Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm
USS Biddle was deployed to the Middle East on September 1990 as part of Operation Desert Shield, where she joined the Saratoga battle group at the Red Sea. On 12 September she diverted the first merchant ship of the operation. By 4 December she had made a total of 27 boardings and four diversions. After spending Christmas at Toulon, France, Biddle rejoined the operations, this time to provide antiaircraft support for the two USA battle groups on station in the northern Red Sea. By the beginning of Desert Storm the cruiser had boarded 30 freighters. At the end of hostilities, USS Biddle made another six boardings, and was the only warship to seize a merchant in the war. She left the Red Sea with the highest percentage of boardings of any coalition vessel, 22.2 percent.
Read more about this topic: USS Biddle (CG-34)
Famous quotes containing the words operations, desert, shield and/or storm:
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)
“It’s alive and waiting for you. Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you, or the cold at night. A thousand ways the desert can kill.”
—Harry Essex (b. 1910)
“The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkled trophy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)