[CTRL] What happened in the final days of the Gulf War? BY SEYMOUR HERSH

[Michael Pugliese]

What happened in the final days of the Gulf War? BY SEYMOUR HERSH

http://cryptome.org/mccaffrey-sh.htm

15 May 2000. Thanks to Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker.
Source: Hardcopy The New Yorker, May 22, 2000, pp. 49-82.


ANNALS OF WAR

OVERWHELMING FORCE

What happened in the final days of the Gulf War?

BY SEYMOUR HERSH

___________________
I -- THE WAR

ACCOLADES
Barry McCaffrey has the best resume of any retired combat general in the
United States
Army. The son of a distinguished general, he attended Phillips Academy, in
Andover,
Massachusetts, and West Point, and in 1966 was assigned to South Vietnam as
a platoon
leader. He served two combat tours, winning two Distinguished Service
Crosses, two
Silver Stars, and three Purple Hearts. He returned from Vietnam with a
shattered left
arm, which was saved only after two years of operations and rehabilitation.
McCaffrey's career continued to be exemplary: he earned a master's degree,
taught at
West Point, and, as he moved up through the ranks, became an outspoken
leader within
the Army for women's rights and the rights of minorities. He had, as the
journalist
Rick Atkinson has noted, "the chiseled good looks of a recruiting poster
warrior:
hooded eyes; dark, dense brows; a clean, strong jawline; hair thick and
gun-metal
gray." He radiated command presence.
In June of 1990, as a two-star major general, McCaffrey was put in charge of
the 24th
Infantry Division (Mechanized), at Fort Stewart, Georgia. He was then
forty-seven, and
the Army's youngest division commander. Two months later, Saddam Hussein
invaded
Kuwait, and McCaffrey took the 24th's tanks, guns, and more than eighteen
thousand
soldiers (eventually, there were twenty-six thousand) from its home base to
Saudi
Arabia in preparation for the Persian Gulf War. The 24th's mission was to
drive more
than two hundred miles into Iraq -- the famed "left hook" maneuver -- and
block the
retreat of Iraqi forces from the war zone in Kuwait. In an account written
after the
war, U.S. News & World Report praised McCaffrey for leading what one officer
called
"the greatest cavalry charge in history." More promotions came McCaffrey's
way, and he
eventually earned four stars, the Army's highest peacetime rank.
McCaffrey announced his retirement from the Army in January of 1996, when
President
Clinton brought him into the Cabinet as the director of the White House
Office of
National Drug Control Policy. In that position, McCaffrey serves as the
architect of
and main spokesman for the Clinton Administration's $1.6-billion plan to
provide,
among other things, more training and weapons for the Colombian Army in an
effort to
cut drug production and export.
The Iraqis offered only disorganized and ragged opposition to the American
invasion,
in February of 1991, and the much feared ground war quickly turned into a
bloody rout,
with many of the retreating Iraqi units, including the elite Republican
Guard, being
pounded by American aircraft, artillery, and tanks as they fled north in
panic along a
six-lane road from Kuwait City to Basra, the major military stronghold in
southern
Iraq. The road became littered with blackened tanks, trucks, and bodies; the
news
media called it the "highway of death." The devastation, which was televised
around
the world, became a symbol of the extent of the Iraqi defeat -- and of
American
military superiority -- and it was publicly cited as a factor in President
George
Bush's decision, on February 28th, to declare a cessation of hostilities,
ending the
killing, and to call for peace talks. That decision, which is still
controversial
today, enabled Saddam's Army to survive the war with many units intact, and
helped
keep the regime in power. In "The Generals' War," by Michael R. Gordon and
Bernard E.
Trainor, Bush explained that he and his advisers were concerned about two
aspects of
the situation: "If we continued the fighting another day, until the ring was
completely closed, would we be accused of a slaughter of Iraqis who were
simply trying
to escape, not fight? In addition, the coalition was agreed on driving the
Iraqis from
Kuwait, not on carrying the conflict into Iraq or on destroying Iraqi
forces."
The ground war had lasted one hundred hours, and there had been a total of
seventy-nine American deaths, eight of them in McCaffrey's 24th Division. On
the
morning of March 2nd, a day before the Iraqis and the Allied coalition were
scheduled
to begin formal peace talks, McCaffrey reported that, despite the ceasefire,
his
division had suddenly come under attack from a retreating Republican Guard
tank
division off Highway 8 west of Basra, near the Rumaila oil field. The Iraqis
were
driving toward a causeway over Lake Hammar, one of five exit routes from the
Euphrates
River Valley to the safety of Baghdad. Overriding a warning from the
division
operations officer, McCaffrey ordered an assault in force -- an all-out
attack. His
decision stunned some officers in the Allied command structure in Saudi
Arabia, and
provoked unease in Washington. Apache attack helicopters, Bradley fighting
vehicles,
and artillery units from the 24th Division pummelled the five-mile-long
Iraqi column
for hours, destroying some seven hundred Iraqi tanks, armored cars, and
trucks, and
killing not only Iraqi soldiers but civilians and children as well. Many of
the dead
were buried soon after the engagement, and no accurate count of the victims
could be
made. McCaffrey later described the carnage as "one of the most astounding
scenes of
destruction I have ever participated in." There were no serious American
combat
casualties.
McCaffrey's assault was one of the biggest and most one-sided-of the Gulf
War, but no
journalists appear to have been in the area at the time, and, unlike the
"highway of
death," it did not produce pictures and descriptions that immediately
appeared on
international television and in the world press. Under Defense Department
rules that
had been accepted, under protest, by the major media, reporters were not
permitted on
the Gulf War battlefields without military escorts. The day after the
assault, a few
journalists were flown by helicopter to McCaffrey's headquarters. When
McCaffrey met
with them, he speculated that the retreating Iraqi units that had mounted
the
seemingly suicidal attack were unaware of the ceasefire, then in its second
day. "Some
might not even know we are here," McCaffrey told a reporter for United Press
International. "But perhaps there are some out there just looking for a
fight." Most
of the journalists shared McCaffrey's enthusiasm. "Not having been there and
seen with
my own eyes," Joe Galloway, of U.S. News & World Report, told me, "I think
it was a
righteous shoot. The Iraqis shouldn't have opened fire. They should have
walked out."
Two months later, in public testimony before the Senate Armed Services
Committee,
which had invited him to discuss the lessons the military had learned from
the war,
McCaffrey gave a graphic account of the battle. It was a time of national
pride in
America's performance in the conflict, and McCaffrey was praised effusively
by the
senators. He told them that the days just after the ceasefire were confused,
as Iraqi
tanks, trucks, and soldiers abandoned Kuwait and fled toward Baghdad along
Highway 8.
The area west of Basra -- a vast tract of wadis and unoccupied desert -- was
especially chaotic in the predawn hours of March 2nd. "There were lots of
people
moving in the dark," he said. "They engaged us with R.P.G. rockets" --
antitank
grenades.
McCaffrey did not give the senators any details about the strength of the
initial
Iraqi attack, but he depicted the enemy soldiers' performance during the war
as, for
the most part, aggressive and eager. "They tried to fight," he said. "They
fired
hundreds of artillery rounds at us. Most of my tracks" -- armored
vehicles -- "were
hit by small-arms fire. They fired tanks, Saggers, et cetera." Saggers are
antitank
missiles. Referring to the situation on March 2nd, he told the senators, "I
elected to
destroy the force that was in this area.... Then we attacked. And between
six-thirty
in the morning and about noon, one brigade, three tank task forces conducted
a classic
attack with five artillery battalions in support." Of the Iraqis, he
said,"We
destroyed all of them. Most of them, in my judgment, only fought for fifteen
minutes
to thirty minutes. Most of them fled." He continued, "Once we had them
bottled up, up
here at the causeway, there was no way out." The senators were deferential
and asked
McCaffrey no critical questions about any aspects of the March 2nd
engagement, which
has come to be known as the Battle of the Causeway, the Battle of Rumaila,
and,
because of the number of destroyed Iraqi vehicles strewn about, the Battle
of the
Junkyard.
McCaffrey refused to be interviewed for this article, but he did agree,
through his
legal counsel, to respond to written questions. Asked about the battle, he
wrote, "I
believe that my actions at Rumaila were completely appropriate and warranted
in order
to defend my troops against unknown and largely unknowable enemy forces and
intentions. If I had not proceeded as I did and had American soldiers of the
24th ID
[Infantry Division] suffered substantial casualties, postwar analysts would
not be
asking if I acted too aggressively, but would rightly condemn me for sitting
still in
the face of a possible major enemy attack."
McCaffrey's insistence that the Iraqis attacked first was disputed in
interviews for
this article by some of his subordinates in the wartime headquarters of the
24th
Division, and also by soldiers and officers who were at the scene on March
2nd. The
accounts of these men, taken together, suggest that McCaffrey's offensive,
two days
into a ceasefire, was not so much a counterattack provoked by enemy fire as
a
systematic destruction of Iraqis who were generally fulfilling the
requirements of the
retreat; most of the Iraqi tanks travelled from the battlefield with their
cannons
reversed and secured, in a position known as travel-lock. According to these
witnesses, the 24th faced little determined Iraqi resistance at any point
during the
war or its aftermath; they also said that McCaffrey and other senior
officers
exaggerated the extent of Iraqi resistance throughout the war.
A few months after the division returned home, an anonymous letter accusing
McCaffrey
of a series of war crimes arrived at the Pentagon. It startled the Army's
top
leadership and led to an official investigation into McCaffrey's conduct of
the war.
The letter directly accused McCaffrey's division of having launched the
March 2nd
assault without Iraqi provocation. A 24th Division combat unit was said to
have
"slaughtered" Iraqi prisoners of war after a battle. The letter was filled
with
information, including portions of what were said to be recorded
communications
between McCaffrey and his field commanders, that could have come only from
the inner
circle. The anonymous letter writer alleged that McCaffrey had covered up
the extent
of "friendly fire" casualties within his division, and claimed that he had
chosen to
award a combat badge to a close aide who had not served in a combat unit.
By midsummer of 1991, the 24th Division's 1st Brigade had quietly
investigated two
earlier complaints at Fort Stewart about alleged atrocities, and determined
that
neither complaint had merit. The most serious allegation involved the
shooting of
prisoners by soldiers in the 1st Brigade. In one case, a soldier attached to
a Scout
platoon reported that more than three hundred and fifty captured and
disarmed Iraqi
soldiers, including Iraqi wounded who had been evacuated from a clearly
marked
hospital bus, were fired upon by a platoon of Bradley fighting vehicles. It
was not
known how many of the Iraqis survived, if any. The second accusation came
from a group
of soldiers assigned to the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion, whose
senior
sergeant claimed that on March 1st, the day after the ceasefire, he saw an
American
combat team open fire with machine guns upon a group of Iraqis in civilian
clothes who
were waving a white sheet of surrender. The precise number killed was not
known, but
eyewitnesses estimated that there were at least fifteen or twenty in the
group,
perhaps more. Neither alleged incident was reported by the 24th Division to
the
appropriate higher authorities, as was mandated by the Army's operations
order for the
Gulf War.
The allegations couldn't have come at a more inopportune time. General H.
Norman
Schwarzkopf, commander of the Allied forces, and General Colin L. Powell,
chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were national heroes. And their success in Kuwait
was seen
as validation for the "Powell doctrine" -- the use of overwhelming force at
the outset
of a war in order to minimize casualties and avoid the incremental buildup
that had
cost so dearly in Vietnam.
McCaffrey's harshest critics are fellow Army generals who served as division
commanders in the Gulf War. McCaffrey was widely believed to be
Schwarzkopf's favorite
general (Schwarzkopf had previously served as commander of the 24th) and was
viewed as
being indifferent to the wishes of Lieutenant General Gary Luck, the
commander of
XVIII Airborne Corps. (XVIII Corps included three divisions: the 24th, the
82nd
Airborne, and the 101st Airborne.) Other commanders in the Corps were
occasionally
involved in bitter disputes with McCaffrey over what they perceived as the
24th's
hoarding of precious tank and truck fuel. These officers, with some
exceptions,
castigated the March 2nd assault and expressed dismay over McCaffrey's
subsequent
promotion to full general. "There was no need to be shooting at anybody,"
Lieutenant
General James H. Johnson, Jr. (Ret.), of Sarasota, Florida, said. "They
couldn't
surrender fast enough. The war was over." Johnson commanded the 82nd
Airborne, and his
initial assignment was essentially the same as McCaffrey's -- to protect the
western
flank of the war zone. "I saw no need to continue any further attacks,"
Johnson told
me, adding that his troops processed hundreds of Iraqi soldiers and
displaced persons
on March 2nd, with no incidents or casualties on either side. McCaffrey, he
said,
"does what he wants to do."
The officer in charge of enforcing the ceasefire was Lieutenant General John
J.
Yeosock (Ret.), who recalled that General Schwarzkopf "was explicit about
the
cessation of offensive operations" after President Bush's declaration of a
unilateral
ceasefire, on February 28th. A day or two later, Yeosock flew from the main
Allied
command post, in Saudi Arabia, to Kuwait City and then took a helicopter
tour of the
war zone, south of Basra, where he saw abandoned equipment and Iraqi
prisoners being
evacuated on the roads to Baghdad but no organized Iraqi units. "What Barry
ended up
doing was fighting sand dunes and moving rapidly," Yeosock said. He was
"looking for a
battle."
Lieutenant General Ronald Griffith, who commanded the 1st Armored Division
of VII
Corps, told me it was well known that many of the Iraqi tanks destroyed by
the 24th
Division on March 2nd were being transported by trailer truck to Baghdad,
with their
cannons facing backward. "It was just a bunch of tanks in a train, and he
made it a
battle," Griffith said of McCaffrey. "He made it a battle when it was never
one.
That's the thing that bothered me the most."
Many of the generals interviewed for this account believe that McCaffrey's
attack went
too far, and violated one of the most fundamental military doctrines: that a
commander
must respond in proportion to the threat. "That's the way we're trained,"
one major
general said. "A single shot does not signal a battle to the death.
Commanders just
don't willy-nilly launch on something like that. A disciplined commander is
going to
figure out who fired it, and where it came from. Especially if your mission
is to
enforce a ceasefire. Who should have been better able to instill fire
discipline than
McCaffrey?"
Although McCaffrey refused repeated requests for an interview to discuss
these
accusations, more than three hundred interviews in the past six months with
Gulf War
veterans and Army investigators have produced evidence that the Army's
inquiries into
the 24th Division failed to uncover many important elements of the story.
