Grunts (54 page)

To the east, Task Force Taro, led by the intrepid Sergeant Iiams, entered the minefield in the gap he had found. Here, too, the Marines placed red and green chemical lights on the mines, creating an impromptu path that the heavily laden grunts followed assiduously. “We were so out in the open it was unbelievable,” Captain Mike McCusker, the commander of India Company, recalled. “There was an oil well fire behind us that lit us up. We couldn’t get away from it. They had so many mines stuck underneath [the sand]. Some were on top. Some weren’t even opened, weren’t even set, but we didn’t know that at the time.”

As the infantrymen gingerly worked their way through the minefield—struggling and cursing all the way—they were under constant pressure from higher command to move fast. The generals and colonels knew that speed offered the best chance of success. But, for the privates, lance corporals, and sergeants who were actually in the minefield, speed was a far lower priority than safety. It was an odd, and terrifying, situation for them, knowing they had to move fast, but realizing that no one could go through a minefield with any degree of quickness. “The blowing sand had uncovered some of the mines and it wasn’t hard to spot them,” Corporal Stricklin said. At times, though, the mines were only a couple feet apart, which made it hard for him to maneuver his cart safely. “We had to stop, back up and go around constantly.” He heard incessant radio chatter from commanders, urging them to hurry it up. “I was tired of hearing that darned radio. We couldn’t see . . . could hardly breathe . . . surrounded by mines that would send you home in pieces and someone was yelling about us slowing things down.”

At last, by dawn, all of the Task Force Taro Marines were through. As in the Task Force Grizzly sector, Iraqi opposition was light, and prisoners began to stream in. Many of them had been pounded by American air attacks for days. When they realized that the minefields could not hold off the Americans, they gave up. Lieutenant Colonel John Garrett, whose 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, led the way for Task Force Taro, believed that the sheer audacity of the minefield breach, combined with the air attacks that clearly softened up the enemy, accounted for the Marine success. “I think they [Iraqis] were surprised by where we came through, when we came through, and the fact that we kept moving,” he said. “It was really a combined arms operation.” Like most Marines, Garrett understood the overwhelming power that resulted from ground troops and aviators working closely together.

As the sun rose on February 24, an exhausted Sergeant Iiams took a moment to look at the long line of two thousand grunts plus vehicles wending their way north. For the first time, the profound importance of his mission hit home to him. “It was a big responsibility on my shoulders. I didn’t realize it until I looked back and all I saw was jarheads for miles.” Against light opposition, the two infantry task forces began to dig in. As the morning wore on, Task Forces Ripper and Papa followed. They forged ahead and breached the second mine belt with their vehicles. From here they assumed the lead role in the push for Kuwait City, staving off several powerful Iraqi mechanized counterattacks. The 0311s were involved in some of this, but not as the leading actors. For one brief moment, though, in the ultimate techno-war, the entire Marine operation hinged on the courage and skill of a few brave men in a minefield.
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Even as the Marines did their thing, Army Eleven Bravo grunts from the 101st Air Assault Division (Screamin’ Eagles) were jammed into Black Hawk helicopters, nearly two hundred miles to the west, carrying out an air assault sixty miles into Iraq. Their divisional forebears were paratroopers who had jumped into Normandy and Holland and had fought at Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. Since then, the 101st had been converted into a helicopter-heavy air assault light infantry formation, rather similar to the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam.

Black Hawk crewmen had removed the seats from their helicopters to accommodate as many heavily laden grunts as possible. On average, each helicopter carried fifteen troopers, who wedged together in spectacular discomfort. Weapons, rucks, boots, helmets, and fists splayed together in a confusing jumble of humanity. Some of the men were twisted into pretzel-like contortions. Most everyone had at least one limb that was asleep. Almost all of them could not wait to get off their helicopters, onto firm ground. Yet, they were also frightened of what might be waiting for them. “Everyone was a little on edge,” Captain John Russell, a company commander, recalled. “You look around at your soldiers, and you’re responsible for them. You want to bring them all back.” The helicopters were flying one hundred fifty miles per hour in the post-dawn shadows, at nap-of-the-earth altitudes, ten or twenty feet off the ground, to foil any inquisitive Iraqi radar installations. Soldiers who were close to the open doors of the Black Hawks could look down and see miles of desert beige speeding by below.

