ANNALS OF WAR - OVERWHELMING FORCE

What Happened In The Final Days Of The Gulf War?

JUST A LINE ON THE GROUND

On August 27th, Dinkel and Warrant Officer Rowell conducted a two-hour
interview with McCaffrey in his office at Fort Stewart. When they arrived,
McCaffrey was "all smiles," Dinkel said, and greeted them cordially. There
was one jarring note, however. Before the questioning could begin, Dinkel
recalled, the General "took off his jacket and showed us his screwed-up
arm." Dinkel felt that McCaffrey was implying that he deserved special
consideration because of his war record -- an implication that Dinkel told
me he resented.

No such resentment showed up in the transcript of the interview, which
lasted two hours. Dinkel and Rowell asked a total of eight questions.
McCaffrey was asked if he was "aware" of any incident in which Iraqi
prisoners were killed; whether he was "aware" of any actions by his
division to provoke the Iraqis into violating the ceasefire on March 2nd;
and what his understanding of the rules of engagement was. The final
question was one asked of all witnesses: "Is there anything you'd like to
add to this statement?"

McCaffrey was asked nothing about Lamar's assertion that the ceasefire
lines had been ignored, inadvertently or not, at the end of the war. Nor
did the investigators pursue Lamar's claim that the senior staff didn't
know or communicate the precise boundaries of the division's area of
operations.

McCaffrey was careful, nonetheless, to explain to the C.I.D. investigators
that he was having "difficulty in remembering precisely times and days" --
the same issue that marred the commanders' conference at King Khalid
Military City. At the ceasefire, he said, his instructions were not to go
more than three or so miles east of the causeway, a map designation known
as Phase Line Crush. That map designation, he added dismissively, "did not
have any meaning in and of itself. It was just a line on the ground." His
goal after the war was to "close the division up on our forward positions,"
consolidating his forces toward the front and standing by for further
instructions.

He had done so by the early morning of March 2nd, he said, when the
retreating Iraqis began firing at the 24th Division. The initial contact
came from Iraqi infantrymen who fired R.P.G.s. "To be honest," McCaffrey
said, "it struck me wrong.... My guess was and still is" that some of the
Iraqi units "were hearing their own forces move through the area and may
have interpreted that as a counterattack . . . because it sounds sort of
screwy to engage an armor unit with R.P.G." -- grenades that posed little
threat to tanks or heavy tracked vehicles. Nonetheless, McCaffrey said, "I
started forces going about this time." He ordered one of the division's
Apache and Air Cavalry helicopter units to get in the air. Two flatbeds
with Iraqi tanks aboard were reported to be moving down the road. "There
was a lot of discussion on 'What the heck does that mean?"' McCaffrey
recalled. "Because, obviously, it is not an attack." By this point, around
eight o'clock in the morning, McCaffrey told the investigators, the Air
Cavalry was reporting that hundreds of Iraqi vehicles were moving. One of
his commanders -- presumably Le Moyne -- "comes up on the net," McCaffrey
said, "and he said now we are being engaged with tanks and Saggers." The
brigade commander further reported that his units were taking direct fire
from Iraqi T-72 tanks, with Sagger missiles, and were returning fire. "I
said, 'O.K. Got it.' "

At this point, McCaffrey's description of the battlefield situation began
to differ from his earlier accounts. McCaffrey told the C.I.D. that he
understood from his brigade commander that "there were a couple or three
battalions, near Rumaila oil field -- armor, tanks." He was also told, he
said, that hundreds of Iraqi vehicles had already crossed the Lake Hammar
causeway. That fact "sort of surprised me because I thought the causeway
was down, so I was not quite sure if they were already over there or" --
and here McCaffrey added a new element -- "had come out of Basra": not an
army fleeing its defeat in Kuwait but one looking for a new battle. "It
sounds like another brigade... headed up toward us." McCaffrey was now
claiming he thought that the 24th Division was under threat from a large
Iraqi military force from Basra, a regional center for the Republican
Guard. "So we got three chunks," he concluded. "A piece north of the river;
we have got a chunk in the Rumaila oil fields firing at us, and we've got
some more back off to the east in a pretty dicey situation."

In the account provided to the C.I.D., McCaffrey was facing a three-pronged
threat -- from the Euphrates, from the infantrymen and tanks already
engaging with his troops, and from Basra.

