by Jim Proser
0654 Hours
Continuing smoke and cloud cover eliminate fighter-attack aircraft and limit the use of Cobra attack helicopters. Reports at headquarters indicate that the Iraqi III Corps are receiving orders to withdraw. Commanding general Boomer of the First Marine Expeditionary Force wants III Corps caught and wiped out. He orders First Division commander Myatt to start the attack.
The battleground approaching the airport is littered with immobilized enemy tanks and abandoned vehicles. But some Iraqis remain in their vehicles, lying in ambush for the Marines. As Task Forces Ripper and Papa Bear advance, scout detachments use thermal sights to determine whether the vehicles have a “hot” or “cold” signature, indicating whether their systems are turned on. Hot vehicles survive only seconds after discovery. It is stop-and-start fighting as Ripper and Papa Bear crawl forward. Ripper is ordered to halt ten miles south of the airport. Myatt orders Papa Bear into a flanking position for the final push through Saddam’s front door. All units are ordered to halt for the evening.
0615 Hours—25 February 1991
Task Force Ripper advances in a wedge formation, with the Third Tank Battalion in the lead. Gunnery Sergeant Cochran journals:
Moved out 0615 for next obj[ective] which was Kuwait International Airport. Ambushed by small arms fire from l[eft] flank. We returned fire, they disengaged and fled. We are getting reports of Iraq units surrendering in mass now and leaving equip[ment] abandoned in place. Encountered many abandoned inf[antry] positions and tanks as we move on north, and recon by fire. Move into small bunker complex. Destroyed 1 bunker. Stopped at LOA [limit of advance] for resupply and orders. Visibility very bad all day. Can’t see well [and] can’t range to tgets [targets]. Must fire all engagements from established battlesight SOP [standard operating procedure].18
0904 Hours
Task Force Ripper is attacked by small-arms fire on their left or western flank. They return fire at the attackers while continuing to advance northeast. It is only harassing fire by a band of disorganized, poorly led infantry and quickly dissipates. Saddam’s reign of terror over senior military commanders, who are constantly suspected of plotting against him, has left many demoralized officers in charge of timid and unmotivated troops. This weakness at the very heart of Saddam’s army is causing the uneven resistance and collapse the Marines are finding all around them. Many brave Iraqis maintain military discipline and fight, some even valiantly. Others, poor farmers and tradesmen pressed into service and motivated only by the threat of being shot by their commanders, decide to shoot their commanders instead and surrender.
About an hour into the attack, Mattis’s 1/7 runs into a large unmapped quarry directly in front of it. Mattis shifts the 1/7 left into Third Tank Battalion’s zone to get around the quarry. He confirms his identity with Third Tank to avoid a friendly-fire incident. CAAT 2 and Team Mech, up front at the point, pour heavy machine gun fire into the quarry as they pass, probing for hidden enemy. The quarry is quiet.
As they pass the quarry to resume their position in the advance, a hailstorm of steel slams into them from barely visible dug-in positions in front of them as the train of unarmored supply trucks trailing them is attacked from behind. It is a trap. Enemy troops and armored vehicles pour out of the quarry and tear into the soft-sided trucks. The 1/7 is surrounded.
Mattis halts and, under heavy fire, organizes a rescue of the supply vehicles behind him. With the low visibility and spotty air reconnaissance, he has no idea of the size of the attacking forces in front or in back of him. He pulls a section of the CAAT 2 anti-armor company and Company C mechanized infantry from his front and sends them to take on the quarry attackers. For some time, as in a venerated story of the 1/7 in a previous war, the battalion is fighting in several directions at once. At that battle, the commander of the 1/7 at the time, the Marine legend Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, shouted to his executive officer, “They’re on the left of us, on the right of us, they’re behind us and in front of us. They won’t get away from us this time!”19
Following Chesty’s example of explosive aggression, Mattis attacks to his front as Company C attacks to the rear. Mattis sees several enemy cannon shells skip harmlessly along the ground through his formation, missing every vehicle and exploding behind them. Colonel Fulford will later say that divine intervention prevented the Iraqis from hitting anything in several engagements. Mattis felt he was simply up against “the gang who couldn’t shoot straight.” In any case, Mattis is beginning to be rumored as having that most important quality in battlefield commanders, the one that the Emperor Napoleon insisted upon before commissioning his leaders. He is lucky.
