ANNALS OF WAR - OVERWHELMING FORCE

What Happened In The Final Days Of The Gulf War?

THE HOSPITAL BUS

Scouts had the war's most dangerous duty, and the job enthralled
twenty-one-year-old Specialist 4 James Manchester, who was the son,
grandson, and great-grandson of U.S. Army officers. Manchester was assigned
to the Scout platoon in the 2-7 Battalion of the 1st Brigade -- the
battalion commanded by the newly assigned Charles Ware. The platoon had six
Humvees and two Bradley fighting vehicles, which operated as many as ten
kilometres in advance of the main force, seeking out the enemy and serving
as a screen in case of attack. It was a glamorous, high-risk assignment. In
a major attack, the Scouts understood that they were to fight to the last
man, if necessary, to buy time for the main force.

Manchester had excellent qualifications for the job. After enlisting, in
1988, he had gone through Airborne training and the Ranger program, and was
offered an appointment to West Point, an honor accorded to only several
dozen enlisted men each year. As the drive across the desert continued,
Manchester told me, he and his fellow-Scouts began to fear friendly fire
more than they did the Iraqis. He recalled that, in the first days of the
war, his thirty-man platoon had been involved in only a few dustups,
including one that began when the driver of an Iraqi truck fired at the
American position. The truck was quickly destroyed, and Manchester and
Edward R. Walker, a fellow-Scout who had emergency-medical training,
attended to the wounded driver.

On February 27th, the fourth day of the war, Manchester's platoon was
ordered to block traffic on a road near Highway 8 while the battalion's
five companies of Bradleys and tanks were refuelled by tanker trucks. The
battalion was at its most vulnerable for those few hours, and nothing was
to get by the Scouts' roadblock. The operation was proceeding routinely,
with vehicles beginning to line up along the road. Then, Manchester said,
"this person comes walking toward us, wearing red running pants." It was an
English-speaking Egyptian, who was serving in the Iraqi Army. He wanted to
surrender, as did several other Iraqi soldiers who were with him. The
American soldiers were soon inundated with Iraqis, who streamed out of the
desert in a caravan of automobiles and trucks, most of them apparently
stolen in Kuwait. The Iraqis were "scared and crying," Manchester
remembered. "A Buick comes up, with the commander, and he surrenders his
battalion to us." The Scout platoon, confronted by a large number of hungry
and thirsty Iraqis, maintained its composure. One of the Iraqi trucks came
barrelling toward the group from the desert, and its driver seemed to have
no intention of stopping. He was not shot at, Manchester said. Instead, one
of the Scouts fired a volley of bullets into the air. The truck stopped,
and its unharmed driver joined the other prisoners. All the Iraqis were
searched for weapons and, once cleared, were seated in a large circle. "We
were doing it by the book," Manchester told me. "We told them that
everything was going to be fine."

In the confusion, Manchester, who was assigned to the lead vehicle, with
Lieutenant Kirk Allen, the platoon commander, got separated from his
teammates. Allen's driver, Specialist 4 John Brasfield, a wiry
twenty-four-year-old Kansan, joined Edward Walker and a few other soldiers
who were stopping the traffic along the road. One of the first vehicles to
pull up, Brasfield recalled, was an Iraqi hospital bus, marked with a
crescent -- the Iraqi equivalent of a Red Cross sign. Four Scouts recalled
that the bus was filled with wounded Iraqi veterans, many of them bandaged.
Another Scout recalled that the wounded were piled in the back of a truck
that trailed behind. Doctors and male nurses were among the prisoners.
"There was a doctor on the bus who could speak English and was real
friendly," Brasfield told me. Brasfield had served as a legal specialist in
the Reserves before the war and understood that the rules of international
law were very clear: "If it had a crescent on it, you couldn't engage it."
Brasfield approached the bus after its military passengers, many in
bandages, had been helped off and searched for weapons. The Iraqi doctor
proved to be extremely helpful as a translator, and directed the prisoners
who had been collected by Manchester and his colleagues to a central site
along the highway, alongside the now empty bus. "He had studied medicine in
Chicago," Brasfield recalled, "and had family there."

