by John McCain
Scuds were not the most accurate weapons to begin with, yet to extend their range, the Iraqis reduced warhead weights and added bigger fuel tanks, which made the missiles even more unstable, inaccurate, and unpredictable. Many broke up in flight, and no one, Iraqi, American, or Israeli, knew with much confidence where they would strike and what damage they would do. No one knows for certain either the total number of Scuds fired by the Iraqis because so many of them broke up in flight or fell harmlessly in the Persian Gulf and Saudi desert. An air force analysis put the number at eighty-six, forty of them directed against Israel and forty-six fired at targets in Saudi Arabia. Most of the Scud attacks targeting Saudi Arabia also did less damage than feared.
The Scuds fired at Israel largely targeted the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. No Israelis were killed in the first attack. In all, two Israelis were killed directly by Scud attacks over the course of the war, although other fatalities were attributed indirectly to them, including heart attack victims and people who suffocated by wearing their gas masks incorrectly. Scores more were injured, and Israelis lived in terror that the more desperate Saddam became, the more likely he would be to attack them with chemical weapons.
With warheads permanently attached to the missiles and traveling at around 4,000 mph, Scuds had a high-velocity impact. Like Londoners reacting to the German V-2s, which the Scud is descended from, Israelis experienced helplessness, terror, and panic as they hurried to put on gas masks and take shelter.
Allaying that somewhat were the approximately fifteen hundred air strikes against suspected Scud launch sites, which represented a substantial daily diversion of air assets. Within a week of the first Scud launches, 40 percent of all coalition sorties flown and a considerable commitment of intelligence resources were employed in the search for and destruction of Scuds. Coalition aircrews would claim they destroyed eighty or more mobile launchers over the course of the war, but the number is almost certainly exaggerated. Most of the sorties failed to find their prey, which usually did their work at night and were hard to find. Others destroyed objects they mistook for launchers. The minimal success of the strikes was a source of frustration to the pilots flying them, the coalition commanders, and the watching Israelis.
Of greater reassurance were the Patriot batteries, which appeared at first to provide surprisingly effective missile defense, although twelve Scuds would hit Israel before the first Patriot battery in the country was operational. There was palpable relief in Israel and among coalition commanders and American political leaders when, the day after the first Scud attack on Israel, Schwarzkopf announced that a Patriot battery had claimed its first Scud kill, destroying a missile targeted at Dhahran. Even better, the successful intercept had been captured on tape, which was broadcast over and over again on the news.
Only after the war would the people of Israel and the United States discover what the Patriot battery operators had realized early on, that the Scud killers were considerably less effective than they first appeared and the army claimed. Only seventeen of the twenty-eight missiles fired at Israel after the Patriots arrived were engaged. The other ten struck underpopulated areas that weren’t covered by the batteries and did little damage. Of those seventeen, the army credits the Patriots with seven successful intercepts at most, but is highly confident of only three.
About half the Scuds fired at Saudi Arabia targeted the air base at Dhahran. Most of the rest were fired at Riyadh, where the coalition headquarters were located. The U.S. Army said as many as 70 percent of those Scuds might have been successfully intercepted but could claim only 40 percent with high confidence, and even that number, eighteen or so Scuds out of forty-six, might be somewhat exaggerated.
Nevertheless just one of the Scuds aimed at Riyadh caused a fatality, and just one of the more than twenty fired at Dhahran claimed lives. But they were more lives than were lost in any other single engagement of the war, and they were American lives. Patriots didn’t just fail to destroy that one very lethal Scud, which missed the air base (assuming that was its intended target) by several miles; they failed even to track it.
