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A once-secret mission revealed By Kevin Opsahl Updated: Jan 21, 2022 02:24 PM A A Jamie Lusch / Mail Tribune Michael Holmes, of Ashland, helped defend Israel during the Gulf War. 31 years later, a local man talks about his part in a mission to defend Israel from Saddam Hussein’s scud missiles In 1991, Michael Holmes was a fresh-faced 21-year-old Army private from Medford sent to Israel to fend off Iraqi scud missiles. Back then, the location of where exactly in Israel Holmes guarded U.S. missiles, in a mission called Joint Task Force Patriot Defender, was undisclosed, according to a Mail Tribune article written at the time. Thirty-one years later, Holmes told his hometown paper that he can now say he was on top of Mount Carmel southeast of Haifa. “It was really a super cool secret mission,” Holmes said in a phone interview from his home in Ashland, just days before the 31st anniversary of the start of Operation Desert Storm. “The Israel mission itself is not classified, but the Haifa mission was.” For years, the former Army private said he’d been “told to shut up” about the mission — and even to this day, with the advent of the internet, he claims to have seen nothing about it published online. “I had to vomit on that day when I found out no history had been written about that,” Holmes said. “So I took it upon myself.” In addition to being interviewed by the paper, he has written and talked about his war experience on social media and even contacted the military to get their response. “No one gets killed; all we did was save lives. There should be movies made of this (mission),” Holmes said. “Why would the military cover that up? Why would the government cover that up? It doesn’t make sense.” Going to Haifa Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces fired scud missiles into Tel Aviv and Haifa, Israel, during the 1991 Gulf War, both as a way to provoke the Jewish state and to disrupt the U.S. armed forces coalition into the dictator’s country. In an oral history Holmes posted on Facebook about his mission, Holmes said Hussein knew Haifa was the site of a nuclear cooling tower, and the Iraqi leader aimed to destroy it with those missiles. “(This would have caused) a meltdown, which would incinerate hundreds of thousands of lives in an instant,” Holmes said. In response to Iraq’s actions against Israel, the President George H.W. Bush Administration made an agreement with the Jewish state to send three U.S. Patriot Missile batteries to aid Israel. “The mission was known as ‘Joint Patriot Task Defender’ under the canopy of the United States Navy 6th Fleet,” Holmes said. Holmes, stationed in Germany in early 1991, heard about his deployment while he was taking a shower. “My wife calls after me and says, ‘Hey, you’ve got to take this phone,’” said Holmes, thinking it was no big deal. “I got out of the shower (and) she said, ‘You’re going to war.’” Once they got orders from their commanders, Holmes and his fellow troops made the brief trip down to Ramstein Air Force Base, which had a plane waiting to take them and the missiles to Israel — but they didn’t know that at the time. But before they could get to the Jewish state, there was trouble — one of the plane’s engines blew out mid flight. “I thought we were dead,” Holmes said. “I thought how ironic it was that an airplane full of anti-aircraft missiles was going down by an accident.” But a Texas National Guard deployment was able to help. “In their Texas drawl, they said, ‘Well, we’ve just lost our starboard engine … but we’re at our highest point, so we’re just going to drift on down and we’ll make it,’” Holmes said. “We’re like, ‘yeah, right.’ But we did.” Patriot Defender mission Once they landed and offloaded the missiles, Holmes and his fellow troops took Israel’s Highway 1 to Mount Carmel. The Israelis relied on the U.S. Patriot Defenders to fire missiles, while Holmes’ job was to guard them. “I assumed there would be some kind of ground offensive when everyone else was underground (in a bunker),” he said. “It would be nearly impossible for them to climb up that mountain and wait, but we never left anything out of possibility.” Once he began his mission on the mountain, it was only be a short time until he nearly lost all of his front teeth. “I ended up landing on my M-16 and busting my mouth,” Holmes said. The injury was due to the sonic boom of the Patriot missiles. “I just remember blacking out and finding my body 20 feet from where I was originally. I thought I landed in a puddle of oil, but it was the blood spewing out of my mouth.” The troops had an abundance of Patriot missiles, but ran out of them within three days. “For 27 hours, we had no missiles,” Holmes said. “That 27 hours was the longest of my life, because we had no idea we were going to get any missiles, and if Saddam had fired anything, we would be kissing our butts goodbye.” His unit would get more missiles and fight on the mountain in Haifa for three months, according to Holmes, and there were successes. “Not one Iraqi soldier was harmed in this action,” Holmes said. “The only victims in this action were unsuspecting innocent Israelis who died before we got there to eradicate the airborne menace out back.” Watching from back home Diane Holmes, the young Army private’s mother, watched coverage of Operation Desert Storm from her home in Medford. “We were