I felt safe with Tex, even when he drove us into a minefield. Actually, it was Colonel Boyd who drove us into the minefield, and he was the boss, so Tex followed. Colonel Boyd was buzzing all the time and could not be still. Tired of standing around our camp, he jumped into his Humvee and told the driver to get moving. Tex tried to keep up, with Command Sergeant Major Woodley in the passenger seat and me in the back of our Humvee, known as the Ugly Mule.
We raced across the sand until Boyd’s driver hit the brakes, hard, and Tex stopped right behind him. The two Humvees were bumper to bumper in the middle of the empty desert. I looked out the window and saw why we had stopped so suddenly: we had driven into a cluster of unexploded bomblets, possibly dropped from rockets we had fired in the days before the ground attack. The bomblets were small cylinders shaped like soup cans. I knew that bumping them could detonate the bomblets, and despite the diminutive name, they could kill us all.
We sat for a minute while the sergeant major and the colonel talked on the radio about what to do. Tex and I looked out the window at the ground. I was wearing a helmet and flak vest over my chemical suit, but right then I wasn’t worried about protecting my chest or head. I moved over toward the middle of the Humvee to sit above the transmission, hoping to put a little more metal between the bomblets and my bottom. Now I understood the jokes about sitting on your helmet.
Woodley, the command sergeant major and the most senior enlisted man in the brigade, decided he would get out and guide us backwards and away from the bomblets. He was afraid to continue forward, and since we were in the rear vehicle, it made sense for us to back out first. Woodley led the way. He was forty-seven years old, most of those years spent in the army, and he was chesty and stern with a deep, gravelly voice. Nobody messed with him, and even Colonel Boyd treated him more like a peer than a subordinate.
He opened the door and stepped down onto the sand, one boot at a time. I didn’t think of him as especially graceful, but he could have been a ballet dancer walking on his toes to get behind the Ugly Mule. He waved at Tex to drive straight back, directing him to follow the tracks we had made going in. Tex eased on the accelerator and backed us toward the sergeant major and out of danger. When the Ugly Mule was safe, Woodley performed the same maneuver with Colonel Boyd’s Humvee.
One brush with death was not going to slow down Colonel Boyd. We were still zipping around the desert looking for action when a chaplain sped by in a Humvee flying a tall black flag with a white cross. The chaplain meant well, but he could have been a Crusader coming across the desert, with “Spiritual Maintenance Vehicle” painted on the windshield. Colonel Boyd roared over and made the chaplain take down the flag, explaining—well, yelling—that this was a war between armies, not religions.
On the morning of February 26, we were up at 4 a.m. It was so dark I couldn’t find the Ugly Mule. I stumbled around on the sand, groggy and sick to my stomach because of the lack of sleep and an overload of junk food, dragging my gear and my computer, hoping I wouldn’t be left behind when the brigade moved out. That would be dangerous, and worse, embarrassing.
Colonel Boyd snuck up on me in the blackness and I jumped. He was vibrating with enthusiasm, which I had learned was his normal state. “I remember what you said yesterday, and it was very astute, that there is a lot of movement and a lot of energy expended to get to this point,” Boyd declaimed in his full briefing voice.
I was barely focused. I enjoyed military theory as much as the next guy, but not at 4 a.m.
He droned on, “but you’ve got to remember, that it all ends with putting steel on the target. We tend to focus on the inputs and forget what is important is the output . . .”
Go away, colonel.
By 10:30 a.m., we had traveled seventy-one miles. I heard commanders on the military radio order the troops to let the Iraqis withdraw if they were on foot but to shoot up the enemy vehicles. Loose columns of Iraqi prisoners walked by us going the opposite way toward Saudi Arabia. Their uniforms were filthy, and they had no equipment, not even a change of clothes. The smell of them hit me like a punch.
Colonel Boyd had ants in his pants again, and off we sped in search of action. I could hear the whine of tank engines, the rattle of tracks, and scattered machine-gun fire. There were deep, rumbling explosions in the distance when bombs hit the ground. We were in untracked desert, with no buildings, roads, or landmarks. There were no trees and little vegetation, just varieties of sand: soft as pudding, gravelly mix, and hard-packed.
