On the evening of February 25, 1991 — two days into the ground war of Operation Desert Storm — an Iraqi Al-Hussein Scud missile broke up in flight over Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and its warhead struck a warehouse in Al Khobar that the U.S. Army was using as a temporary barracks. Twenty-eight American soldiers were killed and 99 were wounded. It was the deadliest single attack on U.S. forces in the war.
The losses fell heaviest on one unit: the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, an Army Reserve water-purification unit from Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The detachment had arrived in Saudi Arabia only six days earlier, on February 19. Thirteen of its 69 soldiers were killed and 43 wounded — more than eighty percent of the unit — the greatest casualties suffered by any allied unit in the conflict. The detachment’s fallen are remembered at home in Greensburg, where the unit’s loss remains the Army Reserve’s worst of the war.
A Patriot missile battery defending Dhahran never engaged the incoming Scud. The U.S. General Accounting Office investigated the failure (report GAO/IMTEC-92-26, “Patriot Missile Defense: Software Problem Led to System Failure at Dhahran,” February 1992) and traced it to the battery’s own software: the system had been running continuously for more than 100 hours, and a rounding error in its internal clock had grown until its tracking calculation had drifted by about a third of a second — long enough, at a Scud’s speed, for the radar to look in the wrong place. Corrected software reached Dhahran on February 26, the day after the attack.