ANNALS OF WAR - OVERWHELMING FORCE

What Happened In The Final Days Of The Gulf War?

BATTLE ORDER

Colonel Burt Tackaberry, the division's chief aviation officer, had been
the first pilot in the air early on the morning of March 2nd, and had flown
at very low altitudes over the column of retreating Iraqis. His helicopter
had been an easy target, but no one had taken a shot. He had noticed Iraqi
tanks with their tubes in travel-lock position and pointed away from a
forward target. "My first order was to go up and make sure the causeway was
cut," he recalled. It was still open, and he could see that about a hundred
vehicles had already crossed over it. He was then ordered to make sure that
no further vehicles got away. ("I never say no to McCaffrey," he told me.)
In an effort to get the vehicles to stop, he fired a few rounds over them.
When they didn't stop, he fired a TOW missile at the first vehicle, which
turned out to be an ammunition truck. ("It exploded for hours.") Once that
vehicle was hit, none of the others could get around it. There was a panic.
"All the people took off to the marshes and squatted down, "Tackaberry
said. "They were scared to death." There was still no opposition. Later
that morning, McCaffrey, running the division from Ware's Bradley, got on
the radio and ordered the division's missile-firing Apache helicopters --
Tackaberry's helicopters -- to begin a full assault.

The division log placed the time of McCaffrey's first known battle order at
five minutes after nine o'clock. According to Log Item 74, McCaffrey
directed that the causeway "be targeted" -- thus blocking the basic escape
route for the retreating forces. The division's Apache helicopters were
to"engage from south with intent of terminating engagement." Within
moments, the assault was all-out. One company reported that it had engaged
a force of between a hundred and two hundred Iraqi "dismounts." By ten
o'clock, division headquarters had begun receiving reports of extensive
damage to the Iraqi forces. One group of Apache helicopters reported in
mid-morning, "Enemy not firing back, they are jumping in ditches to hide."
Forty minutes later, according to another log item, McCaffrey ordered
artillery to be "used in conjunction with personnel sweep to 'pound these
guys' and end the engagement."

The Iraqis, unable to continue driving to the north, because of the
bombed-out causeway, were easy targets. In "Lucky War," an appraisal of the
Gulf War published in 1994, the Army historian Colonel Richard M. Swain
(Ret.) noted, "One can continue to be troubled, however, with the fact that
most of the Iraqis killed seem to have been headed north or simply milling
around -- and not into the defender's lines, notwithstanding that some of
their number quite clearly seem to have initiated the combat by opening
fire when U.S. forces approached their position. "Two other facts remain
somewhat disturbing," Swain added: that "only a small number of Iraqis seem
to have acted with hostility that morning," and that the Iraqis, when fired
upon, had been many miles beyond the 24th Division's front lines, as they
existed on the morning of the ceasefire.

Some soldiers who found themselves ordered into the battle remained
dubious. Stuart Hirstein, the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion
sergeant whose unit had earlier rushed to help a supposedly beleaguered
combat company in Ware's battalion only to find the Iraqis sunning
themselves on top of their tanks, now watched as the division's
missile-firing Apache helicopters systematically began to annihilate the
tanks. "It pissed me off," Hirstein told me. "They were not firing."

Charles Sheehan-Miles recalled that his 1st Brigade tank platoon also had
been told that morning to rush to the rescue of an American unit near
Highway 8 that was under attack by a division of Iraqi soldiers. "We went
up the road blowing the shit out of everything. It was like going down an
American highway -- people were all mixed up in cars and trucks. People got
out of their cars and ran away. We shot them." Sheehan-Miles said that at
least one of his victims was in civilian clothing. "My orders were to shoot
if they were armed or running. The Iraqis were getting massacred."

James Manchester was listening to the radio and heard Colonel Ware receive
permission to engage. "All of a sudden, all hell breaks loose," he said.
"It's surreal." At one point, the battalion's tanks were so eager to fire
on the retreating Iraqi forces that they moved off an embankment and got
mired helplessly in the sand. If the Iraqis had any intention of continuing
the war, Manchester explained, the immobilized American tanks made perfect
targets. The tanks were "helpless," but kept volleying cannon fire at the
Iraqis as they were being pulled out of the sand by tow trucks. What
happened along the causeway, he said, was "fucking murder."

