ANNALS OF WAR - OVERWHELMING FORCE

What Happened In The Final Days Of The Gulf War?

I -- THE WAR

ACCOLADES

Barry McCaffrey has the best resume of any retired combat general in the
United States Army. The son of a distinguished general, he attended
Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, and West Point, and in 1966
was assigned to South Vietnam as a platoon leader. He served two combat
tours, winning two Distinguished Service Crosses, two Silver Stars, and
three Purple Hearts. He returned from Vietnam with a shattered left arm,
which was saved only after two years of operations and rehabilitation.
McCaffrey's career continued to be exemplary: he earned a master's degree,
taught at West Point, and, as he moved up through the ranks, became an
outspoken leader within the Army for women's rights and the rights of
minorities. He had, as the journalist Rick Atkinson has noted, "the
chiseled good looks of a recruiting poster warrior: hooded eyes; dark,
dense brows; a clean, strong jawline; hair thick and gun-metal gray." He
radiated command presence.

In June of 1990, as a two-star major general, McCaffrey was put in charge
of the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), at Fort Stewart, Georgia. He
was then forty-seven, and the Army's youngest division commander. Two
months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and McCaffrey took the 24th's
tanks, guns, and more than eighteen thousand soldiers (eventually, there
were twenty-six thousand) from its home base to Saudi Arabia in preparation
for the Persian Gulf War. The 24th's mission was to drive more than two
hundred miles into Iraq -- the famed "left hook" maneuver -- and block the
retreat of Iraqi forces from the war zone in Kuwait. In an account written
after the war, U.S. News & World Report praised McCaffrey for leading what
one officer called "the greatest cavalry charge in history." More
promotions came McCaffrey's way, and he eventually earned four stars, the
Army's highest peacetime rank.

McCaffrey announced his retirement from the Army in January of 1996, when
President Clinton brought him into the Cabinet as the director of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In that position, McCaffrey
serves as the architect of and main spokesman for the Clinton
Administration's $1.6-billion plan to provide, among other things, more
training and weapons for the Colombian Army in an effort to cut drug
production and export.

The Iraqis offered only disorganized and ragged opposition to the American
invasion, in February of 1991, and the much feared ground war quickly
turned into a bloody rout, with many of the retreating Iraqi units,
including the elite Republican Guard, being pounded by American aircraft,
artillery, and tanks as they fled north in panic along a six-lane road from
Kuwait City to Basra, the major military stronghold in southern Iraq. The
road became littered with blackened tanks, trucks, and bodies; the news
media called it the "highway of death." The devastation, which was
televised around the world, became a symbol of the extent of the Iraqi
defeat -- and of American military superiority -- and it was publicly cited
as a factor in President George Bush's decision, on February 28th, to
declare a cessation of hostilities, ending the killing, and to call for
peace talks. That decision, which is still controversial today, enabled
Saddam's Army to survive the war with many units intact, and helped keep
the regime in power. In "The Generals' War," by Michael R. Gordon and
Bernard E. Trainor, Bush explained that he and his advisers were concerned
about two aspects of the situation: "If we continued the fighting another
day, until the ring was completely closed, would we be accused of a
slaughter of Iraqis who were simply trying to escape, not fight? In
addition, the coalition was agreed on driving the Iraqis from Kuwait, not
on carrying the conflict into Iraq or on destroying Iraqi forces."

The ground war had lasted one hundred hours, and there had been a total of
seventy-nine American deaths, eight of them in McCaffrey's 24th Division.
On the morning of March 2nd, a day before the Iraqis and the Allied
coalition were scheduled to begin formal peace talks, McCaffrey reported
that, despite the ceasefire, his division had suddenly come under attack
from a retreating Republican Guard tank division off Highway 8 west of
Basra, near the Rumaila oil field. The Iraqis were driving toward a
causeway over Lake Hammar, one of five exit routes from the Euphrates River
Valley to the safety of Baghdad. Overriding a warning from the division
operations officer, McCaffrey ordered an assault in force -- an all-out
attack. His decision stunned some officers in the Allied command structure
in Saudi Arabia, and provoked unease in Washington. Apache attack
helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, and artillery units from the 24th
Division pummelled the five-mile-long Iraqi column for hours, destroying
some seven hundred Iraqi tanks, armored cars, and trucks, and killing not
only Iraqi soldiers but civilians and children as well. Many of the dead
were buried soon after the engagement, and no accurate count of the victims
could be made. McCaffrey later described the carnage as "one of the most
astounding scenes of destruction I have ever participated in." There were
no serious American combat casualties.

