Annals of War: Overwhelming Force: What happened in the final days of the Gulf War?
by Seymour Hersh
The New Yorker
May 22, 2000
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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]
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."