IN JANUARY PRESIDENT BUSH authorized the call-up of one million reservists and national guardsmen for up to two years. The sixty-nine soldiers of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment had started hearing scuttlebutt back in November that they would eventually deploy to the Gulf. Their order to mobilize came on January 15, 1991, the day before Desert Storm commenced. They arrived at Fort Lee, Virginia, three days later and spent the following thirty days drilling and training for their job: water purification and distribution. They left for Saudi Arabia on February 18 and arrived at the air base the next day. They were quartered temporarily in a large corrugated metal warehouse in Al Khobar, a suburb several miles from Dhahran. When all their equipment arrived they would split up and deploy to different field support locations.
There were a few Vietnam War veterans in the detachment, although most of the unit had not been to war, and if truth be told, they had not expected they would be. More than a few of them were scared when they received their deployment orders. The air campaign that unfolded while they drilled at Fort Lee had calmed some nerves, although no one knew how hairy it would get when the ground campaign began. Of course, they wouldn’t be on the front lines, although to do their jobs they would have to be closer than two hundred miles behind the front in Al Khobar. Some soldiers had premonitions, as soldiers off to war often do. Beverly Clark told her friend Mary Rhoads she had a bad feeling about the whole thing. She also mentioned her apprehension in the journal she kept. Soldiers’ families have premonitions too, especially the mothers. Just before she passed away from pancreatic cancer in November, Rhoads’s mother had told her that something terrible would happen but that Rhoads would be okay. Whatever fears disturbed them, none of the reservists resented their call-up. They hadn’t seen the war coming, but that didn’t make any difference. They had signed up, taken the government’s money, and accepted the risks. They had to go, and they would do so without complaint, or at least with no more than soldiers’ usual reflexive grumbling about bad luck and the idiots in their chain of command.
Eleven of the reservists in the 14th who deployed to Saudi Arabia were women. The Persian Gulf War occasioned the largest single deployment of women to a combat zone in American military history. Forty-one thousand officers and enlisted—one out of every five women in uniform—deployed. They were pilots, aircrew, doctors, dentists, nurses, military police, truck drivers, communications technicians, intelligence analysts, security experts, administrative clerks, and water purification specialists deployed to a society built on tribalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and primitive notions of gender inequality. Thirteen of them would be killed, four from enemy fire. Twenty-one were wounded in action and two taken prisoner. They did just about everything the men did, including flying missions and accepting other assignments that blurred the lines separating women from combat roles. But this was a war where lines were readily blurred. Even the idea of a front line seemed an anachronism in a war where so much of the fighting was in the air and where missiles were fired at targets located far to the rear, even at a country that wasn’t a belligerent. The metaphor “a line in the sand” has come to mean a statement of resolve, but it originally indicated something impermanent, something that disappears in the first breeze. That is an apt metaphor for the Persian Gulf War, where the front was, literally and figuratively, a line in the sand. Even two hundred miles in the rear, the front could suddenly encompass you.
A common and underappreciated complaint of soldiers at war is the boredom that attends so much of it. It is boredom punctuated regularly by the most terrifying exhilaration, but boredom most of the time, oppressive, enervating boredom. For people in a can-do profession with can-do mentalities, boredom is more of a sacrifice than most civilians appreciate. It’s not that you’d rather be getting shot at, but you don’t want to be sitting idle with your mind drifting to places it shouldn’t and the senses your safety reli
es on getting duller by the minute.
For people of an active disposition, the Gulf War, irrespective of its high-tech thrills, its stunning successes and surprising brevity, could have been stultifying to soldiers who weren’t involved in the fighting. Mary Rhoads was bored to tears sitting in that big warehouse, and she hated being bored. Even though they had been in country for only a few days, even after the ground war started on February 24, she was so bored it drove her crazy. She just wasn’t the type to enjoy sitting around and shooting the breeze in between guard duty rotations. She had to keep herself busy. Some soldiers sat on their bunks, slept, wrote letters, read, played cards. Rhoads liked to run errands.
