Clifton interrupted the Beirut war with frequent trips to Iran to cover the fall of the Shah and the return of Khomeini, and then covered the Iran–Iraq war from the fronts of both sides. He was later posted back to Hong Kong, London, San Francisco, New York and finally New Delhi. The last serious war he covered was the 1991 Gulf War. Occasional forays into the front-line were enmeshed if not embedded in the way contemporary conflict is covered. Clifton wrote in 1991:
There are more than 700 press people registered with the US military’s Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran. No more than about a hundred get anywhere near action at any time. That hundred is divided into a dozen small groups, then chivied, corralled, controlled and censored by press officers, who have virtually no experience of war and even less experience of the press or its needs …
The problems were clear the day the war began. Reporters waiting on the carrier John F. Kennedy to question pilots coming back from the biggest air campaign since World War II were handed a list of suggested questions. The first was, ‘How do you feel?’ At least they got to ask questions. I needed to interview a noncombatant officer stationed 800 yards from my hotel. A J.I.B. officer said no. He had orders: no ‘unilaterals’ (interviews by non-pool individuals). ‘In fact, as I read it,’ he said, ‘you are not allowed to say “Hi” to a soldier in the street. That would be a unilateral.’
If you’ve been around a while you yearn for Vietnam, where you could go where you liked and report what you wanted. You even get nostalgic for the good old days in Iraq – when I covered the Iran war I got to the front, got to see the commanding general in the field, even got to talk to Saddam Hussein, whose interpreter almost fainted in trying to devise a polite translation of ‘Do you fear assassination?’
Clifton says he is now semi-retired in Melbourne and very glad he’s too old and too out of shape to cover the current Iraq War. His passionate book about the civil war in Lebanon, God Cried, with photographs by Catherine Leroy, was published in 1983.
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It was, said the battalion’s scholarly executive officer, Maj. Robert Williams, ‘the chance to do what every cavalry unit wants to do once in its life. Drop the reins and charge.’ As the tanks approached Kuwait City, they were stretched out so far they disappeared into a mist thick with smoke from burning oil wells. Their big 120-mm guns swung restlessly from side to side looking like nothing so much as great dinosaurs sniffing for prey. They charged forward in a hail of orange tracers from their turret-mounted .50-caliber machine-guns. Out of the mist came the chatter of their light machine-guns and the thudding boom of their big guns.
The rolling dunes were honeycombed with Iraqi bunkers defended by light artillery pieces and dug-in T-55 tanks. The Hounds picked off tanks from a mile away. One just ahead of me disintegrated into enormous fragments; the turret, weighing several tons, flew 20 feet into the air like the lid of a giant garbage can. The tracers set off black and scarlet fireballs and brilliant white showers as gas-storage tanks and munitions went up. A strong wind was blowing from behind us, so we rushed ahead wreathed in the black and white smoke from our burning quarry.
Most Iraqis just gave up – or tried to. It was a bizarre scene. The advance was like a giant hunt. The Iraqis were driven ahead of us like animals. But as we streamed forward in a diamond-shape formation more than two miles long and nearly as wide, we had no time to pick up prisoners. Huddled groups of green-uniformed soldiers waving white rags of surrender stood, bewildered, while tanks roared by. They looked like spectators caught on a demolition-derby circuit.
But some fought back. ‘I was driving along in my hummer, and I saw this T-55 that everyone had passed without hitting because it seemed abandoned,’ recalled First Lt. Mark Powell, 27. ‘Just as I came alongside, this Iraqi jumped on the turret with a rocket launcher on his shoulder and aimed at me. I was dead. Then there was this huge double explosion and I really thought they’d got me. I looked up, and I saw the guy against a wall of bright red flame, with the launcher still on his shoulder. Then he sort of vaporised. Major Williams had seen him and fired, and the two bangs were his gun and the T-55 blowing up.’ Williams, a former West Point assistant ethics professor, said only: ‘I killed my first man today, and I’m not sure I feel very good about it.’
