- What happened in the final days of the Gulf
War?
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- By Seymour Hersh
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- Thanks to Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker.
- Source: Hardcopy - The New Yorker, May 22, 2000,
pp. 49-82.
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- ___________________
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- I -- THE WAR
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- ACCOLADES
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- 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?"
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- 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.
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- MORE THAN A COMMANDER
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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]
-
- 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.
-
- II -- THE CAUSEWAY
-
- IMMINENT ATTACK
-
- While other American soldiers and their commanders stopped
and cheered the ceasefire, McCaffrey quietly continued to move his combat
forces. On the morning of the ceasefire, February 28th, they were approximately
twenty-five miles west of the Lake Hammar causeway; by the eve of the Battle
of Rumaila, two days later, he had expanded his area of operations. The
24th Division was now within striking distance of a seventeen-mile access
road connecting the highway to the causeway, one of the few known pathways
out of the marshes and desert in southern Iraq. "I knew I did not
want to go into Basra and fight in Basra," McCaffrey explained to
Army investigators six months after the war, "but I was prepared to
continue the attack to the east." His plan was to be ready, as any
prudent commander would be, to lead an invasion into Baghdad, should one
be ordered. "Was I eager to go north toward Baghdad?" McCaffrey
asked the investigators rhetorically."Personally, I think it would
have been militarily an easy option."
-
- With the ceasefire, the rules of engagement were revised
by XVIII Corps headquarters. Rather than aggressively seek out and destroy
the enemy forces, the commanders were to protect their troops and hold
their positions. McCaffrey was no longer authorized to initiate offensive
military actions on his own; he had to get prior approval from the Corps
commander, General Luck. He could still wage war, but only if he was faced
with "imminent attack." The new rules also stated, "If an
enemy vehicle approaches with its turret turned opposite the direction
of travel, the enemy vehicle will be considered indicating a non-hostile
intent. "The rules went on to say, "If these conditions are not
present, the vehicle will be considered having a hostile intent. In either
case, all attempts will be made to allow the occupants of the vehicle to
surrender before U.S. Forces will take hostile measures." The unilateral
ceasefire gave all Iraqi combat units, including the most elite tank brigades,
the right to unencumbered retreat, provided they moved with cannons reversed.
-
- The Iraqi withdrawal through the Euphrates Valley had
been carefully choreographed by the Third Army headquarters. The goal was
to speed up the exit of the Iraqis from Kuwait, and on March 1st thousands
of soldiers -- in tanks, trucks, and stolen cars -- continued their retreat
toward Baghdad, streaming northwest day and night toward the Lake Hammar
causeway.
-
- McCaffrey had moved his forces toward the access road
without informing all the senior officers who needed to know -- inside
his own division operations center, at XVIII Corps, and at Third Army headquarters.
Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Lamar, McCaffrey's operations officer, told
Army investigators in the summer of 1991 that he did not know at the time
that John Le Moyne's 1st Brigade, which included the most forward units,
had moved to the north and east. Frank H. Akers, a young colonel who was
the operations officer at XVIII Corps headquarters, also told me that he
did not know that McCaffrey had moved two brigades forward after the ceasefire.
Neither did Lieutenant General John Yeosock, commander of the Third Army.
The retreating Iraqis, who had been assured of safe passage, were now in
harm's way -- and so were McCaffrey's soldiers.
-
- McCaffrey's forces were at risk, Akers told me, because
division commanders invariably need "higher headquarters to have an
accurate read of their location in case they have to call in support."
Careful reporting, Akers added, avoids friendly-fire incidents and enables
help to reach a unit in trouble more quickly.
-
- General McCaffrey, in a letter to The New Yorker, firmly
denied that his division had ever purposely failed to inform the appropriate
commands of the troop deployments prior to the March 2nd engagement. In
a separate letter he noted, "It is simply not credible that a division
in combat, employing artillery and air power, and widely equipped with
GPS, could or would falsify unit locations."
-
- However, General Yeosock told me, "Too many people
have the imaginary notion that we can track everything from space."
What was important, he said, was that the operations officers at the Third
Army "get a lot of confirmatory information from the people on the
ground. At the end of the day, it's what comes in through the human channels."
-
- Shortly after dawn on March 2nd, a unit reported to McCaffrey's
command post that it was being fired upon by the retreating Iraqis and
that it had returned fire in self-defense. These were the opening shots
of the Battle of Rumaila.
-
- Over the past nine years, McCaffrey has consistently
defended his March 2nd offensive by emphasizing, as he did in his letters,
that his actions were designed to protect American soldiers -- and were
thus fully compliant with the revised rules of engagement. "My troops
on the ground were under attack," McCaffrey wrote. "My sole focus
was the safety of my soldiers."