MORE THAN A COMMANDER
By all accounts, McCaffrey was one of the Army's most knowledgeable
commanders, a
confident and savvy leader who understood in detail the workings of every
phase of a
combat infantry division. Like most generals, he wanted things done his way,
and, as
the colonels and lieutenant colonels in his command quickly learned, he gave
no middle
ground. Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. (Butch) Brennan (Ret.) was a staff
officer in the
tactical-operations center, traditionally a division's most important
administrative
unit. "A guy like McCaffrey can be intimidating," Brennan told me. "He
believes that
what's good for him is good for the country." Brennan went on, "The No. 1
thing to
McCaffrey is loyalty. If you don't have three-hundred-percent loyalty,
you're not part
of the game."
One of McCaffrey's favorites was John Le Moyne, a colonel who shortly before
the Gulf
War was promoted from a division staff job to be commander of the 1st
Brigade, one of
three front-line fighting brigades in the division. There was an immediate
affinity
between the General and the Colonel. "I like John," one senior division
officer
recalled McCaffrey saying before the war. "I'm going to make this guy a
general." Le
Moyne and other officers who prospered under McCaffrey depict him in glowing
terms. Le
Moyne told me during a telephone interview that McCaffrey was, "without
doubt, the
most dramatic and charismatic leader I've served." Le Moyne, now a major
general and
the commander of the Army's Infantry Training Center, at Fort Benning,
Georgia, said
that McCaffrey scorned the easy way and always did things "for the right
reason. He's
earned our undying love and respect."
Another admirer is Lieutenant General James Terry Scott (Ret.), who is now
the
director of the national-security program at Harvard University's John F.
Kennedy
School of Government; he served in the war as a one-star assistant division
commander.
"He's a guy of high character and high standards, who doesn't make things up
and
doesn't cover up," Scott said. "Anyone who stands out in the Army draws
fire. A lot of
generals were jealous and feared him. They saw him as a guy who would break
rice bowls
and change things." During the war, Scott said, McCaffrey was "the best
division-level
tactician I've ever seen. He was very bold -- and he never ran out of gas."
With the Gulf War unfolding, the 24th Division headquarters became
increasingly tense,
as some of McCaffrey's subordinates felt that they were forced to choose
between doing
the right thing, as they saw it, or doing what their commanding officer
ordered. Four
senior officers -- three colonels and a lieutenant colonel, all of whom had
expectations of becoming generals -- found it impossible to go along with
McCaffrey's
directives, his management style, and his battlefield decisions, and openly
questioned
him. They did so knowing that they were jeopardizing their careers.
In December of 1990, McCaffrey chose Colonel Ronald E.Townsend to be
artillery
commander of the 24th Division, a job that put Townsend in charge of six
field groups
of long-range cannons. Townsend recalled that when he arrived McCaffrey told
him, "My
job is to make you a brigadier general." Sometimes such enticements were
communicated
indirectly The wife of Colonel Theodore Reid, the commander of the
division's 197th
Brigade, recalled that, at a social gathering at Fort Stewart, McCaffrey
whispered to
her, "I have great plans for Ted." But Townsend and Reid found themselves in
chronic
dispute with McCaffrey, mainly because, in their view, he didn't delegate,
interfering
in the jobs of his commanders and making all the key military decisions
himself.
"McCaffrey and I had our differences," Reid told me. "Do I respect him?
Hell, no." By
the war's end, Townsend had defied a direct order from McCaffrey concerning
the
reassignment of a valued senior officer; Reid, during a meeting with the
General, had
ordered his staff to clear the room and "had it out" with him for twenty
minutes. "I
blew off my career, and I knew it," Reid told me.
The commander of the division's aviation brigade, Colonel Burt Tackaberry,
said to me,
"You couldn't tell McCaffrey anything, or disagree with him." Tackaberry had
been
around generals all his life -- his father was a lieutenant general -- and
he felt
that McCaffrey wasn't letting him do his job. His interactions with the
division
commander were professional, he added. McCaffrey always maintained his
poise -- unlike
Schwarzkopf, who was known throughout the Gulf as "the Screamer" -- and yet,
Tackaberry said, he "knew how to hurt you without raising his voice." After
the war,
Tackaberry said, he told McCaffrey, "If you don't have trust in me, you
ought to find
another commander."
Two months before the ground war, McCaffrey abruptly relieved Lieutenant
Colonel
Arnold J. Canada as commander of the 2-7 Battalion in Le Moyne's 1st
Brigade, and
replaced him with Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Ware, who had been serving
as the
division's Inspector General -- a headquarters job. Canada was stunned; he
had
commanded the battalion for two years, he told me, and was fully prepared to
lead it
into war -- a view echoed by many of his soldiers in interviews with me. "It
would be
like taking a conductor out of an orchestra just before a big concert," one
battalion
soldier said. "Yes, the orchestra can still play the music, but there's less
understanding of the skills and abilities of the people in the
orchestra-less perfect
music." Changing the command, many soldiers feared, would inevitably
diminish the
battalion's ability to function in combat; Ware had little time to gain its
confidence.
The 24th's lieutenants knew nothing of the tensions at the top. They were
far too
involved in the day-to-day operations of their platoons. It's always
difficult for
outsiders to get an accurate picture of life at the platoon level of an Army
combat
unit; in the case of the Gulf War, where journalists were effectively
prohibited from
the front lines, it is almost impossibly difficult, but two compelling
accounts have
been published. "Tuskers" (Darlington; 1997) was written by Major David S.
Pierson,
who served as a task-force intelligence captain in the 24th's 1st Brigade.
(The title
refers to the battalion's nickname.) "The Eyes of Orion" (Kent State; 1999)
is a
collection of remembrances by five 2nd Brigade platoon leaders, with an
eloquent
introduction by McCaffrey. ("This is a story of courage, dedication, and
agonizing
self-doubts as these young officers faced the gut-wrenching responsibility
of leading
platoons through the enormous confusion, fear, and physical fatigue of
high-intensity
combat operations.") The books revolve around the life of the combat
soldier-the
rigors of training, the harsh conditions of the desert, and the constant
fear of
death.
As portrayed in these books, McCaffrey is an autocratic father figure who
exhorts his
young officers, "You are going to kick their ass and be home in time for
supper!"
Before the war began, McCaffrey made a series of morale-boosting visits to
his combat
battalions, introducing a kill-or-be-killed theme. Pierson reproduces one of
these
talks in "Tuskers": "This won't be a walk in the woods," McCaffrey says.
"These boys
have the fourth largest army in the world. They're not going to just roll
over. I
fully expect we will have ten percent casualties in the first week....
You're going to
have to prepare yourself for that."
As McCaffrey spoke, Pierson writes, he found himself looking at the
General's wounded
arm. McCaffrey "became larger than life and his persona took on mythical
proportions.
He was more than a commander, he was a legend." McCaffrey concluded the pep
talk by
urging the young officers "to protect yourselves out there," and issued what
amounted
to a standing order -- a sort of foxhole version of the Powell doctrine. "If
you're
driving through a village and someone throws a rock at you, shoot them! If
they shoot
at you, turn the tank main gun on them. If they use anything larger than
small arms,
call for artillery. It's as simple as that. Obey the rules of war but
protect
yourself." Pierson and his fellow-soldiers were inspired: "He had fanned the
embers of
the warrior spirit into a flame."
THE ENEMY
The ground war began for the 24th Division on the afternoon of February
24th. From
that moment, McCaffrey was always on the move, driving in a specially
equipped assault
vehicle or flying in a helicopter to stay near the action. His headquarters
was
situated in the division's tactical command post, a collection of perhaps
fifty tanks
and armored carriers that moved forward with the troops. These troops were
superbly
trained and highly motivated. Tanks, armored cars, and trucks, including
more than
four hundred huge fuel tankers, drove relentlessly, day and night, covering
nearly two
hundred miles in two days and reaching their objective, the Euphrates River
Valley,
more than a full day ahead of schedule.
After the war, according to "Tuskers," McCaffrey told Pierson's battalion
that the
24th Division had accomplished "absolutely one of the most astounding
goddamned
operations ever seen in the history of military science.... We were not
fighting the
Danish Armed Forces up here. There were a half million of these assholes
that were
extremely well armed and equipped." At an Army infantry conference at Fort
Benning, in
April, McCaffrey went further. According to the official talking points of
the
conference, he said that there was "heavy resistance" for parts of two days,
as the
24th was confronted by three Iraqi infantry divisions and a commando
brigade.
There were American casualties, of course, but there seems to have been
little or no
organized resistance in the 24th's area of operations -- only the remnants
of a
military force that was in retreat. It may be the case that no soldier from
the 24th
Division died at the hands of the Iraqis. Scrutiny of the available records
reveals
that at least four of the division's eight officially reported deaths were
the result
of friendly fire, and, on March 3rd, the day McCaffrey briefed the American
press
corps on his victory at Rumaila, a U.P.I. dispatch reported that the
division said
that there had been no combat deaths in the ground war. By the war's end,
many
soldiers told me, fear of being shot by friendly fire far outweighed fear of
the
Iraqis.
"We met the enemy," 1st Lieutenant Greg Downey, one of the 2nd Brigade's
"Eyes of
Orion" diarists, recalled on the second day of the ground war. "My gunner
reported
targets. We moved closer, discovering the Iraqi soldiers to be young boys
and old men.
They were a sad sight, with absolutely no fight left in them. Their leaders
had cut
their Achilles' tendons so they couldn't run away and then left them. What
weapons
they had were in bad repair and little ammunition was on hand. They were
hungry, cold,
and scared. The hate I had for any Iraqi dissipated. These people had no
business
being on a battlefield."
One of his fellow platoon leaders and diarists, 2nd Lieutenant Rob Holmes, a
1989 West
Point graduate, spotted a small building and a water trailer in the
distance, and his
superior officer ordered him to open fire with a machine gun. "I figured why
not --
this is combat," he wrote in "Orion." He missed but then fired an antitank
rocket into
the building, caving in a wall. "Immediately dozens of Iraqi infantry
appeared and
scattered.... We cut loose with machine guns from all of our tanks at the
Iraqi
infantry in front of us." Holmes ordered a second volley of fire into the
building. It
burst into flames. "A few Iraqis ran out a door," and one of Holmes's
gunners "cut
them down, riddling them with machine gun bullets." The America soldiers
stopped
firing when the Iraqis threw up their hands, and the survivors were rounded
up. Now
Holmes, too, was appalled at the condition of his enemy. "Our new prisoners
barely
qualified as soldiers. They were poorly clothed and hardly equipped. They
looked gaunt
and undisciplined. They were very old and very young. They looked pathetic.
Quite a
contrast with us."
The 24th Division veterans interviewed for this article consistently
described the
Iraqi opposition as far less daunting than expected. A few Iraqi stragglers
brandished
weapons, after being fired upon by machine guns from the fast-moving
American tanks,
but they quickly surrendered or were cut down. Most veterans saw no
firefights, and no
attempts to attack directly any of the American tanks as they rolled over
the sand
dunes. The 2nd Brigade's most dramatic moment came early on the morning of
February
27th, when a large tank group from the brigade, after firing an intensive
artillery
barrage, crashed through the chain-link fences surrounding Jalibah Airfield,
near
Highway 8, and stormed down the runway, destroying Iraqi tanks and aircraft.
Iraqi
soldiers guarding the base were overrun and isolated. Some fought bravely,
if
foolishly, firing rifles and automatic weapons at the tanks. One American
soldier was
wounded in the arm. The Iraqi soldiers"tried to hide in shallow bunkers and
some tried
to surrender," according to another "Orion" diarist, 2nd Lieutenant Neal
Creighton,
also a 1989 graduate of West Point. "Most that moved were quickly cut down
under a
swath of machine gun fire. The burning helicopters, jets and dead soldiers
seemed
almost unreal.... My soldiers were alive. It was the happiest moment of my
life."
But suddenly, after the airport was secured, three American Bradleys were
hit by a
barrage of rockets. According to Rob Holmes in "Orion," the rockets had been
fired not
by Iraqis but by "another unit of American tanks, nearly two miles away."Two
men were
killed -- victims of friendly fire -- and eight or nine more were injured.
"Americans
had been killed by Americans," Holmes wrote. "I saw the horrible sight of
full body
bags for the first time.... I just wanted to finish this job and get back to
Georgia."
In the official Desert Storm chronology for XVIII Corps, as posted on the
Internet by
the Army, the 24th Division reports only that it overcame light resistance
in seizing
the airfield and that ten soldiers were wounded in action when an armored
vehicle was
"struck by an artillery round." The division's authorized history, published
after its
return to Fort Stewart, describes the Jalibah Airfield attack as
"brilliantly
executed," and notes that McCaffrey flew to the area to congratulate the
brigade
commander of the mission on his "superb victory." There is no mention of
friendly-fire
casualties.
Like the soldiers in the 2nd Brigade, those in the 1st Brigade were
astonished by the
enemy's reluctance to fight. Pierson eventually began to feel guilty:
"guilty that we
had slaughtered them so; guilty that we had performed so well and they so
poorly;
guilty that we were running up the score.... They were like children fleeing
before
us, unorganized, scared, wishing it all would end. We continued to pour it
on."
Private First Class Charles Sheehan-Miles, a tanker in the 1st Brigade who
served as a
gun loader, was, by all accounts, a competent soldier, a "squared away"
type. A native
of Georgia, he enjoyed his work and was eager for an Army career. That
changed on the
third day of the war. "I'd been up for two days and was totally exhausted,"
Sheehan-Miles told me. There was a radio report from the company commander
about Iraqi
trucks ahead. As Sheehan-Miles watched, one of the vehicles, carrying fuel,
was struck
by an American shell and burst into flames. Gasoline splashed into a nearby
truck
crammed with Iraqis. "Twenty or thirty people came out of the truck,"
Sheehan-Miles
recalled. "They were in flames. We opened fire."
When I asked Sheehan-Miles why he fired, he replied, "At that point, we were
shooting
everything. Guys in the company told me later that some were civilians. It
wasn't like
they came at us m with a gun. It was that they were there -- "in the wrong
place at
the wrong time."
Although Sheehan-Miles is unsure whether he and his fellow-tankers were ever
actually
fired upon during the war, he is sure that there was no significant enemy
fire. "We
took some incoming once, but it was friendly fire," he said. "The folks we
fought
never had a chance." He came away from Iraq convinced that he and his
fellow-soldiers
were, as another tanker put it, part of "the biggest firing squad in
history."
[Full-page organization table omitted showing "XVIII Airborne Corps
Organization and
Ranks During the Ground War, 1991]
THE HOSPITAL BUS
Scouts had the war's most dangerous duty, and the job enthralled
twenty-one-year-old
Specialist 4 James Manchester, who was the son, grandson, and great-grandson
of U.S.
Army officers. Manchester was assigned to the Scout platoon in the 2-7
Battalion of
the 1st Brigade -- the battalion commanded by the newly assigned Charles
Ware. The
platoon had six Humvees and two Bradley fighting vehicles, which operated as
many as
ten kilometres in advance of the main force, seeking out the enemy and
serving as a
screen in case of attack. It was a glamorous, high-risk assignment. In a
major attack,
the Scouts understood that they were to fight to the last man, if necessary,
to buy
time for the main force.
