Grunts (53 page)

For his tankers and infantrymen, though, their biggest danger came from so-called friendly fire, a significant problem in the Gulf War. In the confusion of the Norfolk battle, gunners sometimes snapped off shots at their own side. The Americans destroyed four of their own tanks and five of their own Bradleys. Main-gun rounds from tanks inflicted most of the damage. In at least two instances, these fratricidal shootings resulted in American loss of life. One such tragedy occurred when a tank gunner saw several RPGs crease a Bradley. Thinking the RPGs were muzzle streaks coming from an enemy tank’s main gun, the Abrams gunner mistook the Bradley for the supposed Iraqi tank. He opened fire several times, destroying the Bradley and two adjacent ones as well. Sergeant Joseph Dienstag, a gunner on one of the wrecked Bradleys, escaped from his vehicle and went around to the back to help the dismounts get out. As the grunts poured out, Dienstag smelled the overwhelming stench of burning flesh. He pulled out a wounded radio operator who complained of pain in his chest and legs. “It was dark and I’m doing a lot of this by feel,” Dienstag said, “and I put my hands at the end of his legs and there were no feet left there.”

The Americans lost six men killed and thirty wounded that unhappy night. Medics had to use shovels to recover the charred remains of one dead infantry soldier. The dismounts were especially shaken by the unnecessary losses because they were often so helpless, crammed into the rear of Bradleys. “I felt drained,” one of them said immediately after the self-inflicted killings. “I couldn’t believe something like that could happen. All dismounts . . . were scared. Not only do we have to worry about T72s and T54s and 55s but we have to worry about M1 tanks too. The soldiers had a numb look.” Father Kenehan assisted the medics as they treated one wounded Bradley crewman whose vehicle had been hit by American ordnance. “Part of his upper & lower lip on the right side was taken off & his jaw may have been broken.” Another soldier was beyond help. “I anointed him & prayed for the repose of his soul.”
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In spite of the losses, the Big Red One controlled Objective Norfolk by daylight and the VII Corps avalanche rolled east, seeking to cut the Kuwait City-Basrah road that served as the main Iraqi route of retreat. The Tawalkana Division had, for the most part, ceased to exist. The 12th Armored Division, another enemy unit that stood in the way of the American advance, was also decimated. At 73 Easting and Norfolk, mech infantrymen often fought as veritable tankers, adapting themselves to a desert tank fight in which shells and missiles, not mortars or small arms, did most of the killing at impersonal distances of several hundred meters.

As the VII Corps units attacked and overran the road, though, this was not always the case. In one instance, two platoons of Eleven Mikes from C Company, Task Force 3-41 Infantry, got the job of assaulting a heavily defended cinder-block police post on high ground that dominated a key portion of the road. Only riflemen could take this objective, known as the Al Mutlaa police station. Artillery, tank, and Bradley fire pounded the two buildings that comprised the police post. Iraqi soldiers fired back with rifles, machine guns, and RPGs. Finally, the grunts dismounted under a sky that was smeared with the ebony smoke of oil well fires—the Iraqis were burning Kuwaiti oil rigs as they retreated—and conflagrations from vehicles destroyed on the road by the Air Force.

Moving in urgent rushes, they assaulted west to east, across the road. “The company and platoon had rehearsed and trained for this mission so often in the last six months that everything was executed with the speed of a battle drill,” Lieutenant Daniel Stempniak, whose platoon led the way, later wrote. Even so, once the lieutenant was on the ground, he was shocked by the unceasing noise of exploding vehicles. The explosions hurled metal fragments around, adding to the danger of the open ground. With only the cover offered by their fire support, he and his men had no choice but to brave an open kill zone for almost three hundred yards to the buildings. Using classic fire and maneuver tactics, they made it across the road to the westernmost building. Once inside, they pitched grenades and assaulted room to room, floor by floor. Sometimes they killed their adversaries face-to-face. At times, their uniforms were stained with the blood of their enemies. “That’s where my infantrymen earned their money, fighting room to room,” their brigade commander later said. “The Iraqis had AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. They sprayed a lot of bullets around.”

