Great.
I have to mention the aircraft, the CF-18s, which people believed were just flying over the ships in the gulf and protecting them. In actual fact, they did an awful lot more. They started doing that, but then they were moved up to the head of the gulf and were right off Kuwait City and the operations there. In fact, the station they had was code-named “Brown”. The Americans named it that after Canadian World War I ace Roy Brown. That's how we got that.
They did those operations right off Kuwait at the CAP station, the close air patrol. When the requirement came to actually conduct fighter operations and bombing missions over Iraq and Kuwait, we were asked to provide close air support, the so-called sweep and escort missions, where they went ahead of the attacking force and with the attacking force going over Kuwait and Iraq. That was a tremendous thing. Toward the end, they got into doing air-to-ground, or air-to-sand, perhaps. In any event, it was a mission.
I would point out very proudly that of all the aircraft over there, it was only the Canadians who did all three missions with the same aircraft and the same pilots. That was a testimony to the professionalism of our air force.
All the time, of course, there was—