Vehicles kept arriving, and more Iraqi soldiers surrendered. Edward Walker,
who was thirty-one and, because of his medical training, known as Doc, was
ordered to keep a head count. "It kept building," Walker told me. "It
started with probably thirty, thirty-five. As each vehicle pulled up, it
kept adding up and adding up. We got to somewhere between three hundred and
sixty or three hundred and eighty." (A few moments later in the interview,
he recalled a precise number -- three hundred and eighty-two prisoners.)
Each prisoner was quickly searched and stripped of weapons. "We were
clearing weapons as soon as they were coming out of the vehicles," Walker
said. "They were coming in so fast that we had no time but to grab what
weapons they had and throw them into a pile."

The Americans were badly outnumbered by the Iraqis, but John Brasfield had
no doubts about the enemy's state of mind: "I guarantee you that everybody
in that war would have surrendered if they could. We knew that." He and his
colleagues gave the frightened prisoners water and food and reassured them.
"One of the first guys who came in was bawling -- so happy that he was
safe," Brasfield recalled. "I told him, 'You've surrendered. You're safe.
Nothing is going to happen to you.'" Another man, who had lost an eye,
asked if he was now a prisoner. He was told yes. "Thank Allah," the man said.

Sergeant James Testerman, one of Allen's section leaders, told me that to
insure the prisoners' safety "we gave each one of them a white piece of
paper, if they didn't have anything white." Testerman was referring to
American-designed surrender leaflets, printed in Arabic, that had been
dropped throughout the war zone. The leaflet promised that those who gave
up would live to see their families again.

Brasfield handled the radios for Lieutenant Allen, and Allen made it a
point to keep the battalion headquarters in the loop. Allen told the
battalion operations center that he had captured a large number of
prisoners; he also reported the precise position of the Iraqi hospital bus.
The Scout platoon had a G.P.S. platform on the lead Humvee, and could fix
the bus's location within a hundred yards. "We called in spot reports as
the group got bigger," Brasfield recalled.

According to Walker, someone in Ware's headquarters ordered the Scouts to
blow up the confiscated weapons. Walker was the platoon's demolition expert
as well as a medical specialist, and he took charge. He was an engineer by
training, and had taught an advanced course for the 5th Engineer Battalion
at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, his home unit. He had been assigned to the
Scouts only a few days before the war began. The Iraqi weapons were flung
into a truck, which was moved a safe distance away. Two captured Iraqi
trucks and the hospital bus were also moved, to create what amounted to a
three-sided box, or holding pen, and the prisoners were sitting in rows
inside. The open end of the box faced west, Walker recalled, in the
direction of the main battalion force. "We told them, 'Don't move. Don't go
nowhere.' "Walker then busied himself with his demolition assignment, with
the help of Specialist 4 David A. Collatt. It would take three charges of a
plastic explosive, known as C4, to destroy the truck holding the weapons.

"Suddenly, we're told on our battalion frequency that it's time to move
on," James Manchester recalled. Intelligence reported that an Iraqi missile
truck had been spotted a few miles up the road, and Lieutenant Allen was
ordered to engage it. The platoon took off. In Manchester's recollection,
the prisoners were simply assembled near the hospital bus; he doesn't
remember the holding pen. "We're boogying out," Manchester recalled. "And
we have these people gathered, and we've given them all our M.R.E.s" --
ready-to-eat meals. Then word came that the battalion'.s main battle force
had finished refuelling."The task force was fixing to move," another Scout,
Sergeant Steven L. Mulig, said, "and we had to get out of there, because
they shoot at everything."

