CHAPTER 8
I Volunteer . . . Twice
THE WAR WAS LIKE A video game. Even its official moniker, “Desert Storm,” sounded less like a real war and more like a cleverly packaged, and marketed, game—the kind that Americans of the early 1990s could find on the shelves of prosperous computer stores at a time of explosive growth in home personal computer ownership. The 1991 Persian Gulf War was the first conflict to be covered round the clock on television, most famously by CNN. It was information-age war, bombarding viewers with images and facts yet telling them surprisingly little about the real war. Footage-hungry television outlets broadcast the apparent new face of modern war—laser-guided munitions, “smart” bombs hitting precision targets, the “luckiest man in Iraq” scurrying away in his truck as an adjacent bridge implodes under the weight of new-age bombs. All of this made for great television, and presented modern war as technological, clinical, precise, at a distance . . . sort of like a video game, actually. It was vicarious, even voyeuristic. The images showed buildings and bridges going down in destruction, not people. There was no blood. There were no clumps of seared human flesh, no cries of agony, no sense of the profound, tragic waste that always accompanies war, techno or otherwise. It conveyed a sense of air power’s invincibility and the individual soldier’s irrelevance. It all seemed so clean. It reinforced the wrongheaded idea that wars can be fought exclusively at a distance, technologically, by small groups of highly trained professionals who assume minimal risk.
Stung badly by Vietnam-era media criticism, the armed forces during the Gulf War severely limited reporters’ access to the fighting, especially ground combat. The vast majority of reporters got their information at military briefings, not from troops on the ground, particularly not from infantry soldiers. The briefing officers fed reporters carefully selected, and edited, images that resonated perfectly with a society already becoming inured to desensitized violence. Everybody was reasonably happy, though. The media got drama (and good ratings). Military authorities got to control the story of the war, with little probing or criticism. The sad result was a popular misperception that the war had been a detached experience, more of a spectacle than a traumatic event to the participants. “Oh yeah, I remember that,” one civilian breezily told a combat veteran when the topic of Desert Storm came up, a mere two years after the war. Or, as one acerbic commentator wrote in the early 1990s: “Remember the Gulf War? Or was that last season’s hit show?”
In the longer run, when most people thought of the war, they thought of the devastating effectiveness of air power, a notion reinforced dramatically by the video briefings. There was nothing inherently wrong with this conclusion. In the Gulf War, as always, the power of American air attacks was extraordinary. No one could reasonably deny that. The problem was in the unfair overestimation of this fearsome weapon. Fed by the usual yearning for bloodless wars of technology, the notion grew among Americans, from the ordinary person in the street to security experts, that air power and precision-guided munitions had made infantrymen obsolete. One advocate, in a statement typical of many others, asserted that “the Persian Gulf War . . . confirmed a major transformation in the nature of warfare: the dominance of air power. Simply (if boldly) stated, air power won the Gulf War.” Quite a neat trick! This author apparently missed the fact that, in spite of a sustained six-week aerial campaign, Saddam Hussein only exited Kuwait after the American-led multinational coalition defeated him in a decisive four-day ground war.
Such fallacious notions were eerily similar to those espoused by many military strategists in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when nuclear weapons were supposed to have banished riflemen from existence. “We have heard this siren song before,” Colonel Daniel Bolger, an infantry officer, wrote in 1998. “The nukes meant no more infantry, no more mess and fuss, death from above. Instead, Americans inherited two very big, dirty Asian wars [Korea and Vietnam] that swallowed riflemen like Moloch. The great hydrogen bombs have yet to be used in anger. Now the snake oil salesmen are at the door again, this time hawking precision strike, victory through air-power. Nobody wants to pay for any infantry. Let the airplanes do it.”
As Bolger indicated, the reality of the Gulf War was quite different from popular memory. In fact, 92 percent of munitions in the war were unguided. Indeed, a congressional investigation, conducted several years after the war, revealed that manufacturers and military leaders had significantly exaggerated the effectiveness of air attacks during the war. “Air power was clearly instrumental to the success of Desert Storm,” the authors of the report wrote, “yet air power achieved only some of its objectives, and clearly fell short of achieving others. Even under generally favorable conditions, the effects of air power were limited. After 38 days of nearly continuous bombardment, a ground campaign was still deemed necessary.” Lack of credible intelligence on targets—in other words, information on where to drop the bombs—also limited the reach and power of the American planes. The investigators found that, ironically, older-generation planes, such as B-52 bombers and A-10 Warthogs, inflicted more damage on the enemy than the newer-generation planes. They also found that precise accuracy was rare, even with guided munitions. “ ‘One target, one bomb’ efficiency was not achieved. On average, more than eleven tons of guided and forty-four tons of unguided munitions were delivered on targets assessed as successfully destroyed; still more tonnage of both was delivered against targets where objectives were not fully met.”1
Packed with data and statistics, the report merely stated something that common sense should have made clear: air power was highly important but, by its very nature as a standoff weapon, air power was limited in its effect in achieving strategic goals, even in a war that conformed perfectly to American strengths. Combined arms was the key to success. Everyone was needed. Everyone contributed something valuable, especially the underappreciated ground units. In fact, ground forces inflicted the majority of the damage on Saddam Hussein’s army, accounting for 79 percent of the tanks destroyed, 57 percent of the armored personnel carriers destroyed, and more than three-quarters of the artillery pieces eliminated by the coalition.
The truth was that, even with all the firepower of modern ground and air weapons, infantry soldiers played a significant role in the Gulf War. Every single one of these men was a volunteer. As an unhappy coda to the unpopular Vietnam War, Congress abolished the draft in 1973. From then on, the military would be stocked with people who chose to sign up. In fact, infantry soldiers volunteered twice, once for the Army and once for the infantry. In most cases, they had to actively try to get into the infantry, and then maintain high physical fitness and training standards to stay there.
In the 1980s, Congress and President Ronald Reagan made a point of compensating servicemen and servicewomen well, enticing them with such benefits as money for college, health, and family care. The result of all this was an educated, motivated, well-trained combat force. By 1991, 98 percent of soldiers had a high school diploma, three-quarters scored in the highest mental category on classification tests, and 41 percent were enrolled in the Army College Fund. More than one in four were African-American.
As always, infantrymen were in the minority. Indeed, the Army had more than 115 military occupation specialties (MOS), of which infantry jobs comprised only a few. Every soldier was trained as a rifleman, but few actually served in that capacity. The Marines had a higher percentage of manpower devoted to the infantry, but riflemen were still the minority. These late-twentieth-century grunts were armed with a new assemblage of weapons, including new-generation M16A2 rifles, M249 Squad Automatic Weapons (SAWs), and a variety of handheld and vehicle-mounted antitank missiles. They were outfitted with coal scuttle Kevlar helmets and sturdy battle dress utilities (BDUs).
