by John McCain
Sergeant Joseph Phillip Bongiorni, twenty, from Hickory, Pennsylvania, was an engineering major and honor student at West Virginia University. Joey wanted to be a soldier “ever since he was a little boy,” his mother, Rita, told the New York Times. His mom and dad made him promise to go to college before he joined the regular army, but they let him join the Reserves when he was a junior at Fort Cherry High School. He was eager to go when he was called up and not happy about having to serve far from the front.
Specialist Frank Scott Keough, twenty-two, from North Huntington, was the fourth of Art and Barbara Keough’s eight children. He was loud, funny, friendly, and smart, with an IQ of 137, his dad proudly remembered. He had served a four-year enlistment in the regular army. He wanted to be a math teacher and joined the Army Reserve to earn money for college.
Specialist Anthony Erik Madison, twenty-seven, had been a standout on the Monessen High School football team, playing both sides of the ball, but an indifferent student. His parents divorced and his mom died during his junior year. He joined the army not long after graduation, returned home after his three-year enlistment was up, and got married. He had two kids, a son and a daughter, but had a hard time finding work. Steel mill jobs had disappeared in Monessen, as they had everywhere in western Pennsylvania. His dad, Norman, suggested he join the Reserves to earn some money. He would later blame himself for Tony’s death. When Tony’s son, Anthony Jr., grew up he joined the army and served three tours in Iraq.
Specialist Thomas Gerald Stone, twenty, was from Jamestown, New York. He too had a hard time earning a living and joined the Reserves for the extra money. He hadn’t expected to go overseas. Recently he had moved his wife and baby daughter, Cassandra Renee, to Austin, Texas, where he had found work. He transferred from an artillery battalion to the 14th Quartermaster Detachment in the 99th Army Reserve Command, which he correctly assumed would be posted well to the rear.
Sergeant John Thomas Boxler, forty-four, was the old man in the unit. He had served two tours in Vietnam and was the father of two teenagers, John Jr. and Rebecca. He had lost his job with Bethlehem Steel fourteen years earlier but found work as a mechanic for the U.S. Postal Service in his hometown, Johnstown. Everybody liked him. As more than one neighbor remarked, he was a salt-of-the-earth type, active in the community, a volunteer firefighter. He loved the army. His wife, Elaine, said he was excited to be called up.
Corporal Steven Eric Atherton, twenty-six, grew up in Templeton, Pennsylvania, the youngest of six boys. He loved to hunt and fish in the fields and streams near his boyhood home. He operated a forklift at a lumber company. He enlisted in the army after high school and married his wife, Brenda, after his enlistment was finished and he had joined the Reserves. They had been married about a year when they had their first child, a baby boy, Aaron, who was six months old when Steve left.
Private First Class Richard Wolverton, twenty-two, from Latrobe, followed a similar path. He enlisted in the army after high school and joined the Reserves when his four years were up, partly to supplement his income at a local truck dealership, but also because “he kind of enjoyed the military life,” his mother said. He met his wife, Marlene, in Germany when he was stationed there. They had been married only eight months when he left. She wouldn’t let the two uniformed men at her door deliver their sad news, telling them, “Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”
Sergeant Alan Brent Craver, thirty-two, was from Penn Hills. He joined the Reserves in 1983, when he was still enrolled at Penn State University. He had a degree in environmental resources management, a job in his field he enjoyed, and a steady girlfriend he was thinking about proposing to. His brother said he was just getting his life “to the point where he wanted it to be.” He had recently reenlisted in the 14th because he believed the work the unit did, water purification, was socially responsible. He wasn’t thrilled about deploying overseas but told his family, “I gave my word and I need to follow through.”
Specialist Steven Julius Siko, twenty-five, followed a couple of friends into the Reserves. He had enlisted in the regular army right out of high school, got married and divorced, and was the father of a five-year-old son, Jake. He had recently been made a supervisor at the foam manufacturing company where he worked. A couple of days after he was notified of his only child’s death, Steve’s father, Julius, received a letter from him. He wrote that the war was going well and he expected to be home in July. They would go trout fishing when he got back.