-
- The early-morning; Iraqi attack that McCaffrey and others
speak of was said to be targeted on units in Charles Ware's 2-7 Battalion
that were at the forward edge of the American advance. The 2-7 Scouts were
attacked by R.P.G.s, Sagger missiles, and "direct fire from T-72 tanks,"
McCaffrey wrote. The rocketing continued later that morning, as one Sagger
missile was fired at the American positions and others were prepared for
launch. A muzzle flash was observed, McCaffrey wrote, and an artillery
cannon under tow was moved off the road, disconnected, and pointed at the
division. (The Army inquiry into Rumaila concluded that two weapons were
fired, but did not report any injuries or damage.)
-
- "In sum," McCaffrey wrote, "we acted appropriately
at the time the Rumaila battle occurred. My troops routed a large enemy
force that not only threatened my soldiers but also opened fire on . .
. our position."
-
- "They came rolling in there," John Le Moyne
told an Army oral historian a few days after the March 2nd engagement,
"and I'll be damned if they didn't start shooting at us." In
a separate interview, his operations officer, Major Benjamin Freakley,
told an Army oral historian that the first reports of enemy contact --
the firing of an R.P.G. -- came from Charlie Company in Ware's battalion.
Moments later, Charlie Company again received fire -- this time, Sagger
missiles from Iraqi B.M.P.s (Russian-built armored vehicles known to the
soldiers as Bimps). The Americans immediately counterattacked, Freakley
said, and destroyed six Iraqi B.M.P.s and four T-72 tanks. Meanwhile, a
group of helicopters that had been scrambled to reconnoitre the situation
told of seeing "hundreds" of Iraqi vehicles moving to the north.
McCaffrey"realized this force could move to the west now that they
knew we were here" -- and threaten his forces. "So we decided
to go ahead and fight them, since they had engaged us first."
-
- Freakley was saying, in essence, that McCaffrey chose
to turn all his guns on the Iraqis because of the possibility that the
defeated Army might decide to stop its withdrawal and, in a move that amounted
to suicide, attack the far superior American forces. If Freakley's recollection
is right, McCaffrey waited half an hour or so to gather his forces and
create an attack plan. The precise length of McCaffrey's delay could not
be conclusively fixed from the available documents. The division log entries
suggest that the delay between the two attacks was less than forty minutes.
But in his sworn testimony Patrick Lamar, the division operations officer,
told Army investigators that there "was a period of about two hours
between the time the firing first was reported before any action was ever
taken." All the authorities agree, however, on one essential point
-- there were no further confirmed reports of Iraqi shootings between the
first and second attacks.
-
- John Le Moyne told me that"there was absolutely
no doubt in my mind" that the resumption of firing was justified.
He said he now believes that the Iraqis had not planned their early-morning
attack. "After ten years, I think they just didn't have the discipline
and training." He theorized, "The first guy who fired was part
of a guard post. He woke up, saw American combat vehicles, and said, 'Oh,
shit! Oh, dear,' reacted out of panic, and fired."
-
- The authorized history of the 24th Division in the Gulf
War, written by Major Jason Kamiya, a division operations officer, closely
echoes the Le Moyne and Freakley accounts.
-
- THESE GUYS ARE GOING HOME
-
- Interviews for this article, and the 24th Division's
daily log for March 2nd, fail to support many aspects of the official account.
The Iraqis were driving anything that moved, and by early morning on March
2nd hundreds of retreating trucks, tanks, and other vehicles had come into
radar view of the 1st Brigade. At 4:45 A.M., reports came from Sergeant
Larimore's G.S.R. unit and from Lieutenant Grisillo's 3-7 Scouts, and as
they became increasingly vivid they got everyone's attention.
-
- James Manchester, in the 2-7 Scout platoon commanded
by Lieutenant Allen, did not see any Iraqi firing, any Iraqi prisoners,
or any Iraqi panic that morning. His platoon had been travelling in front
of the main attack force, as usual, and he was cheerfully watching the
Iraqis retreat in an orderly fashion along the road leading to the Lake
Hammar causeway. He and his fellow-Scouts had been told "to make sure
that these guys are retreating." He recalled, "I remember thinking,
It's over, it's over. These guys are going home. It was just a line of
vehicles on the road."
-
- John Brasfield also remembers that morning. He had been
troubled by his own brigade's continuing movement to the east, toward Basra.
"On the day of the ceasefire, we got an order to move out," Brasfield
recalled. "I'm a 'Why?' guy, and I asked Allen why. I didn't want
to die after the ceasefire. He said, 'This is what we're instructed to
do.' "
-
- Early on the morning of March 2nd, Brasfield continued,
his platoon had moved east, with no Iraqi opposition. Some soldiers who
were farther east reported that an Iraqi tank "came up on them, but
it never fired. We sat there all morning watching movement on the road
about six kilometres away." A steady stream of retreating tanks moved
along the road. "There's no hostile action toward us, but they don't
see us," Brasfield said. Edward Walker also recalled the tableau as
non-threatening. "Many of the Iraqi tanks were on flatbed trucks and
had their turrets tucked backward" -- that is, their cannons were
facing away from the American combat forces.