Manchester had excellent qualifications for the job. After enlisting, in
1988, he had
gone through Airborne training and the Ranger program, and was offered an
appointment
to West Point, an honor accorded to only several dozen enlisted men each
year. As the
drive across the desert continued, Manchester told me, he and his
fellow-Scouts began
to fear friendly fire more than they did the Iraqis. He recalled that, in
the first
days of the war, his thirty-man platoon had been involved in only a few
dustups,
including one that began when the driver of an Iraqi truck fired at the
American
position. The truck was quickly destroyed, and Manchester and Edward R.
Walker, a
fellow-Scout who had emergency-medical training, attended to the wounded
driver.
On February 27th, the fourth day of the war, Manchester's platoon was
ordered to block
traffic on a road near Highway 8 while the battalion's five companies of
Bradleys and
tanks were refuelled by tanker trucks. The battalion was at its most
vulnerable for
those few hours, and nothing was to get by the Scouts' roadblock. The
operation was
proceeding routinely, with vehicles beginning to line up along the road.
Then,
Manchester said, "this person comes walking toward us, wearing red running
pants." It
was an English-speaking Egyptian, who was serving in the Iraqi Army. He
wanted to
surrender, as did several other Iraqi soldiers who were with him. The
American
soldiers were soon inundated with Iraqis, who streamed out of the desert in
a caravan
of automobiles and trucks, most of them apparently stolen in Kuwait. The
Iraqis were
"scared and crying," Manchester remembered. "A Buick comes up, with the
commander, and
he surrenders his battalion to us." The Scout platoon, confronted by a large
number of
hungry and thirsty Iraqis, maintained its composure. One of the Iraqi trucks
came
barrelling toward the group from the desert, and its driver seemed to have
no
intention of stopping. He was not shot at, Manchester said. Instead, one of
the Scouts
fired a volley of bullets into the air. The truck stopped, and its unharmed
driver
joined the other prisoners. All the Iraqis were searched for weapons and,
once
cleared, were seated in a large circle. "We were doing it by the book,"
Manchester
told me. "We told them that everything was going to be fine."
In the confusion, Manchester, who was assigned to the lead vehicle, with
Lieutenant
Kirk Allen, the platoon commander, got separated from his teammates. Allen's
driver,
Specialist 4 John Brasfield, a wiry twenty-four-year-old Kansan, joined
Edward Walker
and a few other soldiers who were stopping the traffic along the road. One
of the
first vehicles to pull up, Brasfield recalled, was an Iraqi hospital bus,
marked with
a crescent -- the Iraqi equivalent of a Red Cross sign. Four Scouts recalled
that the
bus was filled with wounded Iraqi veterans, many of them bandaged. Another
Scout
recalled that the wounded were piled in the back of a truck that trailed
behind.
Doctors and male nurses were among the prisoners. "There was a doctor on the
bus who
could speak English and was real friendly," Brasfield told me. Brasfield had
served as
a legal specialist in the Reserves before the war and understood that the
rules of
international law were very clear: "If it had a crescent on it, you couldn't
engage
it." Brasfield approached the bus after its military passengers, many in
bandages, had
been helped off and searched for weapons. The Iraqi doctor proved to be
extremely
helpful as a translator, and directed the prisoners who had been collected
by
Manchester and his colleagues to a central site along the highway, alongside
the now
empty bus. "He had studied medicine in Chicago," Brasfield recalled, "and
had family
there."
Vehicles kept arriving, and more Iraqi soldiers surrendered. Edward Walker,
who was
thirty-one and, because of his medical training, known as Doc, was ordered
to keep a
head count. "It kept building," Walker told me. "It started with probably
thirty,
thirty-five. As each vehicle pulled up, it kept adding up and adding up. We
got to
somewhere between three hundred and sixty or three hundred and eighty." (A
few moments
later in the interview, he recalled a precise number -- three hundred and
eighty-two
prisoners.) Each prisoner was quickly searched and stripped of weapons. "We
were
clearing weapons as soon as they were coming out of the vehicles," Walker
said. "They
were coming in so fast that we had no time but to grab what weapons they had
and throw
them into a pile."
The Americans were badly outnumbered by the Iraqis, but John Brasfield had
no doubts
about the enemy's state of mind: "I guarantee you that everybody in that war
would
have surrendered if they could. We knew that." He and his colleagues gave
the
frightened prisoners water and food and reassured them. "One of the first
guys who
came in was bawling -- so happy that he was safe," Brasfield recalled. "I
told him,
'You've surrendered. You're safe. Nothing is going to happen to you.'"
Another man,
who had lost an eye, asked if he was now a prisoner. He was told yes. "Thank
Allah,"
the man said.
Sergeant James Testerman, one of Allen's section leaders, told me that to
insure the
prisoners' safety "we gave each one of them a white piece of paper, if they
didn't
have anything white." Testerman was referring to American-designed surrender
leaflets,
printed in Arabic, that had been dropped throughout the war zone. The
leaflet promised
that those who gave up would live to see their families again.
Brasfield handled the radios for Lieutenant Allen, and Allen made it a point
to keep
the battalion headquarters in the loop. Allen told the battalion operations
center
that he had captured a large number of prisoners; he also reported the
precise
position of the Iraqi hospital bus. The Scout platoon had a G.P.S. platform
on the
lead Humvee, and could fix the bus's location within a hundred yards. "We
called in
spot reports as the group got bigger," Brasfield recalled.
According to Walker, someone in Ware's headquarters ordered the Scouts to
blow up the
confiscated weapons. Walker was the platoon's demolition expert as well as a
medical
specialist, and he took charge. He was an engineer by training, and had
taught an
advanced course for the 5th Engineer Battalion at Fort Leonard Wood,
Missouri, his
home unit. He had been assigned to the Scouts only a few days before the war
began.
The Iraqi weapons were flung into a truck, which was moved a safe distance
away. Two
captured Iraqi trucks and the hospital bus were also moved, to create what
amounted to
a three-sided box, or holding pen, and the prisoners were sitting in rows
inside. The
open end of the box faced west, Walker recalled, in the direction of the
main
battalion force. "We told them, 'Don't move. Don't go nowhere.' "Walker then
busied
himself with his demolition assignment, with the help of Specialist 4 David
A.
Collatt. It would take three charges of a plastic explosive, known as C4, to
destroy
the truck holding the weapons.
"Suddenly, we're told on our battalion frequency that it's time to move on,"
James
Manchester recalled. Intelligence reported that an Iraqi missile truck had
been
spotted a few miles up the road, and Lieutenant Allen was ordered to engage
it. The
platoon took off. In Manchester's recollection, the prisoners were simply
assembled
near the hospital bus; he doesn't remember the holding pen. "We're boogying
out,"
Manchester recalled. "And we have these people gathered, and we've given
them all our
M.R.E.s" -- ready-to-eat meals. Then word came that the battalion'.s main
battle force
had finished refuelling."The task force was fixing to move," another Scout,
Sergeant
Steven L. Mulig, said, "and we had to get out of there, because they shoot
at
everything."
Walker and Collatt set the delayed fuse for the plastic explosives on the
truck and,
with seconds to spare, jumped into a Humvee and began speeding away. The
explosion was
spectacular, Walker told me. "A lot of little stuff" began hitting the
ground -- truck
parts, shrapnel, and hundreds of unexploded Iraqi bullet rounds. At that
moment,
Walker said, a platoon or two of Bradleys came into view from the west and
began
rolling toward the clutch of prisoners. Mulig, who is still on active duty,
at Fort
Carson, Colorado, recalled, "They were all in line -- moving abreast of each
other."
The Bradleys' machine guns opened up. "I saw rounds impact in front of the
vehicle,"
Mulig said. "I could tell that they were hitting close to the prisoners,
because there
were people running. There were some who could have survived, but a lot of
them
wouldn't have, from where I saw the rounds hit." The Bradleys were armed
with
chain-driven machine guns, capable of firing up to a thousand rounds a
minute. "I
couldn't see the prisoners themselves," Walker said. "You can't hear
screaming. All
you hear is the boom-boom-boom. You could hear rounds hitting the bus and
vehicles. I
could see the bullets were going where they were. We're yelling" -- on the
radio -- "
'They're firing at the prisoners! They're firing at the prisoners!' And
about that
time I look up and that Bradley turns and they start firing at us. We're in
a marked
Humvee. They hit the ground right behind our vehicle." He meant the bullets.
"I turn
around and start screaming. So is Collatt: 'They're firing at us! They're
firing at
us!' We started taking off and they continued to fire at us." Walker,
speaking to me
at his home, in rural Missouri, said that he is convinced that all the
prisoners "got
hit." They were seated in rows, and the high-intensity machine guns on the
Bradleys
were capable of deep penetration. "I'm telling you that when a Bradley hits
something
it's going to take it out," he said. "And a human body ain't going to slow a
twenty-five-calibre round down. And they were in rows. There was a row and
another row
in front of them and another row in front of them. If they shot one guy in
the front
row, it's going to go through everybody in that row. It's not going to slow
down. The
human body will not slow down that round."
Collatt shared Walker's shock as the gun turrets of the Bradleys turned and
started
firing at the prisoners. "The main thing you could see was the mikemike" --
rounds --
"kicking up dirt right around the general area," he said. Collatt, who left
the Army
in 1993, believes that some escaped the firing by fleeing behind the
vehicles: "You
could see the prisoners start running." He said that he remains baffled,
because "we
knew it was a hospital bus and we'd talked about it" -- on the radio. "We
told
everybody where it was. They didn't get the word or they were trigger-happy.
Walker said, "They knew there were prisoners there. They knew they were
unarmed. They
knew the hospital bus was there, and they knew we were blowing the truck
up." The
Bradleys were in no danger from the exploding truck, which had been moved a
safe
distance away. Moreover, Walker said, the attacking soldiers "were all
buttoned down
in their vehicles, so they really had nothing to worry about."
James Manchester and his colleagues on Lieutenant ALlen's Humvee, a few
hundred yards
farther east, initially thought they were being fired upon. "Shit hits the
fan,"
Manchester recalled. "Bullets are flying." He looked back and realized that
the
unarmed Iraqis were being targeted. "I did not see people's heads
exploding," he told
me. "But I definitely saw shooting. I saw a crowd of people who were being
fired
upon." He recalled thinking, This is fucked up, but the Humvee just kept on
moving,
scooting away from the shooting at high speed.
John Brasfield had brought a small, inexpensive tape recorder to the Gulf
and, while
handling the radios on Lieutenant ALlen's Humvee, routinely taped
transmissions. He
would ship some of the tapes home, he thought, and give his wife a glimpse
of war. His
tape recorder was running as Allen's Humvee sped away from the prisoners,
and from the
bullets from the Bradleys' machine guns. The recording, made available by
Brasfield
for this account, documents the young soldiers' horror, anger, and,
ultimately,
resignation as the shooting went on. It's not always clear who is speaking
on the
tape, amid the background noise of engines, radio squeals, and the
crosscutting of
situation reports, but James Manchester, after carefully listening to the
tape, was
able to distinguish his own voice in some of the exchanges, along with Kirk
Allen's
and Brasfield's. He also isolated the voice and call signs of Lieutenant
Colonel
Charles Ware, the battalion commander.
"The lead company behind us is tearing up all those vehicles," someone tells
battalion
headquarters as the recording begins. "I hope they understand what a Humvee
looks
Like," he adds, referring to the indiscriminate firing in the direction of
the Scouts.
A moment later, a Scout reports on the platoon radio net, "Twenty-five
mikemike
blowing approximately five hundred metres behind me with my ass end
showing." He's
telling Lieutenant Allen that machine-gun fire is trailing his Humvee.
"You're not
supposed to be in that area," Alien responds.
"There's no one shooting at them," another Scout says on the platoon net,
referring to
the Bradleys. "Why'd they have to shoot?"
Allen reports on Ware's battalion net, "There's shooting, but there's no one
there" --
no combatants -- "to shoot at." Ware answers, "I understand," and then asks
a series
of operational questions about maps.
Later, Manchester asks Allen, "Sir, what element is firing behind us?"
Allen: "I have no fucking idea."
An unidentified Scout asks, "Why are we shooting at these people when they
are not
shooting at us?"
Brasfield: "They want to surrender.... Fucking armored vehicles [the
Bradleys]. They
don't have to blow them apart."
Sporadic firing continues. Someone asks Allen, "Why don't you tell them,
sir, that
they are willing to surrender. Tell 'em that." Someone else says, amid the
noise,"It's
murder."
Ware is on the radio when someone says, "We shot the guys we had gathered
up." Another
voice interjects, "They didn't have no weapons." Ware calls for all firing
to stop and
then asks another question about routine battalion procedures.
"He heard it; he knew it," Sergeant Mulig told me later, speaking of Ware.
"But it
didn't register."
James Testerman felt shame as he and his fellow-Scouts left the prisoners
and fled. "I
had fed these guys and got them to trust me," he said. "The first two who
came in were
scared to death -- afraid we were going to shoot them. We set them down and
fed them
M.R.E.s." One of the Iraqis played the tough-guy role, Testerman went on.
"He wouldn't
eat it -- afraid we were going to poison him. So I took a bite of it, and
gave it to
him. The tough guy broke down, crying. I can only imagine what he thought"
when the
Bradleys "started shooting -- that we were sending him to the slaughter."
"You think about it," he said. "All those people."
THE WHITE FLAG
The war ended abruptly On February 28th, when the ceasefire was announced,
McCaffrey's
men had not proved themselves in a major engagement, despite months of
training and
anticipation. The complicated feelings that some of them had about the
"one-sided
victory," over Iraqis with no will to fight, are perceptively expressed by
David
Pierson in "Tuskers":
My only reservation was illogical; I somehow wished that they had proved a
more worthy
opponent. They hadn't lost the battle, they had forfeited it. We were
achieving a
great victory but without great sacrifice. Sacrifice, the lifeblood of
freedom, the
price of all glory, the nature of soldiering. It was an expectation and a
curse.
McCaffrey's tankers had driven more than two hundred miles across the sand
dunes and
wadis of southern Iraq with little sleep and almost no action. Many of the
men were
frustrated, on edge, and eager to do what they had been trained to do --
fire their
weapons. The senior officers of the 2-4 Cavalry Squadron, a unit assigned
directly to
McCaffrey's headquarters, found a way to relieve tension and to prevent
civilian
abuse. "The worst thing that could happen was if some kid thought he'd
ridden four or
five days and never shot his weapon," Lieutenant Colonel Joseph C. Barto III
(Ret.),
then the executive officer, told me. "We called all the commanders and
said,'Make sure
these guys get to shoot their weapons."' Targets of opportunity were
found --
abandoned buildings and the like -- and the tanks lined up and fired away
with machine
guns, rockets, and shells.