What we did was just seal the oilfield off so he" -- the enemy -- "couldn't
get out," Le Moyne told the Army oral historian. "Yup, it's about fifteen
kilometres long and ten to fifteen kilometres wide.... So by using
artillery we were able to seal the top and the bottom of it, and I'll tell
you, that once we did that the panic began to set in.... The Apaches
strewed panic and when the columns started rolling up there was just
absolute pandemonium. Everybody began to break and run. Run in blind fear
and terror.... A Hellfire missile hitting aT-72 tank -- it is an absolute
catastrophic destruction. The turret absolutely separates and blows off a
hundred feet in the air, a hundred yards away."

The 24th Division continued pounding the Iraqi column throughout the
morning, until every vehicle moving toward the causeway -- tank, truck, or
automobile -- was destroyed. McCaffrey, in a written response to a
question, reported that his forces had removed a hundred and eighty-seven
tanks and armored vehicles from the Iraqi arsenal, along with four hundred
or more trucks. The Battle of Rumaila was closely reviewed at the war's end
by an analyst for the C.I.A., who confirmed that the Iraqi losses were
great. The toll included at least a hundred tanks from the Hammurabi
division. "It's like eating an artichoke," one colonel had said of combat
to Captain Bell. "Once you start, you can't stop."

One of the destroyed vehicles was a bus, which had been hit by a rocket.
The precise number of its occupants who were injured or killed is not
known, but they included civilians and children. One of the first Americans
at the scene was Lieutenant Charles W. Gameros, Jr., a Scout platoon
leader, who called in a Medevac team for the victims. At the time, he was
"frustrated" by what he saw as needless deaths, Gameros recalled in an
interview. "Now I look at it sadly," he said. Unresisting Iraqis had been
slain all morning, but the deaths of the children troubled many soldiers.

Later that afternoon, a platoon sergeant informed Charles Sheehan-Miles
that he and a few colleagues might be handed a grisly mission. "He said,
'We've blown away a busload of kids,' and warned us that we were going to
get called for a burial mission," Sheehan-Miles recalled. Dirty details
were a way of Army life, but this one would be special. "The sergeant gave
us a heads-up so we could prepare ourselves." The call never came.

A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT OURSELVES

McCaffrey was triumphant at battle's end. "He was smiling like a proud
father,"John Brasfield told me. The young soldier got a good look at the
commanding general, because the 2-7 Scouts had something McCaffrey wanted:
Soviet and Iraqi flags. The flags were not battle trophies but had been
pulled down by the Scouts very early that morning while they were walking
through a deserted Soviet construction plant along Highway 8. "We got
orders to drive up after the battle and present him with the flags,"
Brasfield recalled. "McCaffrey and Ware were surveying the battlefield from
the back of the Bradley." James Manchester thought the scene almost
comical: "He wanted that flag. It was very important that he get the flag."
The soldiers were later told that McCaffrey had made a gift of one of the
flags to General Schwarzkopf.

Le Moyne was jubilant as well. At the end of the battle, David Pierson
writes in "Tuskers," Le Moyne showed up at battalion headquarters. "Hot
damn," he exclaimed, according to Pierson. "I've killed more tanks today as
an infantryman than my daddy did as a tanker in all of World War II." He
told the Army historian, "This whole operation has been a practical
demonstration of what happens when you do things right. For the right kind
of reasons. This war has had no Lieutenant Calleys in it.... Has no Jane
Fondas. It's just a very professional army."

That afternoon, Le Moyne took Linda Suttlehan on a helicopter tour. "I flew
around expecting to see a battlefield," Suttlehan told me. Instead, she
saw"millions of footprints in the sand" amid hundreds of smoking vehicles.
"I thought, Wow. This is not the kind of battle I thought I'd see."

A couple of evenings later, Pierson was driving toward the causeway. "It
must have been a nightmare along this road as the Apaches dispensed death
from five kilometers away one vehicle at a time," he writes. "I stopped as
a familiar smell wafted through the air.... It was the smell of a cookout
on a warm summer day, the smell of a seared steak."

James Manchester also wandered among the dead after the battle, and he
began describing the scene during an interview, telling me about the vast
number of "burning vehicles and burning bodies." He stopped talking, and
began to weep.

Sometime after the battle, an interpreter for the 124th Military
Intelligence Battalion interrogated a captured Iraqi tank commander who,
according to an officer in the 124th, plaintively asked again and again,
"Why are you killing us? All we were doing was going home. Why are you
killing us?"

After the engagement, reporters were flown by helicopter to McCaffrey's
assault command headquarters for a briefing and interviews. McCaffrey
praised the "initiative, intellect, and determinaton" of his troops, and
added that "Saddam Hussein still doesn't know what hit him." He also said,
"We dismantled the Iraqi Army, reduced it to a third of what it had been."
McCaffrey gave the press corps a statistical rundown of miles travelled,
weapons confiscated, prisoners captured, and tanks and trucks demolished.
An officer in his command post recalled that"one of the constant themes"
was the General's belief that "we hadn't destroyed enough."