He went on, "What was I thinking at the time? Number one was: 'I am not
going to lose fifteen Bradleys and tanks in one sheet of fire and have one
hundred eight six killed and wounded. I flat ass wasn't going to do that. I
would almost say co-equally I was extremely aware of the political
implications of a ceasefire" -- that many were angered because the American
military was not taking the war to Baghdad. "You can bet your ass I knew
that was part and parcel of it. And indeed I was joking. . . that if we
make a mistake right now I will be selling ladies' underwear in Sears and
Roebuck before the week is out.... I would not say that I was reluctant to
accept the responsibility, but, baby, you'd bet your bottom dollar I knew
that was going on. So I was pretty keen on knowing what the situation was
and making the right calls." At some point, he added, "I finally ended up
giving instructions -- 'O.K., whack the guys in front of you.'

"I was very proud of what we had done," he said. "I was just thrilled with
that. Was I ready to fight? You are darned tootin'. And, after this battle
was over on 2 March, I again gave instructions and we prepared for an
attack to secure the outskirts of Basra. So, had I been instructed to do so
we would have executed an attack."

There were some war-crime allegations after the war, McCaffrey
acknowledged, and they were fully investigated, at his insistence. "The
bottom line was I said you may not drop this action until the soldiers
involved understand that the Army fully investigated this allegation, which
was done," he told the C.I.D. "So, my personal judgment is that no Iraqis
were maltreated or killed or engaged during any struggle. Indeed, the
opposite of the case, in my judgment."

Near the end of his testimony, McCaffrey summarized his views on the issue
of prisoner rights and possible war crimes. As a combat commander, he said,
he routinely spoke to his soldiers about honor. "To a civilian that might
sound funny," McCaffrey added, "but one of those points [in his speeches]
was talking about your honor as a soldier . . . When you get out there and
you have helpless people in your grasp . . . If you kill or maltreat
prisoners you will violate international law and create a terrible
political disaster for us. But that is not important compared to the fact
that you will violate your honor as a soldier."

Dinkel, who today is the principal of a Lutheran elementary school in
Tampa, Florida, made clear in a series of interviews that he has had no
second thoughts about the McCaffrey investigation. "The case was closed
once we confirmed that rounds were indeed fired," he said. "If I had the
assets that McCaffrey had, I'd have done the same thing."

Rowell isn't as sure. When he was interviewed, he was the most senior
investigator in the C.I.D. -- thirty-six years on the job -- and its
highest-ranking warrant officer. He is now an instructor at the C.I.D.'s
training center at Fort Leonard Wood. "We never did think we got the whole
story on everything,'' Rowell told me. McCaffrey had emerged as a hero from
the war, and there was "some anticipation that he was to grow up and be
Chief of Staff. We knew that we have senior military officers looking at
their careers. There was a lot of sealed lips, and people with amnesia."
Everyone's story was that the Iraqis fired first, he said, and "We never
had information to the contrary.... Nothing to prove that they were lying
to us."

Rowell said he felt that he and his fellow-investigators had established
that, at best, only two rounds were fired by Iraqi forces at the 2-7 Scout
platoon on the morning of March 2nd. But, regardless of his and the others'
doubts about McCaffrey, he said, the Dinkel investigation "came up with
nothing that would have won a trial. If you're a two-star general, you can
do whatever you want to do, under the confusion of war."

STANDARDS AND ETHICS

The mere presence of the C.I.D. investigators, and their questions, posed a
Catch-22 for the men and women of the 24th Division. Those who wanted to
tell all about events that would tarnish the reputation of Barry McCaffrey
-- men like Sergeant Larimore and Edward Walker -- found that their
firsthand testimony wasn't enough. Without physical or documentary evidence
-- without some Iraqi bodies -- the C.I.D. would not consider pressing
charges. Others who would have talked, such as Captain Mike Bell and his
young colleagues in McCaffrey's assault command post, were not contacted.

Some common understandings did emerge. General Peter Barry, the C.I.D.'s
commanding officer, assured me that by the time the investigation shut down
some of the Army's senior leaders realized that there was "a certain
element of truth" to the allegations made by the anonymous letter writer.
"Whoever wrote the letter had detailed knowledge," Barry said. "But
establishing the criminality is difficult."

The issue of what to do about McCaffrey became an early litmus test for
General Gordon Sullivan, the Vice-Chief of Staff, who in mid-1991 was weeks
away from becoming Chief of Staff. Dinkel's voluminous report cleared
McCaffrey of any criminal conduct. It was left to Sullivan to decide
whether to refer many issues deal ing with military standards and ethics to
the Army Inspector General's office. The most important of these dealt with
the March 2nd assault and the proportionality of McCaffrey's response to
the putative Iraqi attack. Did McCaffrey violate the rules of engagement?