In some cases, the end of the war led to an erosion of discipline. Many
soldiers in
the 24th Division's tank companies and Scout platoons began to collect
battlefield
souvenirs -- especially Soviet AK-47 assault rifles carried by the Iraqi
military. The
scavenger hunting caused casualties, especially after the ceasefire, as
soldiers
triggered land mines and other munitions in their search for souvenirs. In
one
instance, an elaborate Iraqi Defense Ministry compound was broken into by
the 2-4
Cavalry, and, under the eyes of its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J.
Leney,
soldiers loaded glassware, trays, sterling silver, gun collections,
oversized rugs,
and a huge photograph of Saddam Hussein onto tanks and armored cars to take
back to
America. Leney, who is now retired, told me that his action in authorizing
the
break-in may have been "bad judgment." The items were to be used, he said,
for a
Cavalry Ball, to be held after the war, at Fort Stewart. (Soldiers are
allowed to
confiscate certain kinds of equipment, and in the Gulf War, as in most
others, looting
was widespread; there was no investigation of the 2-4 Cavalry's actions.)
The looting
took place in front of officers and men from the 124th Military Intelligence
Battalion, whose specialists -- interpreters, radar operators, and
counter-intelligence officers -- were assigned to every brigade in the 24th
Division.
"Our guys watched them fill up five tanks," 1st Sergeant Jason Claar, of the
124th,
told me. "We knew of whole companies loading stuff in their tanks."
One of the 124th's primary missions was to supply forward radar teams to the
Scout
platoons of each battalion. The three-man units, known as
ground-surveillance-radar,
or G.S.R., teams, carried high-resolution equipment in their Humvees that
could
isolate enemy formations and spot vehicle movements thousands of yards away
and in the
dark The G.S.R. team assigned to the 3-7 Battalion of the 1st Brigade was
headed by a
sergeant named Steven Larimore, who had joined the Army, in 1987, at the
advanced age
of thirty-one. Larimore was widely admired by his fellow-soldiers for his
calm under
pressure, his competence, and his integrity, and for his ability to throw
passes in
touch-football games.
On March 1st, the day after the ceasefire went into effect, Larimore's men
and the
platoon to which they were attached, the Scouts from the 3-7 Battalion, were
ordered
to continue patrols in the Euphrates Valley battlefield. In the late
afternoon,
Larimore recalled, there was a report that some Army troops had discovered a
cache of
Iraqi weapons at a deserted schoolhouse in a small village near Highway 8.
The radar
team joined the 3-7 Scouts in clearing the village and searching the
schoolhouse. The
weapons were covered with waxed paper and protective grease; they had never
been
fired. After taking souvenirs, Larimore told me, he and his men left the
destruction
of the weapons to others and moved out, to the east, still accompanied by
six or so
Humvees and Bradleys of the 3-7 Scouts. Larimore and his men noticed a group
of
villagers walking in the area. "One guy had a white bedsheet on a stick,"
Larimore
said. Then, he recounted, "out of the blue sky, some guy from where we're
sitting" --
in the Scout platoon -- "begins shooting" into the villagers. Other machine
guns
joined in. "There was a lot of screaming and hollering going on. We were
screaming,
'Cease fire!' People hit the ground. The firing went on." Larimore estimated
that he
saw at least fifteen, and perhaps twenty or more, Iraqis fall. He had never
been in a
firefight before, he said, and he was stunned by the noise and the carnage.
He
estimated that the firing lasted no more than thirty seconds. "I did not see
anything
that looked like return fire," he said. The vehicles in the Scout unit, he
said, had
opened up on a group of unarmed civilians.
A second eyewitness, Sergeant Wayne P. Irwin, who was in charge of another
G.S.R.
team, said the Iraqis were "just passing through" the area when the Scouts
suddenly
began firing their machine guns. "I yelled for them to cease fire," he said.
"I
couldn't understand why they were firing." Of the Iraqis, he said, "To me,
they posed
no threat to us -- they were all in civilian clothes." Irwin was the senior
man from
the 124th on the scene, and the Scouts subsequently explained to him that
the Iraqis
were carrying"grenade launchers and stuff like that." Irwin, a
seventeen-year Army
veteran who is now on an intelligence assignment in South Korea, told me
that he did
not find that account credible. He had seen the Iraqis. "To me, they had
nothing."
Michael Sangiorge, a nineteen-year-old soldier from Brooklyn, was one of
Larimore's
crew members. (He is now a nursing student in Pembroke, Georgia.) He thought
the
firing lasted a long time. "It seemed like an eternity," he told me. "Three
or four
minutes. The Bradleys were shooting all their guns. They were firing into a
cluster of
people." A few of the victims "were wearing dark robes" -- clothing that did
not rule
out the possibility that they were in the military. There was no doubt,
however, that
"they were basically surrendering," Sangiorge recalled "We heard screaming,
and we're
screaming -- a whole lot of yelling is going on." He didn't take a body
count, but he
estimated that about twenty people were fired upon.
When the firing ended, Sangiorge said, Sergeant Larimore -- who was known
for being
unflappable -- "lost his cool," and jumped off his vehicle to get a better
look at the
scene. "He was pissed." Moments later, the G.S.R. unit was ordered back to
the
schoolyard, along with the 3-7 Scout platoon. "I went to the platoon
leader" --
Lieutenant John J. Grisillo, a 1987 graduate of West Point -- "and asked him
what he
was doing," Larimore told me. "He said they were fired on and we returned
fire."
Grisillo was equally angry at him, Larimore said, because "I was questioning
his
authority. I told him we had a responsibility to go make sure that there
weren't any
wounded" among the slain Iraqis on the field. The G.S.R. teams carried
medical kits in
their vehicles. "He said, 'Go ahead,' " Larimore recounted. "I said, 'I'm
not going
anywhere in front of you.' "
Sangiorge and the other crew members were not even in their twenties,
Larimore
recalled. " 'Sarge,' they said to me. 'That wasn't right what happened. What
do we
have to do?' I told them I didn't know, but I'd find out. I was still very
mad."
Lieutenant Grisillo confirmed Larimore's description of the shootings -- up
to a
point. Larimore, he said, had failed to realize that the men were responding
to a
threat. Grisillo explained that his platoon, made up of two armored vehicles
and six
Humvees, all armed with machine guns, had cleared a village, with the help
of
Larimore's G.S.R. team, and afterward someone looked back and noticed a
small group of
Iraqis in civilian clothes. "They raised a white flag," Grisillo said, but
he and his
men could see through binoculars that "they were carrying weapons. We fired
warning
shots, but they didn't stop" and continued to move toward a building -- the
schoolhouse -- that was known to contain weapons. In so doing, Grisillo
insisted, the
Iraqis posed a threat. His Scout platoon opened fire with machine guns, and
some
Iraqis, perhaps five or six, were shot. No formal written report of the
shootings was
ever made.
Grisillo told me that after the war he met with his brigade commander, John
Le Moyne.
"He let me know that he thought the G.S.R. guys didn't understand the
situation at the
time," Grisillo said. "Calls had to be made. It's not nice, but prudent. If
I had that
situation again, I'd do it again. I've never lost a minute's sleep about
it." Grisillo
left the Army, as a captain, in 1992. He now runs a job-recruiting firm for
retired
military personnel.
According to Major Brennan, McCaffrey's staff officer, during the war the
General
repeatedly asked his staff to survey the battlefield and determine if Iraqi
trophies -- such as enemy tanks and artillery pieces -- could be salvaged
for display
at the Fort Stewart museum, back in Georgia. No one had done anything about
it. At the
morning staff meeting on March 1st, the first full day of the ceasefire,
Brennan said,
McCaffrey suddenly turned to him and appointed him the division's
war-souvenir
officer. Brennan commandeered a Humvee and a driver, loaded up with water
and food,
and took off for the war zone. "I just went out and looked around to the
east and to
the north" -- along the line of retreat from Kuwait to Baghdad, Brennan told
me. "I
wasn't worried. What I saw was an army that had given up." He and his driver
ran into
perhaps ten Iraqi soldiers during the morning. "All they wanted out of me
was water
and food," he recalled. "None of them attempted to fire at me. I felt there
was no
danger. There was a ceasefire. I was more worried about Le Moyne's
brigade" -- the 1st
Brigade's heavily armed command post was nearby -- "than about the Iraqi
Army."
It was an eerie scene, he recalled. Dozens of tanks, trucks, and other
vehicles lay
scattered over the battlefield. In some, the engines were still running.
Bombs,
shells, and other ammunition lay about as well, much of it near smoldering
wreckage
and in danger of "cooking off" -- exploding in the heat. Brennan marked many
sites on
a map. He planned to return the next morning, March 2nd, with more men and
three
forklift trucks to begin the process of gathering McCaffrey's war trophies.

II -- THE CAUSEWAY

IMMINENT ATTACK
While other American soldiers and their commanders stopped and cheered the
ceasefire,
McCaffrey quietly continued to move his combat forces. On the morning of the
ceasefire, February 28th, they were approximately twenty-five miles west of
the Lake
Hammar causeway; by the eve of the Battle of Rumaila, two days later, he had
expanded
his area of operations. The 24th Division was now within striking distance
of a
seventeen-mile access road connecting the highway to the causeway, one of
the few
known pathways out of the marshes and desert in southern Iraq. "I knew I did
not want
to go into Basra and fight in Basra," McCaffrey explained to Army
investigators six
months after the war, "but I was prepared to continue the attack to the
east." His
plan was to be ready, as any prudent commander would be, to lead an invasion
into
Baghdad, should one be ordered. "Was I eager to go north toward Baghdad?"
McCaffrey
asked the investigators rhetorically."Personally, I think it would have been
militarily an easy option."
With the ceasefire, the rules of engagement were revised by XVIII Corps
headquarters.
Rather than aggressively seek out and destroy the enemy forces, the
commanders were to
protect their troops and hold their positions. McCaffrey was no longer
authorized to
initiate offensive military actions on his own; he had to get prior approval
from the
Corps commander, General Luck. He could still wage war, but only if he was
faced with
"imminent attack." The new rules also stated, "If an enemy vehicle
approaches with its
turret turned opposite the direction of travel, the enemy vehicle will be
considered
indicating a non-hostile intent. "The rules went on to say, "If these
conditions are
not present, the vehicle will be considered having a hostile intent. In
either case,
all attempts will be made to allow the occupants of the vehicle to surrender
before
U.S. Forces will take hostile measures." The unilateral ceasefire gave all
Iraqi
combat units, including the most elite tank brigades, the right to
unencumbered
retreat, provided they moved with cannons reversed.
The Iraqi withdrawal through the Euphrates Valley had been carefully
choreographed by
the Third Army headquarters. The goal was to speed up the exit of the Iraqis
from
Kuwait, and on March 1st thousands of soldiers -- in tanks, trucks, and
stolen cars --
continued their retreat toward Baghdad, streaming northwest day and night
toward the
Lake Hammar causeway.
McCaffrey had moved his forces toward the access road without informing all
the senior
officers who needed to know -- inside his own division operations center, at
XVIII
Corps, and at Third Army headquarters. Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Lamar,
McCaffrey's
operations officer, told Army investigators in the summer of 1991 that he
did not know
at the time that John Le Moyne's 1st Brigade, which included the most
forward units,
had moved to the north and east. Frank H. Akers, a young colonel who was the
operations officer at XVIII Corps headquarters, also told me that he did not
know that
McCaffrey had moved two brigades forward after the ceasefire. Neither did
Lieutenant
General John Yeosock, commander of the Third Army. The retreating Iraqis,
who had been
assured of safe passage, were now in harm's way -- and so were McCaffrey's
soldiers.
McCaffrey's forces were at risk, Akers told me, because division commanders
invariably
need "higher headquarters to have an accurate read of their location in case
they have
to call in support." Careful reporting, Akers added, avoids friendly-fire
incidents
and enables help to reach a unit in trouble more quickly.
General McCaffrey, in a letter to The New Yorker, firmly denied that his
division had
ever purposely failed to inform the appropriate commands of the troop
deployments
prior to the March 2nd engagement. In a separate letter he noted, "It is
simply not
credible that a division in combat, employing artillery and air power, and
widely
equipped with GPS, could or would falsify unit locations."
However, General Yeosock told me, "Too many people have the imaginary notion
that we
can track everything from space." What was important, he said, was that the
operations
officers at the Third Army "get a lot of confirmatory information from the
people on
the ground. At the end of the day, it's what comes in through the human
channels."
Shortly after dawn on March 2nd, a unit reported to McCaffrey's command post
that it
was being fired upon by the retreating Iraqis and that it had returned fire
in
self-defense. These were the opening shots of the Battle of Rumaila.
Over the past nine years, McCaffrey has consistently defended his March 2nd
offensive
by emphasizing, as he did in his letters, that his actions were designed to
protect
American soldiers -- and were thus fully compliant with the revised rules of
engagement. "My troops on the ground were under attack," McCaffrey wrote.
"My sole
focus was the safety of my soldiers."
The early-morning; Iraqi attack that McCaffrey and others speak of was said
to be
targeted on units in Charles Ware's 2-7 Battalion that were at the forward
edge of the
American advance. The 2-7 Scouts were attacked by R.P.G.s, Sagger missiles,
and
"direct fire from T-72 tanks," McCaffrey wrote. The rocketing continued
later that
morning, as one Sagger missile was fired at the American positions and
others were
prepared for launch. A muzzle flash was observed, McCaffrey wrote, and an
artillery
cannon under tow was moved off the road, disconnected, and pointed at the
division.
(The Army inquiry into Rumaila concluded that two weapons were fired, but
did not
report any injuries or damage.)
"In sum," McCaffrey wrote, "we acted appropriately at the time the Rumaila
battle
occurred. My troops routed a large enemy force that not only threatened my
soldiers
but also opened fire on . . . our position."
"They came rolling in there," John Le Moyne told an Army oral historian a
few days
after the March 2nd engagement, "and I'll be damned if they didn't start
shooting at
us." In a separate interview, his operations officer, Major Benjamin
Freakley, told an
Army oral historian that the first reports of enemy contact -- the firing of
an
R.P.G. -- came from Charlie Company in Ware's battalion. Moments later,
Charlie
Company again received fire -- this time, Sagger missiles from Iraqi B.M.P.s
(Russian-built armored vehicles known to the soldiers as Bimps). The
Americans
immediately counterattacked, Freakley said, and destroyed six Iraqi B.M.P.s
and four
T-72 tanks. Meanwhile, a group of helicopters that had been scrambled to
reconnoitre
the situation told of seeing "hundreds" of Iraqi vehicles moving to the
north.
McCaffrey"realized this force could move to the west now that they knew we
were
here" -- and threaten his forces. "So we decided to go ahead and fight them,
since
they had engaged us first."