In the Army, the infantry branch was divided into two major areas (some would argue two distinct cultures). Mechanized infantry formations were built around the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Army’s newest armored innovation. To the average person, the Bradley looked like a tank. It was tracked and heavily armored. It had a turret, with a 25-millimeter main gun. It was equipped with a side saddle box that could fire TOW missiles (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) to kill tanks. The thirty-three-ton Bradley was a formidable beast, but it was not a tank. It was an infantry carrier. Crewed by a driver, a gunner, and a commander, who themselves were infantrymen, the Bradley carried several more infantry soldiers in its crowded rear compartment. The Bradley provided these grunts—generally called “dismounts” in the mech world—with transportation and considerable fire support. Once outside the Bradley, their job was to fight as machine gunners and riflemen, the traditional role of the grunts. The Army MOS for mechanized riflemen was 11M, eventually spawning the nickname “Eleven Mikes.” Similar to armor, the mech infantry world was about fire support, vehicle formations, gunnery, and cooperation.
Light infantry comprised the other half of the infantry branch. These were the traditional ground pounders who carried heavy rucksacks, usually walked wherever they went (at best they might have access to Humvees, the successor to the jeep), and fought as regular infantry. Some of them were paratroopers. Others were air assault specialists who rode helicopters into battle. They were the descendants of General Kinnard’s 1st Cavalry Division troopers. Others served in straight leg infantry outfits like the 7th and 25th Infantry Divisions. The elite among them were Army Rangers. The MOS for light infantry riflemen was 11B, generally known as Eleven Bravo. Most of them were trained to manipulate a variety of small arms and antitank weapons. Theirs was a life of privation and deprivation, with long marches, patrols, small-unit live fire training events and the like. Light infantry units emphasized physical conditioning, discipline, camaraderie, teamwork, and patrolling. They were the purest of the pure, the last riflemen in a world full of wonder-weapons. Yet they and their mechanized brothers were among the central characters in the Desert Storm video game.2
Crammed in a Bradley and Acting Like Tankers
In a Bradley, everyone was usually uncomfortable. The driver was perched on a small seat, crammed into a narrow rectangle in the front left of the vehicle. In this cramped compartment, mobility was only a dream. Ventilation consisted mostly of an open hatch, although as he drove he usually had to keep the hatch shut. Mostly he just sweltered and focused on maneuvering the vehicle. A couple feet above and behind the driver, the gunner sat scrunched in the left hatch of the turret, with his thermal sights directly to the front of him. He could stand on his little seat, exposing about half of his torso, or he could sit down, button up his hatch, and squeeze himself into the turret’s confined space. Immediately left of the gunner was the TOW box, arguably the most vital piece of equipment on the vehicle since it served as a launcher for the missiles that allowed Bradleys to destroy enemy tanks. To the gunner’s right, the commander had about the same amount of limited space. Directly to his front was a coaxial 7.62-millimeter machine gun. When the vehicle was running, dust, dirt, and exhaust fumes blew into the faces of the gunner and commander alike. The three crewmen wore special radio-equipped helmets, rather like tankers.
The dismounts wore Kevlar helmets, BDUs, chemical overgarments known as MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) suits, and boots. They secured their M16s and machine guns and kept them pointed downward, at the ready. Jammed in the back of the Bradley, theirs was a life of cramped misery. During Desert Storm, a typical Bradley carried anywhere from four to six such infantrymen. In some vehicles they sat on hard metal seats; others perched on benches. Sometimes, in an effort to create more space, they removed the seats altogether and sat packed together on the floor. The unluckiest soldier (usually the junior guy) sat in the most confined area, right behind the driver in a spot known cheerfully as the hellhole. Personal space, as Americans generally think of it, did not exist in this enclosed world. The men sat draped against, sometimes even over, one another. Any movement affected the others. Few of these grunts were diminutive. One rifleman even remembered a squad mate who somehow wedged his six-foot-six frame into the unit’s Bradley. The men had no windows. The only route of egress was through the rear ramp.
The Bradleys were crammed with an amazing amount of stuff: ammunition, cardboard TOW tubes, MREs (meals ready to eat), tools, water bottles, canteens, wrappers, books, magazines, and other assorted personal items. The Bradley’s engine noise made conversation difficult. When the gunner shot the 25-millimeter gun, the whole vehicle shook. The noise of it all could be deafening. The stench of sweat, pungent feet, and gaseous emissions—of the human variety—mixed with engine fumes, weaponry, and metal to produce an unforgettable odor. Colonel Bolger wrote of the typical Eleven Mike: “He rides for hours and hours—often for days—in the back of a dimly lit metal box with five or more of his closest friends crammed into a space about equal to the back end of an average American family’s minivan. As for heating, it exists . . . with two options: red hot and broken. If you want air-conditioning, take up a different line of work. The suspension system does what it can, but forget about a smooth ride. The track pitches and shimmies, jumps up and plops down. The men in the aft end hang on for dear life.” The grunts sardonically referred to their Bradleys as “sardine cans” and “death boxes.”3
By the late afternoon of February 26, 1991, the troopers of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment had endured these conditions for more than two days. These soldiers, like Kinnard’s people in Vietnam, called themselves cavalry (even referring to each company as a “troop”), but, in effect, they were mechanized infantrymen. In fact, during Desert Storm, commanders took the venerable idea of combined arms to a new level. They cross-attached infantry, armor, and artillery units into task forces and protected them with forward-deployed helicopter squadrons. Forward air controllers added to the party with a dizzying array of close air support planes, such as F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Warthogs. Each troop in the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment consisted of thirteen Bradleys and nine M1 Abrams tanks, the veritable kings of the desert battlefield. The Abrams was, by that time, the most formidable tank in the world, with the best protective armor, the best suspension, the most effective flame suppression system, and the deadliest main gun in existence.
On that February afternoon, the lead vehicles of the 2nd Armored Cav were pushing east through the featureless desert, looking to cut off Saddam’s line of retreat. Two days of ground war had beaten his forward-deployed units to a pulp. Many in those units had surrendered in droves to the 2nd Armored Cav and the other divisions that comprised Lieutenant General Fred Franks’s VII Corps. Saddam had ordered his conquering legions out of Kuwait, and his elite units, most notably the Tawalkana Mechanized Division, were charged with the mission of holding off the advancing Americans long enough for the remnants of the Iraqi Army to escape. The Tawalkana soldiers were members of Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard. Most were from the Sunni tribes that provided a foundation of support for Saddam’s Baathist regime. Unlike many of their Iraqi countrymen, they were determined to stand and fight.
At 1600 the lead tanks and Bradleys of the 2nd Armored Cav crested a slight rise in the desert and came upon a carefully prepared defensive position with tanks, infantry, personnel carriers, artillery pieces, and antiaircraft guns. Many of the enemy weapons were dug into cleverly concealed revetments. Most of the dismounted soldiers were in bunkers. The Americans were actually outnumbered, right in the middle of the Tawalkana’s most powerful units. Both sides were surprised to see each other.
Visibility was severely hampered by a raging sandstorm. Clouds of grainy orange and beige sand swirled randomly in whooshes. The two sides were separated by about fifteen hundred meters. Even with thermal sights and laser range finders, the American crewmen only caught glimpses of their prey. Iraqi artillery exploded overhead, forcing the Americans to slam their hatches shut.