Riding herd on this juggernaut was Lt. Col. Douglas Tystad, Hound Six on the radio. From his lead tank, Hound Dog A1, the lean, selfdeprecating South Dakotan talked almost continuously for 10 hours during the initial charge through Kuwait. Tystad’s role fell somewhere between that of Attila the Hun and a primary school teacher trying to keep in line an unruly group of children – tank crews roaring along on 63-ton monsters with names like ‘Bad Attitude’, ‘Born to be Wild’ and ‘Brain Damage’. His radio calls were channelled through ‘Porcupine Six’, a Vietnam-vintage armoured personnel carrier bristling with antennas that was used as the unit’s communications vehicle. I rode in ‘Porcupine Six’, just behind Tystad’s lead tank at the centre of the front-line. It was easy to see why Tystad’s brigade commander later nominated him for the Silver Star.
The smoky mist made it hard for widely spread tanks to keep formation, and they tended to wander into each other’s lanes. ‘You gotta keep out east, you’re wandering, now get back where you should be,’ said Tystad. Someone radioed that he saw unidentified tanks at 2300 metres. ‘Well, move forward and shoot the goddam things.’ Two huge fireballs blossomed from tanks barely visible at that range. Another voice described Iraqis in armoured vehicles ‘who look as if they’re trying to surrender’. Tystad replied: ‘If they don’t get out quickly, you gotta kill them.’ But when another young commander wanted to fire a few rounds into a bunker with a white flag ‘to see if we can shake a few of ’em out,’ Tystad commanded: ‘Don’t be a cowboy, you can’t do that, you gotta respect the white flag.’
We reached our main objective at about 4 p.m. Wednesday: the al-Mutlaa police station, a square concrete blockhouse. It was important because it sits west of Kuwait City on the main Sixth Ring Motorway, which turns into the highway north to Iraq. We couldn’t see it clearly, but thousands of Iraqis were trying to escape up the highway.
The Hounds soon stopped that. In the smoky twilight, the lead tanks opened up on Iraqi armour grouped outside the station. An Iraqi T-55 tank immediately blew up in a great fountain of white fire. Secondary explosions went on for an hour. Next to go was an armoured personnel carrier. Then a line of fuel tankers spewed flame and oily smoke across the other burning vehicles. Orange and green tracers swept the buildings and armoured vehicles now scattering off the road. Then, in the middle of this mayhem, there was a sudden lull, as if everyone had decided to reload at the same time. As soon as the firing stopped, a middle-aged, balding man in a long Kuwaiti robe walked toward the US tanks. He strolled over to the nearest Bradley armoured personnel carrier, gestured his thanks to the driver, then walked off down the road as the firing broke out again. At its peak, the scene looked like something out of a medieval artist’s vision of hell, a great backdrop of leaping flames against which we could see the tiny figures of men frantically trying to escape the fire.
That night we mourned our own casualty, S/Sgt Harold Witzke, the battalion’s master gunner. While the Hounds blasted the police station, Witzke and a group of men set up the battalion’s Tactical Operations Center nearby. As he was inspecting the perimeter, Witzke was shot dead by a sniper from inside an adjoining junkyard. He had taught most of the battalion gunnery skills and was known as both a ‘stud’, a man to be admired, and a ‘mentor’, a man to be learned from. He was 28 years old, with a wife and two children in Copperas Cove, Texas. The battalion’s operations sergeant major, a tough little veteran named Luis Montero, paid him a soldier’s tribute: ‘You could ask him to do anything, night or day, and he’d just do it. You never had to check on him.’
Witzke died fighting. Many of the Iraqis killed at the police station died dishonourably – while fleeing with everything they could plunder. That was clear when we went
back the next day to see the damage the Hounds had wrought. It was terrifying.
The initial shelling had blocked the road off, and a vast traffic jam of more than a mile of vehicles, perhaps 2000 or more, had formed behind it. Allied jets had then repeatedly pounded the blocked vehicles. As we drove slowly through the wreckage, our armoured personnel carrier’s tracks splashed through great pools of bloody water. We passed dead soldiers lying, as if resting, without a mark on them. We found others cut up so badly, a pair of legs in its trousers would be 50 yards from the top half of the body. Four soldiers had died under a truck where they had sought protection. Others were fanned out in a circle as if a bomb had landed in the middle of their group. I saw no Kuwaiti civilians among the dozens of corpses.