Walker and Collatt set the delayed fuse for the plastic explosives on the
truck and, with seconds to spare, jumped into a Humvee and began speeding
away. The explosion was spectacular, Walker told me. "A lot of little
stuff" began hitting the ground -- truck parts, shrapnel, and hundreds of
unexploded Iraqi bullet rounds. At that moment, Walker said, a platoon or
two of Bradleys came into view from the west and began rolling toward the
clutch of prisoners. Mulig, who is still on active duty, at Fort Carson,
Colorado, recalled, "They were all in line -- moving abreast of each
other." The Bradleys' machine guns opened up. "I saw rounds impact in front
of the vehicle," Mulig said. "I could tell that they were hitting close to
the prisoners, because there were people running. There were some who could
have survived, but a lot of them wouldn't have, from where I saw the rounds
hit." The Bradleys were armed with chain-driven machine guns, capable of
firing up to a thousand rounds a minute. "I couldn't see the prisoners
themselves," Walker said. "You can't hear screaming. All you hear is the
boom-boom-boom. You could hear rounds hitting the bus and vehicles. I could
see the bullets were going where they were. We're yelling" -- on the radio
-- " 'They're firing at the prisoners! They're firing at the prisoners!'
And about that time I look up and that Bradley turns and they start firing
at us. We're in a marked Humvee. They hit the ground right behind our
vehicle." He meant the bullets. "I turn around and start screaming. So is
Collatt: 'They're firing at us! They're firing at us!' We started taking
off and they continued to fire at us." Walker, speaking to me at his home,
in rural Missouri, said that he is convinced that all the prisoners "got
hit." They were seated in rows, and the high-intensity machine guns on the
Bradleys were capable of deep penetration. "I'm telling you that when a
Bradley hits something it's going to take it out," he said. "And a human
body ain't going to slow a twenty-five-calibre round down. And they were in
rows. There was a row and another row in front of them and another row in
front of them. If they shot one guy in the front row, it's going to go
through everybody in that row. It's not going to slow down. The human body
will not slow down that round."

Collatt shared Walker's shock as the gun turrets of the Bradleys turned and
started firing at the prisoners. "The main thing you could see was the
mikemike" -- rounds -- "kicking up dirt right around the general area," he
said. Collatt, who left the Army in 1993, believes that some escaped the
firing by fleeing behind the vehicles: "You could see the prisoners start
running." He said that he remains baffled, because "we knew it was a
hospital bus and we'd talked about it" -- on the radio. "We told everybody
where it was. They didn't get the word or they were trigger-happy.

Walker said, "They knew there were prisoners there. They knew they were
unarmed. They knew the hospital bus was there, and they knew we were
blowing the truck up." The Bradleys were in no danger from the exploding
truck, which had been moved a safe distance away. Moreover, Walker said,
the attacking soldiers "were all buttoned down in their vehicles, so they
really had nothing to worry about."

James Manchester and his colleagues on Lieutenant ALlen's Humvee, a few
hundred yards farther east, initially thought they were being fired upon.
"Shit hits the fan," Manchester recalled. "Bullets are flying." He looked
back and realized that the unarmed Iraqis were being targeted. "I did not
see people's heads exploding," he told me. "But I definitely saw shooting.
I saw a crowd of people who were being fired upon." He recalled thinking,
This is fucked up, but the Humvee just kept on moving, scooting away from
the shooting at high speed.

John Brasfield had brought a small, inexpensive tape recorder to the Gulf
and, while handling the radios on Lieutenant ALlen's Humvee, routinely
taped transmissions. He would ship some of the tapes home, he thought, and
give his wife a glimpse of war. His tape recorder was running as Allen's
Humvee sped away from the prisoners, and from the bullets from the
Bradleys' machine guns. The recording, made available by Brasfield for this
account, documents the young soldiers' horror, anger, and, ultimately,
resignation as the shooting went on. It's not always clear who is speaking
on the tape, amid the background noise of engines, radio squeals, and the
crosscutting of situation reports, but James Manchester, after carefully
listening to the tape, was able to distinguish his own voice in some of the
exchanges, along with Kirk Allen's and Brasfield's. He also isolated the
voice and call signs of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ware, the battalion
commander.

"The lead company behind us is tearing up all those vehicles," someone
tells battalion headquarters as the recording begins. "I hope they
understand what a Humvee looks Like," he adds, referring to the
indiscriminate firing in the direction of the Scouts.