McCaffrey's assault was one of the biggest and most one-sided-of the Gulf
War, but no journalists appear to have been in the area at the time, and,
unlike the "highway of death," it did not produce pictures and descriptions
that immediately appeared on international television and in the world
press. Under Defense Department rules that had been accepted, under
protest, by the major media, reporters were not permitted on the Gulf War
battlefields without military escorts. The day after the assault, a few
journalists were flown by helicopter to McCaffrey's headquarters. When
McCaffrey met with them, he speculated that the retreating Iraqi units that
had mounted the seemingly suicidal attack were unaware of the ceasefire,
then in its second day. "Some might not even know we are here," McCaffrey
told a reporter for United Press International. "But perhaps there are some
out there just looking for a fight." Most of the journalists shared
McCaffrey's enthusiasm. "Not having been there and seen with my own eyes,"
Joe Galloway, of U.S. News & World Report, told me, "I think it was a
righteous shoot. The Iraqis shouldn't have opened fire. They should have
walked out."

Two months later, in public testimony before the Senate Armed Services
Committee, which had invited him to discuss the lessons the military had
learned from the war, McCaffrey gave a graphic account of the battle. It
was a time of national pride in America's performance in the conflict, and
McCaffrey was praised effusively by the senators. He told them that the
days just after the ceasefire were confused, as Iraqi tanks, trucks, and
soldiers abandoned Kuwait and fled toward Baghdad along Highway 8. The area
west of Basra -- a vast tract of wadis and unoccupied desert -- was
especially chaotic in the predawn hours of March 2nd. "There were lots of
people moving in the dark," he said. "They engaged us with R.P.G. rockets"
-- antitank grenades.

McCaffrey did not give the senators any details about the strength of the
initial Iraqi attack, but he depicted the enemy soldiers' performance
during the war as, for the most part, aggressive and eager. "They tried to
fight," he said. "They fired hundreds of artillery rounds at us. Most of my
tracks" -- armored vehicles -- "were hit by small-arms fire. They fired
tanks, Saggers, et cetera." Saggers are antitank missiles. Referring to the
situation on March 2nd, he told the senators, "I elected to destroy the
force that was in this area.... Then we attacked. And between six-thirty in
the morning and about noon, one brigade, three tank task forces conducted a
classic attack with five artillery battalions in support." Of the Iraqis,
he said,"We destroyed all of them. Most of them, in my judgment, only
fought for fifteen minutes to thirty minutes. Most of them fled." He
continued, "Once we had them bottled up, up here at the causeway, there was
no way out." The senators were deferential and asked McCaffrey no critical
questions about any aspects of the March 2nd engagement, which has come to
be known as the Battle of the Causeway, the Battle of Rumaila, and, because
of the number of destroyed Iraqi vehicles strewn about, the Battle of the
Junkyard.

McCaffrey refused to be interviewed for this article, but he did agree,
through his legal counsel, to respond to written questions. Asked about the
battle, he wrote, "I believe that my actions at Rumaila were completely
appropriate and warranted in order to defend my troops against unknown and
largely unknowable enemy forces and intentions. If I had not proceeded as I
did and had American soldiers of the 24th ID [Infantry Division] suffered
substantial casualties, postwar analysts would not be asking if I acted too
aggressively, but would rightly condemn me for sitting still in the face of
a possible major enemy attack."