Captain H. R. McMaster, whose Eagle Troop was in the middle of the American line of vehicles, ordered an immediate attack. He sensed that he was in a tight spot, almost within a U-shaped enemy ambush position, and his instinct was to be aggressive, to unleash the full killing power of his troop and all its supporting firepower before the enemy could adjust to the American presence. He had placed the troop’s nine tanks, including his own, in the middle of his wedge formation. His Bradleys were on the flanks. At McMaster’s command, his gunner, Staff Sergeant Craig Koch, and his loader, Specialist Jeffrey Taylor, fired two 120-millimeter main-gun rounds in less than ten seconds, destroying a pair of Soviet-made T72 tanks. “Two enemy tank rounds impacted next to my tank,” McMaster recalled. Koch fired at another T72. “The enemy tank’s turret separated from its hull in a hail of sparks. It burst into flames as the round penetrated the fuel and ammunition compartments.” The heat was so intense that Captain McMaster could feel hot wind blowing into his face.
What did all this really mean for the Iraqi crewmen? In a word, catastrophe. They died horrible deaths, burned to a crisp, thrown from their vehicles, shredded by the shrapnel of the American shells and their own as well. Some died of blunt trauma, their heads exploding into little more than shards. One crewman, burning from head to toe, managed to exit his tank, only to go down in a hail of machine-gun bullets. The American Bradley and Abrams crewmen knew they had to work together quickly, almost perfectly, to avoid the same fate themselves. There was always a chance that, at any moment, an enemy shell or missile could tear through their own vehicle. The danger was especially real for the Bradleys since their armor was not as thick as that of the tanks.
In mere seconds, the encounter turned into a full-blown desert brawl with both sides firing everything at their disposal. The unit radios were clogged with excited voices as commanders and crewmen alike called out targets, bellowed orders, and relayed information. “All of the Troops’ tanks and scouts [infantry Bradleys] were now in the action,” one of McMaster’s platoon leaders later said. “Enemy tanks and BMPs [armored personnel infantry carriers] erupted into innumerable fireballs.” A dizzying array of Iraqi military hardware went up in flames as depleted uranium, 120-millimeter Abrams rounds, and TOW missiles struck them. “Enemy tank turrets were hurled skyward,” one soldier later said. “The fireballs . . . hurled debris one hundred feet into the air. Secondary explosions destroyed the vehicles beyond recognition.”
The Americans maintained a disciplined formation, advancing and firing in rushes. Vehicles generally operated in pairs, employing Air Force wingman tactics. American artillery observers, riding in thinly armored M577 personnel carriers, called down devastating, continuous 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzer fire on the Iraqis. The M577s were buttoned up and almost unbearably hot. “We all stripped down to our boots and underwear, drenched with sweat,” Specialist David Battleson, one of the crewmen, said. Another observer, Specialist Chris Harvey, peeked outside of his vehicle at the chaos raging around him. The panorama of destruction took his breath away. “All I saw were things burning. For three hundred sixty degrees. Nothing but action.”
Several thousand meters to the rear, the howitzer crews worked without interruption, priming, loading, and firing. “No one could do the same job all night,” Specialist Adeolu Soluade recalled. “I think I did almost every job on the gun that night.” Some of the crews actually ran out of ammo until resupply convoys caught up with them. Flames shot as far as twenty feet from the muzzles of the guns. The noise and concussion waves of the shooting were immense, like an earthquake. “The guns had been firing so long that carbon was building up in the tubes,” one soldier said.
While the tanks took the lead, the Bradleys pummeled the flanks. Their 25-millimeter rounds easily penetrated the armor of Soviet-made BMPs and even some of the tanks as well. Deadliest of all were their TOWs, which Bradley commanders fired at tanks, bunkers, and antiaircraft guns. One Bradley commander remembered rotating his turret just in time to see a T62 tank fire at his vehicle. “The enemy tank missed, throwing dirt in the air.” The explosion was frighteningly close. “After we fired a TOW at the tank and destroyed it, we had to get out and clean off our weapons optics so we could continue.” The Bradley crewmen, with help from their dismounts, had to do all this under extreme stress. “Violent explosions followed the impact of the perfectly aimed and guided fires,” McMaster recalled. “All vehicles were suppressing enemy infantry to the front, who fired machine guns at us and scurried back and forth among the endless sea of berms which comprised the enemy position.”
For the men in the Bradleys, the battle amounted to a constant struggle to keep up with the tanks, sight targets through the blowing sand, figure out their range, and engage them. The TOWs were like grim reapers stalking their prey. They flew within a few feet of the ground, trailing their guiding wires, seemingly picking victims with relish. One soldier saw a TOW score a direct hit on an Iraqi APC, exploding it “as if it were made of plastic. The metal armor shot up into the air accompanied by a fireball and it seemed to rise and fall in slow motion. In the blink of an eye a perfectly functional vehicle had become a burning heap of metal.”
Lieutenant Daniel King and Alpha Troop, 4-7 Cavalry Regiment, were a few kilometers to the south, covering 2nd Armored Cav’s flank. To the left of King in the turret of their Bradley, his gunner spotted, through the foggy mists of sand, a large heat blob on their thermal sight. “We raised our TOW missile, fired, and it exploded almost right away,” King said. “I put my head up out of the turret and saw a T72 tank in a fireball about 300-400 meters away.” Jumping up and down in the turret, he and his gunner exchanged high fives and whoops of pure elation. For them, the killing was impersonal, as if they had only destroyed a vehicle and not people. Armored combat tends to be that way. It also tends to be solitary, with crews in their own vehicular world.
But other men saw enemy soldiers and shot them, especially as Iraqis attacked from behind or fled when American columns advanced past destroyed vehicles. Amid the smoke and dust, Iraqi soldiers with machine guns, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) found concealment from which to hit the Americans. Some of the Republican Guard soldiers even had Sagger missiles, capable of penetrating the armor of an Abrams if fired from a close enough range. McMaster saw his Abrams and Bradley crews “cutting down hundreds of infantry fleeing to subsequent positions. Some tried to play dead and pop up behind the tanks with rocket-propelled grenades. They fell prey to the Bradley 25mm and coaxial machine guns.” Of course, “fell prey” meant that they got torn up by machine-gun bullets or blasted into pieces by the 25-millimeter rounds. “Men were cut in half right in front of our eyes,” a soldier later wrote. One Bradley commander even mowed down several with an M16 rifle and a few grenades. For the Americans who unleashed this storm of death, the killing was personal. “They kept dying and dying and dying,” First Lieutenant Keith Garwick, a platoon leader in Ghost Troop, at the northern edge of the American advance, recalled. “Those guys were insane. They wouldn’t stop.” The twenty-five-year-old West Pointer and his men mowed them down in droves, but still the Iraqis kept counterattacking or stubbornly defending revetments and berm-side bunkers. For Garwick and company, the horror of it all was deeply troubling. “A certain part of you just dies . . . somebody trying to kill you so desperately, for so many hours, and coming so close. I still don’t understand it. I couldn’t wait to see combat. What a fool I was.” To another soldier, the experience was “intoxicating . . . also macabre.”