Freakley was saying, in essence, that McCaffrey chose to turn all his guns
on the
Iraqis because of the possibility that the defeated Army might decide to
stop its
withdrawal and, in a move that amounted to suicide, attack the far superior
American
forces. If Freakley's recollection is right, McCaffrey waited half an hour
or so to
gather his forces and create an attack plan. The precise length of
McCaffrey's delay
could not be conclusively fixed from the available documents. The division
log entries
suggest that the delay between the two attacks was less than forty minutes.
But in his
sworn testimony Patrick Lamar, the division operations officer, told Army
investigators that there "was a period of about two hours between the time
the firing
first was reported before any action was ever taken." All the authorities
agree,
however, on one essential point -- there were no further confirmed reports
of Iraqi
shootings between the first and second attacks.
John Le Moyne told me that"there was absolutely no doubt in my mind" that
the
resumption of firing was justified. He said he now believes that the Iraqis
had not
planned their early-morning attack. "After ten years, I think they just
didn't have
the discipline and training." He theorized, "The first guy who fired was
part of a
guard post. He woke up, saw American combat vehicles, and said, 'Oh, shit!
Oh, dear,'
reacted out of panic, and fired."
The authorized history of the 24th Division in the Gulf War, written by
Major Jason
Kamiya, a division operations officer, closely echoes the Le Moyne and
Freakley
accounts.
THESE GUYS ARE GOING HOME
Interviews for this article, and the 24th Division's daily log for March
2nd, fail to
support many aspects of the official account. The Iraqis were driving
anything that
moved, and by early morning on March 2nd hundreds of retreating trucks,
tanks, and
other vehicles had come into radar view of the 1st Brigade. At 4:45 A.M.,
reports came
from Sergeant Larimore's G.S.R. unit and from Lieutenant Grisillo's 3-7
Scouts, and as
they became increasingly vivid they got everyone's attention.
James Manchester, in the 2-7 Scout platoon commanded by Lieutenant Allen,
did not see
any Iraqi firing, any Iraqi prisoners, or any Iraqi panic that morning. His
platoon
had been travelling in front of the main attack force, as usual, and he was
cheerfully
watching the Iraqis retreat in an orderly fashion along the road leading to
the Lake
Hammar causeway. He and his fellow-Scouts had been told "to make sure that
these guys
are retreating." He recalled, "I remember thinking, It's over, it's over.
These guys
are going home. It was just a line of vehicles on the road."
John Brasfield also remembers that morning. He had been troubled by his own
brigade's
continuing movement to the east, toward Basra. "On the day of the ceasefire,
we got an
order to move out," Brasfield recalled. "I'm a 'Why?' guy, and I asked Allen
why. I
didn't want to die after the ceasefire. He said, 'This is what we're
instructed to
do.' "
Early on the morning of March 2nd, Brasfield continued, his platoon had
moved east,
with no Iraqi opposition. Some soldiers who were farther east reported that
an Iraqi
tank "came up on them, but it never fired. We sat there all morning watching
movement
on the road about six kilometres away." A steady stream of retreating tanks
moved
along the road. "There's no hostile action toward us, but they don't see
us,"
Brasfield said. Edward Walker also recalled the tableau as non-threatening.
"Many of
the Iraqi tanks were on flatbed trucks and had their turrets tucked
backward" -- that
is, their cannons were facing away from the American combat forces.
When word of the Iraqi column first reached Le Moyne's 1st Brigade command
post, his
intelligence officer, Captain Linda Suttlehan, informed him that "the only
unit it
could belong to was the Hammurabi Republican Guard tank division, one of the
most
battle-hardened units in the Iraqi Army, which was scrambling to get back,
intact, to
Baghdad. There was a growing sense of excitement both in the brigade and in
the
division headquarters, Suttlehan recalled. Some of the senior officers
"wanted
action," and said as much.
A far less threatening observation was officially reported sometime around 6
or 7 A.M.
by the 1st Brigade to the 24th Division tactical-operations center. Item 47
in the
division log for March 2nd noted, "Col Le Moyne is observing vehicles, which
consist
of 200 trucks (flatbeds with some mil[itary] vans)." A tank or any other
vehicle
riding on a flatbed posed no threat, as every armored officer knew. However,
that
reassuring report was contradicted by Le Moyne in the very next log item,
which said
that Le Moyne "reports that vehicles' report is 'erroneous and bullshit.' "
Le Moyne
then ordered an attack-helicopter reinforcement for his brigade -- a major
escalation.
The radio suddenly came to life, James Manchester recalled. He listened as
Captain
Richard B. Averna, the commander of Ware's Charlie Company, told Ware that
the
retreating Iraqis were preparing to fire antitank missiles at the American
forces.
Manchester said his platoon was astonished at the message. "We are sitting
right on
top of these people," he told me, referring to the Iraqis, "and there are no
vehicles
pulled off." Captain Averna, he said, was behind him and could not see the
line of
vehicles.
Brasfield recalled a different but equally overwrought report. "One of the
companies
sees one or two dismounts" -- Iraqi soldiers who have climbed off a tank or
armored
vehicle -- "with an R.P.G. pointed in its direction. They ask permission to
engage,
and finally get it. There's some boom, boom, boom -- a very short
engagement. This was
early, before the big battle." Brasfield said he was later told, "Somebody
panicked
and thought they saw something they didn't see." Another factor in the Scout
platoon's
skepticism over the report, Brasfield said, was a lack of confidence in
Ware's
leadership.
Sergeant Stuart Hirstein, of the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion, was
clearing
an Iraqi bunker with a company in the 2-7 Battalion when his unit monitored
the early
reports about Iraqi fire. One of the combat companies in Ware's battalion
had issued
an urgent call for help, asking every available unit to come to its rescue:
it was
taking fire from oncoming Iraqi tanks. Hirstein and his team rushed to the
site in
their armored vehicles. When they arrived, he said, there was no attack and
no
imminent threat from the retreating Iraqi tanks. "Some of the tanks were in
travel
formation, and their guns were not in any engaged position."The Iraqi crew
members
"were sitting on the outside of their vehicles, catching rays," he said.
"Nobody was
on the machine guns." And yet the Americans "wanted to fire them up." At
that point,
he added, their commanders said no.
There was a barrage of messages. "The radio was blasting," Linda Suttlehan
told me.
One message stood out: a Scout claimed that an Iraqi R.P.G. had been fired
at him.
Other soldiers reported that an Iraqi tank had fired at their positions. "We
plotted
grids, but the timing didn't make sense," Suttlehan said. "The timing was
too close.
Was it one or two different tanks? Or was it the same guy shooting?" In any
case,
Suttlehan recalled, "I needed to know which way the tubes are pointing" --
the cannons
on the Iraqi tanks. "Are they in front or back?" After some time had passed,
she said,
she and the other analysts were "still trying to figure it out."
There was similar confusion in the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion.
Major James
P. Kump, the 124th's senior intelligence officer forward in the field during
the
attack, had been monitoring what he assumed was a routine retreat early that
morning
when the fighting started. Kump, who spent twenty-two years on active duty
and is now
retired, told me, "I thought, I can't believe what I'm hearing! There's
nothing going
on. These guys are retreating. "The skies above the battlefield were crammed
with
state-of-the-art intelligence devices, Kump said, and much of the
intelligence was
being passed to his Humvee. "I had links to several intelligence systems --
more than
I can talk about. And I'd have known if troops were moving toward us." Kump
went on,
"I knew of no justification for the counterattack. I always felt it was a
violation of
the ceasefire. From an integrity standpoint, I was very troubled." Before
all previous
operations, he said, planners at division headquarters had routinely sought
his
intelligence assessments. This time, he said, "no one asked me for an
assessment."
COMMAND DECISION
McCaffrey's official headquarters was the division's mobile tactical command
post, but
he directed the war from what is known as an assault command post, a unit of
four
tanks and three or so tracked vehicles which stays in the front lines with
the
advancing troops. At intervals, the vehicles would stop together, and
McCaffrey's
staff would pull out canvas extensions to provide shade, and set up cots for
quick
naps. Fresh coffee was brewed, and the area neatly served as a mobile
headquarters
where McCaffrey could get up-to-date briefings and hold small staff
meetings.
The men in the assault command post worked intimately with McCaffrey and
were the most
knowledgeable about what was going on. They included Captain Michael Bell,
Captain
Michael Bell, an armor officer who was McCaffrey's personal aide -- the man
who
arranged his schedule, screened his appointments, and monitored his
telephone. Bell, a
West Point graduate, was married to a fellow West Point graduate, whose
father was a
two-star general on active duty at the Pentagon. Bell considered it his
responsibility
to let his boss know what he thought, in essence confronting McCaffrey with
observations he sometimes did not want to hear. Whatever the cause, Bell
fell out of
favor. "One day, he was the greatest thing since sliced bread," Patrick
Lamar, the
division's operations officer, said. And then, he said, "Bell got blitzed."
Lamar ran the assault command post, and thus was responsible, in war, for
relaying
McCaffrey's orders to the field units. The son of an abandoned Second World
War French
war bride, he had worked his way through Kent State University, and to an
Army
commission, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship.
According to Lamar, the interval after the first skirmishing by Ware's
battalion
provoked a debate inside McCaffrey's assault command post. "There was no
incoming,"
Lamar told me. "I know that for a fact." He described the battle as "a giant
hoax. The
Iraqis were doing absolutely nothing. I told McCaffrey I was having trouble
confirming
the incoming." It didn't matter, Lamar added. McCaffrey wanted to attack.
Colonel Townsend, the division artillery commander, remains skeptical today
of some of
the early-morning radio discussions between McCaffrey and Le Moyne. "There
was not
point-blank fire," Townsend told me. "The excitement on the command net was
not
there."Townsend thought that at least one antitank round had been fired. but
there was
also "some indication" in the radio traffic that "something wasn't right."
"There was a lot of confusion," Captain Jim Morris, a West Point graduate
who worked
in the command post, told me, and also "some huddling" among Lamar,
McCaffrey, and
General Terry Scott, the deputy division commander. "I remember Lamar
outside, smoking
a cigarette and shaking his head." Major Thomas Matyok, another junior
officer in the
command post, had the impression, as he told me, that there was not "a lot
of
enthusiasm" on Lamar's part for a renewed attack on the Iraqi forces. He
added that he
and Captain Morris had a running joke about the lack of Iraqi aggression:
Iraq was a
surprisingly patriotic country "because everybody was always waving their
national
flag-all white."
As one officer recalled the discussion, "General Scott was all for the
attack" -- even
to the point of suggesting ways to provoke an Iraqi retaliation. "He was
asking a lot
of questions about 'Can we get the Scout [helicopter] out and kick some dirt
up and
see what happens?"' Log Item 53, filed shortly after 7:30 A.M., states that
Scott
"requests PSYOPS Helicopter."
"Scott was sitting there saying, 'Let's go get these guys,'" Lamar told me.
Lamar said
his own view was "We didn't need to kill more people -- we'd proved our
point." But,
he said, "McCaffrey had to have his armor battle." Scott, when he was asked
about his
actions that morning, told me he was "emphatic that the enemy had to start
it.
Eventually, we became convinced that it was a real, no-shit attack by the
Iraqis."
In the course of the discussions, Lamar reminded McCaffrey of XVIII Corps's
newly
revised rules of engagement, and urged him to obtain higher authority. At
that point,
McCaffrey made a telephone call to General Luck, or so Lamar assumed, at
XVIII Corps
headquarters. (Luck later told me that he did not provide any guidance to
McCaffrey,
or have any conversation with him, immediately before the March 2nd
counterattack.)
And then, Lamar said, the discussion was over.
After the phone call, McCaffrey in effect pushed Lamar aside and assumed
operational
command of the division himself. "He just took me out of the picture," Lamar
said.
McCaffrey abruptly left the meeting and moved his command post, without
Lamar, to
Colonel Ware's battalion. "He left the operations center in the cold," Lamar
said.
"Nobody knew what the hell was going on." (The division log suggested that
the time of
the shift in command post was 8:27 A.M.)
"I'll kill somebody if I have to," Lamar told me. "But if you're going to
violate a
truce you'd better have permission to do so. McCaffrey put people at risk at
the peace
table." Lamar was referring to General Schwarzkopf's formal ceasefire talks
with the
Iraqi leadership, scheduled to begin the next morning.
Captain Bell, who had been present during the discussions before the
counterattack,
came to believe that McCaffrey's decision to move his brigades to the east
of the
original ceasefire line was designed to provoke the Iraqis. Referring to the
deployment in force, he said, "The entire regiment moves forward. He's
pulled the
whole division in line. You have an army that comes forward in the dark
after a
ceasefire in a confined battlefield, and of course somebody's going to shoot
at you."
There is a serious distinction, nonetheless, Bell added, between a round or
two fired
in panic or self-defense and McCaffrey's insistence that the Iraqis were
"attacking
us." That "is pure fabrication," he said.
BATTLE ORDER
Colonel Burt Tackaberry, the division's chief aviation officer, had been the
first
pilot in the air early on the morning of March 2nd, and had flown at very
low
altitudes over the column of retreating Iraqis. His helicopter had been an
easy
target, but no one had taken a shot. He had noticed Iraqi tanks with their
tubes in
travel-lock position and pointed away from a forward target. "My first order
was to go
up and make sure the causeway was cut," he recalled. It was still open, and
he could
see that about a hundred vehicles had already crossed over it. He was then
ordered to
make sure that no further vehicles got away. ("I never say no to McCaffrey,"
he told
me.) In an effort to get the vehicles to stop, he fired a few rounds over
them. When
they didn't stop, he fired a TOW missile at the first vehicle, which turned
out to be
an ammunition truck. ("It exploded for hours.") Once that vehicle was hit,
none of the
others could get around it. There was a panic. "All the people took off to
the marshes
and squatted down, "Tackaberry said. "They were scared to death." There was
still no
opposition. Later that morning, McCaffrey, running the division from Ware's
Bradley,
got on the radio and ordered the division's missile-firing Apache
helicopters --
Tackaberry's helicopters -- to begin a full assault.
The division log placed the time of McCaffrey's first known battle order at
five
minutes after nine o'clock. According to Log Item 74, McCaffrey directed
that the
causeway "be targeted" -- thus blocking the basic escape route for the
retreating
forces. The division's Apache helicopters were to"engage from south with
intent of
terminating engagement." Within moments, the assault was all-out. One
company reported
that it had engaged a force of between a hundred and two hundred Iraqi
"dismounts." By
ten o'clock, division headquarters had begun receiving reports of extensive
damage to
the Iraqi forces. One group of Apache helicopters reported in mid-morning,
"Enemy not
firing back, they are jumping in ditches to hide." Forty minutes later,
according to
another log item, McCaffrey ordered artillery to be "used in conjunction
with
personnel sweep to 'pound these guys' and end the engagement."