Most grotesque of all was the charred corpse of an Iraqi tank crewman, his blackened arms stretched upward in a sort of supplication. He lay just a few yards from a grandiose monument to Saddam. It was a sort of shrine, 15 feet high, bearing two portraits of Saddam in coloured tiles – one showing him in a suit, the other with him dressed as a Kuwaiti in flowing white robes and headdress. ‘I’m going down there later with 50 pounds of C4 [plastic explosive] and I’m going to blow the goddam thing sky high,’ said the Tiger Brigade’s commander, Col. John Sylvester.
Apart from military vehicles of all kinds, there were private Kuwaiti automobiles, Kuwaiti police cars, orange school buses, trucks and ambulances. Many obviously were stolen; they had been hot-wired. Nearly all were piled with loot. There were trucks filled with carpets and furniture, cars packed with video recorders, tapes, radios, television sets, boxes of men’s underwear in original wrappers, women’s jewellery, hundreds of bottles of perfume, books, cutlery, children’s toys, medical equipment, bunches of artificial flowers. There was even a rosary, probably stolen from a Filipino servant in what is a very Muslim country. One of the ambulances was piled high with AK-47 rifles. Marine Brig. Gen. Paul Van Riper looked disgustedly at the tangled wreckage. ‘This was an army that came to Kuwait for one reason,’ he said. ‘To loot and pillage.’
In his tent afterward, Sylvester said that the battle had gone exactly the way he had outlined in his Commander’s Intent, the description of an attack given to subordinate officers before a campaign begins. ‘It [was] to be a quick, violent action, resulting in decisive delivery of overwhelming firepower on the enemy,’ he said. Sylvester’s own Intent could be used to describe the whole of this extraordinary campaign; never before has such overwhelming firepower been delivered so decisively in so short a time. Harried relentlessly by men like the Hounds, Saddam Hussein’s Mother of Battles was never allowed time to give birth.
Cold Revenge
Monica Attard
Monica Attard was the ABC’s Moscow correspondent from 1990 to 1994, when she returned to become presenter of the nightly current affairs program PM. Her radio reports from the front-line streets of Moscow in 1991 are among the most vivid ever broadcast in Australia. Attard seemed to be everywhere that was important in those tumultuous days, speaking to an extraordinary range of contacts and people she met in the street – and on the backs of tanks. This was the kind of immediate, documentary-style radio reporting that Chester Wilmot and Frank Legg had in mind 50 years before. It had the urgency and flavour that more modern technology such as the internet could not provide. She won a Gold Walkley for her coverage in 1991. Her book Russia: Which Way Paradise? is the result of the experience and was published in 1997.
Monica Attard is one of Australia’s most respected news and current affairs journalists. She is the recipient of a total of four Walkley Awards. Following her time with PM, Attard moved to ABC Radio’s The World Today. Monica’s latest role is as presenter of Sunday Profile on ABC Local Radio.
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Fear, which picks out objects in the dark,
Guides a ray of moonlight to an axe.
From behind the wall comes an enormous knock –
What is there? A spectre, a thief, or rats?
–ANNA AKHMATOVA, from ‘The Seventh Book’, 1921
On the 17th of August, 1991, Boris Yeltsin was in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, where he was signing a bilateral treaty with the Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. Nazarbayev was happy. The two republics had just made a substantial step towards taking hold of their own affairs. Gorbachev’s central government had played no part in this event. The Kazakh wanted to eat, drink and be merry. Yeltsin, however, felt a heaviness he couldn’t ascribe to anything physical. He had a ‘sense of vague, unfocused anxiety’.
In Moscow a powerful group of men close to the president were anxious too. The day before, the K.G.B. chief Vladimir Kruchkov, the Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov, the Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, and the Vice-president Gennady Yanaev had gathered in a Kremlin office to talk over the ‘crisis’. To them, the situation seemed hopeless.