Analysts in Washington and at General Schwarzkopf's headquarters were
skeptical of McCaffrey's claim that the Iraqis fired first. A senior Iraq
analyst for the C.I.A. told me that he and his colleagues had concluded
almost immediately that there was "no way" the retreating Iraqi forces
opened fire on the 24th Division. People at the C.I.A. understood that the
Hammurabi tanks had a much more important mission than continuing an
already lost war: more than half the Republican Guard units made their way
back to Baghdad and helped to keep Saddam Hussein in power.

Military analysts at the coalition headquarters asked to view the battle
films that were automatically recorded by cameras on board each Apache
helicopter. The footage clearly showed, one officer told me, that the Iraqi
tanks were in full retreat when the attack began, and in no way posed a
threat to the American forces. "These guys were in an offroad defensive
position -- deployed in a perimeter," the analyst added. Once the American
attack reached full force, some Iraqi vehicles did attempt to return fire.
"We saw T-72s in battle lines, firing away blindly in the air. They didn't
know what was killing them, but they were gamely shooting -- knowing they
would die." (An American could be overheard on the footage shouting, as a
missile tore into an Iraqi vehicle, "Say hello to Allah!")

It was clear at the Pentagon, too, that something had gone awry. One
colonel assigned at the time to monitor war reports at the National
Military Command Center -- he is now a major general, and still on active
duty -- told me that the reports from the 24th Division were extremely
''unsettling,'' because "it made no sense for a defeated army to invite
their own death. It didn't track with anything we knew about the theatre.
It came across as shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone was incredulous."

The disquiet reached into XVIII Corps headquarters, where doubts about
McCaffrey's attack were widespread. On March 3rd, General Luck, McCaffrey's
immediate boss, flew to the 24th Division headquarters to ask McCaffrey
what had gone on. Luck, who retired from the Army with four stars, said of
McCaffrey, "I have a deep and abiding respect for anyone who serves his
country." But, he added, speaking carefully, "I felt when I was in command
I had a parental responsibility to my soldiers. You don't bring any
limelight on yourself. Better to give it to your soldiers."

"I went straight up there," Luck went on. "I asked all the people I
suspected, 'What went on? Why did it happen at this time?' I went up in a
positive way and looked them in the eye. Everybody said, 'This is a fair
deal."'The Arms, he added, "has built everything on trust and
responsibility. I've got to respect what they say. When you give them every
opportunity to say what happened and nothing is said, what do you do?"
Luck's dilemma was acute: an official inquiry was unlikely to produce any
evidence to contradict McCaffrey's account, and would have undermined the
Army's victory in the war.

Colonel Frank Akers, who retired as a brigadier general, accompanied Luck
on his visit to the division's headquarters. "He was worried," Akers said
of Luck. The anxiety was shared by many on the staff of XVIII Corps. "Deep
down, there were several of us who said, 'Something doesn't feel right
about this,' " Akers told me. " 'It doesn't quite add up.' " The response
to Luck's questioning at 24th Division headquarters didn't help.
McCaffrey's people were "kind of looking at their feet and shuffling
around," Akers said. One of Luck's questions caused consternation, Patrick
Lamar told Army investigators in 1991. Luck"turned around and said, 'How's
the ceasefire line going?' We said, 'What ceasefire line?' "

Lamar's staff showed the Corps commander the division's ceasefire
deployment lines, as of March 2nd. Luck said,"This isn't the right one,
fellows." Lamar, the loyal soldier, took the blame. "My guys screwed up,"
he said. He told Luck that the division had deployed forward because
someone made an innocent mistake and got the coordinates wrong. McCaffrey
said nothing.

Lamar laughed at himself as he told me the story eight years later.
"McCaffrey played stupid in front of Luck," he said, adding that
McCaffrey's getting the coordinates wrong had been anything but a mistake.