The Iraqis, unable to continue driving to the north, because of the
bombed-out
causeway, were easy targets. In "Lucky War," an appraisal of the Gulf War
published in
1994, the Army historian Colonel Richard M. Swain (Ret.) noted, "One can
continue to
be troubled, however, with the fact that most of the Iraqis killed seem to
have been
headed north or simply milling around -- and not into the defender's lines,
notwithstanding that some of their number quite clearly seem to have
initiated the
combat by opening fire when U.S. forces approached their position. "Two
other facts
remain somewhat disturbing," Swain added: that "only a small number of
Iraqis seem to
have acted with hostility that morning," and that the Iraqis, when fired
upon, had
been many miles beyond the 24th Division's front lines, as they existed on
the morning
of the ceasefire.
Some soldiers who found themselves ordered into the battle remained dubious.
Stuart
Hirstein, the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion sergeant whose unit had
earlier
rushed to help a supposedly beleaguered combat company in Ware's battalion
only to
find the Iraqis sunning themselves on top of their tanks, now watched as the
division's missile-firing Apache helicopters systematically began to
annihilate the
tanks. "It pissed me off," Hirstein told me. "They were not firing."
Charles Sheehan-Miles recalled that his 1st Brigade tank platoon also had
been told
that morning to rush to the rescue of an American unit near Highway 8 that
was under
attack by a division of Iraqi soldiers. "We went up the road blowing the
shit out of
everything. It was like going down an American highway -- people were all
mixed up in
cars and trucks. People got out of their cars and ran away. We shot them."
Sheehan-Miles said that at least one of his victims was in civilian
clothing. "My
orders were to shoot if they were armed or running. The Iraqis were getting
massacred."
James Manchester was listening to the radio and heard Colonel Ware receive
permission
to engage. "All of a sudden, all hell breaks loose," he said. "It's
surreal." At one
point, the battalion's tanks were so eager to fire on the retreating Iraqi
forces that
they moved off an embankment and got mired helplessly in the sand. If the
Iraqis had
any intention of continuing the war, Manchester explained, the immobilized
American
tanks made perfect targets. The tanks were "helpless," but kept volleying
cannon fire
at the Iraqis as they were being pulled out of the sand by tow trucks. What
happened
along the causeway, he said, was "fucking murder."
What we did was just seal the oilfield off so he" -- the enemy -- "couldn't
get out,"
Le Moyne told the Army oral historian. "Yup, it's about fifteen kilometres
long and
ten to fifteen kilometres wide.... So by using artillery we were able to
seal the top
and the bottom of it, and I'll tell you, that once we did that the panic
began to set
in.... The Apaches strewed panic and when the columns started rolling up
there was
just absolute pandemonium. Everybody began to break and run. Run in blind
fear and
terror.... A Hellfire missile hitting aT-72 tank -- it is an absolute
catastrophic
destruction. The turret absolutely separates and blows off a hundred feet in
the air,
a hundred yards away."
The 24th Division continued pounding the Iraqi column throughout the
morning, until
every vehicle moving toward the causeway -- tank, truck, or automobile --
was
destroyed. McCaffrey, in a written response to a question, reported that his
forces
had removed a hundred and eighty-seven tanks and armored vehicles from the
Iraqi
arsenal, along with four hundred or more trucks. The Battle of Rumaila was
closely
reviewed at the war's end by an analyst for the C.I.A., who confirmed that
the Iraqi
losses were great. The toll included at least a hundred tanks from the
Hammurabi
division. "It's like eating an artichoke," one colonel had said of combat to
Captain
Bell. "Once you start, you can't stop."
One of the destroyed vehicles was a bus, which had been hit by a rocket. The
precise
number of its occupants who were injured or killed is not known, but they
included
civilians and children. One of the first Americans at the scene was
Lieutenant Charles
W. Gameros, Jr., a Scout platoon leader, who called in a Medevac team for
the victims.
At the time, he was "frustrated" by what he saw as needless deaths, Gameros
recalled
in an interview. "Now I look at it sadly," he said. Unresisting Iraqis had
been slain
all morning, but the deaths of the children troubled many soldiers.
Later that afternoon, a platoon sergeant informed Charles Sheehan-Miles that
he and a
few colleagues might be handed a grisly mission. "He said, 'We've blown away
a busload
of kids,' and warned us that we were going to get called for a burial
mission,"
Sheehan-Miles recalled. Dirty details were a way of Army life, but this one
would be
special. "The sergeant gave us a heads-up so we could prepare ourselves."
The call
never came.
A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT OURSELVES
McCaffrey was triumphant at battle's end. "He was smiling like a proud
father,"John
Brasfield told me. The young soldier got a good look at the commanding
general,
because the 2-7 Scouts had something McCaffrey wanted: Soviet and Iraqi
flags. The
flags were not battle trophies but had been pulled down by the Scouts very
early that
morning while they were walking through a deserted Soviet construction plant
along
Highway 8. "We got orders to drive up after the battle and present him with
the
flags," Brasfield recalled. "McCaffrey and Ware were surveying the
battlefield from
the back of the Bradley." James Manchester thought the scene almost comical:
"He
wanted that flag. It was very important that he get the flag." The soldiers
were later
told that McCaffrey had made a gift of one of the flags to General
Schwarzkopf.
Le Moyne was jubilant as well. At the end of the battle, David Pierson
writes in
"Tuskers," Le Moyne showed up at battalion headquarters. "Hot damn," he
exclaimed,
according to Pierson. "I've killed more tanks today as an infantryman than
my daddy
did as a tanker in all of World War II." He told the Army historian, "This
whole
operation has been a practical demonstration of what happens when you do
things right.
For the right kind of reasons. This war has had no Lieutenant Calleys in
it.... Has no
Jane Fondas. It's just a very professional army."
That afternoon, Le Moyne took Linda Suttlehan on a helicopter tour. "I flew
around
expecting to see a battlefield," Suttlehan told me. Instead, she
saw"millions of
footprints in the sand" amid hundreds of smoking vehicles. "I thought, Wow.
This is
not the kind of battle I thought I'd see."
A couple of evenings later, Pierson was driving toward the causeway. "It
must have
been a nightmare along this road as the Apaches dispensed death from five
kilometers
away one vehicle at a time," he writes. "I stopped as a familiar smell
wafted through
the air.... It was the smell of a cookout on a warm summer day, the smell of
a seared
steak."
James Manchester also wandered among the dead after the battle, and he began
describing the scene during an interview, telling me about the vast number
of "burning
vehicles and burning bodies." He stopped talking, and began to weep.
Sometime after the battle, an interpreter for the 124th Military
Intelligence
Battalion interrogated a captured Iraqi tank commander who, according to an
officer in
the 124th, plaintively asked again and again, "Why are you killing us? All
we were
doing was going home. Why are you killing us?"
After the engagement, reporters were flown by helicopter to McCaffrey's
assault
command headquarters for a briefing and interviews. McCaffrey praised the
"initiative,
intellect, and determinaton" of his troops, and added that "Saddam Hussein
still
doesn't know what hit him." He also said, "We dismantled the Iraqi Army,
reduced it to
a third of what it had been." McCaffrey gave the press corps a statistical
rundown of
miles travelled, weapons confiscated, prisoners captured, and tanks and
trucks
demolished. An officer in his command post recalled that"one of the constant
themes"
was the General's belief that "we hadn't destroyed enough."
Analysts in Washington and at General Schwarzkopf's headquarters were
skeptical of
McCaffrey's claim that the Iraqis fired first. A senior Iraq analyst for the
C.I.A.
told me that he and his colleagues had concluded almost immediately that
there was "no
way" the retreating Iraqi forces opened fire on the 24th Division. People at
the
C.I.A. understood that the Hammurabi tanks had a much more important mission
than
continuing an already lost war: more than half the Republican Guard units
made their
way back to Baghdad and helped to keep Saddam Hussein in power.
Military analysts at the coalition headquarters asked to view the battle
films that
were automatically recorded by cameras on board each Apache helicopter. The
footage
clearly showed, one officer told me, that the Iraqi tanks were in full
retreat when
the attack began, and in no way posed a threat to the American forces.
"These guys
were in an offroad defensive position -- deployed in a perimeter," the
analyst added.
Once the American attack reached full force, some Iraqi vehicles did attempt
to return
fire. "We saw T-72s in battle lines, firing away blindly in the air. They
didn't know
what was killing them, but they were gamely shooting -- knowing they would
die." (An
American could be overheard on the footage shouting, as a missile tore into
an Iraqi
vehicle, "Say hello to Allah!")
It was clear at the Pentagon, too, that something had gone awry. One colonel
assigned
at the time to monitor war reports at the National Military Command
Center -- he is
now a major general, and still on active duty -- told me that the reports
from the
24th Division were extremely ''unsettling,'' because "it made no sense for a
defeated
army to invite their own death. It didn't track with anything we knew about
the
theatre. It came across as shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone was
incredulous."
The disquiet reached into XVIII Corps headquarters, where doubts about
McCaffrey's
attack were widespread. On March 3rd, General Luck, McCaffrey's immediate
boss, flew
to the 24th Division headquarters to ask McCaffrey what had gone on. Luck,
who retired
from the Army with four stars, said of McCaffrey, "I have a deep and abiding
respect
for anyone who serves his country." But, he added, speaking carefully, "I
felt when I
was in command I had a parental responsibility to my soldiers. You don't
bring any
limelight on yourself. Better to give it to your soldiers."
"I went straight up there," Luck went on. "I asked all the people I
suspected, 'What
went on? Why did it happen at this time?' I went up in a positive way and
looked them
in the eye. Everybody said, 'This is a fair deal."'The Arms, he added, "has
built
everything on trust and responsibility. I've got to respect what they say.
When you
give them every opportunity to say what happened and nothing is said, what
do you do?"
Luck's dilemma was acute: an official inquiry was unlikely to produce any
evidence to
contradict McCaffrey's account, and would have undermined the Army's victory
in the
war.
Colonel Frank Akers, who retired as a brigadier general, accompanied Luck on
his visit
to the division's headquarters. "He was worried," Akers said of Luck. The
anxiety was
shared by many on the staff of XVIII Corps. "Deep down, there were several
of us who
said, 'Something doesn't feel right about this,' " Akers told me. " 'It
doesn't quite
add up.' " The response to Luck's questioning at 24th Division headquarters
didn't
help. McCaffrey's people were "kind of looking at their feet and shuffling
around,"
Akers said. One of Luck's questions caused consternation, Patrick Lamar told
Army
investigators in 1991. Luck"turned around and said, 'How's the ceasefire
line going?'
We said, 'What ceasefire line?' "
Lamar's staff showed the Corps commander the division's ceasefire deployment
lines, as
of March 2nd. Luck said,"This isn't the right one, fellows." Lamar, the
loyal soldier,
took the blame. "My guys screwed up," he said. He told Luck that the
division had
deployed forward because someone made an innocent mistake and got the
coordinates
wrong. McCaffrey said nothing.
Lamar laughed at himself as he told me the story eight years later.
"McCaffrey played
stupid in front of Luck," he said, adding that McCaffrey's getting the
coordinates
wrong had been anything but a mistake.
A few days after the battle, McCaffrey and the other Army generals who had
helped win
the war took part in an extended review and planning meeting at King Khalid
Military
City. The talks were headed by Lieutenant General Yeosock, who, as the Third
Army
commander, had been responsible for much of the Army's war planning. He was
assisted
by his operations officer, Brigadier General Steven L. Arnold. One of the
first steps
in the review, according to some of the officers who participated, was to
discuss and
compare the reporting of each division -- the logs, journals, and situation
reports --
with the available satellite data fixing the division's location.The
officers did not
dispute McCaffrey's claim that the Iraqis had fired first, but the
overriding issue
was the most basic one of all: why had the 24th Division moved during the
ceasefire
into the path of the retreating Iraqis? McCaffrey, in a May 8th letter to
The New
Yorker, stated that all the appropriate headquarters always knew his
position. "U.S.
Army elements in Desert Storm," the letter said, "were the first military
force in
history that almost always knew exactly where we were." The 24th Division
"never
falsely reported its position," McCaffrey wrote. "I never did so and never
instructed
any of the soldiers under my command to do so."
A number of generals at the King Khalid commanders' conference remember it
differently. Most of the position reports to higher headquarters during the
war were
accurate to within a few dozen metres, General Ronald H. Griffith (Ret.),
who
commanded the 1st Armored Division in the war, recalled. "In Barry's logs,"
Griffith
added,"the distances were off dramatically -- dozens of miles." McCaffrey
spent much
of the meeting insisting that he needed to adjust his record, and was
finally
permitted to do so. "We all laughed about it," the general said. "If we'd
known that
he was rewriting history, we'd have protested more."
The general's point was that the 24th Division was not always where
McCaffrey said it
was. "Barry would tell you where he was going or where he had been," General
Yeosock
told me later, "but his division isn't there. Some commanders will tell you
where
they're going; others will not." For General Arnold and the Third Army
planners who
were plotting the Iraqi retreat, McCaffrey's antics masked a consequential
discrepancy. They did not know that the 24th Division would be blocking the
causeway
over Lake Hammar. "We gave the Iraqis an area" of safe passage, which
included the
causeway, Arnold told me. "We didn't know there were two American brigades
there. We
would not have sent the Iraqis there." The planners would have told the
Iraqis to get
home another way. None of the assembled generals, of course, had any reason
to suspect
that an official investigation would take place into the March 2nd
counterattack, and
the potential significance of McCaffrey's inexact reporting escaped everyone
at King
Khalid Military City. Arnold recalled, "We took it as an honest mistake and
attempted
to sort it out."
According to the Army historian Richard Swain, who was the only outsider
allowed to
attend the review, McCaffrey arrived without any detailed records, and came
close to
turning the proceedings into a shambles. "He got dates all wrapped around
the axle,"
Swain said, and unsuccessfully tried to reconcile his version of events with
the
versions of others. The goal of Arnold's conference, Swain explained, was to
create a
broad narrative sequence of what had happened, on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour
basis,
during the war. McCaffrey "kept on insisting that things happened in
different time
frames. He was confused, and, being McCaffrey, assumed everyone else was
wrong and he
was right." At one point, Swain said, McCaffrey was arguing about which day
was which.
By then, he said, the conference had degenerated into "an attempt to get
McCaffrey's
times right."
McCaffrey remained triumphant. According to "Tuskers," he told his troops
before they
flew back to Fort Stewart, "You knocked them to their goddam knees in the
opening day
of the war and they never got up." Later in the speech, he said."You knocked
them to
their knees because they were like an eighth-grade team playing with pro
football
players." He had never been "more proud of American soldiers in my entire
life as
watching your attack on 2 March.... It's fascinating to watch what's
happening in our
country. God, it's the damnedest thing I ever saw in my Life. It's probably
the single
most unifying event that has happened in America since World War II.... The
upshot
will be that, just like Vietnam had the tragic effect on our country for
years, this
one has brought back a new way of looking at ourselves. "
After the offensive, McCaffrey asked his senior aviation officer, Colonel
Tackaberry,
to provide him with a list of pilots who deserved the Distinguished Flying
Cross. This
time, Tackaberry did say no to his commander. Or, at any rate, he didn't say
yes.
