops surrendering, of smashed war vehicles, of the bodies of Iraqi soldiers and a smoke-clogged sky.
The Davises drank coffee and watched television news for much of the day. At one point, as Bob Davis flipped through the television channels searching for scraps of fresh news, Wilma Davis perused a special Desert Storm edition of a local newspaper. Inside were photographs of more than 100 Western Virginians in the armed forces.
She knew at least half of them.
There was Brian Safewright, who played baseball against the Davis twins in the Dixie Youth League. And Steven Evans and Chris Shay, who sometimes came over to shoot baskets. And Brian Palmer and Graham Duncan Jr.
"They all went to school with our kids," Wilma Davis recalled. After class, they would meet at McDonald's, or at the Davis house for snacks, or go cruising in their cars.
It is hard sometimes for the Davises to grasp.
"If the kids came over and wanted to play basketball with our kids - you would expect that," said Bob Davis. "But not for them to be in the war."
Despite the allied advances, Bob and Wilma Davis still fear Iraq's poison gas and Republican Guard.
Meanwhile, Bob Davis wonders how his sons will do in war.
"I don't think either one of them will shirk their responsibility, because they weren't raised that way," he said. Still, he said, this can't be what the twins had in mind when they signed up.
"When you're 17 years old, you don't think about dying. This is really going to make a lot of those guys grow up fast," Davis said. THIRD IN A SERIES Reporter Kevin Kittredge is visiting periodically with the Davis family of Dublin to tell how one family deals with having children serving in the gulf. The Davises' twin sons, Keith and Kevin, are participating in Operation Desert Storm.
by CNB