Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq sic-1

by Tom Clancy

  Both 1st AD and 3rd AD went back over their battle areas to look at what had been destroyed by air and what their units had destroyed. As best as both units could determine, about 15 to 20 percent of the damage had been done by CENTAF; the rest had come from direct-fire systems, artillery, or aviation. Third AD meticulously counted every destroyed tank in its sector and came up with 603. Of that number, fewer than 100 had been by air. In his AAR, Butch Funk confirmed the 9th and 29th Brigades of the Tawalkana in his sector, as well as the 10th and 12th Iraqi Armored Divisions. In some cases the Iraqis had abandoned perfectly functioning pieces of equipment, which we either took back to Germany as display monuments or blew up. First AD methodically reconstructed the Battle of Medina Ridge, locating each Iraqi vehicle by GPS, and recording its orientation vis-a-vis the attacking 1st AD, and what had killed the vehicle. Their statistics of that fight are accurate beyond doubt. I personally spent the better part of an afternoon with Joe Sartiano, H. R. McMaster, and Lieutenant Colonel Mike Kobbe going around the 73 Easting battle step by step.

  The previously mentioned booklet, "The 100-Hour War: How the Iraqi Plan Failed," assembled by a team headed by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Kirk from VII Corps G-2 in a little more than thirty days, and from a variety of sources, remains the most definitive account of what the Iraqis were trying to do in our sector. One Iraqi infantry unit commander said, "You attacked us with the same NATO force that was designed to attack the entire Warsaw Pact, and the entire earth shook." He got all that right, except the part about attacking the Warsaw Pact. An Iraqi brigade commander said, "I stood and looked to the west, and all I could see for as far as one could see were tanks and more tanks; tanks everywhere." One Iraqi general said, after he was captured, "I will never forget the way we were treated. Your soldiers are heroes."

  One area where we failed was in capturing the combat in video and still pictures. Since many of our battles were in bad weather, rain, blowing sand, and at night, they would have been difficult to capture on film in any event, but we could have done better. I regret that the video legacy of Desert Storm gives a poor to erroneous impression of the war that the soldiers and Marines fought on land.

  We recorded all our lessons learned, as well as made notes for what needed to be improved for the future. We learned that our soldiers, training, organizations, doctrine, and equipment were as able as we had thought they were. It was also a vindication of the Total Army concept that included the Reserve component.

  There were also some things we needed to look at for the future of land warfare. I thought Desert Storm represented a transition war (in fact, all wars are transition wars). A lot of the old methods bear repeating in the future, but also some of the new ones. I also thought our possible enemies of the future were watching this war and taking notes. If they ever confronted the United States on a battlefield, they would attempt to stay away from some of our strengths — and take note of our weaknesses. All that meant to me was that we could not stand still and rest on our laurels. We would have to continue to maintain the edge. I filed it all away in my own notes to look at after we had some more time and perspective.

  In some of the other actions we started during those days:

  • I wanted to get the story told of what the corps soldiers had done in our eighty-nine-hour war, and so made sure there were many interviews with soldiers in the media and in unit publications.

  • I had training resume. Not that I had to remind anyone; after the war, commanders instinctively turned to training. We had lots of ammo, plenty of targets still to shoot at, and plenty of real estate. Each unit set up its own target area and began training again. You have to keep your edge. If Saddam had decided to start something again, or if the rules changed, we were ready.

  • We continued to destroy the Iraqi equipment we had bypassed in our attack.

  We had one ally in all this. When XVIII Corps left, the French left a company-sized aviation unit with us, under my tactical control, and it was of great assistance to us in the western part of our sector. At one point, I asked the French commander when he was going home. "When you do," he answered. "We will stay as long as you need us." That they did. Like the British, they were terrific allies.

  DESTRUCTION OF ENEMY EQUIPMENT

  This task was vast, and went on from the beginning of the war on 24 February until we left Iraq for good on 9 May. Each unit was given the task of destroying the enemy ammunition and equipment in the area it had been assigned for occupation duties.