Sergeant Frank James Walls, twenty, grew up in New Bethlehem, a well-liked kid. He played varsity football in high school and trumpet in the band and read scripture at his Presbyterian church. He had just joined the Reserves the summer before, after finishing a two-year enlistment in the regular army, including a year spent in Korea. In the fall he enrolled at Indiana University of Pennsylvania but hoped to transfer to the University of Pittsburgh, where he wanted to study civil engineering.
Specialist Christine Mayes, twenty-two, was from the coal town of Rochester Mills. Her story broke a lot of hearts. She had been a shy child. She served in the regular army after high school, was stationed in Germany, and, according to friends and family, had come home all grown up and outgoing. She was working as a cook and taking classes part time at the Punxsutawney campus of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She joined the Reserves in October to help pay for college and help out her family, who were going through a difficult financial time. The weekend before she deployed to Saudi Arabia, her boyfriend, David Fairbanks, asked her to marry him. She said yes and left her engagement ring behind, afraid she would lose it in the desert. They were to be married when she returned that summer. She wasn’t worried, she told her mother. She liked the army, and the unit was going to be far from the front lines.
Specialist Beverly Sue Clark, twenty-three, was also from Indiana County. She had joined the Reserves out of high school. She worked as a security guard and as a secretary at a local window and door manufacturer. She too was planning to enroll at IUP. She wanted to be a teacher. She was popular and athletic and loved to ski. Her best friend in the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, headquartered in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, was Mary Rhoads, a meter maid in California Borough, Pennsylvania. Mary was the soldier seen in the CNN broadcast of the Scud attack, cradling in her arms the dead body of her best friend, Beverly.
Mary Alice David was born and raised in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, the sixth of nine children born to David and Ruth David, who had married over their families’ objections three days after they had fallen in love at first sight. David was a steel worker and Ruth a homemaker. Like most western Pennsylvania families, the Davids had a long tradition of military service. David was a veteran of World War II. Three of Mary’s brothers had served in the military. Her oldest brother, Johnny, had done two tours in Vietnam. Her brothers Chuck and Jimmy had served in the air force and navy, respectively, during the Vietnam era.
Mary joined the Army Reserve in 1974, during the summer between her junior and senior years at Canon-McMillan Senior High, south of Pittsburgh. She didn’t have clear plans for her life after graduation, and she thought a part-time job in the army would let her follow in the family tradition and bring home much needed extra income. Her dad had died of heart disease two years earlier. She joined C Company, 429th Engineer Battalion, based in nearby Washington, Pennsylvania, where she was the only woman in the unit. Three years later she transferred to Company D in Greensburg, where there were other women on the roster.
After high school she found work in a nursing home for retired Catholic nuns. In 1979 she transferred from the engineering company to the 1004th General Supply Company, also based at the Army Reserve Center in Greensburg. She was married that same year. But the marriage failed, and she divorced in 1983, the year her daughter and only child, Samantha, was born.
Mary and Beverly Clark became friends when Beverly joined the 1004th in 1985. They hit it off right away. Mary, ten years in the Reserves by then, took the younger woman under her win
g. They were road buddies. They volunteered for an eighteen-month tour at Fort Meade in Maryland and for a summer duty assignment in Canada. They enjoyed each other’s company. They made each other laugh. When Mary transferred to the 14th Quartermaster Detachment at Greensburg in 1988, Bev followed her. At Greensburg the two friends became a trio when Specialist Kellie George joined the unit. They were close, and thought they always would be. They would watch each other’s kids grow up. Mary’s daughter, Samantha, called Beverly “Aunt Bev” and always pestered Mary to pass the phone to Beverly when she called home.