McCaffrey's insistence that the Iraqis attacked first was disputed in
interviews for this article by some of his subordinates in the wartime
headquarters of the 24th Division, and also by soldiers and officers who
were at the scene on March 2nd. The accounts of these men, taken together,
suggest that McCaffrey's offensive, two days into a ceasefire, was not so
much a counterattack provoked by enemy fire as a systematic destruction of
Iraqis who were generally fulfilling the requirements of the retreat; most
of the Iraqi tanks travelled from the battlefield with their cannons
reversed and secured, in a position known as travel-lock. According to
these witnesses, the 24th faced little determined Iraqi resistance at any
point during the war or its aftermath; they also said that McCaffrey and
other senior officers exaggerated the extent of Iraqi resistance throughout
the war.

A few months after the division returned home, an anonymous letter accusing
McCaffrey of a series of war crimes arrived at the Pentagon. It startled
the Army's top leadership and led to an official investigation into
McCaffrey's conduct of the war. The letter directly accused McCaffrey's
division of having launched the March 2nd assault without Iraqi
provocation. A 24th Division combat unit was said to have "slaughtered"
Iraqi prisoners of war after a battle. The letter was filled with
information, including portions of what were said to be recorded
communications between McCaffrey and his field commanders, that could have
come only from the inner circle. The anonymous letter writer alleged that
McCaffrey had covered up the extent of "friendly fire" casualties within
his division, and claimed that he had chosen to award a combat badge to a
close aide who had not served in a combat unit.

By midsummer of 1991, the 24th Division's 1st Brigade had quietly
investigated two earlier complaints at Fort Stewart about alleged
atrocities, and determined that neither complaint had merit. The most
serious allegation involved the shooting of prisoners by soldiers in the
1st Brigade. In one case, a soldier attached to a Scout platoon reported
that more than three hundred and fifty captured and disarmed Iraqi
soldiers, including Iraqi wounded who had been evacuated from a clearly
marked hospital bus, were fired upon by a platoon of Bradley fighting
vehicles. It was not known how many of the Iraqis survived, if any. The
second accusation came from a group of soldiers assigned to the 124th
Military Intelligence Battalion, whose senior sergeant claimed that on
March 1st, the day after the ceasefire, he saw an American combat team open
fire with machine guns upon a group of Iraqis in civilian clothes who were
waving a white sheet of surrender. The precise number killed was not known,
but eyewitnesses estimated that there were at least fifteen or twenty in
the group, perhaps more. Neither alleged incident was reported by the 24th
Division to the appropriate higher authorities, as was mandated by the
Army's operations order for the Gulf War.

The allegations couldn't have come at a more inopportune time. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the Allied forces, and General Colin L.
Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were national heroes. And
their success in Kuwait was seen as validation for the "Powell doctrine" --
the use of overwhelming force at the outset of a war in order to minimize
casualties and avoid the incremental buildup that had cost so dearly in
Vietnam.

McCaffrey's harshest critics are fellow Army generals who served as
division commanders in the Gulf War. McCaffrey was widely believed to be
Schwarzkopf's favorite general (Schwarzkopf had previously served as
commander of the 24th) and was viewed as being indifferent to the wishes of
Lieutenant General Gary Luck, the commander of XVIII Airborne Corps. (XVIII
Corps included three divisions: the 24th, the 82nd Airborne, and the 101st
Airborne.) Other commanders in the Corps were occasionally involved in
bitter disputes with McCaffrey over what they perceived as the 24th's
hoarding of precious tank and truck fuel. These officers, with some
exceptions, castigated the March 2nd assault and expressed dismay over
McCaffrey's subsequent promotion to full general. "There was no need to be
shooting at anybody," Lieutenant General James H. Johnson, Jr. (Ret.), of
Sarasota, Florida, said. "They couldn't surrender fast enough. The war was
over." Johnson commanded the 82nd Airborne, and his initial assignment was
essentially the same as McCaffrey's -- to protect the western flank of the
war zone. "I saw no need to continue any further attacks," Johnson told me,
adding that his troops processed hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and displaced
persons on March 2nd, with no incidents or casualties on either side.
McCaffrey, he said, "does what he wants to do."