  Because I was aware that it would require a total corps effort, I directed Task Force Demo to be formed on 2 March, and gave the mission to Colonel Sam Raines's 7th Engineer Brigade. Sam formed a special composite unit, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Mark E. Vincent from an M577 in the VII Corps TAC CP in Iraq.

  At 1500 on 2 March, they briefed me at the TAC on their concept of the operation, and I approved it on the spot. For the next seven weeks, this task force went about destroying Iraqi equipment and munitions and supervising the work done by our divisions, the 2nd ACR, and even the 11th Aviation Brigade in their sectors. It was an enormous effort.

  Each day, I got a report on the previous day's destruction. Extensive records were kept of what was destroyed and its GPS location; specific areas were designated, and each day's mission ordered within those areas. Thus, all units knew who was working where, and safety was maintained. In the entire operation, not one U.S. soldier was injured.

  In seven weeks, the task force supervised the destruction of equipment equivalent to that of two Iraqi MECH/armor divisions. EOD personnel cleared thousands of unexploded or unexpended munitions, and — in a humanitarian effort — fenced off hazardous areas around populated sites. A total of 6,622 targets were destroyed, worth, we estimated, about $1.2 billion.

  The task force did not examine each of the munitions before exploding it, but we were sensitive to the possibility of unexploded Iraqi chemical munitions, and to my knowledge, no one ever detected any release of Iraqi chemical agents. If such agents had in fact been released, the chemical alarms in use with the troops would have detected them. During the time of the mission, no mission-caused illnesses were reported, except for one soldier who got a mustard gas blister on his arm.

  We even destroyed an Iraqi gunboat. One day, Tom Rhame called and said, "Boss, we've got an Iraqi gunboat just off the coast by Umm Qasr. We'd like to destroy it."

  "Is it occupied?" I asked.

  "No."

  "Go ahead."

  A few 120-mm tank rounds later, the gunboat went to the bottom of the Gulf.

  Near Umm Qasr on 10 March, the 1st INF uncovered a huge cache of cruise missiles, Exocets and Silkworms. The unit not only destroyed the concrete facility that housed them, but set off the missiles in a spectacular explosion near the coast (they used remote fusing from five kilometers away).

  HUMANITARIAN OPERATIONS

  It was in the area of humanitarian operations that we were least prepared, and experienced the most frustrations — and, in the end, the greatest satisfaction — of anything we did in the postwar period.

  We were genuinely surprised by the magnitude of this mission.

  Immediately after Desert Storm, there were few civilians in the VII Corps sector. The largest towns were Safwan and al-Busayyah. When Moreno and the Big Red One had taken it, Safwan had been largely deserted, while al-Busayyah was now mostly rubble, and completely abandoned. Shortly after the beginning of the XVIII Corps withdrawal on 9 March, and while the talks continued at the UN, a civil war broke out in the south of Iraq, when the Shi'ite Muslims in the region rebelled against the Baghdad regime.

  As a direct result of that civil war, and the Iraqi government's indiscriminate and deliberate acts of violence against the civilian population along the Euphrates, a large number of refugees began arriving in the VII Corps sector, starting on about 15 March. Many of these refugees were drawn to Safwan, the only significantly built-up area in U.S.-occupied Iraq, and refugees thought that from there th
ey would have quick access to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (Safwan was only a few kilometers north of the Kuwaiti border). Soon after the war, however, both of those countries closed their borders to these refugees, and VII Corps faced a growing refugee population.

  That meant a real command problem for me, of escalating proportions. I felt we needed to do something.

  The day after XVIII Corps moved back to Saudi to begin redeployment, I came to this realization: I am the senior American in occupied Iraq. Orders or not, as American soldiers and according to the laws of land warfare and the Geneva Convention, we have responsibilities in an occupied country. So we acted.

  I assembled the VII Corps civil affairs officer and G-5, Colonel Art Hotop, and VII Corps SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman. "Picture this on the day we leave," I told them. "What should we have done as an occupying force in a foreign country up to that time? We will use your determination as the basis for what we will do until we leave." They laid out the normal responsibilities of an occupying force, such as law and order, medical care, the clearance of unexploded ordnance around populated areas, and the provision of emergency food and water.