It was at Fort Meade where a federal employee, Reed Rhoads, caught Mary’s eye and she asked him out. He was a fellow reservist and a western Pennsylvania native, having grown up in California Borough, about a half-hour drive from Canonsburg. They married in 1989, and Reed adopted Samantha. That same year Mary started work as a meter maid in California Borough. Scott Beveridge, a reporter for a local paper, the Observer-Reporter, met Rhoads when she was writing parking tickets. Her manner was so friendly and engaging that a motorist smiled when she handed him his ticket. Beveridge told her every town should have someone like her in that job. She could have told him that some people weren’t as charmed by her manner; some folks gave her a hard time when she gave them a ticket, especially some of the younger ones. But she took it in stride. She liked being friendly. Life was good.
IN THE PREDAWN HOURS of Friday, August 2, 1990, four Iraqi Republican Guard divisions spearheaded an invasion of Iraq’s oil-rich neighbor, the Emirate of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein had been threatening trouble for months, but the Kuwaitis were still caught by surprise. The conquest was nearly complete the following day. After a weekend spent considering his response, President George H. W. Bush declared in an impromptu Sunday afternoon statement on the South Lawn of the White House, “This aggression will not stand.” He dispatched Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia with an offer of military assistance, setting in motion a gathering force that would ultimately bring the armed representatives of thirty-four countries and over half a million Americans to the Arabian desert for the purpose of liberating Kuwait from Iraqi rule. They would need clean water.
Five months of Desert Shield preceded the six-week Desert Storm. On August 8 Iraq announced it had formally annexed Kuwait as its nineteenth province. That same day the first F-15 Eagle fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia landed at the big air base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and immediately began flying combat air patrols along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The first boots of the 82nd Airborne Division’s ready brigade stepped onto the tarmac at Dhahran the next day, and two carrier battle groups steamed into the Gulf. These were the very tip of what Rick Atkinson, in his superb history of the war, called “an expeditionary masterpiece rivaling the invasion of Normandy.”
On August 12 Air Force Staff Sergeant John Francis Campisi of West Covina, California, sat with his maintenance unit’s gear piled on a darkened runway at Dhahran and smoked a cigarette. He was hit and killed by a van driven by another airman, becoming the first American casualty of the Gulf War. Predictions varied about how many dead and wounded the United States would suffer in the war. Most were wildly off the mark. The Pentagon expected somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand. One military analyst reckoned the United States would lose 160 to 170 killed in action every day of the war. Saddam’s army was estimated to be the fourth largest in the world and was believed capable of putting up a tough fight. It was widely assumed a lot of Americans would have to die to eject it from Kuwait.
That turned out not be the case. The U.S. Armed Forces were immeasurably better war fighters, better armed and equipped, and better led than the armed forces of the Republic of Iraq. The ratio of combat casualties suffered by each country, roughly one hundred Iraqis for every American killed in action or wounded, would bear that out. None of the prognosticators realized just how much of a war you could fight from the air over a desert battleground where the enemy parked his tanks and artillery in the glaring sun and sheltered his soldiers in sand berms. Nor did they appreciate just how determined Desert Storm’s commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., was to use the immense force he assembled to keep casualties low. When the blow was finally struck, the fight would be decisive and over as rapidly as possible, with the loss of coalition lives kept to a minimum.
Yet during the weeks and months of Desert Shield, Americans watching the build-up in Saudi Arabia on their televisions heard again and again how daunting the task would be, how prepared the nation must be to lose many valiant sons and daughters. That’s as it should be, of course, even if few of the talking heads enjoining our sober reflection had any real idea what they were talking about. When Americans and their elected leaders contemplate sending soldiers to war, they ought to appreciate the costs that will be borne on their behalf, though the only people who can appreciate them fully are the soldiers themselves and the families who bury them and tend to their wounds.
For the sake of expelling Saddam’s army from Kuwait and restoring stability to a region that produces great quantities of a critically important resource, hundreds of thousands of Americans were going into harm’s way. Given the nature of that war—a long air campaign followed by a short ground war and Iraq’s quick capitulation—casualties were far fewer than the most optimistic analyst had expected. But there were casualties: 149 killed in action, a comparable number of noncombat deaths, such as Sergeant Campisi’s, and eight hundred or so wounded. Three hundred graves over which three hundred families wept and prayed. Many thousands of survivors wept too and bore their own wounds, seen and unseen. It helps none of them to know it could have been worse.