A few days after the battle, McCaffrey and the other Army generals who had
helped win the war took part in an extended review and planning meeting at
King Khalid Military City. The talks were headed by Lieutenant General
Yeosock, who, as the Third Army commander, had been responsible for much of
the Army's war planning. He was assisted by his operations officer,
Brigadier General Steven L. Arnold. One of the first steps in the review,
according to some of the officers who participated, was to discuss and
compare the reporting of each division -- the logs, journals, and situation
reports -- with the available satellite data fixing the division's
location.The officers did not dispute McCaffrey's claim that the Iraqis had
fired first, but the overriding issue was the most basic one of all: why
had the 24th Division moved during the ceasefire into the path of the
retreating Iraqis? McCaffrey, in a May 8th letter to The New Yorker, stated
that all the appropriate headquarters always knew his position. "U.S. Army
elements in Desert Storm," the letter said, "were the first military force
in history that almost always knew exactly where we were." The 24th
Division "never falsely reported its position," McCaffrey wrote. "I never
did so and never instructed any of the soldiers under my command to do so."

A number of generals at the King Khalid commanders' conference remember it
differently. Most of the position reports to higher headquarters during the
war were accurate to within a few dozen metres, General Ronald H. Griffith
(Ret.), who commanded the 1st Armored Division in the war, recalled. "In
Barry's logs," Griffith added,"the distances were off dramatically --
dozens of miles." McCaffrey spent much of the meeting insisting that he
needed to adjust his record, and was finally permitted to do so. "We all
laughed about it," the general said. "If we'd known that he was rewriting
history, we'd have protested more."

The general's point was that the 24th Division was not always where
McCaffrey said it was. "Barry would tell you where he was going or where he
had been," General Yeosock told me later, "but his division isn't there.
Some commanders will tell you where they're going; others will not." For
General Arnold and the Third Army planners who were plotting the Iraqi
retreat, McCaffrey's antics masked a consequential discrepancy. They did
not know that the 24th Division would be blocking the causeway over Lake
Hammar. "We gave the Iraqis an area" of safe passage, which included the
causeway, Arnold told me. "We didn't know there were two American brigades
there. We would not have sent the Iraqis there." The planners would have
told the Iraqis to get home another way. None of the assembled generals, of
course, had any reason to suspect that an official investigation would take
place into the March 2nd counterattack, and the potential significance of
McCaffrey's inexact reporting escaped everyone at King Khalid Military
City. Arnold recalled, "We took it as an honest mistake and attempted to
sort it out."

According to the Army historian Richard Swain, who was the only outsider
allowed to attend the review, McCaffrey arrived without any detailed
records, and came close to turning the proceedings into a shambles. "He got
dates all wrapped around the axle," Swain said, and unsuccessfully tried to
reconcile his version of events with the versions of others. The goal of
Arnold's conference, Swain explained, was to create a broad narrative
sequence of what had happened, on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis, during
the war. McCaffrey "kept on insisting that things happened in different
time frames. He was confused, and, being McCaffrey, assumed everyone else
was wrong and he was right." At one point, Swain said, McCaffrey was
arguing about which day was which. By then, he said, the conference had
degenerated into "an attempt to get McCaffrey's times right."

McCaffrey remained triumphant. According to "Tuskers," he told his troops
before they flew back to Fort Stewart, "You knocked them to their goddam
knees in the opening day of the war and they never got up." Later in the
speech, he said."You knocked them to their knees because they were like an
eighth-grade team playing with pro football players." He had never been
"more proud of American soldiers in my entire life as watching your attack
on 2 March.... It's fascinating to watch what's happening in our country.
God, it's the damnedest thing I ever saw in my Life. It's probably the
single most unifying event that has happened in America since World War
II.... The upshot will be that, just like Vietnam had the tragic effect on
our country for years, this one has brought back a new way of looking at
ourselves. "

After the offensive, McCaffrey asked his senior aviation officer, Colonel
Tackaberry, to provide him with a list of pilots who deserved the
Distinguished Flying Cross. This time, Tackaberry did say no to his
commander. Or, at any rate, he didn't say yes. There was a second request,
and then a third. Tackaberry refused. "I put it in writing, and said, 'I do
not believe that any of these people deserved it."' His reasoning was
simple: none of his pilots had flown in a sustained battle, with the enemy
firing at them. "Our pilots were killing from three or four miles away," he
said, and were not in a "battle," as the authorized Army history later
reported. He never gave McCaffrey any names.

There was a final Gulf War assignment for Major Brennan as well. McCaffrey
ordered him to find two Saudi Arabian camels and transport them to Fort
Stewart, where they could serve as constant reminders of the division's
success in the desert. "I'm the camel guy," Brennan told me. "Got the
mission personally from him. He said, 'I want a mascot.' " Two camels were
found, with the aid of the Saudi Arabian government, but the U.S.
Department of Agriculture refused to allow them into the country. McCaffrey
persisted. "We ended up buying some from a farmer somewhere in Indiana,"
Brennan said.

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