The Americans dominated the battle, but they were hardly impervious to damage of their own. Lieutenant Garwick found that his company radio net was so jammed with frantic voices that he often had to dismount and run, under heavy fire, to the artillery forward observer’s vehicle. In one instance, enemy artillery fire was so accurate that he and another man had to take shelter under the lieutenant’s Bradley. “We just sat there crying, just shaken. The air bursts were coming right on top, ricocheting around us. We were in a corner of hell. I don’t know how we made it out of there.” Specialist Patrick Bledsoe, a Bradley driver in Ghost Troop, was absorbed with the movement of Iraqi infantrymen moving toward his track when a tank shell ripped into the turret behind him. “It was just like somebody hit us with a sledgehammer,” he said. In the turret, the gunner, Sergeant Nels Andrew Moller, asked, “What was that?” A second later, another shell hit in nearly the same spot and exploded, killing Moller. Bledsoe got out of the destroyed Bradley and crawled to safety, as did the track commander.
Sergeant Roland Jones’s Bradley in 4-7 Cavalry had dodged several near misses from enemy tanks or infantry, he was not sure which. As sparks and dirt kicked up around the Bradley, the engine got stuck in neutral. A track commanded by his platoon leader, Lieutenant Michael Vassalotti, drove up to shield him. Jones ordered his people to abandon the track. They no sooner got out than a Sagger missile struck it in the turret. “My whole right side felt it,” Corporal Darrin McLane, Jones’s gunner, said. “I caught some shrapnel in the arm. I . . . staggered a couple of steps, then started running.” He and the others made it into the lieutenant’s Bradley just in time for it to absorb two T72 hits just behind the driver, below the turret. “It was smoky inside,” Jones said. “Everyone had been injured in some sort of way. I had flash burns to the side of my head and the back of my neck.” Lieutenant Vassalotti and Corporal Jones also took flash burns to the face. Even as 25-millimeter rounds began to cook off in their casings, the men evacuated the Bradley. Not long after this, another tank round smashed through a nearby Bradley, shearing off the gunner’s leg, mortally wounding him. The commander remembered experiencing “a big flash and a big wind, and the next thing I knew I was burning. I jumped out of the hatch.” Other soldiers extinguished the fire. Fortunately the man’s body armor absorbed much of the flames and shrapnel.
After dark, the battle petered out amid the horrendous stench of burning metal, rubber, fuel, and flesh. The noxious smoke of death—from men and vehicles—hung over the cold desert. The 2nd Armored Cav, and its friends from 4-7 Cavalry, had wrecked much of the Tawalkana Division. Infantry grunts herded thousands of enemy soldiers into captivity. There was little else to do with them except give them some water, MREs, medical care if they needed it, and wait for support troops to come up and take them away. For lack of any other defining feature or objective, American commanders called this engagement the Battle of 73 Easting, after the map coordinates of this otherwise nondescript patch of desert. In the battle, the Americans destroyed 161 tanks, 180 APCs, 12 artillery pieces, and half a dozen antiaircraft guns. Eagle Troop alone accounted for 28 tanks and 16 APCs. No one knew, or was much interested in, exactly how many enemy soldiers they killed—a telling contrast from the body-count obsession of the Vietnam War.4
Tawalkana was not finished yet, though. Like a runner accepting a baton in a relay race, the 1st Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade advanced through the 2nd Armored Cav and kept up the pressure on the Republican Guards. Just after midnight, this combined arms force from the Big Red One collided with them at Objective Norfolk, another artificial American name for a patch of desert. The fighting was pure chaos, a three-hundred-sixty-degree struggle that was the very embodiment of modern combat. Commanders had a difficult time maintaining unit integrity and order of movement. The lack of navigational equipment on most of the Abramses and Bradleys made it easy to get lost. The night was windy and chilly, specked with sheets of light rain. These conditions, combined with the fire and smoke of burning vehicles, made it quite difficult for crews to identify targets through their thermals. Visual identification was a near impossibility in the dark and smudge. “At night, war becomes even more difficult as you try to identify friend and foe,” Father David Kenehan, the chaplain of a nearby cavalry unit, wrote in his diary. “Some guys will shoot first & question later in order not to endanger their crew.”
The Republican Guards, in hopes of foiling the American heat-seeking thermal sights, shut their engines off or abandoned their vehicles until the Americans got within range or bypassed them. Then they attacked, either on foot or after jumping back into their vehicles. “They were shooting us from the rear, which is the only way a T55 or T62 [tank] can hurt an M1,” a tank commander recalled. “We were ‘coaxing’ [machine-gunning] guys running between tanks, running between our tanks and bunkers, as we were moving through. It was really hairy. There were rounds flying all over the place.” The Americans learned to shoot at all tanks and APCs, even those that looked empty because of cold signatures on the thermals. Surrendering enemy soldiers were sometimes interspersed with the attackers, making it very hard for the Americans to know when to shoot and when to hold their fire. “The passage into enemy-held territory was an eerie, almost surreal experience,” Colonel Lon Maggart, the brigade commander, later wrote. “The night sky was filled with catastrophic explosions and raging fires the likes of which I had never seen before. Horrible fires roared from the turrets of Iraqi tanks with flames shooting high into the night air.” He and the other soldiers were inundated with the unforgettable odor of burning oil, rubber, and flesh.
The air was thick with the thunderous booming of Abrams main guns and Bradley chain guns. Muzzle flashes and tracers flickered in the night like flashbulbs. Coaxial machine guns, firing at small groups of dismounted, RPG-toting attackers, could be heard chattering tinnily when the bigger guns paused for ammo. One Bradley gunner alone killed six attacking RPG teams. The American gunners blew up several ammo-laden trucks and dumps, creating dangerous fireballs and secondary explosions. Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Fontenot, commander of Task Force 2-34 Armor, finally ordered his crews to stop shooting up the trucks. “As we made our way through the trucks, many of which were on fire and a hazard to us, we found many enemy soldiers attempting to surrender.” His armor heavy task force had few grunts to disarm the prisoners and move them to safety. Fontenot took to running over their discarded weapons with his tank.
“We were bypassing BMPs, MTLB [personnel carriers], trucks, and empty fighting positions,” First Lieutenant Douglas Robbins, a Bradley-equipped scout platoon leader, wrote. “These vehicles were barely visible through our thermal sights.” His platoon led the way for Task Force 5-16 Infantry, the main brigade grunt element. In an encounter typical of many that night, his gunner spotted two armored scout cars moving directly in front of them. “I halted the platoon, ensuring the four lead vehicles were on-line and ordered them to open fire” with 25-millimeter armor-piercing rounds. The Iraqi scout cars “blew up and began burning.” Later they came upon enemy infantrymen in a bunker system. Lieutenant Robbins hoped they would surrender but they did not. As his vehicles laid down suppressive fire, a platoon of dismounted grunts assaulted the bunkers, killing anyone who resisted. Eventually, after enduring this lethal combination of mechanized infantry power, twenty of the Iraqi soldiers surrendered.