There was a second request, and then a third. Tackaberry refused. "I put it
in
writing, and said, 'I do not believe that any of these people deserved it."'
His
reasoning was simple: none of his pilots had flown in a sustained battle,
with the
enemy firing at them. "Our pilots were killing from three or four miles
away," he
said, and were not in a "battle," as the authorized Army history later
reported. He
never gave McCaffrey any names.
There was a final Gulf War assignment for Major Brennan as well. McCaffrey
ordered him
to find two Saudi Arabian camels and transport them to Fort Stewart, where
they could
serve as constant reminders of the division's success in the desert. "I'm
the camel
guy," Brennan told me. "Got the mission personally from him. He said, 'I
want a
mascot.' " Two camels were found, with the aid of the Saudi Arabian
government, but
the U.S. Department of Agriculture refused to allow them into the country.
McCaffrey
persisted. "We ended up buying some from a farmer somewhere in Indiana,"
Brennan said.
III -- THE INVESTIGATIONS
THE WHITE FLAG
When the 24th Division returned to the United States, not long after the
March 2nd
attack, there was a tumultuous rally at Fort Stewart. The Gulf War generals
became
instant national heroes. "We had given America a clear win at low casualties
in a
noble cause," Colin Powell wrote in "My American Journey," his 1995 memoir,
"and the
American people fell in love again with their armed forces."
At Fort Stewart and at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, however, word began
spreading that
some things had gone very wrong in the war. Shortly after returning from
Iraq,
Sergeant Steven Larimore gathered five of his colleagues from the Ground
Surveillance
Radar teams of the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion, and walked into
the Fort
Stewart branch of the Army's Criminal Investigations Division, or C.I.D.,
office and
met with two investigators.
The men described what they had seen on March 1st, when Iraqis in civilian
clothes had
been shot near a schoolhouse while holding a white flag. "All six of us went
and told
what we knew," Larimore said to me. "The basic tenet was that we didn't see
anybody
shooting at us" before the 1st Brigade platoon opened fire. Larimore had the
support
of his company commander, Lieutenant Charles Febus. Michael Sangiorge, one
of
Larimore's crew members, was anxious about going to the C.I.D. "Are we going
to get in
trouble?" he recalled asking.
The C.I.D. is known inside the Army as a "stovepipe" command -- one whose
chain of
command leads directly to the chief of staff, in Washington. The goal is to
insulate
the reporting and investigation of any wrong-doing from a local division
commander,
who has no interest in prosecutions that could damage his career. Such
interference is
known as "command influence."
Larimore and his colleagues heard nothing more from the C.I.D., and
continued with
their day-to-day assignments. The next step gave everyone pause. Colonel Le
Moyne, the
1st Brigade commander, wanted to meet after work with the men in the chain
of
command -- including Larimore, Lieutenant Febus, and the commander of the
124th
Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Reuss. "Evidently," Larimore told me,
"the C.I.D.
stovepipe didn't work." Once in Le Moyne's office, Larimore said, "We got
this big
long speech about how we had never been in combat or in a firefight. We
didn't know
what it was like. He ripped us pretty good."
Febus, who is now a legal officer in the Army Reserve, was appalled by Le
Moyne's
intervention, which took place before any of the issues were officially
investigated.
"It was totally one-sided, totally confrontational," he told me. "Instead of
'What did
you see?' or 'What was going on?' it was 'You haven't been in a firefight.
You don't
know what you saw.' He was accusing my soldiers of not knowing what was
going on -- of
not being squared away," he said. "If his beef was the way it got reported,
he should
have said that. If his beef was what they saw, I got a problem with that."
Sergeant
Larimore did not back off in the meeting, Febus said.
Le Moyne also criticized Lieutenant Colonel Reuss, the battalion commander,
because
his subordinates had made a report to the C.I.D. without Reuss's prior
approval --
approval that was unnecessary under Army regulations. Reuss said little
during the
meeting, Febus recalled. (Reuss, who is now retired, told me recently that
he had "no
recollection whatsoever" of the meeting.) Le Moyne's intent seemed obvious:
to get the
men to withdraw their complaint. "I was biting my lip to keep from getting
in
trouble," Febus said.
When I interviewed Le Moyne recently, he defended his meeting with Larimore
and the
other complainants as merely an attempt "to cut down on confusion. You
gather the key
people all in one place, so there's no misunderstanding." His message to the
G.S.R.
teams, he said, was that their allegations "would be investigated fully and
completely." He continued, "On issues of morality and integrity, there is no
substitute for looking them dead in the eye and telling them of their
rights....
McCaffrey's guidance to the chain of command was that any report of any
irregularity
had to be investigated -- every suspicion, war story, fairy tale, and rumor.
I told Le Moyne that some of the young enlisted men felt that his message
was one not
of reaffirming their rights but of intimidation.
"Absolutely untrue," Le Moyne responded. "The only surprise I had is that
they lacked
confidence in their chain of command" -- that is, in Lieutenant Colonel
Reuss -- "not
to take it to him first. There are no secrets in a military unit. Soldiers
talk. Why,
months later, had they not discussed this with their chain of command?"
Nonetheless, Le Moyne's showdown meeting badly rattled some of the young
radar
operators. One battalion officer told me,"The men were terrified -- they
said, 'We've
got the Big Green Machine going after us.' "
Le Moyne's next step was to authorize a captain in his brigade to conduct an
informal
investigation, known as an AR15-6, and file a report. Such a step was
perfectly legal.
However, a number of senior Army lawyers, in interviews for this article,
questioned
Le Moyne's judgment. "As a general rule," one military lawyer said, serious
allegations should be "thoroughly examined by an unbiased, neutral party
outside of
your command. You have a charge of deaths allegations that rise above the
norm. Having
a captain? Why do it that way? Is he" -- the captain -- "trying to come up
with
results his boss wants?"
A few weeks after Le Moyne's meeting with Larimore and his teammates, the
officers and
men of the 124th Battalion were again summoned to his office, this time to
listen to
the results of the brigade's investigation. There were no surprises. "The
captain laid
out the course of his investigation," Larimore told me. "He said there was a
group who
observed no weapons" among the civilians who had been shot and "there were
also people
who said they saw weapons and muzzle flashes" from the Iraqi civilians. The
captain
then concluded that the allegations of wrongful death were "unsubstantiated.
"
In Le Moyne's view, the case was now closed. The investigation, he said, had
produced
a series of witnesses who "totally refuted the allegations." After the
captain's
report, Le Moyne recalled, "I asked Larimore very specifically, 'Do you
understand
what's been said here?' and he said yes. 'Do you agree with what's been
found?' He
said yes."
Larimore's recollection of the encounter is rueful. "For some reason," he
explained,
"I was tagged as the ringleader. Le Moyne asked me if I was satisfied. I
wasn't going
to argue with an 0-6" -- a colonel. "I told him that I was glad my soldiers
could see
the Army had a system to deal with things." Larimore, who is still on active
duty in
Army intelligence, shrugged and said, "I didn't like Colonel Le Moyne or the
way he
did business. I know what I saw."
Charles Febus, speaking of Larimore and the others, said, "They did their
duty and
filed their report. And the Army chose to do what it did."
THE HOSPITAL BUS
Specialist 4 Edward Walker was tense, irritable, and quick to take offense
after his
experiences with the 2-7 Scouts. He returned to the 5th Engineer
headquarters in Saudi
Arabia around March 6th and immediately got into a dispute with a battalion
officer
who wanted him to turn in an Iraqi pistol he'd kept as a war souvenir. "I
wasn't even
there five minutes and they told me, 'Give me your pistol,' " Walker
related. "I got
pissed and I start screaming and yelling. 'No, you're not going to take
this. I been
out there getting shot at. You motherfuckers -- out there shooting unarmed
prisoners,'
and stuff like this."
Within a few days, Walker found himself telling his story to a lawyer at a
nearby Air
Force base. He remembered little about the meeting, but he did recall that
1st
Sergeant Rex A. Wertz, Sr., approved it. (Wertz, now living in retirement in
Pennsylvania, confirmed Walker's account, telling me that "All I know is
that this guy
Walker said he wanted to talk to the I.G. and we let him go.")
Walker returned to Fort Leonard Wood and soon found himself going three
times to Fort
Stewart, because the 1st Brigade had convened a second AR15-6 inquiry, into
his
allegations. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kight was the brigade's executive
officer --
that is, Le Moyne's most senior deputy. Walker recalled spending hours at
one of the
sessions going through maps and documents in an attempt to recount the
incident fully.
When he was asked if he had seen anyone actually get shot, Walker said what
he always
said: he hadn't seen any prisoners fall, but he saw rounds being fired at
them.
Kight's investigation absolved Ware's battalion of any wrongdoing. Le Moyne,
in a
conversation with me, depicted the inquiry as sweeping in its absolution.
"It not a
hospital bus," he declared. "There were no wounded. They were armed Iraqi
officers and
soldiers." Le Moyne added that Edward Walker "wasn't even there. He was off
in the
distance." At the end of the inquiry, Le Moyne said, he brought Walker to
Fort Stewart
to hear the investigating officer's report. "You have to look him in the
eye," Le
Moyne told me. "It's tough to find Walker as a credible witness. The kid
never
connected with the Scout platoon he was attached to. This kid never took."
Walker viewed Le Moyne's inquiry as a coverup. "The Colonel was up there
doing the
talking, "Walker told me. "He was the one leading the whole thing, and he
was saying
'The Scouts ' " -- Walker's colleagues on the battlefield -- " 'say this
didn't
happen.' " Walker said Le Moyne did reveal that one lieutenant in the
battalion
remembered seeing the prisoners before the Bradleys began shooting, but the
lieutenant
testified that he did not recall what happened to them. "He went through the
whole
thing and my story," Walker said. "By the time he got done, the Colonel
looked at me
and said, 'You haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about. You
were just
upset and overwrought.' "
"That colonel was basically just reaming my tush," Walker told me. He felt
abandoned
by his former colleagues. "I had nobody backing me up anymore. Everybody had
changed
their story." Sergeant Steven Mulig also felt helpless. He and a few other
Scouts had
been summoned to testify, but he felt that none of the brigade officers
wanted to hear
what they had to say. "We were all getting upset," Mulig told me. The
investigators
tried to undermine the Scouts' credibility by challenging their ability to
read map
coordinates and suggesting that they had no idea where the alleged shootings
took
place. "They made it look like we didn't know what was going on over there,"
Mulig
said. Lieutenant Colonel Kight kept "beating it to death. He just let it go
the way it
went. It was just an officer coverup kind of thing."
Kight's report, as summarized by the Army, concluded that, while the
Americans had
fired in the direction of the Iraqis, no prisoners "had been killed or
wounded in the
incident.... No bodies, graves, or wounded were attributed to this
incident-Iraqi or
friendly." Another finding, the Army report said, was that the Iraqis who
died had
contributed to their own demise: "The Iraqi vehicles carrying surrendering
soldiers
had not been marked with white flags."
Former Lieutenant Kirk Allen, the Scout commander, who is now a major
serving in
Georgia, told me that all the witnesses from the Bradley companies denied
that their
bullets had struck any prisoners. Two important witnesses, he added, turned
out to be
Le Moyne and the brigade executive officer, Major Benjamin Freakley, whose
armored
vehicles were determined to have been in a position to see the shooting --
and both
men subsequently testified that they saw no wrongdoing. One Army lawyer who
was on
active duty at Fort Stewart in mid-1991 told me that the AR15-6 testimony
even
suggested that some of the Iraqis had "feigned" their surrender, and had
turned
themselves into prisoners with the intent of taking a shot at the Americans.
"It was
essentially a ruse," he said.
Some of the lawyers in the Judge Advocate General's office at Fort Stewart
came to
believe that Le Moyne was far from independent in his handling of the
allegations. "Le
Moyne is on the firing line," one senior lawyer told me, "but McCaffrey is
pulling the
string." Le Moyne, in one of his conversations with me, was categorical in
asserting
the independence of his role: "I appointed one of my brigade officers to
investigate .
. . and his report was that it was not true."
McCaffrey had a different recollection of who appointed the investigators,
as he told
two questioners from the C.I.D. in 1991. There were, he said, "three
allegations of
enemy prisoners being fired on. In each case, I had appointed an
investigating
officer, and I said you will get to the truth of the allegations. You will
interview
everybody involved.... Which was done."
For reasons not known, John Brasfield and James Manchester were never called
to
testify in the 1st Brigade's investigation. David Collatt, their colleague
on the 2-7
Scout team, testified that he didn't actually see any prisoners get shot.
But he
scoffed at the brigade's finding that none of the Iraqi prisoners had been
killed or
wounded: "Our Bradleys turned and started firing at the prisoners. And there
was no
wounded or killed? Rounds pumping right where they're at, and they tell us
nobody got
hurt?" Collatt told me that he had no hard feelings toward Edward Walker for
not
leaving the war behind him: "Walker did what he had to do. We were just glad
to be
alive."
"I knew I was a marked man as soon as I said something," Walker said. He was
not
permitted to reenlist by the authorities at Fort Leonard Wood, and he left
the Army in
the fall of 1991.
MITCHELL'S INQUIRY
Sometime late in the spring of 1991, three members of the 5th Engineer
Battalion at
Fort Leonard Wood went to the Inspector General's office on base. They told
a story
much like Larimore's and Walker's about the shooting of Iraqi prisoners of
war by
soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the 24th Division. The complaints became
the
responsibility of Fort Leonard Wood's Inspector General, Major Thomas
Mitchell.
Mitchell, who had little experience in investigations, Army law, or
procedure, had
spent his career in the Army as an engineer and had agreed to become Fort
Leonard
Wood's Inspector General only reluctantly. None of his superior officers did
anything
to help him out. Of the three enlisted men who made the complaint, Mitchell
said, "The
kids who came in were nice, and there seemed to be some validity to what
they saw. But
we couldn't confirm anything illegal. Even if you have a witness, if you
can't
substantiate it you can't report it as a finding." He did not recall their
names, but
he did recall that their allegations involved "several hundred" prisoners
and some
Iraqis who got "ripped up."
Army records show that at least one company of engineers from Fort Leonard
Wood was
assigned in the Gulf War to the 2-7 Battalion of the 1st Brigade. Edward
Walker told
me that a number of his colleagues worked closely with the various units in
Charles
Ware's battalion, and that some of those engineers -- including, perhaps,
those who
made the complaint -- had swept into the area along Highway 8 on the
afternoon of
February 27th. "Behind us was the Bradleys, and right behind them were the
engineers,"
Walker said. "They would have seen it" -- the prisoners' shootings.
