American engineer Larry Barnes was working on a Wednesday at Abqaiq, one of the main Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) installations in Saudi Arabia, when he heard about ‘some kind of trouble’ taking place seventy kilometres away in Dhahran. Barnes listened on the phone as an Aramco secretary ‘shriek[ed], “They are burning Dhahran! They are setting cars and houses on fire!”’ She was referring to Aramco's Arab employees, many of whom were protesting US support for Israel. This was no ordinary Wednesday, but 7 June 1967, the third day of what some would later call the ‘Six Day War’ and a day that came to be known as ‘Rock Wednesday’ among the thousands of Aramco employees and their families who lived in the Saudi Eastern Province. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ‘Aramco was hit by a mob which broke in the gates, looting and overturning cars’, forcing the company to shut down its refinery and loading facilities. Demonstrators then surrounded the US consulate before advancing on the family quarters serving the US Military Training Mission at the Dhahran Airbase. ‘Despite the fact that women and children were inside’, the CIA reported, ‘homes were entered and almost everything inside destroyed.’

Barnes immediately became concerned about his own family. Like other Americans, Barnes, his wife Marion and their three children resided in Dhahran's suburban Senior Staff Community, once an all-white company town that Aramco was slowly integrating as it promoted Saudi Arabs in response to government demands and previous strikes. According to his written account, Barnes thought in that moment of a Belgian friend's terrifying experience in the Congo, which had witnessed its own ‘native uprising’. Ominously, this Belgian claimed that relations between locals and westerners there had seemed at least as friendly as they were in Saudi Arabia. Barnes telephoned Marion, who was ‘semi-hysterical’. He could ‘hear glass shattering as rocks came through the windows’. Barnes ordered his wife to load his .38 revolver and lock herself in the bedroom closet with their three-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, Barnes had his American foreman gas up a new ‘V8 Chevy sedan’. Barnes put his ‘foot flat down on the gas pedal’ and raced at top speed to Dhahran.