These grunts were members of the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed “the Bulldogs.” Their mission was to lead the way on a deep penetration into Iraq, to secure the far western flank of General Norman Schwarzkopf’s minutely planned ground offensive, and cut off a major enemy route of retreat along the Euphrates River. More specifically, their task was to seize control of a forward operating base (FOB), called Cobra by the planners, which would function as a refuel and resupply point for subsequent air assaults all the way to the Euphrates. Like all light infantry units, the 1st of the 327th required a great deal of fire support from a formidable blend of fighter planes, artillery, Apache attack helicopters, and giant, twin-rotor Chinook helicopters that carried many of the unit’s TOW-mounted antiarmor Humvees and its supplies.

All of these helpers, except for the Chinooks, raked over the landing zone before the Black Hawks landed. In their wake, plumes of angry smoke boiled high into the sky. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hancock, the battalion commander, had been told by his intelligence people to expect light opposition, maybe a platoon of enemy, but he did not buy that. He had a hunch that the planned landing zone (LZ) would be more heavily defended, possibly even by a battalion. So, the night before the assault he had decided to land his unit a mile and a half south of the original LZ. The decision was a nightmare for the mission planners but it was fortuitous for the trigger pullers. The billowing smoke was coming from a ridgeline of inhabited Iraqi bunkers, right smack dab on the original LZ. “Had we not shifted that LZ, we would have been in a major fight on literally the first ships going in,” Colonel Tom Hill, the 1st Brigade commander—Hancock’s boss—later commented. Instead they made a smooth landing, safely out of the range of Iraqi fire.

In mere moments, sixty Black Hawks touched down and disgorged nearly six hundred grunts, who quickly spread out into a defensive perimeter. Within half an hour, they had artillery in place, and many of the infantrymen had worked their way close enough to the ridgeline to call in more accurate artillery fire and air strikes on the entrenched Iraqi soldiers. For several minutes, Hancock was content to let them work over the enemy trenches and bunkers. Then the first white flags appeared. Attack helicopters actually herded some surrendering enemy soldiers into the waiting muzzles of riflemen. “The air-bursts over the bunkers and trenches helped to turn the tide,” the brigade’s command sergeant major, Bob Nichols, recalled. Dozens of the Iraqis streamed out. Many clutched white handkerchiefs. Others, though, stayed put and kept shooting at the helicopters. At this point, the infantrymen surged forward and attacked the recalcitrants at close range. “[They] were charging uphill toward the Iraqi trenches like Gettysburg,” Nichols added. In the face of this aggressiveness, most gave up quickly, without much fighting.

Several thousand meters away, Lieutenant Colonel Hancock hopped aboard a helicopter at his command post for the short trip to the trenches, where he met with the Iraqi commander, Major Samir Ali Khadr, whose presence confirmed that the ridgeline was indeed defended by an infantry battalion. Hancock had never received a surrender before so he was not sure how to act. He did suspect, though, that there were more Iraqi soldiers farther to the north, at a potential logistics site. He turned to his interpreter and pointed at Major Khadr. “You tell this sonofabitch that he better surrender everyone or I’ll bring the aircraft back and bomb again!” The major willingly complied. Over 350 soldiers surrendered and the Americans captured large caches of weapons, including small arms, mortars, and antiaircraft guns. FOB Cobra belonged to the Americans. The Iraqis admitted that the air assault completely surprised them, and they never recovered from the shock effect. The easy U.S. victory stemmed from the speed and boldness of the deep penetration assault, the aggressiveness of the riflemen, and the prodigious power of the close air support.

The capture of FOB Cobra allowed the American commanders to air-assault several more light infantry battalions, in the face of some nasty weather, to the Euphrates and Highway 8, severing a key line of withdrawal for the reeling Iraqi Army. The Eleven Bravos struggled through deep mud. Most of them were carrying about one hundred pounds of equipment, a crushing load for even the strongest of young infantrymen. “Such loads reduced their endurance, their ability to react quickly, and their ability to move great distances,” one of their junior officers wrote. The heavy loads stemmed from the American tendency to reject austerity and rely upon heavy firepower and diverse logistical support. They also resulted from the American ability to put boots on the ground over long distances. After all, any grunt operating behind enemy lines needed to sustain himself until help arrived. At the Euphrates, commanders combated the problem by ordering their men to leave behind their rucks and instead carry only weapons, ammo, and food. The grunts were only too happy to comply.