just hoping to get any kind of tidbit of goings on,” said Diane, who attended Gulf War support group meetings in downtown Medford. “We always went,” Diane said. “That was an important part of our day. We felt that we were contributing some type of emotion or moral support for not just our son, but for all the other men and women who were involved. We just wanted our son to be safe and the world to be safe because it was such a scary time.” Diane wrote to her son a lot but doesn’t remember getting a response from him. “I had the feeling he probably couldn’t say a lot,” she said. “The fact that we had troops in Israel was not broadcast.” It worried Diane not knowing where her son was. “I knew he must have been fighting somewhere or doing something with the Army group that he was in,” she said. “I can remember how worried we were for him.” Now that she knows where Michael was, Diane said it only makes some of her “nervous fears pop up” from the time of the war. “Even in retrospect, it’s frightening,” she said. Yet Diane acknowledges the success of the Patriot Defender mission. “It’s a sense of pride (not only) for him, but the whole crew that was there in probably one of the most dangerous areas at the time,” she said. “The scud missiles were directed at Haifa; they wanted to get the nuclear reactor. I didn’t know until way after that there was a nuclear reactor they were protecting.” Diane is proud of who her son is today and what he has overcome. “He thinks of others before himself,” she said. “I think he’s always had a servant attitude. He wanted to be in the Army ever since he was a little boy.” End of the mission Holmes described where he was in Israel when he learned his mission had ended. He was at a finishing school for college girls as part of the U.S. military’s efforts to make Israel more comfortable with its presence there. “They would send us out on diplomatic missions, and this was one of those missions where we were at this school,” Holmes said. “We played basketball with these girls — and they killed us.” The young women also taught the troops a dance, which is when an announcement was made in Hebrew over the facility’s intercom. “All of the girls burst into cheers. … They just all fell about themselves,” Holmes said. “We didn’t know what was going on.” A woman walked up to Holmes and told him, “You’ve just won your war,” and she asked him what he was going to do. When Holmes said he didn’t know, the woman asked if she could kiss him. “She grabbed me and she kissed me,” he said. “We fell in love. I was with her every day after that.” That was perhaps a symbolic end for Holmes’ mission atop Mount Carmel. The Patriot Defenders had been a success. In an Associated Press article from 1991, a U.S. commander overseeing the mission described the partnership with Israeli forces as “perhaps equaled but never surpassed in the history of allied warfare.” The Israelis, too, heralded the U.S. military support, sending them off in a farewell ceremony with folk music, according to the same news article. Israel’s air force commander dubbed them “the scudbusters,” which got the attention of a pop artist from the Jewish state who recorded a song parody to the tune of “Ghostbusters.” Holmes was not at that particular ceremony, but he did get a “VIP tour” of the Jewish state with his fellow troops. “We became like The Beatles everywhere we went,” Holmes said. During his time in Israel, he also considered himself “an ambassador of Southern Oregon.” “I couldn’t even tell you how many people said, ‘Wow! Southern Oregon,’ and I’d say, ‘We’re from God’s country,’” Holmes said, “and they’d say, ‘no, this is God’s country’ and I’d be like, ‘there can be two God’s countries.’” Reflecting on Haifa The Israelis seemed to love the American forces as Patriot Defender wrapped; the military commanders took credit for it, but no one has ever talked about the mission in Haifa, according to Holmes. “It was always a wink, wink, nod, nod, ‘shut up, Holmes,’” he said. “I’ve contacted the Israeli government and they don’t even accept the fact that we were in Haifa.” That hasn’t stopped him from asking the Israelis if he can return to the site of his mission, but he has not received a substantive response. “It’s living history for me, and I want to be able to talk to the current Israeli defense forces,” he said. The Israelis’ positive reception to U.S. forces fighting Hussein is one reason why the now-retired Army private is so upset his Haifa mission isn’t public. “Saddam didn’t know we were in Haifa until we took down his missiles, and no one knows, to this day, that anyone was in Haifa,” Holmes said. The reason he is OK talking about the mission now is, “no one’s telling me to shut up now, and I’ve posted everything on Facebook and there’s been no government backlash.” Holmes’ message to the public right now is, “Yes, we were in Haifa and we saved the world.” “It’s not bragging; it’s just a fact,” Holmes said. He also sees a link between the Patriot Defenders’ mission in Haifa and movements in the U.S. such as Black Lives Matter. “Every religion and every race came together for the world and did something good,” Holmes said. “Especially with the racial strife that’s going on in the country, I think that’s the message to get out: We all came together.” Reach reporter Kevin Opsahl at 541-776-4476 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @KevJourno.