Another scout platoon leader adopted the risky but effective tactic of creeping to within a couple hundred meters of Iraqi infantry positions. “This kept the enemy soldiers from firing their RPG-7 antitank grenade launchers and machine guns until we were almost right on top of their positions.” The sheer violence of these attacks, combined with concentrated firepower, was a deadly experience for the Iraqis. “We destroyed approximately 40 enemy infantry soldiers,” the lieutenant wrote euphemistically, “including one RPG gunner who deployed less than 50 feet forward of my vehicle.” The lieutenant’s use of the word “destroyed” is revealing, as if he and his men had euthanized a lame horse rather than killing fellow human beings. Such is the emotional distance from killing that combat participants must sometimes forge in their own minds.
Throughout the night, the 1st Division tore through three lines of Iraqi defenses, consisting mostly of dug-in tanks and infantry. Like so many other Americans, Colonel Maggart employed movie and entertainment references to describe the carnage of the battle. In his recollection, when enemy vehicles got hit they “would explode in a huge fireball of flame and debris. These explosions were much like those seen on television shows, where space vehicles are vaporized by phasers or photon torpedoes. Metal particles were blown two to three hundred yards into the air. Often, each massive initial explosion was followed by two or three subsequent, but equally violent, secondary explosions as fuel and remaining ammunition detonated.” Maggart constantly warned his crews to be wary of exploding ammo and fuel as they advanced past the funeral pyres.
For his tankers and infantrymen, though, their biggest danger came from so-called friendly fire, a significant problem in the Gulf War. In the confusion of the Norfolk battle, gunners sometimes snapped off shots at their own side. The Americans destroyed four of their own tanks and five of their own Bradleys. Main-gun rounds from tanks inflicted most of the damage. In at least two instances, these fratricidal shootings resulted in American loss of life. One such tragedy occurred when a tank gunner saw several RPGs crease a Bradley. Thinking the RPGs were muzzle streaks coming from an enemy tank’s main gun, the Abrams gunner mistook the Bradley for the supposed Iraqi tank. He opened fire several times, destroying the Bradley and two adjacent ones as well. Sergeant Joseph Dienstag, a gunner on one of the wrecked Bradleys, escaped from his vehicle and went around to the back to help the dismounts get out. As the grunts poured out, Dienstag smelled the overwhelming stench of burning flesh. He pulled out a wounded radio operator who complained of pain in his chest and legs. “It was dark and I’m doing a lot of this by feel,” Dienstag said, “and I put my hands at the end of his legs and there were no feet left there.”
The Americans lost six men killed and thirty wounded that unhappy night. Medics had to use shovels to recover the charred remains of one dead infantry soldier. The dismounts were especially shaken by the unnecessary losses because they were often so helpless, crammed into the rear of Bradleys. “I felt drained,” one of them said immediately after the self-inflicted killings. “I couldn’t believe something like that could happen. All dismounts . . . were scared. Not only do we have to worry about T72s and T54s and 55s but we have to worry about M1 tanks too. The soldiers had a numb look.” Father Kenehan assisted the medics as they treated one wounded Bradley crewman whose vehicle had been hit by American ordnance. “Part of his upper & lower lip on the right side was taken off & his jaw may have been broken.” Another soldier was beyond help. “I anointed him & prayed for the repose of his soul.”5
In spite of the losses, the Big Red One controlled Objective Norfolk by daylight and the VII Corps avalanche rolled east, seeking to cut the Kuwait City-Basrah road that served as the main Iraqi route of retreat. The Tawalkana Division had, for the most part, ceased to exist. The 12th Armored Division, another enemy unit that stood in the way of the American advance, was also decimated. At 73 Easting and Norfolk, mech infantrymen often fought as veritable tankers, adapting themselves to a desert tank fight in which shells and missiles, not mortars or small arms, did most of the killing at impersonal distances of several hundred meters.
As the VII Corps units attacked and overran the road, though, this was not always the case. In one instance, two platoons of Eleven Mikes from C Company, Task Force 3-41 Infantry, got the job of assaulting a heavily defended cinder-block police post on high ground that dominated a key portion of the road. Only riflemen could take this objective, known as the Al Mutlaa police station. Artillery, tank, and Bradley fire pounded the two buildings that comprised the police post. Iraqi soldiers fired back with rifles, machine guns, and RPGs. Finally, the grunts dismounted under a sky that was smeared with the ebony smoke of oil well fires—the Iraqis were burning Kuwaiti oil rigs as they retreated—and conflagrations from vehicles destroyed on the road by the Air Force.
Moving in urgent rushes, they assaulted west to east, across the road. “The company and platoon had rehearsed and trained for this mission so often in the last six months that everything was executed with the speed of a battle drill,” Lieutenant Daniel Stempniak, whose platoon led the way, later wrote. Even so, once the lieutenant was on the ground, he was shocked by the unceasing noise of exploding vehicles. The explosions hurled metal fragments around, adding to the danger of the open ground. With only the cover offered by their fire support, he and his men had no choice but to brave an open kill zone for almost three hundred yards to the buildings. Using classic fire and maneuver tactics, they made it across the road to the westernmost building. Once inside, they pitched grenades and assaulted room to room, floor by floor. Sometimes they killed their adversaries face-to-face. At times, their uniforms were stained with the blood of their enemies. “That’s where my infantrymen earned their money, fighting room to room,” their brigade commander later said. “The Iraqis had AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. They sprayed a lot of bullets around.”
A couple dozen grunts spent hours clearing out the two buildings and an adjacent ridgeline of bunkers but suffered no casualties. The same could not be said for their enemies, who lost fifty-two killed and twenty-eight captured. “There was gore all over,” one soldier recalled. “Many [dead Iraqis] were dismembered.” Lieutenant Stempniak attributed the successful attack to the discipline and preparation of his grunts. “If not for the quality and training invested in the soldiers and NCOs the platoon would have suffered substantial casualties from friendly and enemy fire.” The lesson, as he saw it, was that small groups of well-prepared and well-armed men, with superior will to their enemies, would always prevail, even against daunting odds.
To a great extent, the capture of the police post put the road firmly in coalition control. The road came to be known as the Highway of Death, not because of what happened at Al Mutlaa police station but because of the enormous destruction the Air Force unleashed upon retreating Iraqi columns of tanks, personnel carriers, and even civilian vehicles. It was almost as if the Eleven Mikes were never there.6
Marines in a Minefield and Screamin’ Eagles on Helicopters: Job Opportunities for Eleven Bravos
As an amphibious expeditionary force, the Marine Corps was ill suited to desert warfare. War in the desert, with its great open spaces and flat ground, called for the mobility that came from fleets of armored vehicles. The Army of 1991 was designed for just this sort of mechanized conventional war, although most American leaders had believed this war would be fought in Europe against the Soviets. The Marines had no such capability. Outfitted, to a great extent, with an inadequate collection of amphibious light armored vehicles, older-generation M60 tanks, and thin-skinned Humvees, the Marines were not even as well equipped as the Iraqis. But they had something their enemies did not—superb light infantrymen. What makes the Marine Corps special is the recognition that the individual rifleman is the ultimate weapon of war. The Corps is built around that concept. In the Marines, the MOS for grunts is 0311. By the time a man earns that moniker, he has survived boot camp at Camp Pendleton, California, or Parris Island, South Carolina. Following boot camp, the arduous training regimen of the School of Infantry in California or North Carolina turns him into an infantry Marine.