A couple dozen grunts spent hours clearing out the two buildings and an adjacent ridgeline of bunkers but suffered no casualties. The same could not be said for their enemies, who lost fifty-two killed and twenty-eight captured. “There was gore all over,” one soldier recalled. “Many [dead Iraqis] were dismembered.” Lieutenant Stempniak attributed the successful attack to the discipline and preparation of his grunts. “If not for the quality and training invested in the soldiers and NCOs the platoon would have suffered substantial casualties from friendly and enemy fire.” The lesson, as he saw it, was that small groups of well-prepared and well-armed men, with superior will to their enemies, would always prevail, even against daunting odds.

To a great extent, the capture of the police post put the road firmly in coalition control. The road came to be known as the Highway of Death, not because of what happened at Al Mutlaa police station but because of the enormous destruction the Air Force unleashed upon retreating Iraqi columns of tanks, personnel carriers, and even civilian vehicles. It was almost as if the Eleven Mikes were never there.
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Marines in a Minefield and Screamin’ Eagles on Helicopters: Job Opportunities for Eleven Bravos

As an amphibious expeditionary force, the Marine Corps was ill suited to desert warfare. War in the desert, with its great open spaces and flat ground, called for the mobility that came from fleets of armored vehicles. The Army of 1991 was designed for just this sort of mechanized conventional war, although most American leaders had believed this war would be fought in Europe against the Soviets. The Marines had no such capability. Outfitted, to a great extent, with an inadequate collection of amphibious light armored vehicles, older-generation M60 tanks, and thin-skinned Humvees, the Marines were not even as well equipped as the Iraqis. But they had something their enemies did not—superb light infantrymen. What makes the Marine Corps special is the recognition that the individual rifleman is the ultimate weapon of war. The Corps is built around that concept. In the Marines, the MOS for grunts is 0311. By the time a man earns that moniker, he has survived boot camp at Camp Pendleton, California, or Parris Island, South Carolina. Following boot camp, the arduous training regimen of the School of Infantry in California or North Carolina turns him into an infantry Marine.

In 1991, these Marines fought their war on foot, amid daunting circumstances. Specifically, they led the way into the most elaborate minefield in modern military history. During the many months of standoff that preceded hostilities, the Iraqis in southern Kuwait built two major defensive belts, consisting of millions of mines, augmented by bunkers, trenches, and barbed wire. Their hope was to pin down the Americans in the minefields and slaughter them with artillery, something they had often done in their war against Iran during the 1980s. For the Americans, the worst-case scenario was to get hung up in the minefields and come under chemical weapons attacks. “We were concerned about speed, and building momentum going north, to get through those two obstacle belts,” Major General Mike Myatt, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, later wrote. “Because the worst thing that could happen was to get trapped between them.” His division’s job was to breach the mine belts and drive straight for Kuwait City. Myatt adopted an Army concept and divided his venerable unit into five task forces: Task Force Shepherd, a scouting force; Task Forces Papa Bear and Ripper, improvised mechanized outfits with light armor; and regimental-sized Task Forces Taro and Grizzly, the light infantry. Colonel John Admire commanded Taro. Colonel James Fulks was the CO of Grizzly.

Three days before the ground war was scheduled to begin, they learned from General Myatt that they would go into the minefield first. Their orders were to infiltrate, breach lanes through the first mine belt, and open the way for the armor. If the Iraqis counterattacked, as most expected them to do, the grunts were to hold them off, with a major assist from AV-8B Harrier close support aircraft until help arrived. Admire was flabbergasted, going so far as to call the news a “psychological shock” for his Marines. Although they did have some engineers attached to them, they had never trained for the task of infiltrating a minefield. They had no armor, few vehicles, and none of the sophisticated breaching equipment necessary to blow holes in the mine belts. “We would simply infiltrate at night on foot, with bayonets and rifles as our principal weapons,” Admire later wrote. In Myatt’s opinion, only foot troops could carry out the mission with the speed, stealth, and surprise necessary for success. When Corporal Michael Eroshevich of Task Force Taro and his squad mates heard the news, they exchanged death glances, as if to say “nice knowing you.” With great insight, Eroshevich perceived the incongruity of the mission. “This was pretty much a Nintendo war. But we were going to walk thirty miles and go through a minefield on hands and knees.” Another Marine believed that they would suffer a 70 percent casualty rate. “I didn’t expect to come back alive,” he said.