The country was falling apart. Gorbachev had refused to return ‘order’ to the country as far as they were concerned. Protesters had all but done away with the authority of the party while Gorbachev had allowed its power to be constitutionally whittled down. He’d abandoned Article Six. Yeltsin was gnawing at what was left of the party’s once almighty hold on power. He’d even outlawed its propaganda cells in all Russian workplaces. And in three days’ time, Gorbachev would help Yeltsin bury the USSR by signing the Union treaty when he returned to Moscow. Together they would consign the workers’ paradise to the dustbin of history.
All of the coup plotters except Vladimir Kruchkov felt frustrated. Only the grey man of Lubyanka had given serious, strategic thought to what to do. A few of the plotters were assigned the gruesome task of confronting Gorbachev. He’d be given an ultimatum: either support a state of emergency or step down.
In the afternoon of the next day, the 18th of August, there was a knock at the door of Gorbachev’s Foros villa. The leader had visitors. Gorbachev began to sweat. How unusual, he thought, to receive uninvited, unexpected visitors. He picked up a phone to call Moscow to see what all this was about. But the line was dead. All lines into the villa had been cut. ‘Noo vsyo’ [‘Well, that’s it’] Gorbachev told his wife, Raisa Maximovna, as he went from phone to phone with mounting despair.
The delegation which had come to Foros from Moscow was rude, according to Gorbachev. They told him that a State Committee for the State of Emergency had been formed. It was called the GKChP. The plotters showed Gorbachev a list of its members. Gorbachev was shocked, ‘deeply hurt’ he would say later. Finally, the penny had dropped. He had been betrayed. The ringleaders were men he had nurtured and trusted.
The delegation told Gorbachev, incorrectly, that Boris Yeltsin had been arrested and they urged him to put his name to the GKChP. He refused. ‘Then resign,’ one of them demanded. Gorbachev told them they were criminals. If they were really worried about the crisis which had gripped the Soviet Union, they should convene the parliament and discuss the problems in an open forum. He was, of course, dithering, his mind darting through all the possibilities and consequences of his refusal to go along with the coup. But to this suggestion Gorbachev received a reply he didn’t want to hear. The delegation muttered concern about his health which they claimed had suffered during the perestroika period. Gorbachev knew what they were up to.
‘General Valentin Varennikov, the commander of the ground forces, spewed out the usual line,’ said Gorbachev after the coup attempt was defeated and he was brought back to Moscow. ‘The country was being torn apart by extremists and people were tired. I told him I’d heard all this before. And I said to them they must be mad if they think the country would simply follow another dictatorship. People are not that tired.’
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When the delegation returned to the Kremlin, Yanaev, Gorbachev’s vice-president, wanted to know – incredibly – whether Gorbachev had agreed to the GKChP. Told that Gorbachev was angry and had dissociated himself from the hardliners completely, Yanaev began to worry.
A year later, as he sat in his apartment waiting
to be tried for treason, he told me that he had wanted to speak with Gorbachev himself. The bottom line was that he didn’t want to assume the presidency and with it responsibility for the coup and worse still for running the country. I wondered whether the question of morality had played any part in his anxiety. But the man who sat before me was no moral beacon. He was a drunk who mouthed the Leninist mantra for a bit of payola – a huge apartment, a car, free airfares and power. It was more likely that his sudden concern for Gorbachev’s welfare was born of pure fear that no-one would take him seriously. And nobody did.
‘To be honest, I wasn’t up to it. The country was in a mess, I knew I couldn’t fix the problems. So how can they blame me for the coup?’ he asked me.
Indeed, Yanaev was the consummate Soviet – subservient not just to the party but to any form of authority, unable to make decisions, unwilling to accept responsibility. On the night before the GKChP seized power, Yanaev sweated over a document sitting on the table before him. It had been drawn up by the K.G.B. chief and declared to the country and to the world the formation of the committee and the state of emergency. It would use as its justification the lie that Gorbachev was too ill to rule. Yanaev procrastinated but eventually succumbed to habit.
‘You see, I was ordered to sign the document and I am telling you, I never believed that responsibility for the GKChP would be mine alone. Lukyanov [Chairman of the Supreme Soviet] told me the parliament would support me,’ he said.
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