Company C finishes cutting the quarry attackers to pieces behind them, killing dozens of dismounted troops and destroying several vehicles. They pursue the retreating Iraqis into the quarry and finish them off.
As the guns go quiet in front and the quarry becomes a silent graveyard, Mattis halts again to assess casualties and allow CAAT 2 and Company C to rejoin the steel spearhead. Then 1/7 rolls on again over the broken bodies and burning machines of some of Saddam’s best fighters. They continue toward their attack position near Kuwait International Airport.
Halting at their attack position, Task Force Ripper and the 1/7 again wait for Task Force Papa Bear to join them. Papa Bear has swept the al-Jaber airfield and is on its way north. Near Kuwait International, CAAT 2 begins taking sporadic small-arms fire from a group of buildings 650 yards to the northeast. Mattis, perhaps still edgy after driving into the ambush at the quarry, unleashes the full fury of his weapons against the building—artillery, mortars, machine guns, 40-millimeter MK-19 grenades, and light anti-armor weapons (LAAWs). Thousands of glowing orange-yellow tracer rounds rain fire into the buildings, and explosions blast gaping holes in their sides, rocking them on their foundations. In moments the burning, shattered buildings collapse, burying the dead and wounded attackers inside together.
They have picked the absolute worst time to shoot at Jim Mattis and his men. While other units have been running into bunkers of Iraqis ready to surrender after brief firefights, Mattis has been running into well-planned and competently led ambushes. By the time he and the 1/7 get to the airport, shooting at Mattis is like poking a mad dog with a stick. The first layer of his reputation, along with his personally disliked nickname, “Mad Dog,” has been created.
1530 Hours
The final advance toward Kuwait International begins in spite of clouds of black oil smoke obscuring nearly everything around them. Minutes into the action, Lance Corporal Peter Ramsey of CAAT 2 spots two “hot” T-54s through his thermal sights, about seventy yards away. Before the Iraqi tanks can even see Ramsey and CAAT 2 through the smoke, a pair of TOW missiles blows both of them to pieces. Another 1/7 crew spots another “hot” T-62 and takes it out with a TOW missile.
Just fifteen minutes into the attack, they roll up on an unmapped obstacle belt that begins with three bands of double-strand concertina wire. Mattis notifies Fulford of the obstacle in his sector, and before Fulford can reply with instructions to go through or around it, Mattis orders a quick breach. He’s going through it. Heavy enemy fire across their entire front mixes with a windstorm that blows another coat of sand and crude oil over every machine and every exposed turret gunner. The gunners have to use their fingers to scrape the oil sludge off the glass eye ports of their gas masks to see anything.
By 1609 the 1/7 has destroyed eight armored vehicles. They lay down suppressing fire to protect the engineers who run from cover into the fire zone to manually prime the line charges, forty-foot-long steel chains studded with high explosive. When these are shot out in front of a vehicle across a minefield or other obstacle, the detonator wire frequently snaps, breaking the connection to the remote-control detonator. Combat engineers then have to execute one of the most dangerous assignments in combat: run from protective cover, sometimes under fire, and manually light the fuse to set off the charges.
Two Iraqi tanks suddenly roll ou
t of the smoke two hundred yards to the front and begin raking the engineers with machine-gun fire. They dive for cover. Team Tank zeroes in the Iraqi tanks and blows them away. The engineers repeat their dangerous ordeal three times to open the three lanes that Mattis orders. Team Tank with its mine plows clears two additional lanes so the battalion can pass through more quickly.
When the Iraqis realize that Mattis’s 1/7 has just rolled through their best defenses under heavy fire, they begin to disintegrate as a fighting force. As Mattis reported later in Leatherneck, the magazine of the Marine Corps, “I think they thought it would take us 24 hours to reach the second breach, giving them enough time to move guns and reposition ammunition supplies, but they guessed wrong. It took First Battalion 40 minutes to clear a path through the first minefield, but only eight minutes to make it through the second breach. That was twice as fast as we did during rehearsals and this was with the added factor of 82mm mortar, 122mm artillery and machine-gun fire.”20
Mattis and his 1/7 chase fleeing Iraqis north along the western airport perimeter, rolling over and crushing their positions as he goes. He orders a hailstorm of artillery to run ahead of him and then cuts through the surviving enemy like a scythe through wheat. The wind builds into a raging sandstorm, blinding the 1/7 and isolating it from the rest of Ripper. Mattis’s GPS navigation fails. He continues the attack. Moments later, the GPS backup system also fails. Mattis continues the attack, navigating with only a compass, a paper map, and odometer readings.