The officer in charge of enforcing the ceasefire was Lieutenant General
John J. Yeosock (Ret.), who recalled that General Schwarzkopf "was explicit
about the cessation of offensive operations" after President Bush's
declaration of a unilateral ceasefire, on February 28th. A day or two
later, Yeosock flew from the main Allied command post, in Saudi Arabia, to
Kuwait City and then took a helicopter tour of the war zone, south of
Basra, where he saw abandoned equipment and Iraqi prisoners being evacuated
on the roads to Baghdad but no organized Iraqi units. "What Barry ended up
doing was fighting sand dunes and moving rapidly," Yeosock said. He was
"looking for a battle."

Lieutenant General Ronald Griffith, who commanded the 1st Armored Division
of VII Corps, told me it was well known that many of the Iraqi tanks
destroyed by the 24th Division on March 2nd were being transported by
trailer truck to Baghdad, with their cannons facing backward. "It was just
a bunch of tanks in a train, and he made it a battle," Griffith said of
McCaffrey. "He made it a battle when it was never one. That's the thing
that bothered me the most."

Many of the generals interviewed for this account believe that McCaffrey's
attack went too far, and violated one of the most fundamental military
doctrines: that a commander must respond in proportion to the threat.
"That's the way we're trained," one major general said. "A single shot does
not signal a battle to the death. Commanders just don't willy-nilly launch
on something like that. A disciplined commander is going to figure out who
fired it, and where it came from. Especially if your mission is to enforce
a ceasefire. Who should have been better able to instill fire discipline
than McCaffrey?"

Although McCaffrey refused repeated requests for an interview to discuss
these accusations, more than three hundred interviews in the past six
months with Gulf War veterans and Army investigators have produced evidence
that the Army's inquiries into the 24th Division failed to uncover many
important elements of the story.

MORE THAN A COMMANDER

By all accounts, McCaffrey was one of the Army's most knowledgeable
commanders, a confident and savvy leader who understood in detail the
workings of every phase of a combat infantry division. Like most generals,
he wanted things done his way, and, as the colonels and lieutenant colonels
in his command quickly learned, he gave no middle ground. Lieutenant
Colonel Edward J. (Butch) Brennan (Ret.) was a staff officer in the
tactical-operations center, traditionally a division's most important
administrative unit. "A guy like McCaffrey can be intimidating," Brennan
told me. "He believes that what's good for him is good for the country."
Brennan went on, "The No. 1 thing to McCaffrey is loyalty. If you don't
have three-hundred-percent loyalty, you're not part of the game."

One of McCaffrey's favorites was John Le Moyne, a colonel who shortly
before the Gulf War was promoted from a division staff job to be commander
of the 1st Brigade, one of three front-line fighting brigades in the
division. There was an immediate affinity between the General and the
Colonel. "I like John," one senior division officer recalled McCaffrey
saying before the war. "I'm going to make this guy a general." Le Moyne and
other officers who prospered under McCaffrey depict him in glowing terms.
Le Moyne told me during a telephone interview that McCaffrey was, "without
doubt, the most dramatic and charismatic leader I've served." Le Moyne, now
a major general and the commander of the Army's Infantry Training Center,
at Fort Benning, Georgia, said that McCaffrey scorned the easy way and
always did things "for the right reason. He's earned our undying love and
respect."

Another admirer is Lieutenant General James Terry Scott (Ret.), who is now
the director of the national-security program at Harvard University's John
F. Kennedy School of Government; he served in the war as a one-star
assistant division commander. "He's a guy of high character and high
standards, who doesn't make things up and doesn't cover up," Scott said.
"Anyone who stands out in the Army draws fire. A lot of generals were
jealous and feared him. They saw him as a guy who would break rice bowls
and change things." During the war, Scott said, McCaffrey was "the best
division-level tactician I've ever seen. He was very bold -- and he never
ran out of gas."

With the Gulf War unfolding, the 24th Division headquarters became
increasingly tense, as some of McCaffrey's subordinates felt that they were
forced to choose between doing the right thing, as they saw it, or doing
what their commanding officer ordered. Four senior officers -- three
colonels and a lieutenant colonel, all of whom had expectations of becoming
generals -- found it impossible to go along with McCaffrey's directives,
his management style, and his battlefield decisions, and openly questioned
him. They did so knowing that they were jeopardizing their careers.