We pulled up onto a dune next to an American tank, and a startled tanker looked down on us and said, “Sir, uh, there is contact just over this hill.” That just made Colonel Boyd want to go closer, but he relented, and we drove back to the safety of the pack. The convoy headed deeper into Iraq.
At the next meeting in the TOC, one of the junior officers wanted an accounting of everyone’s position on the battlefield for his planning. Colonel Boyd got mad: “We happen to be in the middle of a bloody firefight. We don’t have time for that. You guys are going to get the basics right or one day you are going to get us all killed.” Everybody looked at the floor until the storm passed.
We stopped for a few hours at night. Woodley dug a little pit in the sand for a fire and heated up a metal coffee pot. The coffee was delicious. In the deep darkness, we stood around the Ugly Mule, ate junk food, and watched a rocket raid chew up an Iraqi convoy.
Everyone was hidden in darkness until the raid began. The first rockets launched in a whoosh of white fire. Then there were little red bursts in the sky downrange, and the bomblets rained on the Iraqi convoy. When a bomblet found a vehicle it started a yellow fire that sparked up when it hit ammo or fuel. Soon there was a row of golden balls burning on the horizon. At the best explosions, the soldiers went ooohhh and aaahhh like the Fourth of July and yelled “hooah” and “Get some,” until the sergeant major reminded them, with an Alabama drawl roughed up by too many Marlboros, “Hey, don’t forget there are guys dying out there.”
One of the younger officers, watching the convoy with night-vision goggles, said, “Fuck ’em.” We laughed, but everyone knew what was happening. They tried to pretend it was the same as training—that was the emotional protection.
I fell into it, too. If I had tried to open myself to all that pain, I would have dissolved. It was easier and safer to take one step back and maintain my distance. My job required me to be open and sensitive to what was happening around me, but I had to protect myself emotionally if I were going to be out here for months. I was watching, I told myself, not participating. That was my job.
Taylor, the medic, talked to me that night about his job and the irony of being a medical person at war: “I’m in the business of saving lives, not taking them. But if it comes down to him or me, it’s not going to be a coin toss.”
As we continued to roll through Iraq on the morning of February 27, the soldiers’ morale was high and we were moving fast. I bounced along in the rear of a vehicle, trying to take notes and listening to the back-and-forth on the military radio. Someone said, “See you in Basra,” and asked, “Permission to stop for tail?” A more mature voice answered back: “Chatter is fine, but we’ve got a job to do.”
There were unexploded US missiles in the sand, pointy noses buried like lawn darts, sharp fins in the air. They might have been duds, but maybe they were just waiting for a nudge to explode. We drove by Iraqi tanks with the turrets popped off as easily as caps off beer bottles. In one crater was a crumble of metal bits, as if the tank had been run through a grinder, forming a burnt metal nest for the chunky engine block. Armored personnel carriers burned and sizzled, shrunken bodies were charred and black. A helmet and uniform were spread on top of a greasy smear in the sand. Body parts. Blankets, helmets, boots, and scraps of paper blowing.
Our convoy stopped in front of an Iraqi bunker complex. Before we went closer, the commanders wanted to confirm no one was inside hiding. Just one Iraqi with an automatic weapon could kill a lot of people
if we were close enough. The guns set up and eight howitzers pounded the bunker for fifteen minutes. The ground shook, and the guns spit yellow fire. In the daylight, the rounds leaving the barrels reminded me of golf balls heading down the fairway. The targets were not the luxury bunkers where Saddam and his generals took shelter. These were holes scratched in the dirt, covered with sheets of tin and draped with blankets, or simply metal culverts buried under the sand.
When we got closer, we found hundreds of defeated Iraqi troops waiting to surrender. At first, the US soldiers weren’t sure how to react, glaring at the enemy because that’s what they thought was expected. Then an American threw down a water bottle. Someone else threw down an MRE. The Iraqis were tired and hungry and must have been frightened about what was going to happen to them. Some did not even have boots, and their feet were covered with sores. They waved quiet thank-yous for the food and water.
