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

by Tom Clancy

  At 0700, John Tilelli called to tell me he was ready to attack if I wanted to exercise that option. It was one hour before the end, with still no room north of 1st AD and no time to get him room. It ripped me up inside. I could picture the 1st CAV, leaning forward in the saddle, as it were. They had deployed in October and had trained to a razor's edge; they had selflessly been the feint and demonstration force that had successfully deceived the Iraqis into believing we were coming up the Wadi al Batin; and finally, they had in a short time come all this way and gotten themselves in a position to attack. I did not want to be the commander to tell them now. It was painful; it's still painful today.

  "No," I told John, "we are out of time."

  He merely said, "Roger out."

  At 0720 a frantic voice was heard over the corps line-of-sight FM radio net: "JAYHAWK, this is THRASHER BLUE 6" — a corps artillery unit, as it turned out—"we are taking incoming friendly fire."

  The last thing I wanted was one or more of our soldiers killed or wounded by blue-on-blue this close to a cease-fire. Force protection was much more on my mind than destroying another ten or twenty Iraqi tanks. "Tell them cease fire," I said. The officer closest to the radio ordered, "JAYHAWK, JAYHAWK, this is JAYHAWK OSCAR, cease fire, I say again cease fire." As it turned out, some commanders took it to mean that we were issuing the actual cease-fire order when, in fact, it was only intended to stop the possible blue-on-blue. It was a confusing order, and I should not have let it go out.

  The confusion did not end there. We got a reply from everyone, including the 1st INF, whom we had called on SATCOM. A moment later, it occurred to me that the blue-on-blue could not have involved them, since they were not in line-of-sight comms range. "Order the Big Red One to continue the attack," I ordered. The call went out immediately, but I later learned that not all their units got the second call.

  Meanwhile, we got a call from 3rd AD explaining that THRASHER BLUE 6 was a corps unit on the other side of the enemy on their (3rd AD's) gun target line. When rounds missed and went over the Iraqis, they impacted in THRASHER BLUE 6's area. I told THRASHER to get the hell out of the way. They had already done that.

  At 0740, the order went out to the other units to resume the attack.

  Just before 0800, the 1st AD reported they had captured the HQ of the Medina Division. That was great news.

  I glanced around the TAC. It was full of troops — those from the TAC and those who had come inside to witness the end. Everyone wanted to be in there when the order went out.

  I looked at them, their tired faces, their by now grimy uniforms, and I was full of thanks for what they had done. I wished I could shake everyone's hand, give each of them a hug, and tell them all how proud I had been to serve in battle with them.

  I watched the GPS Toby had brought into the TAC. It was our most accurate timepiece. At precisely 0800, I got on the radio and told units to cease fire.

  First Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 1st CAV Division, was sixty kilometers from Basra (which, of course, was now in XVIII Corps sector) and about twenty kilometers from the Hammurabi. First INF was fifteen kilometers south of Safwan. First and 3rd ADs were twenty-five kilometers from Highway 8, and 1st AD Apaches could see the blue waters of the Gulf. The British were on Highway 8, north of Kuwait City.

  It was over.

  RESULTS

  We had attacked close to 250 kilometers in eighty-nine hours with five divisions, day and night, in sandstorms and rain. It had been an incredible battlefield performance by the soldiers and leaders of VII Corps.

  We had accomplished our mission to destroy the RGFC forces in our sector. The Tawalkana had ceased to exist as a division. The Medina was down to a few battalions, if that. At war's end, we could determine no other RGFC forces (with the possible exception of some scattered units of the Hammurabi) in our sector. Other Iraqi units were either destroyed or combat ineffective, and their equipment would be destroyed later. The better part of eleven Iraqi divisions lay in the wake of the VII Corps attack (including the two RGFC divisions). In those eighty-nine hours, corps units had destroyed 1,350 tanks, 1,224 personnel carriers of all types, 285 artillery pieces, 105 air defense pieces, and 1,229 trucks. And in our rolling attack we had bypassed an amount of equipment equal to that; after the cease-fire we went back and destroyed it. Though we had counted more than 22,000 Iraqi EPWs as captured, the true figure was probably as high as double that, since units lost count.

