ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Monday, February 26, 1996              TAG: 9602270048
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: A-2  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER

HE WISHES THEY'D FINISHED THE JOB THEY STARTED

GULF WAR VETERANS from Western Virginia look back on their wartime experiences - and wonder why Saddam Hussein is still in power.

Christopher Shay was still a teen-ager, fresh out of Pulaski County High School, when he shipped out with the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne for the Middle East. He was the youngest member of his platoon.

When the air war began in January 1991, Shay's unit was in Saudi Arabia on the border of Iraq. The bombing went on 24 hours a day.

"You could just see smoke all the way to the horizon," he recalled.

On Feb. 23, the ground war began, and Shay's platoon moved into Iraq. He remembers seeing the remnants of an Iraqi convoy that had been smashed by Allied bombing - including the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers.

"That was the part that hit the hardest," he said. "They were just so burned up. They were trying to get out, and they couldn't. That was when we realized they were still human beings."

Now 24, Shay thinks he grew up a lot during his time in the war zone. Before going to the Middle East, "I hadn't traveled anywhere except maybe going to Myrtle Beach." He met people of various cultures and, at the same time, endured the incredible stresses of being a soldier in wartime.

He married after he returned from the Middle East. He got out of the Army in 1994; he and his wife, Amy, have two children, 2-year-old Desiree Nicole and 2-month-old Candice Danielle. He works the second shift at Lynchburg Foundry in Radford.

In the end, he thinks the war was worth the sacrifices Americans made to evict Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. But he wishes "we could have finished what we started" and removed Saddam from power in Iraq.

Shay stays in touch with some of the friends he made during the war - "It kind of made a lot of people get close. You made friends for life."

But he doesn't dwell on those days too often.

"I think about it every now and then," he said. "I really don't talk about it that much."

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