In 1991, these Marines fought their war on foot, amid daunting circumstances. Specifically, they led the way into the most elaborate minefield in modern military history. During the many months of standoff that preceded hostilities, the Iraqis in southern Kuwait built two major defensive belts, consisting of millions of mines, augmented by bunkers, trenches, and barbed wire. Their hope was to pin down the Americans in the minefields and slaughter them with artillery, something they had often done in their war against Iran during the 1980s. For the Americans, the worst-case scenario was to get hung up in the minefields and come under chemical weapons attacks. “We were concerned about speed, and building momentum going north, to get through those two obstacle belts,” Major General Mike Myatt, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, later wrote. “Because the worst thing that could happen was to get trapped between them.” His division’s job was to breach the mine belts and drive straight for Kuwait City. Myatt adopted an Army concept and divided his venerable unit into five task forces: Task Force Shepherd, a scouting force; Task Forces Papa Bear and Ripper, improvised mechanized outfits with light armor; and regimental-sized Task Forces Taro and Grizzly, the light infantry. Colonel John Admire commanded Taro. Colonel James Fulks was the CO of Grizzly.
Three days before the ground war was scheduled to begin, they learned from General Myatt that they would go into the minefield first. Their orders were to infiltrate, breach lanes through the first mine belt, and open the way for the armor. If the Iraqis counterattacked, as most expected them to do, the grunts were to hold them off, with a major assist from AV-8B Harrier close support aircraft until help arrived. Admire was flabbergasted, going so far as to call the news a “psychological shock” for his Marines. Although they did have some engineers attached to them, they had never trained for the task of infiltrating a minefield. They had no armor, few vehicles, and none of the sophisticated breaching equipment necessary to blow holes in the mine belts. “We would simply infiltrate at night on foot, with bayonets and rifles as our principal weapons,” Admire later wrote. In Myatt’s opinion, only foot troops could carry out the mission with the speed, stealth, and surprise necessary for success. When Corporal Michael Eroshevich of Task Force Taro and his squad mates heard the news, they exchanged death glances, as if to say “nice knowing you.” With great insight, Eroshevich perceived the incongruity of the mission. “This was pretty much a Nintendo war. But we were going to walk thirty miles and go through a minefield on hands and knees.” Another Marine believed that they would suffer a 70 percent casualty rate. “I didn’t expect to come back alive,” he said.
Indeed, the mission was a prime example of the difference between the Army and the Marines. Army commanders in the Gulf War assigned their breach missions to armored and mechanized units with mine-defeating explosives and equipment; in their wildest imaginings, they would never have entertained the risky, potentially casualty-intensive idea of sending foot infantry in first. They much preferred risking machines to destruction rather than men, plus they had more hardware to lose. For the Marines, the idea was daunting but not necessarily far-fetched. After all, good Marines with rifles in their hands were the Corps’ primary asset, its best and its toughest people. Why not use the first team for what loomed as the greatest challenge?
Starting on February 21, both of the task forces infiltrated about eight miles into Kuwait on foot. Reconnaissance teams then approached the minefields with great stealth and caution. Their job was to find possible gaps in the layers of mines. Some of the recon Marines were so close to the Iraqis that they could hear and even observe them. “We could see the Iraqis walking up and down, and anytime a jet came overhead, they would sneak down into their holes,” one of them recalled.
Under cover of the night and the smoggy black smoke emitted by hundreds of oil well fires, Sergeant William Iiams led one team from Task Force Taro up to a fence the Iraqis had built to mark the southern edge of the first mine belt. Through his night vision goggles he saw several antipersonnel mines near the fence and avoided them. Using specially modified wire cutters, he opened a hole in the fence and it fell down. “We went into the minefield for about ten or fifteen meters. We were side by side, shoulder to shoulder, because that’s how we figured to clear a lane. We got up to the first real clump of mines. They were the Italian kind, with the clusters on top and trip wires all around. We tried to get through them, but they were just too thick in that one area.” They turned around and quietly retraced their steps out of the minefield. At one point, his buddy grabbed him and pointed downward. Iiams glanced down and saw that he was standing right on top of a mine! Fortunately it was an antitank mine designed to detonate only with thousands of pounds of pressure. “I was kind of relieved,” Iiams added with great understatement.
Safely away from the mines, he and the two other Marines on his team built a hide site inside an oil pipe, under cover of sand and burlap. They spent the entire day hiding and observing. The next night, Iiams and another Marine went back into the minefield and found a weak point where the mine layer was thin. Task Force Taro had found an opening to exploit.
As of the eve of the ground attack on February 23, Task Force Grizzly still had not. Nonetheless, General Myatt still ordered both of his task forces to go in that night. They had a few stops and starts because of a potential cease-fire the Soviets were negotiating with Saddam, but those peace entreaties fell through. Supported by only a few Humvees with TOW launchers, the Marines shuffled in long columns through the windy desert, in the flickering shadows of oil well fires, bound for the same jump-off spots where the recon Marines had entered the first mine belt. Each Marine was hauling at least seventy pounds of weapons, ammo, gear, and food. Dragon antitank gunners had a miserable time manhandling their unwieldy fifty-pound weapons. M60 and M249 SAW machine gunners also struggled. Some of the Marines, particularly mortar crews, dragged their gear on improvised carts. “These carts were the size of large wheelbarrows,” Corporal Greg Stricklin said. “With all the gear loaded I figured a cart weighed between five and six hundred pounds.” They had their MOPP suits on, but not their gas masks. The evening was chilly, causing many of them to alternately sweat and shiver. Only the best-conditioned troops could carry and maneuver such onerous loads and endure this strenuous march for miles. One of them called it “the most grueling physical experience of my life.”
For Task Force Grizzly, two intrepid staff sergeants led the way, on their hands and knees, into the first mine belt, gently prodding with their bayonets, “old World War I style,” in the estimation of one officer. The minefield was between one hundred and one hundred and thirty meters deep. “The majority of the [antitank] mines were exposed on the surface and very obvious,” one Marine engineer recalled. “The majority of the antipersonnel mines were buried with the triggering devices exposed to be detonated [when] stepped on.” Ever so carefully they crawled forward, gently poking with their bayonets. The job required total concentration. One slip, one moment of distraction, one mistake could mean instant death. Moreover, if the enemy did open fire with artillery or small arms, there was no cover to be had. “Once they found a mine, they just marked it and moved around it, leaving it in place,” Colonel Fulk later said. “So they created a meandering path through the field.” The two sergeants marked their finds with chemical lights. In their wake, the grunts carefully followed. Each man made sure to walk in the footsteps of the person ahead of him. It took nearly eight exacting, spine-tingling hours to forge a path through the minefield. By 0400, twenty-seven hundred Marines were through. Iraqi resistance was negligible. There were a few firefights, but most of the enemy soldiers quit when they saw that the Marines had gotten through the mines.