  In the eighty-nine hours, we had fired a total of 55,000 artillery rounds and 10,500 MLRS rockets, and we had also fired twenty-five ATACMs in twenty-one missions. We'd used 348 close-support air strikes, mainly A-10s, and mainly in the daylight.

  As the time of the cessation of hostilities arrived, most lead combat elements were in Kuwait, with smaller combat units from the 1st Infantry Division and the 1st (UK) Armored reaching across Highway 8. The VII Corps double envelopment did not occur.

  Kuwait was liberated. The Iraqi army had gone from fourth largest in the world to twenty-second in a little over a month. A coalition of thirty-five nations had quickly formed, had united its forces on the battlefield, and together had achieved impressive results in a short time. Was it perfect? No. But it was a hell of a lot closer to perfect than we had come in anyone's memory or experience. It was a victory of staggering battlefield dimensions.

  But it had come at a price. At that point, I thought we had twenty-one soldiers KIA and ninety-seven wounded. That turned out to be grossly inaccurate. The final figure was 46 KIA and 196 U.S. wounded, and 16 British soldiers KIA and 61 wounded. I will never forget them for the rest of my life.

  Eleven M1A1s were damaged, and four were destroyed; sixteen Bradleys damaged, and nine destroyed; one Apache damaged, and one destroyed.

  I say again: It was fast but it was not easy.

  Let no one equate swiftness with ease.

  It was a total team effort, as we'd known it would be. I was humbled to have had the privilege to lead such a magnificent armored corps into battle. Their battlefield achievements had come about because of twenty years of rebuilding, and because of their courage and selfless sense of duty. That I had been permitted to return to battle with that Army after we had both been badly wounded was something more than I could ever have dreamed of.

  LOGISTICS

  The logistics dimension in such a short period of time had been staggering. Modern mounted warfare is fast and lethal, and consumes an enormous amount of supplies. Our logisticians kept the corps constantly sustained, and many entire armies cannot do that. They operate for a while, then pause for days, weeks, or even months, to allow their forces to resupply. That such was not the case with VII Corps was a testament to the skill and hard, brute force work done by VII Corps logisticians in all units.

  Fuel and ammunition had been transported by corps soldiers mostly in truck convoys over the trackless desert. Led by junior officers and NCOs with few navigation devices and few radios, the convoys had rolled day and night. They had moved in rain and in driving sandstorms in which it was difficult to see the vehicle in front. They'd come upon bypassed Iraqi units and soldiers and captured them. They'd gone through minefields and our own unexploded munitions. At times, they'd gotten closer to the combat action with their fuel and ammo vehicles than normal practice would dictate.

  Here is an account from the 125th Support Battalion, 1st Armored Division, from the day they almost ran out of fuel: "When the convoy [forty-two fuel trucks] arrived at the refuel site [Nelligen] they found that the other two brigades had taken everything and no allocation had been saved. Prior to first light [around 0400] on the twenty-seventh, enough fuel arrived for nineteen HEMMTS. Those fuelers left immediately for our location [about 100 kilometers away] under Major Dunn's control. He raced at speeds of over fifty mph across the desert to get us fuel. One tanker was lost, as it turned upside down when rolling over a ravine. No one was hurt, but we lost 2,500 gallons of fuel. The battalion commander… went back to meet them. SPC Spencer [the battalion
commander's driver] later recounted topping sixty-five mph as his HMMWV left the ground when hitting even the smallest bump. [Sometime along the way] the second HEMMT convoy drove into a minefield. [One] vehicle ran over one of the mines, and it exploded," damaging the vehicle but not wounding anyone. Later that morning, the convoy reached the 1st Brigade and refueled them with enough to continue the attack on 27 February. "After distributing the newly arrived fuel to the combat battalions, we began movement through the log base [an Iraqi logistics base that the Medina had been defending and 1st AD had overrun]. Everywhere you looked there was total destruction. Ammo pits were burning and exploding, sending shrapnel flying through the air; trucks were overturned and ablaze; trailers full of supplies also were on fire. Moving the BSA through all of this in formation was nearly impossible." (The BSA — brigade support area — was where logistics units supporting 1st Brigade gathered and set up.) "Company-sized units broke into smaller columns and moved through. It took almost all day to re-form the BSA on the eastern side of the complex. As we moved through the area, the BSA captured some 146 EPWs. [And] there was a harrowing moment when one prisoner ran from the holding area to kiss the hand of the soldier who had just thrown him an MRE from his truck. There were no contemptuous victors, only compassionate soldiers."