He will never again trust complex electronics in battle, always referring to paper maps. Notoriously spotty radio communications are also not to be trusted. Instead, under Mattis’s command, each Marine must know the general’s commander’s intent before the battle. When communications fail in battle, as they always do, each man knows the strategy, tactics, and objective without further discussion.
Partially blind, with visibility between ten and a hundred yards in all directions, Mattis attacks through the oily darkness, killing everyone in his path who resists but showing mercy to those who surrender. “We did a number of things to lessen their will to fight,” Mattis will say later. “We wanted them to know we weren’t going to kill them and when Iraqis hiding in trenches saw their comrades being herded to the rear and the wounded being treated, that lessened their will to fight even more.”21
But those who fired on Task Force Ripper were shown no mercy. They were crushed under the task force’s tank treads, plowed into their graves while still alive, and had their will to fight permanently shattered by images of violent death that would haunt their nightmares for decades.
1720 Hours
Seven hundred yards south of Kuwait City and four hundred yards west of the airport perimeter, Mattis halts and orders his infantry to dismount into the crude-oil-and-sand storm. They take positions along Highway 6, the main artery into Kuwait City. No one can see the city less than a half mile away through the storm. The Marines dig in as the storm pelts them with greasy grit from the bowels of the earth that stinks of tar and rotten eggs—a genuine shitstorm.
Mattis has outrun the rest of Ripper, exposing his right flank. As he repositions and waits for Ripper’s elements to catch up, his immediate concern is for his obstacle-clearing vehicles, which are carrying full loads of high-explosive line charges. A rocket or mortar hit on any one of them would be lights out for dozens of Marines. He waits in a defensive formation until the rest of Ripper and all of Task Force Shepherd catch up, using the thermal sights of his tank and TOW gunners to see through the shitstorm in all directions.
Task Force Shepherd, normally covering Task Force Ripper’s right or eastern flank, has been fighting its way up coastal highway 40. About an hour after the 1/7 reaches Highway 6, Shepherd finds the airport’s eastern perimeter fence, turns north and fights its way up the east side as Ripper had done along the west. Driving north all the way to the city racetrack, Shepherd hits more Iraqi units at 1830. By 1930 it controls the racetrack and is once again covering Ripper and the 1/7’s right flank. General Myatt lets Shepherd rest in place for five hours.
0230 Hours—26 February 1991
Task Force Shepard pulls out from Highway 6 next to Ripper and moves south to assist in the attack on Kuwait International, leaving Ripper in place against any attempted counterattack coming from the city.
0430 Hours
The attack on the airport begins in complete darkness. At 0645, the Marines raise the Marine Corps colors on the flagpole in front of the airport terminal. Fighting has stopped all across the division front. Myatt orders a halt for all units. For Mattis and the 1/7, the war is over.
1615 Hours
Myatt downgrades the MOPP level to zero, allowing the Marines to get out of their chemical protection suits for the first time in almost four days. An hour later the order comes down to stop taking the nauseating nerve agent protection pills (NAPP) and Cipro antibiotics that have been required since August.
The First Division has lost eighteen Marines killed in action, and fifty-five have been wounded. They’ve lost one tank, one truck, one howitzer, and one Humvee. Saddam has lost 10,365 troops by surrender, an unknown number killed and wounded, 600 tanks, 450 armored vehicles, and 750 trucks. As Mattis and his 1/7 stand at their post south of Kuwait City, Saddam’s remaining 70,000 troops are in full retreat across the border, headed north back to Iraq on Highway 80. There they meet the Marine Third Air Wing and a battalion of the US Army’s CH-64 Cobra helicopter gunships in what is officially known as the Battle of Rumaylah, for the oil fields nearby, but unofficially known as “the turkey shoot.” Highway 80 unofficially becomes known as “the Highway of Death.”22
As the sun comes up on February 27, 1991, Saddam’s elite Republican Guard Divisions lie defenseless and strung out along eighty miles of the highway without cover or air defenses of any kind. They never make it back to their barracks in Baghdad. Saddam will lose another seven hundred military vehicles and estimates of up to ten thousand additional men along the Highway of Death that day.
