It was four in the afternoon on March 10, 1991, when the first planned explosion of Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons went off at the U.S. weapons depot in Khamisiyah, Iraq, and the first gray-white smoke cloud that would come to be called The Plume wafted skyward and drifted over the troops. There would be many blasts that day.
Bill Florey, a young and proud-to-serve E4 Specialist, had just parked his truck after a day’s work.
Francesca Yabraian, who would become his friend and would fight the losing battle to save his life (at a time when it seemed horribly clear the Department of Veterans Affairs wasn’t), was just a student half-a-world away. She was in Dallas on that day.
Pat Toomey was also half-a-world away on March 10, 1991. Pennsylvania’s future Republican senator was all into the rich expectations of his first career (in international currency swap transactions and derivatives) when his hopes were shaken. Deutsche Bank acquired the London-based investment bank where he worked, and he didn’t know what to expect. So, he returned to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and began a career rich with a different sort of expectations: politics.
What Toomey couldn’t know back then was that, in the summer of 2022, he’d be in a position to shake up the hopes and expectations of thousands who also served in Iraq with the same pride Bill Florey felt on that 1991 day.