She had spent seventeen years in the Army Reserve, half her life. She looked at the kids in the unit as her kids, saw herself as the mother hen. To relieve the boredom, she would take one of the buses to the PX at Dhahran or visit a friend she knew in a supply unit. She was a scrounger. She picked up stuff they liked to eat, things to read, games to play, anything that might shorten the days until they were sent forward to do the job they had come to do. She had purchased a Trivial Pursuit game, among other diversions, and it was instantly a favorite entertainment in the barracks. She still felt closest to Clark. They both brought teddy bears with them to war; Clark’s was white and Rhoads’s brown. One night they were both on guard duty on the warehouse roof when Bev noticed a mist forming in the desert. “Look,” she pointed, “the angel of death.” Rhoads would remember that through all the years that followed, wondering if her friend had had another premonition.
People had started to relax about the Scuds. The number of launches had declined to an average of one a day, when earlier they had numbered a dozen or more. Their unpredictability was still unsettling, but more and more Scuds were dismissed as the sideshow they were. People made fun of them. Fears that Saddam would arm them with chemical warheads had dissipated; few people clutched at their gas masks anticipating the next warning siren. The Saudi government typically downplayed the damage they did. Israel still threatened eventual retaliation, but the attacks there had dwindled to a few and were doing little damage. The Patriot batteries still seemed to reassure people there was an effective countermeasure to a capricious weapon that, despite its ultimate pointlessness, could, if you were unlucky, kill you.
Rather than the lingering Scud threat, on the second day of the ground war people were paying more attention to the American armored columns crossing the Kuwaiti border and plunging into Iraq and to the thousands of Iraqi soldiers emerging from their bunkers, blinking in the bright sunshine, shell-shocked after six weeks of incessant bombardment, and surrendering by the thousands. People were more worried about and perplexed by the oil well fires the Iraqis had started, the first of almost seven hundred. They might have felt otherwise if they had known there was a bug in the Patriot’s software.
The Israelis noticed it first and told the Americans that after eight hours of continuous operation, the Patriot’s targeting was unreliable. Patriots had been developed initially as a defense against Soviet bombers and cruise missiles that traveled at twice the speed of sound. They were mobile to avoid detection, designed to be shut down and moved every day, not continuously operated as a static defense against missiles that reached Mach 5.
The Patriot’s “range gate” is the device in its radar that tracks incoming missiles by calculating the area where they should be based on their velocity and the last time radar detected them. But the Patriot’s timing drops a microsecond for every second of operation, a tiny error that wouldn’t matter if the Patriots were used for their original purpose and operated accordingly. When the system is turned off, its clock resets automatically and the error is corrected. But the Patriots in Saudi Arabia weren’t shut down and moved every day. Alpha, one of the batteries protecting the area around Dhahran, had been operating continuously for over four days and had accumulated a timing error of a third of a second. A Scud travels a little over a mile a second. Alpha’s tracking was off by more than a third of a mile, a distance outside its range gate.
The Iraqis fired four Scuds the night of February 25. Three of them appeared to break up in the atmosphere. The missile fired at 8:32 p.m. was detected by satellite and its position relayed to Patriot crews in Saudi Arabia. Three batteries tracked it on their radarscopes but didn’t launch their missiles because the Scud was outside their respective sectors. Two batteries, Alpha and Bravo, protected the air base at Dhahran. Bravo was shut down for maintenance that night. Alpha’s crew had been alerted to the Scud traveling in their direction, but their screen was blank. They checked to make sure their equipment was operating properly and were satisfied that it was. Still they saw nothing. They didn’t know their range gate had miscalculated the missile’s whereabouts. No one knew a Scud was plunging to earth at five times the speed of sound above the big metal warehouse where 127 reservists were living.
Rhoads had made plans with friends in the 475th Quartermaster Group, who were also quartered in Al Khobar, to eat dinner at the air base in Dhahran. She wanted to relieve the monotony of sitting in that warehouse before suffering the monotony of guard duty later that night. Steve Siko, Frank Keough, Beverly Clark, and a few others were engrossed in a game of Trivial Pursuit while Rhoads was getting ready to leave. She asked Clark to come along but got a firm no in response. Before she left, Clark asked her for the answer to one of the game’s questions. Rhoads didn’t know the answer. “You know, for a sergeant, you’re not very smart,” Clark cracked.