To the east, Task Force Taro, led by the intrepid Sergeant Iiams, entered the minefield in the gap he had found. Here, too, the Marines placed red and green chemical lights on the mines, creating an impromptu path that the heavily laden grunts followed assiduously. “We were so out in the open it was unbelievable,” Captain Mike McCusker, the commander of India Company, recalled. “There was an oil well fire behind us that lit us up. We couldn’t get away from it. They had so many mines stuck underneath [the sand]. Some were on top. Some weren’t even opened, weren’t even set, but we didn’t know that at the time.”
As the infantrymen gingerly worked their way through the minefield—struggling and cursing all the way—they were under constant pressure from higher command to move fast. The generals and colonels knew that speed offered the best chance of success. But, for the privates, lance corporals, and sergeants who were actually in the minefield, speed was a far lower priority than safety. It was an odd, and terrifying, situation for them, knowing they had to move fast, but realizing that no one could go through a minefield with any degree of quickness. “The blowing sand had uncovered some of the mines and it wasn’t hard to spot them,” Corporal Stricklin said. At times, though, the mines were only a couple feet apart, which made it hard for him to maneuver his cart safely. “We had to stop, back up and go around constantly.” He heard incessant radio chatter from commanders, urging them to hurry it up. “I was tired of hearing that darned radio. We couldn’t see . . . could hardly breathe . . . surrounded by mines that would send you home in pieces and someone was yelling about us slowing things down.”
At last, by dawn, all of the Task Force Taro Marines were through. As in the Task Force Grizzly sector, Iraqi opposition was light, and prisoners began to stream in. Many of them had been pounded by American air attacks for days. When they realized that the minefields could not hold off the Americans, they gave up. Lieutenant Colonel John Garrett, whose 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, led the way for Task Force Taro, believed that the sheer audacity of the minefield breach, combined with the air attacks that clearly softened up the enemy, accounted for the Marine success. “I think they [Iraqis] were surprised by where we came through, when we came through, and the fact that we kept moving,” he said. “It was really a combined arms operation.” Like most Marines, Garrett understood the overwhelming power that resulted from ground troops and aviators working closely together.
As the sun rose on February 24, an exhausted Sergeant Iiams took a moment to look at the long line of two thousand grunts plus vehicles wending their way north. For the first time, the profound importance of his mission hit home to him. “It was a big responsibility on my shoulders. I didn’t realize it until I looked back and all I saw was jarheads for miles.” Against light opposition, the two infantry task forces began to dig in. As the morning wore on, Task Forces Ripper and Papa followed. They forged ahead and breached the second mine belt with their vehicles. From here they assumed the lead role in the push for Kuwait City, staving off several powerful Iraqi mechanized counterattacks. The 0311s were involved in some of this, but not as the leading actors. For one brief moment, though, in the ultimate techno-war, the entire Marine operation hinged on the courage and skill of a few brave men in a minefield.7
Even as the Marines did their thing, Army Eleven Bravo grunts from the 101st Air Assault Division (Screamin’ Eagles) were jammed into Black Hawk helicopters, nearly two hundred miles to the west, carrying out an air assault sixty miles into Iraq. Their divisional forebears were paratroopers who had jumped into Normandy and Holland and had fought at Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. Since then, the 101st had been converted into a helicopter-heavy air assault light infantry formation, rather similar to the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam.
Black Hawk crewmen had removed the seats from their helicopters to accommodate as many heavily laden grunts as possible. On average, each helicopter carried fifteen troopers, who wedged together in spectacular discomfort. Weapons, rucks, boots, helmets, and fists splayed together in a confusing jumble of humanity. Some of the men were twisted into pretzel-like contortions. Most everyone had at least one limb that was asleep. Almost all of them could not wait to get off their helicopters, onto firm ground. Yet, they were also frightened of what might be waiting for them. “Everyone was a little on edge,” Captain John Russell, a company commander, recalled. “You look around at your soldiers, and you’re responsible for them. You want to bring them all back.” The helicopters were flying one hundred fifty miles per hour in the post-dawn shadows, at nap-of-the-earth altitudes, ten or twenty feet off the ground, to foil any inquisitive Iraqi radar installations. Soldiers who were close to the open doors of the Black Hawks could look down and see miles of desert beige speeding by below.
These grunts were members of the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed “the Bulldogs.” Their mission was to lead the way on a deep penetration into Iraq, to secure the far western flank of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s minutely planned ground offensive, and cut off a major enemy route of retreat along the Euphrates River. More specifically, their task was to seize control of a forward operating base (FOB), called Cobra by the planners, which would function as a refuel and resupply point for subsequent air assaults all the way to the Euphrates. Like all light infantry units, the 1st of the 327th required a great deal of fire support from a formidable blend of fighter planes, artillery, Apache attack helicopters, and giant, twin-rotor Chinook helicopters that carried many of the unit’s TOW-mounted antiarmor Humvees and its supplies.
All of these helpers, except for the Chinooks, raked over the landing zone before the Black Hawks landed. In their wake, plumes of angry smoke boiled high into the sky. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hancock, the battalion commander, had been told by his intelligence people to expect light opposition, maybe a platoon of enemy, but he did not buy that. He had a hunch that the planned landing zone (LZ) would be more heavily defended, possibly even by a battalion. So, the night before the assault he had decided to land his unit a mile and a half south of the original LZ. The decision was a nightmare for the mission planners but it was fortuitous for the trigger pullers. The billowing smoke was coming from a ridgeline of inhabited Iraqi bunkers, right smack dab on the original LZ. “Had we not shifted that LZ, we would have been in a major fight on literally the first ships going in,” Colonel Tom Hill, the 1st Brigade commander—Hancock’s boss—later commented. Instead they made a smooth landing, safely out of the range of Iraqi fire.
In mere moments, sixty Black Hawks touched down and disgorged nearly six hundred grunts, who quickly spread out into a defensive perimeter. Within half an hour, they had artillery in place, and many of the infantrymen had worked their way close enough to the ridgeline to call in more accurate artillery fire and air strikes on the entrenched Iraqi soldiers. For several minutes, Hancock was content to let them work over the enemy trenches and bunkers. Then the first white flags appeared. Attack helicopters actually herded some surrendering enemy soldiers into the waiting muzzles of riflemen. “The air-bursts over the bunkers and trenches helped to turn the tide,” the brigade’s command sergeant major, Bob Nichols, recalled. Dozens of the Iraqis streamed out. Many clutched white handkerchiefs. Others, though, stayed put and kept shooting at the helicopters. At this point, the infantrymen surged forward and attacked the recalcitrants at close range. “[They] were charging uphill toward the Iraqi trenches like Gettysburg,” Nichols added. In the face of this aggressiveness, most gave up quickly, without much fighting.