-
- When word of the Iraqi column first reached Le Moyne's
1st Brigade command post, his intelligence officer, Captain Linda Suttlehan,
informed him that "the only unit it could belong to was the Hammurabi
Republican Guard tank division, one of the most battle-hardened units in
the Iraqi Army, which was scrambling to get back, intact, to Baghdad. There
was a growing sense of excitement both in the brigade and in the division
headquarters, Suttlehan recalled. Some of the senior officers "wanted
action," and said as much.
-
- A far less threatening observation was officially reported
sometime around 6 or 7 A.M. by the 1st Brigade to the 24th Division tactical-operations
center. Item 47 in the division log for March 2nd noted, "Col Le Moyne
is observing vehicles, which consist of 200 trucks (flatbeds with some
mil[itary] vans)." A tank or any other vehicle riding on a flatbed
posed no threat, as every armored officer knew. However, that reassuring
report was contradicted by Le Moyne in the very next log item, which said
that Le Moyne "reports that vehicles' report is 'erroneous and bullshit.'
" Le Moyne then ordered an attack-helicopter reinforcement for his
brigade -- a major escalation.
-
- The radio suddenly came to life, James Manchester recalled.
He listened as Captain Richard B. Averna, the commander of Ware's Charlie
Company, told Ware that the retreating Iraqis were preparing to fire antitank
missiles at the American forces. Manchester said his platoon was astonished
at the message. "We are sitting right on top of these people,"
he told me, referring to the Iraqis, "and there are no vehicles pulled
off." Captain Averna, he said, was behind him and could not see the
line of vehicles.
-
- Brasfield recalled a different but equally overwrought
report. "One of the companies sees one or two dismounts" -- Iraqi
soldiers who have climbed off a tank or armored vehicle -- "with an
R.P.G. pointed in its direction. They ask permission to engage, and finally
get it. There's some boom, boom, boom -- a very short engagement. This
was early, before the big battle." Brasfield said he was later told,
"Somebody panicked and thought they saw something they didn't see."
Another factor in the Scout platoon's skepticism over the report, Brasfield
said, was a lack of confidence in Ware's leadership.
-
- Sergeant Stuart Hirstein, of the 124th Military Intelligence
Battalion, was clearing an Iraqi bunker with a company in the 2-7 Battalion
when his unit monitored the early reports about Iraqi fire. One of the
combat companies in Ware's battalion had issued an urgent call for help,
asking every available unit to come to its rescue: it was taking fire from
oncoming Iraqi tanks. Hirstein and his team rushed to the site in their
armored vehicles. When they arrived, he said, there was no attack and no
imminent threat from the retreating Iraqi tanks. "Some of the tanks
were in travel formation, and their guns were not in any engaged position."The
Iraqi crew members "were sitting on the outside of their vehicles,
catching rays," he said. "Nobody was on the machine guns."
And yet the Americans "wanted to fire them up." At that point,
he added, their commanders said no.
-
- There was a barrage of messages. "The radio was
blasting," Linda Suttlehan told me. One message stood out: a Scout
claimed that an Iraqi R.P.G. had been fired at him. Other soldiers reported
that an Iraqi tank had fired at their positions. "We plotted grids,
but the timing didn't make sense," Suttlehan said. "The timing
was too close. Was it one or two different tanks? Or was it the same guy
shooting?" In any case, Suttlehan recalled, "I needed to know
which way the tubes are pointing" -- the cannons on the Iraqi tanks.
"Are they in front or back?" After some time had passed, she
said, she and the other analysts were "still trying to figure it out."
-
- There was similar confusion in the 124th Military Intelligence
Battalion. Major James P. Kump, the 124th's senior intelligence officer
forward in the field during the attack, had been monitoring what he assumed
was a routine retreat early that morning when the fighting started. Kump,
who spent twenty-two years on active duty and is now retired, told me,
"I thought, I can't believe what I'm hearing! There's nothing going
on. These guys are retreating. "The skies above the battlefield were
crammed with state-of-the-art intelligence devices, Kump said, and much
of the intelligence was being passed to his Humvee. "I had links to
several intelligence systems -- more than I can talk about. And I'd have
known if troops were moving toward us." Kump went on, "I knew
of no justification for the counterattack. I always felt it was a violation
of the ceasefire. From an integrity standpoint, I was very troubled."
Before all previous operations, he said, planners at division headquarters
had routinely sought his intelligence assessments. This time, he said,
"no one asked me for an assessment."
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