Sullivan chose not to press these questions. McCaffrey had been cleared by
the C.I.D. of any criminal wrongdoing, and that was that. He would explain
later to a colleague that McCaffrey was an "honest-to-God" hero who had
moved his division farther and faster than any other general in the war.
McCaffrey also had the strong support of General Schwarzkopf, whose
headquarters staff in Saudi Arabia was quick to publicly endorse the March
2nd attack. (Schwarzkopf reiterated his confidence in McCaffrey's attack
this spring, telling me that "the information that was relayed to me" made
it clear that the 24th Division had been fired upon by the Iraqis "and, for
that reason, the 24th ID [infantry division] attacked those troops.") Colin
Powell, the Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
also defended McCaffrey's offensive. "They fired on us," he told the
reporter Patrick Sloyan, of Newsday. "It was their mistake." Later in 1991,
according to a senior aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "Colin, like
others in Washington, heard the stories" about McCaffrey's problems with
the C.I.D. and asked Gordon Sullivan about it. "In the language of the
Pentagon," this person said, Powell "received reassurances" that McCaffrey
had been unblemished by the inquiry. Colin Powell told me that he had no
"specific recollection" of asking about McCaffrey, but added that he
invariably made inquiries about an officer he was considering for an
important post, such as McCaffrey was to receive.

Later in 1991, the Army got a new Inspector General -- Major General Ronald
H. Griffith, who, like most generals, knew through the Army grapevine that
McCaffrey had emerged from the war under intense investigation. "If it had
come up to us," Griffith told me, "the first thing I'd do is go to Sullivan
and say, 'Chief, we've a got a problem.' " But nothing; showed up. "I can't
understand how the system could break down like this," Griffith, who is now
retired, told me. "If it had come up to the I.G., I'd have known of it."

In his four years as Inspector General, Griffith said, he learned that "the
guys will go out and do the investigations and if they determine they can't
substantiate the allegations, the chief" -- referring to the senior agent
-- "will call me and say, 'Sir, we can't find anything but there's a whole
lot of stuff out there that you can't go to court with.' So you have to ask
if you want to know. A lot of officers didn't want to ask about Barry
McCaffrey, because you knew what the answer would be" -- something
negative. (One senior C.I.D. officer laughed on being told of that comment,
and said that the Army's generals "didn't need to ask the C.I.D. about
McCaffrey. They knew.")

McCaffrey continued to serve as commanding general of the 24th Division at
Fort Stewart. Some of his fellow-generals have offered me theories about
why the Army decided not to press its investigation further. "They'd just
won a war and didn't want to shit in their mess kit," a retired major
general told me.

A public controversy over McCaffrey's action might have raised questions
about the over-all conduct of the Gulf War, they point out, and, at the
least, raised public and congressional doubts about the advisability of
permitting the military to conduct a war without independent press
coverage. In the Gulf, the American military had tried, to an unprecedented
degree, to wage a war, judge its success, and tell the world's press what
to write about it.

By early 1992, McCaffrey, by then a lieutenant general, was serving as an
assistant to Colin Powell. (The general who replaced McCaffrey at Fort
Stewart quickly donated his predecessor's camels to a Savannah zoo.) His
promotion, and the assumption that he would soon be promoted again, caused
consternation inside the Army -- with most of the complaints aimed at
General Sullivan, the Vice-Chief of Staff. A year later, a group of Gulf
War generals banded together to successfully lobby Sullivan not to name
McCaffrey deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, one of the Army's plum
assignments. The internal bickering also kept McCaffrey from being named
commander of the Army forces in Europe -- a job he had eagerly lobbied for.

McCaffrey got his fourth star in 1994 and an unwanted assignment, according
to his aides, as commander-in-chief of the Southern Command, then based in
Panama City, which was responsible for all American military forces in
Central and South America. In 1996, he retired from the Army to join the
Clinton Administration as the director of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy -- the White House drug czar. The appointment was widely
seen as one that would boost Bill Clinton's standing with the military in
an election year and put a hero of the Gulf War to work on America's other
war. McCaffrey's new war is in Colombia, where he is the Administration's
most enthusiastic supporter of a greater American military presence to
counter the increasing strength of anti-government guerrilla groups.