Several thousand meters away, Lieutenant Colonel Hancock hopped aboard a helicopter at his command post for the short trip to the trenches, where he met with the Iraqi commander, Major Samir Ali Khadr, whose presence confirmed that the ridgeline was indeed defended by an infantry battalion. Hancock had never received a surrender before so he was not sure how to act. He did suspect, though, that there were more Iraqi soldiers farther to the north, at a potential logistics site. He turned to his interpreter and pointed at Major Khadr. “You tell this sonofabitch that he better surrender everyone or I’ll bring the aircraft back and bomb again!” The major willingly complied. Over 350 soldiers surrendered and the Americans captured large caches of weapons, including small arms, mortars, and antiaircraft guns. FOB Cobra belonged to the Americans. The Iraqis admitted that the air assault completely surprised them, and they never recovered from the shock effect. The easy U.S. victory stemmed from the speed and boldness of the deep penetration assault, the aggressiveness of the riflemen, and the prodigious power of the close air support.
The capture of FOB Cobra allowed the American commanders to air-assault several more light infantry battalions, in the face of some nasty weather, to the Euphrates and Highway 8, severing a key line of withdrawal for the reeling Iraqi Army. The Eleven Bravos struggled through deep mud. Most of them were carrying about one hundred pounds of equipment, a crushing load for even the strongest of young infantrymen. “Such loads reduced their endurance, their ability to react quickly, and their ability to move great distances,” one of their junior officers wrote. The heavy loads stemmed from the American tendency to reject austerity and rely upon heavy firepower and diverse logistical support. They also resulted from the American ability to put boots on the ground over long distances. After all, any grunt operating behind enemy lines needed to sustain himself until help arrived. At the Euphrates, commanders combated the problem by ordering their men to leave behind their rucks and instead carry only weapons, ammo, and food. The grunts were only too happy to comply.
The soldiers made it to Highway 8 and set up roadblocks. Their main worry was the possibility of an enemy armored attack, but fortunately that never materialized. They also had to be careful not to shoot civilian cars. Mostly they engaged retreating trucks and other light vehicles that were likely to carry Iraqi soldiers. Captain Mark Esper believed that his Eleven Bravo unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 187th Infantry Regiment (Rakkasans), stymied the enemy retreat because of four weapons. “The M60 MG [machine gun] was very effective at disabling or stopping moving vehicles; the LAW [Light Antitank Weapon] and AT-4 [antitank weapon] effectively destroyed moving targets; the 60mm mortar proved surprisingly effective at disabling the vehicles, and as we expected, killing soldiers; and the M203 grenade launcher was also an effective indirect fire, area weapon.”
In one instance, a rifle squad placed two abandoned Hondas across the road as a roadblock obstacle. One night, an Iraqi military truck tried to ram its way through the Hondas. “I heard these guys [in the truck] lock and load,” Sergeant Steven Edwards, the squad leader, said, “and that’s when I gave my guys the [order to] open fire. We didn’t get any fire back from them. We just shot ’em up.” Edwards alone fired two full magazines into the truck. All thirteen enemy soldiers inside were dead. At another roadblock somewhere else along Highway 8, an officer came upon a small convoy that the grunts had thoroughly destroyed. “The scene . . . was right out of a movie.” The grunts had shot up a couple of command cars, searched the dead bodies, and laid them out. “Farther ahead was a burning Mercedes truck towing an antiaircraft gun with the crew’s bodies hanging out the doors. All of this destruction had been wrought by very disciplined, well-trained light infantry.” In many cases, the Iraqi vehicles were full of loot from occupied Kuwait. Very often, the Americans captured retreating enemy soldiers, including many NCOs, who told their captors that their officers had abandoned them. “Leadership as befits a bunch of thieves,” one grunt officer wryly commented. The light infantrymen were the ultimate nemesis of these “thieves.”
The 101st’s impressive leapfrog to the Euphrates elicited deep fear in Saddam that the Americans might push for Baghdad but, of course, that did not happen. Instead, the Highway 8 roadblocks had the effect of redirecting many Iraqi soldiers east, right into the main aerial attacks along the highway and powerful ground attacks by the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) and the 1st Armored Division. Highway 8 was part of the same road known as the Highway of Death. The American-led coalition succeeded in kicking Saddam out of Kuwait, but the dictator remained in power because of the coalition’s reluctance to take Baghdad and overthrow him.8
Too many Americans learned the wrong lessons from their desert victory. Far too many believed that Desert Storm represented a new transformation in warfare. The natural American affinity for air power, technology, and intellectually appealing, clinical standoff war strengthened that belief all the more. Desert Storm belonged to tankers, close air support fighter pilots, attack helicopter pilots, and technicians. With inevitable advances in weapons and information technology, the future practically guaranteed more of the same. From now on, the transformation advocates argued, wars would be impersonal and clean, a simple matter of superior technology and logistical planning. The foot soldier supposedly had no major place amid such evolutionary sophistication.
But the techno-vangelists overlooked the fact that in the Gulf War, the Americans were lucky enough to grapple with an incompetent, ill-motivated, foolish enemy who indulged nearly every American strength. Saddam allowed the Americans plenty of time and space to ship their heavy armor and weapons overseas and put them in place. He ceded control of the air to them. He then made the colossal error of fighting them in the sort of set-piece, desert war of maneuver that conformed exactly to the American military’s strong points of mobility, technology, professionalism, combined arms planning, and logistics. All in all, he was breathtakingly stupid.
Like all desert wars, though, the Gulf War was indecisive. People do not live in deserts. In the modern era, they live in cities. The vital center of gravity for most governments and political groups, then, tends to be in the cities, and that was quite true of Saddam’s regime, which lived on to cause the Americans plenty more trouble. But too many late-twentieth-century Americans ignored, or overlooked, the urgent trend of global urbanization. With more and more people living in cities, the likelihood increased that future wars would be fought in populated areas, where American firepower and technology could be liabilities.
After the Gulf War, American leaders began to scale back the armed forces. The infantry, especially the Eleven Bravo units, suffered some of the deepest cuts from the economizing scalpel. Three entire light infantry divisions were phased out. Almost all remaining grunt units, mech and light, were chronically understrength. As always, Americans particularly underestimated the importance of their light fighters. “Light-infantrymen are a unique breed,” the historian Adrian Lewis sagely wrote, “a unique national resource that has been continuously undervalued in American culture, in part, by the erroneous belief that anybody can serve as a combat soldier. The American fetish for advanced technologies further devalued the role of soldiers. This was no small loss, but it went almost unnoticed, until they were needed again.” And, as Colonel Bolger sensed in 1998, they would be needed again—badly—in the urban battlefields that only infantry can truly master. “What will happen,” he asked presciently, “in a future war when we have only the wonderful warplanes, we bomb and bomb, and the enemy does not crack?” Unfortunately, very few American policymakers in the late 1990s and early 2000s bothered to ask themselves this very same question. The sad result was old lessons learned by a new generation.9