  Though occupation duties had not been part of the mission we had been ordered to execute, for the next seventy days, VII Corps performed them de facto. Afterward, the official VII Corps report to ARCENT, CENTCOM, and the Department of the Army said, "While occupying Iraq, U.S. forces incurred certain legal obligations under international law. VII Corps has aggressively sought to meet these obligations."

  For most of us, it was our first experience at occupation duty and large-scale humanitarian assistance.

  How did we accomplish it?

  We had already divided the occupied area into unit sectors, with each unit responsible for its particular sector — usually where the individual units had ended the war. Thus, 1st INF Division was in Safwan. The remainder of the units, however, were still in the desert, where there was no populated area, and so we shifted them. First we moved the 1st CAV into the area south of the Euphrates that had been vacated by the 24th Division. Next, we put 2nd ACR in the west, and the 1st INF northwest of the 1st CAV along Highway 8. South of them we assigned the entire western sector to the 11th Aviation Brigade, with the French regiment (it was actually battalion sized) under their operational control. When the 1st CAV left, soon after the departure of the XVIII Corps, we assigned the 1st AD to Highway 8 west of Basra. And when 1st INF left to fill the more western area, we assigned the Safwan area to the 3rd AD.

  Our work fell into two periods. The first lasted from the beginning of the refugee influx, on about 15 March, to the signing of the UN-sponsored peace treaty, on 12 April. The second lasted from 12 April to 9 May, when all refugees under U.S. protection were settled in a camp in Saudi Arabia.

  With the beginning of the refugee movement and the return of the indigenous population, Safwan's population returned to its prewar size of about 11,500. Soon, more than 8,000 refugees arrived, with no place to go, and began to build temporary shelters for themselves on the southern outskirts of town. The other towns of significance along Highway 8 (in what had been the XVIII Corps sector) were ar-Rumaylah and as-Salman, each with about 2,500 people. About 300 people returned to al-Busayyah, but they soon left again.

  About 200 kilometers west of the corps TAC, about eighty kilometers north of the Saudi town of Rafha, and just north of the Saudi-Iraq border, the Saudis began a settlement similar to the one in Safwan, which we eventually called Rafha I, after the closest Saudi town. Gathered there were close to 12,000 people, with all the worldly possessions they could bring with them, including automobiles.

  While this population and refugee movement was beginning, on 7 March, 1st INF helped to transfer 1,181 Kuwaiti citizens formerly held in Iraq back to Kuwait. During the time up to the cease-fire, we also processed more than 25,000 additional EPWs — Iraqi military who were either escaping the civil war or who otherwise wanted out of Iraq (we stopped this after the signing of the cease-fire agreement on 12 April).

  At the corps TAC, I established a special task force to run this operation, consisting of the G-5, Colonel Art Hotop; his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Marsella; two lawyers, Captains Dan Smith and Jorge Lorenzo; and a logistician, Major Bob Corbett. To command the civil affairs operation, we had Colonel Bob Beahm, commander of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade out of the Reserve component. Each division commander ran operations in his sector. In Safwan, Butch Funk put Colonel Bill Nash and the 1st Brigade in charge of the town.

  Meanwhile, Ron Griffith established a series of checkpoints along Highway 8 leading toward Safwan. At these checkpoints, troops of the 1st AD both screened and assisted Iraqi civilians and others moving through the area. Checkpoint B, about eighty kilometers west of Basra on the way to Baghdad, soon grew into a sizable way point, complete with medical treatment facilities.

  On 27 March, I visited Lieutenant Colonel Steve Smith and 1/7 INF, who were manning Checkpoint B and providing medical help. Inside the medical treatment tent, I saw Major Dr. Rodriquez, U.S. Army, obviously dog-tired, but continuing to treat Iraqi civilians (General Powell later awarded him the Humanitarian Service Medal, on our recommendation). He was treating a little two-year-old girl named Nura, who had a gunshot wound in her shoulder, and another little boy, about six or seven, with a wounded leg.