  The 2nd COSCOM work to supply the VII Corps before, during, and after the war had been an extraordinary achievement, one that has to rank in one of the all-time feats of logistics in the history of the U.S. Army. Expanding from a base of fewer than 8,000 soldiers in Germany, the COSCOM had grown before the start of the war to fifty battalion-sized units, in five brigade-sized organizations, with a total of over 26,000 soldiers (an armored division with attachments normally had less than forty battalion organizations). Their operations had begun on 8 November, the moment we were notified to deploy, and they had not stopped until we redeployed. They'd simultaneously deployed themselves, expanded by a factor of almost four, and built an infrastructure in the desert that had kept the corps supplied. It was austere, but it worked.

  During the VII Corps eighty-nine-hour war, the COSCOM had moved 2.6 million meals, 6.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, 2.2 million gallons of aviation fuel, and 327 major assemblies, such as tank engines. Every day, they moved 4,900 tons of ammo. To do this, in addition to the transportation assets of each division, they used 1,385 tractor trucks, 608 fuel tankers, 1,604 trailers, and 377 five-ton trucks, organized in 11 petroleum companies, 13 medium truck companies, 8 HET companies, and 4 medium/light truck companies. These transportation assets had been augmented by the CH-47 helos of the 11th Aviation Brigade and by C-130 airlift drops by CENTAF.

  Within the COSCOM was the 332nd Medical Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General Mike Strong, a physician from the Reserve component. My VII Corps surgeon, Colonel Bob Griffin, served as Mike's chief of staff and organized the staff of the brigade. They had fifteen hospitals, which provided world-class medical care to our soldiers. They'd arranged the medical support in bands of increasing medical capability, depending on how close you were to the action. In the band closest to the action were the medical assets of the divisions, augmented by five MASHs (mobile army surgical hospitals) from the medical brigade. In the next band were five combat-support hospitals, which augmented the surgical capability of the more forward and mobile MASHs and provided more beds. Back in Saudi, along Tapline Road, were the five evacuation hospitals. Of all our medical facilities, these had the most complete surgical and nursing capabilities, and were used to stabilize patients before evacuation from theater, or to keep patients until they recovered and could return to duty. During the war, the brigade recorded 1,768 admissions and 960 air evacuations. The list of professional medical personnel either called to active duty or already on active duty could fill the pages of a medical Who's Who. One hospital commander was a sixty-seven-year-old, physically fit orthopedic surgeon who had begun his service in North Africa as an enlisted soldier with the British in World War II. He wanted to continue to serve, and that he did. Many of our medevac pilots were Vietnam veterans who had stayed in the Reserve component and were proud to answer the call again.

  Brigadier General Bob McFarlin and all the logisticians of the 2nd COSCOM, the divisions, and separate corps units were heroes in my book. "Forget logistics and you lose," I have said on many occasions. I might add that one should not forget the logisticians, either. They were magnificent. Nothing got in their way.

  OPERATING SYSTEMS

  The Army uses the term battle operating systems to describe the seven parts of a tactical force that must work in harmony and in the right combination to ensure victory. These are maneuver, fires, logistics, command, mobility and countermobility, air defense, and intelligence.

  In Desert Storm, all elements of the VII Corps made these work. Though I have put most of my focus on elements such as maneuver, fires, command, and intelligence, there were many others:

  • The engineers of Colonel Sam Raines's 7th Engineer Brigade continually built and maintained thousands of kilometers of MSRs (main supply routes), opened and marked lanes through minefields, built several airfields, and destroyed Iraqi fortifications.