In December of 1990, McCaffrey chose Colonel Ronald E.Townsend to be
artillery commander of the 24th Division, a job that put Townsend in charge
of six field groups of long-range cannons. Townsend recalled that when he
arrived McCaffrey told him, "My job is to make you a brigadier general."
Sometimes such enticements were communicated indirectly The wife of Colonel
Theodore Reid, the commander of the division's 197th Brigade, recalled
that, at a social gathering at Fort Stewart, McCaffrey whispered to her, "I
have great plans for Ted." But Townsend and Reid found themselves in
chronic dispute with McCaffrey, mainly because, in their view, he didn't
delegate, interfering in the jobs of his commanders and making all the key
military decisions himself. "McCaffrey and I had our differences," Reid
told me. "Do I respect him? Hell, no." By the war's end, Townsend had
defied a direct order from McCaffrey concerning the reassignment of a
valued senior officer; Reid, during a meeting with the General, had ordered
his staff to clear the room and "had it out" with him for twenty minutes.
"I blew off my career, and I knew it," Reid told me.

The commander of the division's aviation brigade, Colonel Burt Tackaberry,
said to me, "You couldn't tell McCaffrey anything, or disagree with him."
Tackaberry had been around generals all his life -- his father was a
lieutenant general -- and he felt that McCaffrey wasn't letting him do his
job. His interactions with the division commander were professional, he
added. McCaffrey always maintained his poise -- unlike Schwarzkopf, who was
known throughout the Gulf as "the Screamer" -- and yet, Tackaberry said, he
"knew how to hurt you without raising his voice." After the war, Tackaberry
said, he told McCaffrey, "If you don't have trust in me, you ought to find
another commander."

Two months before the ground war, McCaffrey abruptly relieved Lieutenant
Colonel Arnold J. Canada as commander of the 2-7 Battalion in Le Moyne's
1st Brigade, and replaced him with Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Ware, who
had been serving as the division's Inspector General -- a headquarters job.
Canada was stunned; he had commanded the battalion for two years, he told
me, and was fully prepared to lead it into war -- a view echoed by many of
his soldiers in interviews with me. "It would be like taking a conductor
out of an orchestra just before a big concert," one battalion soldier said.
"Yes, the orchestra can still play the music, but there's less
understanding of the skills and abilities of the people in the
orchestra-less perfect music." Changing the command, many soldiers feared,
would inevitably diminish the battalion's ability to function in combat;
Ware had little time to gain its confidence.

The 24th's lieutenants knew nothing of the tensions at the top. They were
far too involved in the day-to-day operations of their platoons. It's
always difficult for outsiders to get an accurate picture of life at the
platoon level of an Army combat unit; in the case of the Gulf War, where
journalists were effectively prohibited from the front lines, it is almost
impossibly difficult, but two compelling accounts have been published.
"Tuskers" (Darlington; 1997) was written by Major David S. Pierson, who
served as a task-force intelligence captain in the 24th's 1st Brigade. (The
title refers to the battalion's nickname.) "The Eyes of Orion" (Kent State;
1999) is a collection of remembrances by five 2nd Brigade platoon leaders,
with an eloquent introduction by McCaffrey. ("This is a story of courage,
dedication, and agonizing self-doubts as these young officers faced the
gut-wrenching responsibility of leading platoons through the enormous
confusion, fear, and physical fatigue of high-intensity combat
operations.") The books revolve around the life of the combat soldier-the
rigors of training, the harsh conditions of the desert, and the constant
fear of death.

As portrayed in these books, McCaffrey is an autocratic father figure who
exhorts his young officers, "You are going to kick their ass and be home in
time for supper!" Before the war began, McCaffrey made a series of
morale-boosting visits to his combat battalions, introducing a
kill-or-be-killed theme. Pierson reproduces one of these talks in
"Tuskers": "This won't be a walk in the woods," McCaffrey says. "These boys
have the fourth largest army in the world. They're not going to just roll
over. I fully expect we will have ten percent casualties in the first
week.... You're going to have to prepare yourself for that."