A moment later, a Scout reports on the platoon radio net, "Twenty-five
mikemike blowing approximately five hundred metres behind me with my ass
end showing." He's telling Lieutenant Allen that machine-gun fire is
trailing his Humvee. "You're not supposed to be in that area," Alien responds.

"There's no one shooting at them," another Scout says on the platoon net,
referring to the Bradleys. "Why'd they have to shoot?"

Allen reports on Ware's battalion net, "There's shooting, but there's no
one there" -- no combatants -- "to shoot at." Ware answers, "I understand,"
and then asks a series of operational questions about maps.

Later, Manchester asks Allen, "Sir, what element is firing behind us?"

Allen: "I have no fucking idea."

An unidentified Scout asks, "Why are we shooting at these people when they
are not shooting at us?"

Brasfield: "They want to surrender.... Fucking armored vehicles [the
Bradleys]. They don't have to blow them apart."

Sporadic firing continues. Someone asks Allen, "Why don't you tell them,
sir, that they are willing to surrender. Tell 'em that." Someone else says,
amid the noise,"It's murder."

Ware is on the radio when someone says, "We shot the guys we had gathered
up." Another voice interjects, "They didn't have no weapons." Ware calls
for all firing to stop and then asks another question about routine
battalion procedures.

"He heard it; he knew it," Sergeant Mulig told me later, speaking of Ware.
"But it didn't register."

James Testerman felt shame as he and his fellow-Scouts left the prisoners
and fled. "I had fed these guys and got them to trust me," he said. "The
first two who came in were scared to death -- afraid we were going to shoot
them. We set them down and fed them M.R.E.s." One of the Iraqis played the
tough-guy role, Testerman went on. "He wouldn't eat it -- afraid we were
going to poison him. So I took a bite of it, and gave it to him. The tough
guy broke down, crying. I can only imagine what he thought" when the
Bradleys "started shooting -- that we were sending him to the slaughter."

"You think about it," he said. "All those people."

THE WHITE FLAG

The war ended abruptly On February 28th, when the ceasefire was announced,
McCaffrey's men had not proved themselves in a major engagement, despite
months of training and anticipation. The complicated feelings that some of
them had about the "one-sided victory," over Iraqis with no will to fight,
are perceptively expressed by David Pierson in "Tuskers":

My only reservation was illogical; I somehow wished that they had proved a
more worthy opponent. They hadn't lost the battle, they had forfeited it.
We were achieving a great victory but without great sacrifice. Sacrifice,
the lifeblood of freedom, the price of all glory, the nature of soldiering.
It was an expectation and a curse.

McCaffrey's tankers had driven more than two hundred miles across the sand
dunes and wadis of southern Iraq with little sleep and almost no action.
Many of the men were frustrated, on edge, and eager to do what they had
been trained to do -- fire their weapons. The senior officers of the 2-4
Cavalry Squadron, a unit assigned directly to McCaffrey's headquarters,
found a way to relieve tension and to prevent civilian abuse. "The worst
thing that could happen was if some kid thought he'd ridden four or five
days and never shot his weapon," Lieutenant Colonel Joseph C. Barto III
(Ret.), then the executive officer, told me. "We called all the commanders
and said,'Make sure these guys get to shoot their weapons."' Targets of
opportunity were found -- abandoned buildings and the like -- and the tanks
lined up and fired away with machine guns, rockets, and shells.