The soldiers made it to Highway 8 and set up roadblocks. Their main worry was the possibility of an enemy armored attack, but fortunately that never materialized. They also had to be careful not to shoot civilian cars. Mostly they engaged retreating trucks and other light vehicles that were likely to carry Iraqi soldiers. Captain Mark Esper believed that his Eleven Bravo unit, the 3rd Battalion of the 187th Infantry Regiment (Rakkasans), stymied the enemy retreat because of four weapons. “The M60 MG [machine gun] was very effective at disabling or stopping moving vehicles; the LAW [Light Antitank Weapon] and AT-4 [antitank weapon] effectively destroyed moving targets; the 60mm mortar proved surprisingly effective at disabling the vehicles, and as we expected, killing soldiers; and the M203 grenade launcher was also an effective indirect fire, area weapon.”

In one instance, a rifle squad placed two abandoned Hondas across the road as a roadblock obstacle. One night, an Iraqi military truck tried to ram its way through the Hondas. “I heard these guys [in the truck] lock and load,” Sergeant Steven Edwards, the squad leader, said, “and that’s when I gave my guys the [order to] open fire. We didn’t get any fire back from them. We just shot ’em up.” Edwards alone fired two full magazines into the truck. All thirteen enemy soldiers inside were dead. At another roadblock somewhere else along Highway 8, an officer came upon a small convoy that the grunts had thoroughly destroyed. “The scene . . . was right out of a movie.” The grunts had shot up a couple of command cars, searched the dead bodies, and laid them out. “Farther ahead was a burning Mercedes truck towing an antiaircraft gun with the crew’s bodies hanging out the doors. All of this destruction had been wrought by very disciplined, well-trained light infantry.” In many cases, the Iraqi vehicles were full of loot from occupied Kuwait. Very often, the Americans captured retreating enemy soldiers, including many NCOs, who told their captors that their officers had abandoned them. “Leadership as befits a bunch of thieves,” one grunt officer wryly commented. The light infantrymen were the ultimate nemesis of these “thieves.”

The 101st’s impressive leapfrog to the Euphrates elicited deep fear in Saddam that the Americans might push for Baghdad but, of course, that did not happen. Instead, the Highway 8 roadblocks had the effect of redirecting many Iraqi soldiers east, right into the main aerial attacks along the highway and powerful ground attacks by the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) and the 1st Armored Division. Highway 8 was part of the same road known as the Highway of Death. The American-led coalition succeeded in kicking Saddam out of Kuwait, but the dictator remained in power because of the coalition’s reluctance to take Baghdad and overthrow him.
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Too many Americans learned the wrong lessons from their desert victory. Far too many believed that Desert Storm represented a new transformation in warfare. The natural American affinity for air power, technology, and intellectually appealing, clinical standoff war strengthened that belief all the more. Desert Storm belonged to tankers, close air support fighter pilots, attack helicopter pilots, and technicians. With inevitable advances in weapons and information technology, the future practically guaranteed more of the same. From now on, the transformation advocates argued, wars would be impersonal and clean, a simple matter of superior technology and logistical planning. The foot soldier supposedly had no major place amid such evolutionary sophistication.

But the techno-vangelists overlooked the fact that in the Gulf War, the Americans were lucky enough to grapple with an incompetent, ill-motivated, foolish enemy who indulged nearly every American strength. Saddam allowed the Americans plenty of time and space to ship their heavy armor and weapons overseas and put them in place. He ceded control of the air to them. He then made the colossal error of fighting them in the sort of set-piece, desert war of maneuver that conformed exactly to the American military’s strong points of mobility, technology, professionalism, combined arms planning, and logistics. All in all, he was breathtakingly stupid.

Like all desert wars, though, the Gulf War was indecisive. People do not live in deserts. In the modern era, they live in cities. The vital center of gravity for most governments and political groups, then, tends to be in the cities, and that was quite true of Saddam’s regime, which lived on to cause the Americans plenty more trouble. But too many late-twentieth-century Americans ignored, or overlooked, the urgent trend of global urbanization. With more and more people living in cities, the likelihood increased that future wars would be fought in populated areas, where American firepower and technology could be liabilities.