European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - December 07, 1994, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Kuwaiti soldiers sit in the desert Sand and Sun while waiting for orders to mount their tanks during training with a . Army special forces team for fort Campbell by. Green berets in the Sand Bevin Ccrawley staff writer he Only american ground combat troops ordinarily stationed in Kuwait Are about 65 army Green berets who live and a York with the desert emirate s tiny army. Our Job is to live with them to eat with them and if needed to die with them capt Don Bolduc a special forces a team commander said during a recent gunnery exercise with the kuwaiti 7th tank regt in the Oil Rich country s Northern desert. The multilingual Multi skilled Green berets act As military advisers for Kuwait s 20,000-Man army which is about the size of one american division. In wartime the special forces troops would deploy with kuwaiti units to the front lines where they would direct Allied airstrikes and act As liaisons with coalition forces. And during the october crisis in the persian Gulf when Iraq massed 80,000 troops near the kuwaiti order special forces teams went with kuwaiti units that rushed to defend the desert Frontier. Our bread and butter is working with foreign forces said Green Beret capt. Joseph Haydon of the 3rd in 5th special forces group out of fort Campbell by. Haydon said the combat ability of the kuwaiti army is not bad. I think they be come a Long Way since the Gulf War _ the special forces share expertise with countries that Are Friendly toward the United states and try to forge relationships with those nations that Are ambivalent. One senior enlisted Man said that ideally special forces would Avert a War by winning the peace. Kuwait which is slightly smaller than new Jersey was invaded and occupied by iraqi forces aug. 2,1990. Much of the kuwaiti army was on leave at the time in a failed attempt to reduce tensions along the iraqi Border. Still when 100,000 iraqis invaded at 1 . Aug. 2, the kuwaiti air Force and scattered ground units outnumbered 30-to-1 fought stalling skirmishes until they either ran out of fuel or were overwhelmed. Thousands of soldiers were captured and killed while a few remnant units evacuated to the saudi arabian Border. Until the summer of 1990, kuwaitis had used a diplomatic strategy of playing one superpower off another negotiating with both Washington and Moscow to see who would give them the Best defense Deal. With the fall of the Berlin Wall followed the next summer by the iraqi invasion Kuwait decisively turned toward the United states. American special forces troops began training with continued on Page 18 wednesday december 7,1994 the stars and stripes 17