  • Colonel Rich Pomager's 14th Military Police Brigade processed over 20,000 prisoners, operated the many EPW compounds, and provided route security on the thousands of kilometers of corps MSRs.

  • The corps signal units of Colonel Rich Walsh's 93rd Signal Brigade ensured communications within the VII Corps, as well as with Riyadh and with units processing arriving soldiers and equipment through the ports and airfields. Signal soldiers and MPs operated in small units that often were isolated from their parent unit for extended periods. The successful completion of their mission was a tribute to their small-unit leadership.

  • The 7th Personnel Group, commanded by Colonel Jo Rusin, linked our wartime replacement soldiers with equipment, or, where necessary, moved individual replacements forward to units where and when they were needed. She and her staff (together with corps AG Lieutenant Colonel Eugenia Thornton) were meticulous in maintaining accountability and the records of those VII Corps soldiers killed in action, who died as a result of disease and non-battle injury, were wounded in action, and injured as a result of non-battle causes. Later the 7th was timely and thorough in reporting to Third Army the circumstances of soldier deaths caused by fratricide.

  • The 7th Finance Group, commanded by Colonel Russ Dowden, whose soldiers kept track of the myriad details of wartime finance so important to soldiers and families of VII Corps, many of whom had joined the Corps only recently. It was no small task and they did it superbly.

  • Lieutenant Colonel Larry Dogden's Air Defense TF 8/43 moved with the VII Corps, providing an umbrella from Iraqi tactical missile attack or helicopter attack (CENTAF had earlier established air supremacy against Iraqi fixed-wing attack). At one point I told Larry that his air defense units moved with the same rapid agility as a cavalry unit, the highest compliment I could pay them.

  0800–1000 VII CORPS TAC

  We had some orders to get out.

  First, I wanted the corps to understand the rules of engagement; in particular, I wanted them to know they had the right of self-defense. I imagined that many Iraqi units were out of communications and therefore did not know the war was over. Second, we had some minor repositioning to do in order to get into a better and more coherent posture, and some of the commanders might have figured that getting into a more coherent posture would violate the cease-fire. Third, I was concerned about force protection, especially unexploded munitions, which numbered in the tens of thousands all over the battlefield. We'd already had casualties and deaths from these — just getting out of your vehicle in the dark had become hazardous. Fourth, I wanted the corps to stop taking the PSG pills and to get out of the by-now-nasty chemical overgarments we had worn day and night since 24 February.

  Fifth, I wanted to meet with the commanders at noon.

  1000–1200 VISITS

  After taking care o
f these orders, I wanted to get out and around the corps as soon as possible, and personally congratulate as many units and commanders as I could. I began in the north with the 1st AD, to congratulate them on capturing the Medina headquarters.

  Ron Griffith had commanded the division with great skill and tenacity, and had been thorough in preparing his soldiers for war. His Old Ironsides team had reflected his thorough, savvy approach to war fighting. He'd drilled them hard. Their intelligence had always been current, and Ron had synchronized his ground maneuver, combat aviation, and artillery masterfully. I always knew that when Ron told me something, it was well considered, and he was what I called an "aware" commander; he always knew the score. I liked having Ron's savvy, street-smart commander wisdom on my team.

  Ron went on to four-star rank, and is currently Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, the number-two-ranking general in the Department of the Army.

  When Ron Griffith and I met that morning, I shook his hand and told him how proud I was of him and the soldiers and leaders of Old Ironsides.

  Ron was elated at the performance of his division, and well he should have been. They had gone farther in their attack than any other of our units. During their attack, they had destroyed the better part of a brigade of the Tawalkana, a brigade of the Adnan, and two-thirds of the Medina, and captured the HQ of that division (by then vacant) and the HQ of the Iraqi VII Corps.

  After I left Ron, we flew back toward the TAC. I noticed a tank unit on the ground and told Mark Greenwald to land so that I could talk to some of the soldiers. It was Company B, 1/8 Cavalry, a tank battalion in the 1st CAV. I walked up to a tank and talked to the crew. In a little while, some other soldiers gathered around, then identified themselves and their unit. When I asked what they had done, they told me they had moved all day and night to get there, but had never gotten into the fight. They were not happy about that.