In some cases, the end of the war led to an erosion of discipline. Many
soldiers in the 24th Division's tank companies and Scout platoons began to
collect battlefield souvenirs -- especially Soviet AK-47 assault rifles
carried by the Iraqi military. The scavenger hunting caused casualties,
especially after the ceasefire, as soldiers triggered land mines and other
munitions in their search for souvenirs. In one instance, an elaborate
Iraqi Defense Ministry compound was broken into by the 2-4 Cavalry, and,
under the eyes of its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Leney,
soldiers loaded glassware, trays, sterling silver, gun collections,
oversized rugs, and a huge photograph of Saddam Hussein onto tanks and
armored cars to take back to America. Leney, who is now retired, told me
that his action in authorizing the break-in may have been "bad judgment."
The items were to be used, he said, for a Cavalry Ball, to be held after
the war, at Fort Stewart. (Soldiers are allowed to confiscate certain kinds
of equipment, and in the Gulf War, as in most others, looting was
widespread; there was no investigation of the 2-4 Cavalry's actions.) The
looting took place in front of officers and men from the 124th Military
Intelligence Battalion, whose specialists -- interpreters, radar operators,
and counter-intelligence officers -- were assigned to every brigade in the
24th Division. "Our guys watched them fill up five tanks," 1st Sergeant
Jason Claar, of the 124th, told me. "We knew of whole companies loading
stuff in their tanks."

One of the 124th's primary missions was to supply forward radar teams to
the Scout platoons of each battalion. The three-man units, known as
ground-surveillance-radar, or G.S.R., teams, carried high-resolution
equipment in their Humvees that could isolate enemy formations and spot
vehicle movements thousands of yards away and in the dark The G.S.R. team
assigned to the 3-7 Battalion of the 1st Brigade was headed by a sergeant
named Steven Larimore, who had joined the Army, in 1987, at the advanced
age of thirty-one. Larimore was widely admired by his fellow-soldiers for
his calm under pressure, his competence, and his integrity, and for his
ability to throw passes in touch-football games.

On March 1st, the day after the ceasefire went into effect, Larimore's men
and the platoon to which they were attached, the Scouts from the 3-7
Battalion, were ordered to continue patrols in the Euphrates Valley
battlefield. In the late afternoon, Larimore recalled, there was a report
that some Army troops had discovered a cache of Iraqi weapons at a deserted
schoolhouse in a small village near Highway 8. The radar team joined the
3-7 Scouts in clearing the village and searching the schoolhouse. The
weapons were covered with waxed paper and protective grease; they had never
been fired. After taking souvenirs, Larimore told me, he and his men left
the destruction of the weapons to others and moved out, to the east, still
accompanied by six or so Humvees and Bradleys of the 3-7 Scouts. Larimore
and his men noticed a group of villagers walking in the area. "One guy had
a white bedsheet on a stick," Larimore said. Then, he recounted, "out of
the blue sky, some guy from where we're sitting" -- in the Scout platoon --
"begins shooting" into the villagers. Other machine guns joined in. "There
was a lot of screaming and hollering going on. We were screaming, 'Cease
fire!' People hit the ground. The firing went on." Larimore estimated that
he saw at least fifteen, and perhaps twenty or more, Iraqis fall. He had
never been in a firefight before, he said, and he was stunned by the noise
and the carnage. He estimated that the firing lasted no more than thirty
seconds. "I did not see anything that looked like return fire," he said.
The vehicles in the Scout unit, he said, had opened up on a group of
unarmed civilians.

A second eyewitness, Sergeant Wayne P. Irwin, who was in charge of another
G.S.R. team, said the Iraqis were "just passing through" the area when the
Scouts suddenly began firing their machine guns. "I yelled for them to
cease fire," he said. "I couldn't understand why they were firing." Of the
Iraqis, he said, "To me, they posed no threat to us -- they were all in
civilian clothes." Irwin was the senior man from the 124th on the scene,
and the Scouts subsequently explained to him that the Iraqis were
carrying"grenade launchers and stuff like that." Irwin, a seventeen-year
Army veteran who is now on an intelligence assignment in South Korea, told
me that he did not find that account credible. He had seen the Iraqis. "To
me, they had nothing."

Michael Sangiorge, a nineteen-year-old soldier from Brooklyn, was one of
Larimore's crew members. (He is now a nursing student in Pembroke,
Georgia.) He thought the firing lasted a long time. "It seemed like an
eternity," he told me. "Three or four minutes. The Bradleys were shooting
all their guns. They were firing into a cluster of people." A few of the
victims "were wearing dark robes" -- clothing that did not rule out the
possibility that they were in the military. There was no doubt, however,
that "they were basically surrendering," Sangiorge recalled "We heard
screaming, and we're screaming -- a whole lot of yelling is going on." He
didn't take a body count, but he estimated that about twenty people were
fired upon.

