By the time Iraqi troops overran Kuwait in the early hours of Aug. 2, Jim Calvin had been the coach of the Kuwaiti national basketball team for 1 1/2 years and was living in Kuwait city with his wife, Phyllis, and their three poodles.
Calvin, 50, was walking the dogs at 4:30 a.m. Thursday--"It's bright sunshine in Kuwait at that hour"--when he saw transport trucks clattering past his apartment building on the main highway between Iraq and Kuwait.
It was to be his introduction to a harrowing week during which he watched soldiers kill and loot, drove hours across the desert in a car with a leaky radiator to flee the country, coped with American bureaucracy and, finally, arrived penniless back in the United States with no idea of what the future might hold.
In the days before the invasion, Calvin said he had heard news reports of an Iraqi troop buildup at the Kuwaiti border. But his Kuwaiti acquaintances, such as his assistant coach, believed it to be "no problem." The assistant coach had even teased Calvin that the buildup was his fault because under Calvin's tutelage, the Kuwaiti basketball team last year won the "Saddam Championship."
"Saddam Hussein had set this up, and it was kind of wired they'd win their own championship," Calvin said in a telephone interview from San Antonio. "They played on their 'War Day,' the day they won their war with Iran, and we beat them, 105 to 96."
Calvin, an Indiana native, had spent his career as a high school and college basketball coach in Kentucky, Texas and Arkansas before deciding to accept a job "with foreign basketball, to see some places we could never see otherwise."
At the time of the invasion, Calvin had been planning to take the team to Germany for practice.
He was so confident, in fact, that Wednesday night--"the night before it all happened"--he called his 80-year-old mother in the United States to assure her that "nobody's dropping bombs; don't worry."
"But in the middle of the night, at 2 a.m., they bombed the airport. . . .," he said. The situation did not become clear, however, until about 6:30 a.m., when his assistant coach called to say, "Iraqi troops are invading!"
"We're on the seventh floor, so I walk out on the balcony and look out and, sure enough, there are rows and rows of tanks heading up Fourth Ring Road for Kuwait city," Calvin said. "No shots were being fired, though."