A force as immense as the one General Schwarzkopf required necessitated the activation of Reserve and National Guard forces in very large numbers. The post-Vietnam, all-volunteer force depended on the Army Reserve to a greater extent than at any other time in history. Critical combat support functions were entrusted to the Reserves, from military police to fuel tankers and water purification units. The army couldn’t go to war without them. President Bush authorized the first call-up two weeks after the first American soldiers arrived in Saudi Arabia. When he made the decision in November to double the size of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, he increased the Reserve and Guard call-ups correspondingly and extended their active duty tour to 180 days.
Members of the Reserves deployed to the Gulf numbered 217,000. Half of them would serve in Kuwait, and the rest would stay behind the front lines in Saudi Arabia. But the nature of this conflict, and the tactics Saddam used in response to the pounding his army and capital took during the air campaign, meant that no matter how deep in the rear echelon you belonged, you could suddenly, unexpectedly discover the battle had come to you.
The most powerful air assault in the history of warfare began at 2:38 on the morning of January 17, 1991, when eight Apache helicopters destroyed Iraqi radar sites near the Saudi border. A moment later U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf launched the first barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iraqi air defenses in and near Baghdad. They were followed by warplanes of every description using the latest stealth technology and carrying laser-guided munitions in the first of over one hundred thousand sorties that would quickly establish near total coalition air supremacy, devastate Iraqi command and control, and relentlessly pound the Iraqi Army in advance of the ground war. The six-week air campaign began five days after Congress authorized the use of force and twenty-four hours after the UN Security Council deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait had expired. But moon phase rather than political events determined the timing of H-Hour. The vast airborne armada would deal out death and destruction for the first time on the darkest night of the month.
The shock and awe of the unprecedented campaign stunned Iraqis in its first hours. But it did not incapacitate the decision making of the mass murderer and reckless gambler who had ruled Iraq through violence and terror for twelve years. Saddam’s first gambit in re
sponse to Desert Storm’s launch had American commanders scrambling to counter it and divert coalition warplanes from their mission to destroy the enemy’s command and control and pulverize his armed forces.
Five hours after the first shot was fired, Saddam declared on state radio, “The mother of all battles has begun.” The next day he ordered eight Scud missiles fired in the direction of Tel Aviv. He had threatened such an attack in advance of Desert Storm, and American war planners, not to mention the Israelis, had worried he was serious, and worse, that the missiles would carry chemical weapons. An attack on Israel could serve as a blow to coalition unity. Were Israel to respond, which Saddam devoutly hoped it would, it could rally support for Saddam in the Arab streets, which in turn could imperil the Saudis’ and other Arab states’ continued participation in the coalition. And the State of Israel had not survived for over forty years by turning the other cheek when attacked.
Complicating matters was the less than warm relationship President Bush and Secretary of State Jim Baker had with Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Secretary Cheney made the first call, to Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens, who described the location and damage of the attacks. The Israeli Army initially believed at least one of the Scuds had carried a chemical warhead. But initial reports were wrong. Saddam had considered arming them with chemical weapons, but he feared the Israelis would respond with a nuclear attack on Baghdad, which would have made the coalition’s continued unity rather beside the point. They might not have liked each other, but Bush and Shamir wouldn’t talk past each other in a critical hour for both countries. Shamir made clear his intention to defend his people from the Scuds if the coalition couldn’t, and Bush made clear the importance of keeping the coalition focused on destroying their mutual enemy. He pleaded for Israel’s patience, promised to redirect air assets to seek and destroy Iraqi missile sites, and offered to strengthen Israel’s air defense assistance with Patriot antiballistic missile batteries. Demonstrating wisdom and a forbearance many countries would have found impossible, Israel refrained from retaliation.