Khobar Towers 15 years later: A Team MacDill survivor remembers

  • Published
  • By Nick Stubbs
  • 6th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --  Fatigue. It was the feeling Air Force Master Sgt. Leighton Reid had every night in the seven-room office and living quarters he shared with other members of his disaster preparedness team. But tonight he would get to bed before midnight, an unusual blessing.

The pet cats he'd made of strays, the cats he wasn't supposed to have, were on the balcony when he stepped out to have a smoke before turning in. He scanned the terrain from his perch, dug into a pocket for his lighter and noticed a car in the parking lot nearby. It flashed its lights a couple of times. By now he'd fished through every pocket and the lighter he always had with him was not there.

"Strange," he thought to himself - the lighter and the car.

He stepped back into the apartment to fetch the lighter, which was on a table, when he noticed something else strange. His laptop computer was turned on, when he was sure it had been off. He heard a truck pull up outside as he sat down in front of the computer to shut it down. It was taking a "miserably" long time to shut down, Sergeant Reid thought to himself - "come on, come on," he urged the Windows 95 software. "You're too slow."

"Crack, crack, crack," outside. Three shots from an M-16? Air Force security police who guarded the buildings were shooting at something, he thought. But they were not rifle shots. They were detonators going off. It was 9:50 p.m., June 25, 1996, the moment 5,000 pounds of explosives went off outside building 131 at the Khobar Towers housing complex, Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

The blast sent debris and a shockwave through the balcony doors and windows from behind where Sergeant Reid was sitting at his computer in building 133, adjacent to 131. He tried to get to the floor, but it seemed he couldn't move, though he actually was making his way to a lower position. As he dropped, he could hear and feel a large shard of glass whizz inches from his head. It went through a wood door on the other side of the room and lodged in the concrete wall beyond.

By now Sergeant Reid realized he was under the desk, as the impact of the massive concussion wave caught up with him.

He came to about 30 seconds later, screaming and shouts for help ringing in his bloody ears, inky dark but for the erratic, dancing light from burning trees outside. Hell was there. And briefly last week, on the 15th anniversary of that fateful day, the memory of Hell was there again.

"It's something I go through - something all of us who survived it - go through every year," said Mr. Reid, who is a civilian working in the disaster preparedness office of the 6th Civil Engineer Squadron at MacDill.

His hand is on the mouse of his computer, as he guides the cursor around the Facebook page dedicated to the survivors of the Hezbollah Al-Hejaz terrorist attack. On it are dozens of pictures posted by survivors and their family members - pictures of the good times, and pictures of the aftermath. There are videos of the scene after the blast, but most important, there are the names of the 19 Airmen who were killed.

"He had a sucking chest wound," Mr. Reid said of the young Airman he was tending moments after the blast. "You hear about sucking chest wounds, and you try to remember what you do for one; you cover it up, so that's what I did."

Did the Airman make it? Did he live?

Mr. Reid's head shakes back and forth, as his chin drops to his chest. His left hand rises like a comforting stranger, the fingers pressing into his eyes to stop an outflow of tears. Fifteen years and it hurts like yesterday.

The next sunrise would be the second of three Sergeant Reid would see before sleeping again. The golden glow revealed the transformation that took place overnight. Concrete rubble, twisted metal and shattered glass littered the area. A crater 35 feet deep and 85 feet across marked the spot where the tanker truck loaded with explosives was sitting. The terrorists were not suicide bombers. All drove off minutes before the explosion.

"It (the bombing) gave me an entirely new perspective on life," said Mr. Reid. "I see every day as a gift now."

Mr. Reid also doesn't keep things from people. He tells them what he thinks and how he feels.

"Life's too short to do anything else," he says.

It's what happens to some people when they escape such a brush with death, Mr. Reid guesses. He wonders about the tiny twists of fate he experienced. Why wasn't his lighter in his pocket? Had he been on the balcony smoking, he surely would have been killed by the blast. Had his computer not been on and taken so long to shut down, he would have been on the balcony when the truck exploded.

Cleaning up his Khobar Towers room afterward, he found the laptop computer he was sitting in front of when the blast ripped into the room behind him. Imprinted on the lcd screen was the outline of his head, both ears clearly visible.

The thought of it makes him chuckle a little.

"Windows 95 saved my life," he joked. "If it wasn't so slow, I probably wouldn't be here."

Despite the horrific memories, Mr. Reid said he and everyone on the scene learned the real value of training and resourcefulness. Self aid buddy care and all the other training the Air Force had given them "kicked in automatically," he said.

"Everyone was helping each other and using their training," Mr. Reid said. "It saved a lot of lives."

Sergeant Reid retired from the Air Force a couple of months after the Khobar attack, going to work as a civilian consultant for the U.S. and Saudi military. In Saudi Arabia, on Sept. 11, 2001, he heard a broadcast report on the shortwave radio about a plane crashing into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

"The report was that it was an accident - a small plane crash," he recalled. "I knew better."