Then one of the Iraqis gave a thumbs-up and said, “Bush Number One! Down Saddam!” It wasn’t funny or even sad, but it was telling. Spc. William Raymond, twenty-one, of North Highlands, California, told me, “Yesterday I wanted to kill those guys. Today I just want to hug ’em.”
The US soldiers swept through the bunkers looking for stragglers. Inside they found a metal box with a padlock. They got excited and wanted to break it open, hoping to find secret military documents or at least a cool souvenir, maybe a pistol. They checked the box for booby traps, and then pounded off the lock. One of them carefully opened the lid and found the treasure: two potatoes, probably the last food in the bunker. Soldiers picked up abandoned Iraqi gear, ammo, and other souvenirs. They grabbed a small plastic bag of Iraqi dog tags that had been sealed for safekeeping.
I used the time riding in the Humvee to write. I had to look ahead for a clear patch of desert to type, otherwise the bumps sent my computer flying off my lap. When I had a story written, I printed a hard copy on a battery-operated printer. Then when I saw people going to the rear, especially on a helicopter, I ran over and asked them to deliver it to the military press operation. Everybody was happy to help. One day the colonel let me use the brigade radio to dictate a story. The radio operator read a copy of my story to another operator at the edge of our radio’s range. Then that operator read it to someone else, until the story was relayed to the press operation.
The sky was gray and dark, and I could see for miles across the unbroken desert, as featureless as the surface of the moon. Bolts of lightning came straight down on the plain. There was so much armor I imagined a herd of iron buffalo. The tanks chewed up big sand moguls that would have tipped over a car. A-10 attack jets, called Warthogs because of their blunt appearance, banked and rolled leisurely above us, the sound of their Gatling guns like the tearing of huge metal blankets. The convoy made a sharp right turn toward the final battle in Kuwait.
When we crossed the border, someone on the radio announced, “At 1643 hours on 27 February Thunder Brigade is in Kuwait.” Just then flashes erupted to the right, bright lights that appeared to be strobes or cameras flashing. I thought, either some Iraqi is taking our picture, or he’s trying to kill us. I was wearing my helmet and flak jacket but I noticed, as if for the first time, that the door of the Humvee was 1/4-inch plastic. The door would not have stopped an arrow, let alone an armor-piercing round. I didn’t hear noise from the weapons firing at us, so I hoped the muzzle flashes were still out of range.
Then I heard thumping rotors overhead. Roaring up from the south, a US attack helicopter flew across the desert straight toward the shooting Iraqis. The helicopter was so low it looked like a dragonfly gliding above the sand. It dipped its nose and fired, sending out a string of white pearls of light that settled on the Iraqi armored vehicle and turned it into a ball of fire. No more shooting. The helicopter banked and turned away from us. The convoy moved on.
There was fighting all night, and then it stopped.
President Bush came on the radio at 5 a.m. on Thursday, February 28 to announce a pause in offensive operations. Everyone around me was shocked. We were just getting going and now it was time to stop? It was hard for the soldiers to understand what was happening. We had the Iraqis on the run, and we could have destroyed all their tanks and equipment. No one I saw wanted to kill more soldiers, but neither did they want them to escape back to Iraq with their weapons.
A few people thought we should march on Baghdad and dig out the root of the problem—Saddam—but the commanders explained the mission was to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, and then go home. There was not going to be an occupation of Kuwait, and no one I was with even hinted at occupying Iraq. Still, there was confusion and disappointment. A soldier told me, “I don’t want my son to have to come back here and finish this thing. Let’s do it.”
There was no celebration of victory. The only cheer went up when we were told we could remove the chemical suits, which were lined with charcoal and had stained our skin black as coal miners. I had been sleeping in my suit and even my boots during the short nights. When I pulled down the zipper, the sour smell of my own body just about knocked me over. I cleaned up with a wet towel and wrote a story about the end of the war and the reluctance of the soldiers to stop so soon. I printed a copy and gave it to a general heading to the rear in a helicopter. I sent a backup version on the army teleprinter.