When the firing ended, Sangiorge said, Sergeant Larimore -- who was known
for being unflappable -- "lost his cool," and jumped off his vehicle to get
a better look at the scene. "He was pissed." Moments later, the G.S.R. unit
was ordered back to the schoolyard, along with the 3-7 Scout platoon. "I
went to the platoon leader" -- Lieutenant John J. Grisillo, a 1987 graduate
of West Point -- "and asked him what he was doing," Larimore told me. "He
said they were fired on and we returned fire." Grisillo was equally angry
at him, Larimore said, because "I was questioning his authority. I told him
we had a responsibility to go make sure that there weren't any wounded"
among the slain Iraqis on the field. The G.S.R. teams carried medical kits
in their vehicles. "He said, 'Go ahead,' " Larimore recounted. "I said,
'I'm not going anywhere in front of you.' "

Sangiorge and the other crew members were not even in their twenties,
Larimore recalled. " 'Sarge,' they said to me. 'That wasn't right what
happened. What do we have to do?' I told them I didn't know, but I'd find
out. I was still very mad."

Lieutenant Grisillo confirmed Larimore's description of the shootings -- up
to a point. Larimore, he said, had failed to realize that the men were
responding to a threat. Grisillo explained that his platoon, made up of two
armored vehicles and six Humvees, all armed with machine guns, had cleared
a village, with the help of Larimore's G.S.R. team, and afterward someone
looked back and noticed a small group of Iraqis in civilian clothes. "They
raised a white flag," Grisillo said, but he and his men could see through
binoculars that "they were carrying weapons. We fired warning shots, but
they didn't stop" and continued to move toward a building -- the
schoolhouse -- that was known to contain weapons. In so doing, Grisillo
insisted, the Iraqis posed a threat. His Scout platoon opened fire with
machine guns, and some Iraqis, perhaps five or six, were shot. No formal
written report of the shootings was ever made.

Grisillo told me that after the war he met with his brigade commander, John
Le Moyne. "He let me know that he thought the G.S.R. guys didn't understand
the situation at the time," Grisillo said. "Calls had to be made. It's not
nice, but prudent. If I had that situation again, I'd do it again. I've
never lost a minute's sleep about it." Grisillo left the Army, as a
captain, in 1992. He now runs a job-recruiting firm for retired military
personnel.

According to Major Brennan, McCaffrey's staff officer, during the war the
General repeatedly asked his staff to survey the battlefield and determine
if Iraqi trophies -- such as enemy tanks and artillery pieces -- could be
salvaged for display at the Fort Stewart museum, back in Georgia. No one
had done anything about it. At the morning staff meeting on March 1st, the
first full day of the ceasefire, Brennan said, McCaffrey suddenly turned to
him and appointed him the division's war-souvenir officer. Brennan
commandeered a Humvee and a driver, loaded up with water and food, and took
off for the war zone. "I just went out and looked around to the east and to
the north" -- along the line of retreat from Kuwait to Baghdad, Brennan
told me. "I wasn't worried. What I saw was an army that had given up." He
and his driver ran into perhaps ten Iraqi soldiers during the morning. "All
they wanted out of me was water and food," he recalled. "None of them
attempted to fire at me. I felt there was no danger. There was a ceasefire.
I was more worried about Le Moyne's brigade" -- the 1st Brigade's heavily
armed command post was nearby -- "than about the Iraqi Army."

It was an eerie scene, he recalled. Dozens of tanks, trucks, and other
vehicles lay scattered over the battlefield. In some, the engines were
still running. Bombs, shells, and other ammunition lay about as well, much
of it near smoldering wreckage and in danger of "cooking off" -- exploding
in the heat. Brennan marked many sites on a map. He planned to return the
next morning, March 2nd, with more men and three forklift trucks to begin
the process of gathering McCaffrey's war trophies.

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