Apparently, Saddam leads a country that can survive ten thousand deaths in one day—as he had taunted President Bush that America could not do. Saddam’s Iraq not only survived ten thousand deaths that day, it was invigorated by them.
This humiliation at the hands of the Americans has revealed the weakness of Saddam’s Sunni tribe. To survive among their enemies, they immediately begin to rebuild their army. Over the next decade, Saddam will foment and finance terrorist covert operations to internally weaken America and other enemies, stockpile more chemical weapons, begin developing nuclear weapons and a gigantic science-fiction creation last attempted by Adolf Hitler, called a Super Gun. For Mattis, the war against Saddam Hussein, which he thought ended at the Kuwait International Airport, in fact has just begun.
8
The Sleeping Enemy
My philosophy of command has several basic assumptions. First, all Marines want to do the job. Second, mission accomplishment in the Marine Corps requires the combined efforts of all hands. Last, I assume that all Marines can be trusted.
—Captain Jim Mattis, “Concept of Command,” 1983
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Mattis and the Marines enjoy a hero’s welcome back in the United States. The first military parades since the end of World War II shower Desert Storm veterans in New York City, Washington, DC, and California with honor and ticker tape. The 1/7’s Marine Corps Band marches through Oceanside, California, home city of Camp Pendleton, playing the “Marines’ Hymn” for adoring citizens waving yellow ribbons and American flags. The stain of disgraceful retreat from Vietnam is suddenly bleached from memory by the glaring sunlight of victory. America has formed a powerful fist of allies and crushed a snarling Iraqi braggart like a fly, liberating the Kuwaiti people and creating the beginning of a new world order with America as the clear leader.
In Saudi Arabia, it is the feast of Eid al-Fitr, the beginning of Islam’s holiest season. Twenty-four thousand mostly American coalition troops rema
in in Saudi Arabia, keeping a watchful eye on Saddam Hussein and other threats against the kingdom. The postwar calm in Saudi Arabia is roiled by the rest of the Islamic world exploding into turmoil. Riots of rage warn leaders of the vengeance intended toward them. By not supporting Iraq, they have strengthened the foreign invaders. They are apostates of the true Islam, they have humiliated their citizens, and most unforgivable of all, they have shown weakness.
Five thousand enraged demonstrators in Algiers wave new Iraqi flags in solidarity with Saddam. The green in the flag of Iraq is now black, indicating mourning, and inscribed in the center in Saddam’s own handwriting1 is “Allahu Akbar” (God is the Greatest), the ancient battle cry of faithful Muslims not heard for centuries. The committed secular socialist suddenly transforms himself into a religious leader. His propaganda ministry floods the Muslim world with the devotional story of Saddam transcribing a personal copy of the Koran with his own blood. This is to thank Allah for giving him the strength to beat back the new infidel crusaders and chase them from Iraq. Saddam calls all faithful Muslims, the dispossessed heirs of the great Ottoman caliphate, to jihad. Avenge this new infidel crusade that has torn Kuwait once again from the motherland, he urges. The Islamic world has begun to fracture. On one side are the jihadi or Saddam Muslims; on the other is the Saudi King Fahd, and the infidel Muslims.
In the holy city of Medina, Saudi Arabia’s final preparations are being completed for the coming feast and holy month. An angry young man supervises the finishing touches to the holy mosque for his family’s construction company—a global conglomerate that has been given the exclusive contracts to renovate all of Islam’s holiest sites, including Mecca. A fervent Muslim, he broods over a recent insult from his king. He offered his own army of one hundred thousand devout Muslim fighters to Saudi King Fahd to help push Saddam from Kuwait but was rejected in favor of the Americans. Now the angry young Osama, heir to the bin Laden family construction business, will not forgive his king. Instead, he will side with the defiant strongman and visionary of a new Islamic caliphate, Saddam Hussein, and devote the rest of his life to the promotion of jihad.