As McCaffrey spoke, Pierson writes, he found himself looking at the
General's wounded arm. McCaffrey "became larger than life and his persona
took on mythical proportions. He was more than a commander, he was a
legend." McCaffrey concluded the pep talk by urging the young officers "to
protect yourselves out there," and issued what amounted to a standing order
-- a sort of foxhole version of the Powell doctrine. "If you're driving
through a village and someone throws a rock at you, shoot them! If they
shoot at you, turn the tank main gun on them. If they use anything larger
than small arms, call for artillery. It's as simple as that. Obey the rules
of war but protect yourself." Pierson and his fellow-soldiers were
inspired: "He had fanned the embers of the warrior spirit into a flame."

THE ENEMY

The ground war began for the 24th Division on the afternoon of February
24th. From that moment, McCaffrey was always on the move, driving in a
specially equipped assault vehicle or flying in a helicopter to stay near
the action. His headquarters was situated in the division's tactical
command post, a collection of perhaps fifty tanks and armored carriers that
moved forward with the troops. These troops were superbly trained and
highly motivated. Tanks, armored cars, and trucks, including more than four
hundred huge fuel tankers, drove relentlessly, day and night, covering
nearly two hundred miles in two days and reaching their objective, the
Euphrates River Valley, more than a full day ahead of schedule.

After the war, according to "Tuskers," McCaffrey told Pierson's battalion
that the 24th Division had accomplished "absolutely one of the most
astounding goddamned operations ever seen in the history of military
science.... We were not fighting the Danish Armed Forces up here. There
were a half million of these assholes that were extremely well armed and
equipped." At an Army infantry conference at Fort Benning, in April,
McCaffrey went further. According to the official talking points of the
conference, he said that there was "heavy resistance" for parts of two
days, as the 24th was confronted by three Iraqi infantry divisions and a
commando brigade.

There were American casualties, of course, but there seems to have been
little or no organized resistance in the 24th's area of operations -- only
the remnants of a military force that was in retreat. It may be the case
that no soldier from the 24th Division died at the hands of the Iraqis.
Scrutiny of the available records reveals that at least four of the
division's eight officially reported deaths were the result of friendly
fire, and, on March 3rd, the day McCaffrey briefed the American press corps
on his victory at Rumaila, a U.P.I. dispatch reported that the division
said that there had been no combat deaths in the ground war. By the war's
end, many soldiers told me, fear of being shot by friendly fire far
outweighed fear of the Iraqis.

"We met the enemy," 1st Lieutenant Greg Downey, one of the 2nd Brigade's
"Eyes of Orion" diarists, recalled on the second day of the ground war. "My
gunner reported targets. We moved closer, discovering the Iraqi soldiers to
be young boys and old men. They were a sad sight, with absolutely no fight
left in them. Their leaders had cut their Achilles' tendons so they
couldn't run away and then left them. What weapons they had were in bad
repair and little ammunition was on hand. They were hungry, cold, and
scared. The hate I had for any Iraqi dissipated. These people had no
business being on a battlefield."

One of his fellow platoon leaders and diarists, 2nd Lieutenant Rob Holmes,
a 1989 West Point graduate, spotted a small building and a water trailer in
the distance, and his superior officer ordered him to open fire with a
machine gun. "I figured why not -- this is combat," he wrote in "Orion." He
missed but then fired an antitank rocket into the building, caving in a
wall. "Immediately dozens of Iraqi infantry appeared and scattered.... We
cut loose with machine guns from all of our tanks at the Iraqi infantry in
front of us." Holmes ordered a second volley of fire into the building. It
burst into flames. "A few Iraqis ran out a door," and one of Holmes's
gunners "cut them down, riddling them with machine gun bullets." The
America soldiers stopped firing when the Iraqis threw up their hands, and
the survivors were rounded up. Now Holmes, too, was appalled at the
condition of his enemy. "Our new prisoners barely qualified as soldiers.
They were poorly clothed and hardly equipped. They looked gaunt and
undisciplined. They were very old and very young. They looked pathetic.
Quite a contrast with us."