There was no hint when McCaffrey joined the Cabinet of any lingering
questions about his actions in the Gulf War. Leon Panetta, then the White
House chief of staff, told me that he and his colleagues put McCaffrey
through "the normal vetting process" and learned, to their surprise, that
Panama was going to be his last Army assignment. "There were problems in
his career -- problems of speaking his own mind," Panetta recalled being
told. "He'd rubbed some of his commanders the wrong way. He'd pissed off
people." But that was all. There was no suggestion from anyone in the
Pentagon that the issues surrounding McCaffrey were any more serious than that.

James Manchester left the Army after the war and attended Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York, on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship.
He was planning, after graduation, to join the Marine Corps. Like many
veterans, he was still troubled by his war experiences -- even as he
prospered academically. "Everything was going good," he said. "But
everything was not good." One afternoon, while browsing in the school
library, he ran across Major Jason Kamiya's history of the 24th Division,
which was published after the war -- to McCaffrey's satisfaction. The
history stated that a Scout platoon from Ware's battalion -- Manchester's
unit-had been "engaged by Sagger missiles" from the Iraqis and also
received "direct fire from T-72 tanks" before the American counterattack.
Manchester went into a funk. He stopped sleeping. He eventually resigned
from the R.O.T.C. program and wrote a letter to his R.O.T.C. battalion
commander, telling what he knew about the shooting of prisoners and the
origin of the McCaffrey offensive. The letter was forwarded, with his
permission, to the Judge Advocate General, in Washington. A few weeks
later, he was interviewed by two Army officers, who arrived with a tape
recorder and a warning that he would be wise to black out his name on the
complaint to avoid possible recriminations. "I told them everything,"
Manchester said. The interview lasted several hours. A few months later, on
April 7, 1994, the Army's Office of the Inspector General wrote him what it
called "a final response" to his allegations.

Manchester had accurately described, the letter said, an incident in which
both Iraqi prisoners and his Scout platoon had been fired upon by
fellow-soldiers in a battalion task force. "Another soldier" -- presumably
a reference to Edward Walker -- had reported the incident at the time, and
a "thorough and timely" AR15-6 investigation had been conducted. The letter
went on to tell Manchester that the investigation had discovered "no
evidence of Iraqi EPW injury or death," because his calls for a ceasefire
had "served to notify the task force" that the prisoners as well as his
Scout platoon "were in the zone of fire." The 1st Brigade's investigation
was reviewed by legal officers in the 24th Division and by the C.I.D., the
letter added, and "deemed technically and legally sufficient." Therefore,
it concluded, there was no need for further inquiry, "because no proof was
available a war crime had occurred." Manchester had not been summoned by
that investigation, the letter went on, because he had already left the
Scout platoon. (Manchester did leave the Scouts shortly after the war, but
he remained on active duty at Fort Stewart until July 31, 1991 .) There was
a striking omission in the Army's review: the American combat unit that
fired, and managed not to strike one Iraqi, was not identified. The letter
spoke only of "unknown elements" of the 24th Division.

As for March 2nd, the Army informed Manchester that its earlier C.I.D.
inquiry had produced an eighteen-volume report that contained the sworn
testimony of a hundred and eighty witnesses. "The totality of evidence
supported the finding that the Iraqi forces had initiated hostile actions,"
the letter said. "It was concluded that the responding use of force was
appropriate to safeguard U.S. forces and within the allowable limits of the
ceasefire rules of engagement." Manchester was also told that the account
of the battle in the 24th Division history that triggered his letter "was
not accurate." Major Kamiya had compiled the history "from his memory and
his personal notes" and was not privy to the C.I.D. investigation.

Manchester graduated first in his class and is now a senior manager at a
successful high-tech communications company. He remains convinced today
that the Iraqis did not initiate the battle on March 2nd. "I was as
patriotic as they come," he told me. "I was a gung-ho ass-kicking
Commie-hating patriotic son of a bitch. I hated the Arabs. We all did. I
dehumanized them. Did the Iraqis commit war crimes in Kuwait? Did they
retreat back into Iraq to commit war crimes against their own people? The
answer is yes to both questions. But does that make March 2nd justified?
There have to be limits, even in war. Otherwise, the whole system breaks
down."

[Posted in the following parts:
One: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a151.html
Two: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a152.html
Three: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a153.html
Four: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a154.html
Five: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a155.html
Six: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a156.html ]