  There was an enormous crush of refugees needing medical treatment, brought about by the countless atrocities committed by the Iraqi army upon its civilians. What I saw with my own eyes confirmed reports we had been getting from about 24 March of atrocities in Basra and all over the south — reports of people hanging from lampposts, mass executions, and starvation.

  Afterward, I called John Yeosock to tell him, "It's bad enough that this is happening at all. But why are we so slow to react? Let's get observers into the Iraq side of the DML," I went on, "and get the UN to help us with displaced persons."

  "I'll see what I can do," John answered.

  I then asked my SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman, to start collecting evidence about atrocities from the Iraqi people for whom we were providing care; and Walt had the 1st AD make video- and audiotapes of their firsthand accounts, with their permission. This information was collected according to the rules of evidence, and sent to Third Army a few weeks later. From there it went to CENTCOM and the State Department, for further analysis and use.

  The 3rd AD ran Safwan. They not only supervised the refugee camp, but essentially reopened the town: they established law and order. They cleared unexploded munitions within the town and to a distance of 500 meters outside it. They opened schools… and even got textbooks and school lunches. They reopened medical clinics, using both our own medical supplies and some captured from the Iraqis (one of our first sergeants told me he and his troops particularly enjoyed using Iraqi medical supplies to stock the civilian health clinic in Safwan). According to our doctors, the health treatment we provided to the over 8,000 people in the camp near Safwan dramatically improved the overall health of the refugees there. By the end of April, daily requests for medical assistance were few.

  On 22 March, on a visit with Bill Nash and Butch Funk to the Safwan health clinic, I asked CW4 Joe Hatch, the 3rd AD head physician assistant, if I could do anything for them (his assistant was CW2 Ben Beaoui, who spoke Farsi).

  "Get us some baby food!" he answered, holding up an infant. "This baby will die soon if we don't get it food and get it treated."

  We got them the baby food via C-130s, and the child survived. For his work in that clinic, General Powell awarded Joe the Humanitarian Service Medal.

  WITHDRAWAL

  At 0230 on 13 April, Toby woke me for another middle-of-the-night phone call from Riyadh. At a little past midnight (our time) of the day before, the peace treaty and the UN resolutions had been signed. This phone call was from ARCENT: the President had ordered us to move the rest of our troops out of Iraq by 19 April. I did not mind being awakened for that call at all.

  I had estimated it would take u
s five days to get out of Iraq, and that was the time we had. We swung into action, with first-in, first-out still my rule. First out of Iraq had been the 2nd ACR, on 9 April. On the twelfth, we moved the 1st AD, followed on the fifteenth by the 1st INF. By the nineteenth, everyone was out, including all of our own equipment. At each stage, our units had moved into redeployment assembly areas near KKMC, where they had begun the tedious procedures necessary to prepare the vehicles and equipment for shipment back to Germany or the U.S.A.

  Since the UN-sponsored treaty included no provision for the protection of the refugees who had fled the Iraqi civil conflict and who (rightly) feared government reprisals, I asked Major General Greindl (the Austrian commander of the UN force) what he planned to do about them. "Since that's not in my orders," he informed me, "I can't do anything."

  "General, we have a problem," I said. "We are not leaving until we get this settled. We are not abandoning these people to Iraqi government atrocities."

  That same day I told John Yeosock we had a responsibility to ensure the continued protection of the refugees, and he ordered us to protect the refugee sites. In fact, during this period, John constantly went out on a limb for us in order to authorize our humanitarian activities. "Fred, do what you think is right," he told me again and again; and he backed us up.

  Meanwhile, on 7 April, we had changed command in 3rd AD. Much to his, and my, disappointment (since he would not be with us for the redeployment and homecoming in Germany), Butch Funk was pulled out of command to become the deputy J-3 on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. He was replaced by Major General Jerry Rutherford, who had been an ADC in the 1st INF. I assigned to Jerry Rutherford the mission with 3rd AD in Safwan.

  In the western part of our sector, 2nd AD (Forward), which I had pulled from the 1st INF, replaced the 11th Aviation Brigade (the French remained). I assigned the protection mission to them.