Ten minutes later, driving down the highway toward Dhahran, Rhoads heard the siren. They pulled off the road and watched as the Scud slammed into the barracks and detonated, creating a red and orange inferno that engulfed twisted beams, flying shrapnel, the modest possessions and mementos of the dead, and their charred bodies. Twenty-eight people were killed and ninety-nine wounded, grievously wounded in many cases. Among the dead were thirteen reservists in the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, including Keough, Siko, and Clark. Forty-three of the reservists wounded in the attack were from the 14th, which meant the detachment had suffered in a single attack a casualty rate higher than 80 percent, about as high a rate as any recorded. They had been in Saudi Arabia only six days.
Rhoads and her companions raced back to the base. They had to climb a fence to get into the compound, where all was bedlam. Fire trucks and ambulances had raced to the scene, sirens wailing. Blackhawks descended from the dark heavens to airlift the most seriously wounded. Scores of Saudi civilians crowded around, transfixed by the sights and sounds of the disaster: girders bent by the heat groaning as they yielded, aluminum walls clanging as they fell, M-16 rounds cooking off, the shouts of rescuers, the agonized cries of the injured, the pitiful wailing of the survivors.
Rhoads tried to enter the burning building, but one of the rescuers stopped her. “My friends are in there,” she repeated over and over again. “You don’t want to go in there,” he warned her. When the ambulances pulled away, she ran to the other side and entered the building there. The smell of burned flesh, of death, filled her nostrils. She thought they were all dead. A moment later she tripped over a girder, wrenching her knee. A soldier in a transportation unit pulled her back outside and told her to stay there. That was where she saw the bodies. The Vietnam veterans in the unit who survived the attack had retrieved them and lined them up side by side. She recognized Clark right away. She limped over to her friend, embraced her lifeless form, and shrieked at the treacherous night, while a news camera recorded her agony.
EVERYONE WHO WASN’T BADLY hurt was quartered that night in a large, convention center–like meeting space, where television sets replayed the disaster on what seemed a continuous loop. Rhoads called her husband to let him know she was alive and reported to a sergeant back at the Reserve center in Greensburg. Then she and a few others, impatient and wanting to help, commandeered a van and drove first to the warehouse, then to different hospitals to locate the wounded, and then to the morgue to identify the dead.
Rhoads identified the bodies of Tony Madison, Frank Keough, and Beverly Clark.
Back home the 99th Army Reserve Command had set up a casualty assistance center in Greensburg. Chaplains and counselors and support personnel from various federal agencies were flown in to help families, who, two days after the attack, were still waiting to learn if their loved ones were among the casualties. They gathered at the armory in Greensburg and were keeping vigil in a room above the hall where the 99th’s commanding officer, Major General James Baylor, was holding a news conference they hadn’t been permitted to attend. Baylor informed the media that all but nine of the dead had been identified. He also said the only Patriot battery protecting Al Khobar had been down for maintenance and that even if it had been operational it wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy because the Scud was disintegrating and falling end over end when it struck the barracks. None of that was true, but Baylor hadn’t intentionally misled reporters; he was only repeating what Riyadh had told him.
Baylor made another mistake that day. The families were quite understandably agitated that they still hadn’t been informed if their loved ones had been killed or wounded, and the atmosphere inside the armory was, in the words of an eyewitness, “indescribable tension, frustration, anxiety and stress.” Since most of the families were present at the armory, Baylor directed a chaplain to begin the sad task of notifying the families of the dead right there rather than dispatch notification teams to their homes. In a subsequent review of the decision, one of the chaplains present recalled the trauma that ensued: “The notified families’ reaction sent panic through other family members sitting in the assembly hall. A second family was called out to talk with the notification officer. Their reaction further destabilized an already disrupted situation.”