Colonel Boyd gathered his officers. He acknowledged that everyone was exhausted and that they should force the soldiers to sleep; then they all had to get haircuts. When we go home, Boyd told the officers, “We can say we played, we played big time.” They had fired 9,144 rounds from the howitzers and 2,700 rockets. We spent the day searching for souvenirs, eating junk food, and watching the engineers blow up Iraqi vehicles with carefully set charges.
By the next day, I was convinced the war really had ended. I had not expected this kind of victory, and I had not expected it in only four days. We listened to civilian news broadcasts on a shortwave radio, and the reporters said the US troops arriving in Kuwait City were being greeted as heroes.
Out here the sand was blowing horizontally in a stinging, blinding veil. Driving was impossible, and even walking was dangerous because I couldn’t see three feet. The sky at noon was dark as midnight because the retreating Iraqis had torched the oil fields, and inky clouds of smoke blocked the sun. We hunkered down under the black sky and whipping sand.
When the sandstorm cleared, I said good-bye and promised to send the brigade copies of my stories, which I had filed at least once a day. Bill Cain, the intelligence officer, confessed that I wasn’t at all what he had imagined a reporter to be. It wasn’t like in the movies, he said, where the reporters and the soldiers were going at each other all the time. Colonel Boyd presented me with a brigade coin, which was an honor. I understood that if someone from the brigade ever asked to see the coin, and I couldn’t produce it, the drinks were on me.
I never was a member of their pack, but the brigade had let me run alongside for a few thrilling days during the hunt of their lives. I was proud to have been with them. The soldiers presented me with a Russian-style, Iraqi tanker’s helmet as a souvenir, and one of the Iraqi dog tags they had found abandoned in the desert bunker.
I hitched a ride back to Saudi Arabia with some National Guardsmen in two Humvees. We stayed on a marked route through the desert to avoid hitting a mine or unexploded ordnance, and we left the headlights off so we would not attract fire. We pulled up suddenly at a cluster of tents. A dozen Arabs in fatigues came running at us, screaming commands and waving their weapons. We hit the brakes and my eyes went wide. The soldiers turned out to be friendly Egyptians. They bummed cigarettes and confirmed we were headed in the right direction.
We were in a tight little convoy when the vehicle ahead of us—the only thing I could see were the brake lights—vanished in the dark. We jumped out and ran forward until we saw the back end of the Humvee sticking up in the air, the rear wheels spinning. The front was jammed into a waist-high trench. I guessed the trench had been made by our allies
the Syrians, because I remembered the sergeant major telling me, admiringly, “Those boys can dig.”
No one was hurt badly, but everybody seemed paralyzed looking at the buried Humvee. What are we gonna do? I dunno, what do you wanna do? They went back and forth, and I was afraid we were going to spend all night there. Someone wanted to light a flare. No, another one said, we might call in an air strike on ourselves. I just wanted to get home.
In this case, I wasn’t going to be a passive observer. I rummaged around in the vehicles until I found an “entrenching tool” (in the army, it could never just be a shovel) and started hacking at the sand. Everybody watched me dig. “Isn’t there another shovel?” I asked. Somebody started digging in the dark on the other side of the vehicle. Then silence. “I don’t hear digging over there!” I yelled, sweating now and increasingly angry. Dig, dig. Silence. “I don’t hear shoveling!” Dig, dig. We broke down the trench wall, used a cable to pull out the stuck vehicle, and rumbled south.
I needed a phone. I had not talked to the office since before the ground attack, and I wanted to check in. When we reached the Saudi border, I convinced the guys to stop at a hotel by promising to treat them all to phone calls home. They hadn’t talked to their families in weeks. It was Friday afternoon in Washington, and my coworkers would be clearing their desks to head across the street to Stan’s bar.
At a worn and dusty roadside motel, I explained to the clerk at the front desk that we just wanted to make a few phone calls, but I would happily pay for a room. I was excited to talk to the office. I wanted a friendly voice from home, a pat on the back for a job well done, and a cash bonus.
I dialed the number in Washington, and the editor on duty answered.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
Finding the News Page 23