The 24th Division veterans interviewed for this article consistently
described the Iraqi opposition as far less daunting than expected. A few
Iraqi stragglers brandished weapons, after being fired upon by machine guns
from the fast-moving American tanks, but they quickly surrendered or were
cut down. Most veterans saw no firefights, and no attempts to attack
directly any of the American tanks as they rolled over the sand dunes. The
2nd Brigade's most dramatic moment came early on the morning of February
27th, when a large tank group from the brigade, after firing an intensive
artillery barrage, crashed through the chain-link fences surrounding
Jalibah Airfield, near Highway 8, and stormed down the runway, destroying
Iraqi tanks and aircraft. Iraqi soldiers guarding the base were overrun and
isolated. Some fought bravely, if foolishly, firing rifles and automatic
weapons at the tanks. One American soldier was wounded in the arm. The
Iraqi soldiers"tried to hide in shallow bunkers and some tried to
surrender," according to another "Orion" diarist, 2nd Lieutenant Neal
Creighton, also a 1989 graduate of West Point. "Most that moved were
quickly cut down under a swath of machine gun fire. The burning
helicopters, jets and dead soldiers seemed almost unreal.... My soldiers
were alive. It was the happiest moment of my life."

But suddenly, after the airport was secured, three American Bradleys were
hit by a barrage of rockets. According to Rob Holmes in "Orion," the
rockets had been fired not by Iraqis but by "another unit of American
tanks, nearly two miles away."Two men were killed -- victims of friendly
fire -- and eight or nine more were injured. "Americans had been killed by
Americans," Holmes wrote. "I saw the horrible sight of full body bags for
the first time.... I just wanted to finish this job and get back to Georgia."

In the official Desert Storm chronology for XVIII Corps, as posted on the
Internet by the Army, the 24th Division reports only that it overcame light
resistance in seizing the airfield and that ten soldiers were wounded in
action when an armored vehicle was "struck by an artillery round." The
division's authorized history, published after its return to Fort Stewart,
describes the Jalibah Airfield attack as "brilliantly executed," and notes
that McCaffrey flew to the area to congratulate the brigade commander of
the mission on his "superb victory." There is no mention of friendly-fire
casualties.

Like the soldiers in the 2nd Brigade, those in the 1st Brigade were
astonished by the enemy's reluctance to fight. Pierson eventually began to
feel guilty: "guilty that we had slaughtered them so; guilty that we had
performed so well and they so poorly; guilty that we were running up the
score.... They were like children fleeing before us, unorganized, scared,
wishing it all would end. We continued to pour it on."

Private First Class Charles Sheehan-Miles, a tanker in the 1st Brigade who
served as a gun loader, was, by all accounts, a competent soldier, a
"squared away" type. A native of Georgia, he enjoyed his work and was eager
for an Army career. That changed on the third day of the war. "I'd been up
for two days and was totally exhausted," Sheehan-Miles told me. There was a
radio report from the company commander about Iraqi trucks ahead. As
Sheehan-Miles watched, one of the vehicles, carrying fuel, was struck by an
American shell and burst into flames. Gasoline splashed into a nearby truck
crammed with Iraqis. "Twenty or thirty people came out of the truck,"
Sheehan-Miles recalled. "They were in flames. We opened fire."

When I asked Sheehan-Miles why he fired, he replied, "At that point, we
were shooting everything. Guys in the company told me later that some were
civilians. It wasn't like they came at us m with a gun. It was that they
were there -- "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Although Sheehan-Miles is unsure whether he and his fellow-tankers were
ever actually fired upon during the war, he is sure that there was no
significant enemy fire. "We took some incoming once, but it was friendly
fire," he said. "The folks we fought never had a chance." He came away from
Iraq convinced that he and his fellow-soldiers were, as another tanker put
it, part of "the biggest firing squad in history."

[Full-page organization table omitted showing "XVIII Airborne Corps
Organization and Ranks During the Ground War, 1991][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 ]