Indeed, the mission was a prime example of the difference between the Army and the Marines. Army commanders in the Gulf War assigned their breach missions to armored and mechanized units with mine-defeating explosives and equipment; in their wildest imaginings, they would never have entertained the risky, potentially casualty-intensive idea of sending foot infantry in first. They much preferred risking machines to destruction rather than men, plus they had more hardware to lose. For the Marines, the idea was daunting but not necessarily far-fetched. After all, good Marines with rifles in their hands were the Corps’ primary asset, its best and its toughest people. Why not use the first team for what loomed as the greatest challenge?

Starting on February 21, both of the task forces infiltrated about eight miles into Kuwait on foot. Reconnaissance teams then approached the minefields with great stealth and caution. Their job was to find possible gaps in the layers of mines. Some of the recon Marines were so close to the Iraqis that they could hear and even observe them. “We could see the Iraqis walking up and down, and anytime a jet came overhead, they would sneak down into their holes,” one of them recalled.

Under cover of the night and the smoggy black smoke emitted by hundreds of oil well fires, Sergeant William Iiams led one team from Task Force Taro up to a fence the Iraqis had built to mark the southern edge of the first mine belt. Through his night vision goggles he saw several antipersonnel mines near the fence and avoided them. Using specially modified wire cutters, he opened a hole in the fence and it fell down. “We went into the minefield for about ten or fifteen meters. We were side by side, shoulder to shoulder, because that’s how we figured to clear a lane. We got up to the first real clump of mines. They were the Italian kind, with the clusters on top and trip wires all around. We tried to get through them, but they were just too thick in that one area.” They turned around and quietly retraced their steps out of the minefield. At one point, his buddy grabbed him and pointed downward. Iiams glanced down and saw that he was standing right on top of a mine! Fortunately it was an antitank mine designed to detonate only with thousands of pounds of pressure. “I was kind of relieved,” Iiams added with great understatement.

Safely away from the mines, he and the two other Marines on his team built a hide site inside an oil pipe, under cover of sand and burlap. They spent the entire day hiding and observing. The next night, Iiams and another Marine went back into the minefield and found a weak point where the mine layer was thin. Task Force Taro had found an opening to exploit.

As of the eve of the ground attack on February 23, Task Force Grizzly still had not. Nonetheless, General Myatt still ordered both of his task forces to go in that night. They had a few stops and starts because of a potential cease-fire the Soviets were negotiating with Saddam, but those peace entreaties fell through. Supported by only a few Humvees with TOW launchers, the Marines shuffled in long columns through the windy desert, in the flickering shadows of oil well fires, bound for the same jump-off spots where the recon Marines had entered the first mine belt. Each Marine was hauling at least seventy pounds of weapons, ammo, gear, and food. Dragon antitank gunners had a miserable time manhandling their unwieldy fifty-pound weapons. M60 and M249 SAW machine gunners also struggled. Some of the Marines, particularly mortar crews, dragged their gear on improvised carts. “These carts were the size of large wheelbarrows,” Corporal Greg Stricklin said. “With all the gear loaded I figured a cart weighed between five and six hundred pounds.” They had their MOPP suits on, but not their gas masks. The evening was chilly, causing many of them to alternately sweat and shiver. Only the best-conditioned troops could carry and maneuver such onerous loads and endure this strenuous march for miles. One of them called it “the most grueling physical experience of my life.”

For Task Force Grizzly, two intrepid staff sergeants led the way, on their hands and knees, into the first mine belt, gently prodding with their bayonets, “old World War I style,” in the estimation of one officer. The minefield was between one hundred and one hundred and thirty meters deep. “The majority of the [antitank] mines were exposed on the surface and very obvious,” one Marine engineer recalled. “The majority of the antipersonnel mines were buried with the triggering devices exposed to be detonated [when] stepped on.” Ever so carefully they crawled forward, gently poking with their bayonets. The job required total concentration. One slip, one moment of distraction, one mistake could mean instant death. Moreover, if the enemy did open fire with artillery or small arms, there was no cover to be had. “Once they found a mine, they just marked it and moved around it, leaving it in place,” Colonel Fulk later said. “So they created a meandering path through the field.” The two sergeants marked their finds with chemical lights. In their wake, the grunts carefully followed. Each man made sure to walk in the footsteps of the person ahead of him. It took nearly eight exacting, spine-tingling hours to forge a path through the minefield. By 0400, twenty-seven hundred Marines were through. Iraqi resistance was negligible. There were a few firefights, but most of the enemy soldiers quit when they saw that the Marines had gotten through the mines.