It is far from clear that Mitchell, who has since left the Army, made a
serious
attempt to substantiate the soldiers' story. In my first conversation with
him, by
telephone, he told me that he had made a trip to Saudi Arabia but was unable
to
establish that the Iraqi soldiers who were "ripped up" were victims of
wrongdoing by
soldiers of the 24th. In a subsequent interview, in Missouri, where he now
lives,
Mitchell provided a different account. He said it was one of the enlisted
men in his
office who had travelled to Saudi Arabia to look into an allegation that
"hundreds
were involved in a shooting incident where dozens were killed." Mitchell
shared his
information with the C.I.D. Office at Fort Leonard Wood, and was informed
that the
C.I.D. had previously investigated the allegation and concluded that the
Iraqis had
been killed in an exchange of gunfire among themselves. Mitchell said he was
told,
"Where they found bodies, the wounds were from Iraqi rounds. The shell
casing on the
ground did not match U.S. casing. We were finding Warsaw Pact ammunition on
the
ground."
A number of government and academic experts on the war told me that they
knew of no
reports during or immediately after the war of Iraqi soldiers shooting one
another to
prevent surrender. One analyst, Michael Eisenstadt, of the Washington
Institute for
Near East Policy, noted that the anti-Hussein uprisings -- which were all
violently
suppressed -- did not begin in earnest until after the war and involved the
selected
targeting of high-level military and party officials. "Among stragglers in
the war, it
was every man for himself," Eisenstadt said. I subsequently asked Mitchell
if he or,
to his knowledge, any other government investigator had actually seen the
Iraqi
victims, and examined their wounds. He said no.
In the report that Mitchell prepared for his superiors at Fort Leonard Wood,
he found
that the 5th Engineer allegations were "unsubstantiated." A draft of those
findings,
which he gave me, concluded -- with no evidence cited -- that the Iraqis had
shot each
other. "In a couple of instances," the draft report said, "gunfire was
exchanged
within refugee groups and gunshot victims were pointed out as Republican
Guard morale
officers keeping tabs on Iraqi reservists. Some incidents were explained as
internal
vengeance and retribution among Iraqis."
Sergeant Tony Abernathy, one of the enlisted men assigned to the Inspector
General's
office at Fort Leonard Wood, subsequently informed me that no one from the
office
"went to the desert" during the investigation. Abernathy also provided me
with a far
different account of Mitchell's investigation. "I don't remember Mitchell
doing
anything about it," he said. "It was a big situation that nobody wanted to
mess with
at the time. We weren't equipped to handle it. I think it was not an
investigation.
The U.S. Army just didn't want the publicity." Abernathy is now retired;
before his
assignment to the Fort Leonard Wood Inspector General's office, he had spent
much of
his career in the Special Forces.
No one in the chain of command at Fort Leonard Wood seems to have objected
to
Mitchell's investigation. He was apparently doing, as Abernathy suggested,
exactly
what the system wanted.
THE LETTER
In August, 1991, Colonel Ernest H. Dinkel was a deputy chief of staff for
the Criminal
Investigation Division. Dinkel, then forty-six years old, had spent several
years as
an Army cop and was working out of the C.I.D.'s local headquarters in Falls
Church,
Virginia, near the Pentagon. "I'm walking down the hall one afternoon," he
recounted
recently. "And the General's secretary says, 'Don't go anywhere.' " A few
moments
later, Dinkel and some associates were in the office of Major General Peter
T. Barry,
the director of the C.I.D. command. Barry had just returned from the office
of General
Gordon Sullivan, the Army's Vice-Chief of Staff. The Army had a problem. A
carefully
typed, two-page anonymous letter had been mailed to the Army Inspector
General. It
appeared to have been written by an officer serving in one of McCaffrey's
24th
Division command posts, for it was filled with information that only an
insider could
have known. "That's what scared everybody," Dinkel recalled. "This was from
someone
who was there."
The letter contained a number of allegations that were certain to be
explosive if they
turned out to be true. Two in particular stood out. The letter alleged that
McCaffrey
was guilty of a "war crime" in his March 2nd assault on the retreating
Iraqis, and had
urged his brigade commanders "to find a way for him to go kill all of those
bastards.
"The letter also claimed that 24th Division soldiers had "slaughtered" Iraqi
prisoners
of war after seizing an airfield on the fourth day of the war.
The letter included a threat that, as its writer obviously understood, would
get the
attention of the Army's leadership, which was still relishing the warm glow
of the
Gulf War. "If you chose not to investigate, so be it," the letter said.
"Tapes,
documents, and photos exist. Jack Anderson" -- the columnist -- "would be
very
interested."
Given the extent and severity of the letter's accusations, an investigation
was
inevitable, and Dinkel was put in charge of it. His deputy, Warrant Officer
Willie J.
Rowell, was the most experienced and respected C.I.D. investigator in the
Washington
area. The inquiry was not merely to be kept secret, as all such
investigations were,
but to be kept secret from every other office in the C.I.D. It was believed
that
public knowledge of the allegations -- and they were, of course, nothing
more than
anonymous allegations -- would be devastating to McCaffrey's career and to
the Army's
postwar reputation.
Colonel Dinkel and his C.I.D. team arrived at Fort Stewart in mid-August,
1991, just
three weeks after Le Moyne's 1st Brigade concluded its report on the Edward
Walker
allegations, and well after it closed out its case on the allegations
brought by
Sergeant Larimore, of the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion. Both files
were
immediately made available to the C.I.D. In each instance, the brigade's
findings were
taken at face value. The cases in Le Moyne's brigade, once closed, stayed
closed.
Dinkel and his crew spent the next several weeks assiduously conducting
interviews and
collecting data on the anonymous letter, at Fort Stewart and at Army bases
across
America. They spent weeks looking into the letter's charge of the slaughter
of
prisoners at an airfield, and could find no evidence to support it. They
never
focussed on the hospital-bus shootings described by Larimore and Walker.
Dinkel was most concerned with the letter's charges about McCaffrey's
leadership
before and after the annihilation of the Iraqis at Rumaila. One C.I.D. team
flew to
Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, to interview Colonel Michael MacLaren (Ret.), who, as
the
division's G-1, or logistics officer, had been in charge of its rear command
post in
Saudi Arabia.
MacLaren was told six weeks after the war that the unit no longer needed him
around.
MacLaren's testimony, released under the Freedom of Information Act,
provided support
for one of the anonymous letter's most serious charges -- that a colleague
had
overheard McCaffrey urge his commanders on the command radio net "to find a
way for
him to go kill all of those bastards." MacLaren said that he had been
troubled by the
March 2nd engagement, especially in the months after the war, when the
division spun
"numerous versions of how contact was initiated by the enemy-tank fire,
frontal
assault, artillery, R.P.G., Sagger missile. I was surprised that there were
so many
versions of the truth," especially by late spring. "I thought we ought to
have figured
it out," he said. "After all, it was these enemy actions which prompted us
into
action."There was another troubling aspect of the March 2nd engagement,
MacLaren said:
"Our apparent lack of 'measured response' in light of the ceasefire. I
thought we
should have met enemy force with appropriate force -- not necessarily
overwhelming
force. Even the use of force on the battlefield has its ethical
restrictions." The
term "turkey shoot," he said, had become "common usage within the division
when
describing the March 2nd engagement."
MacLaren also told the C.I.D. of a cryptic comment he said that McCaffrey
made at the
beginning of an after-action review meeting later in March: "Remember, the
Iraqis
started this one." When asked why he had not filed a formal complaint about
McCaffrey's actions, MacLaren said that he had no hard evidence to back up
his
information. "I have no firsthand knowledge," he told the C.I.D. "I believe
it may
have been a bad decision on someone's part."
The C.I.D. also learned about McCaffrey's dispute with Patrick Lamar, and on
August
17th Dinkel and a colleague flew to Fort Stewart to interview Lamar. Lamar,
like all
colonels, wanted to become a general, and he understood that volunteering
his views on
the events of March 2nd would do little for that ambition. And, like many
Army
officers, he had contempt for the C.I.D.; investigators are known as "two by
twos,"
because they travel in pairs and conduct interviews jointly. "They're not
real cops,"
Lamar told me.
Lamar's testimony about McCaffrey alternated between praise and revelation.
"He is
smart," Lamar told the C.I.D. "He's a combat commander I would follow. I
think he
knows what he's doing -- otherwise he wouldn't be where's he's at.... He has
never
treated me wrong." Nonetheless, Lamar told the C.I.D. that he considered the
attack to
be a violation of the ceasefire, and that the Iraqis had taken no action to
provoke
it. On March 2nd, Lamar testified, he had been contacted by the 1st Brigade
and told
that lights, from vehicles, could be seen in the distance. "I asked which
way they
were going," Lamar went on, "and they said they were going north" -- to the
causeway.
"I said, 'O.K., stay away from it, you don't need to have any contact with
it.' " His
caution won him little favor. Hours later, Lamar said, McCaffrey "took
charge" and the
attack began. "I'll tell you the truth," the Colonel said, "I didn't support
it
because at that point in time I thought it was a slaughter. But the bottom
line was he
was doing what was necessary to protect the force because they had been
fired on and
nobody knew what these guys were liable to do." Lamar denied the anonymous
letter's
report that he had described McCaffrey's actions on March 2nd as a war
crime, but he
added, "What I did tell him was that we better make darn sure that they were
fired on
first or otherwise we would violate the ceasefire rule.... The bottom line
is that he
wanted to keep pushing."
The C.I.D. interview lasted for hours, Lamar says, and he was not contacted
again by
its investigators.
The Lamar interview convinced Dinkel that the C.I.D. was wasting its time.
"Boss, we
ain't got shit," he recalls telling General Barry. "This is a bullshit
letter." A day
or so later, Dinkel recalls, he was summoned to the Pentagon along with
General Barry,
to meet with the Army's top brass in the offices of General Sullivan, the
Vice-Chief
of Staff. It was Dinkel's first visit to the Army's inner sanctum. There
were at least
six generals at the meeting, many with two or more stars on their
epaulettes. A few
civilian officials were also present. Dinkel says that he and General Barry
were told
that it was unacceptable to stop the inquiry. There was worried talk, to
Dinkel's
astonishment, of "another My Lai," and the C.I.D. was given a broad mandate
to
investigate McCaffrey.
The C.I.D. returned to Fort Stewart and began a series of interviews there,
and at
Army bases around the country. Dinkel and his colleagues worked hard over
the next few
weeks -- more than a hundred and fifty men and women were interviewed. Had a
soldier
volunteered information about a crime, the C.I.D. most certainly would have
taken the
complaint seriously, and begun an inquiry. But few soldiers report crimes,
because
they don't want to jeopardize their Army careers.
The interviews went on, the questions were asked, and the answers duly
transcribed. In
the C.I.D. interviews, released under the Freedom of Information Act,
soldier after
soldier, including those in Ware's 2-7 battalion, reports that he knew
nothing about
the mistreatment of prisoners. Several thought that the Iraqi prisoners, far
from
being abused, were treated too well. Many testify that the Iraqis engaged in
a variety
of hostile acts on March 2nd. The inescapable fact is that Dinkel and his
team were
left in the dark by the senior officers of the 24th Division, and its 1st
Brigade.
Dinkel told me he knew nothing of allegations involving an Iraqi hospital
bus or a
large number of Iraqi prisoners of war: "If someone had said two hundred
people, I
would have remembered that." He also said he never heard the name Edward
Walker,
adding, "I don't know anybody at Fort Leonard Wood."
JUST A LINE ON THE GROUND
On August 27th, Dinkel and Warrant Officer Rowell conducted a two-hour
interview with
McCaffrey in his office at Fort Stewart. When they arrived, McCaffrey was
"all
smiles," Dinkel said, and greeted them cordially. There was one jarring
note, however.
Before the questioning could begin, Dinkel recalled, the General "took off
his jacket
and showed us his screwed-up arm." Dinkel felt that McCaffrey was implying
that he
deserved special consideration because of his war record -- an implication
that Dinkel
told me he resented.
No such resentment showed up in the transcript of the interview, which
lasted two
hours. Dinkel and Rowell asked a total of eight questions. McCaffrey was
asked if he
was "aware" of any incident in which Iraqi prisoners were killed; whether he
was
"aware" of any actions by his division to provoke the Iraqis into violating
the
ceasefire on March 2nd; and what his understanding of the rules of
engagement was. The
final question was one asked of all witnesses: "Is there anything you'd like
to add to
this statement?"
McCaffrey was asked nothing about Lamar's assertion that the ceasefire lines
had been
ignored, inadvertently or not, at the end of the war. Nor did the
investigators pursue
Lamar's claim that the senior staff didn't know or communicate the precise
boundaries
of the division's area of operations.
McCaffrey was careful, nonetheless, to explain to the C.I.D. investigators
that he was
having "difficulty in remembering precisely times and days" -- the same
issue that
marred the commanders' conference at King Khalid Military City. At the
ceasefire, he
said, his instructions were not to go more than three or so miles east of
the
causeway, a map designation known as Phase Line Crush. That map designation,
he added
dismissively, "did not have any meaning in and of itself. It was just a line
on the
ground." His goal after the war was to "close the division up on our forward
positions," consolidating his forces toward the front and standing by for
further
instructions.
He had done so by the early morning of March 2nd, he said, when the
retreating Iraqis
began firing at the 24th Division. The initial contact came from Iraqi
infantrymen who
fired R.P.G.s. "To be honest," McCaffrey said, "it struck me wrong.... My
guess was
and still is" that some of the Iraqi units "were hearing their own forces
move through
the area and may have interpreted that as a counterattack . . . because it
sounds sort
of screwy to engage an armor unit with R.P.G." -- grenades that posed little
threat to
tanks or heavy tracked vehicles. Nonetheless, McCaffrey said, "I started
forces going
about this time." He ordered one of the division's Apache and Air Cavalry
helicopter
units to get in the air. Two flatbeds with Iraqi tanks aboard were reported
to be
moving down the road. "There was a lot of discussion on 'What the heck does
that
mean?"' McCaffrey recalled. "Because, obviously, it is not an attack." By
this point,
around eight o'clock in the morning, McCaffrey told the investigators, the
Air Cavalry
was reporting that hundreds of Iraqi vehicles were moving. One of his
commanders --
presumably Le Moyne -- "comes up on the net," McCaffrey said, "and he said
now we are
being engaged with tanks and Saggers." The brigade commander further
reported that his
units were taking direct fire from Iraqi T-72 tanks, with Sagger missiles,
and were
returning fire. "I said, 'O.K. Got it.' "
At this point, McCaffrey's description of the battlefield situation began to
differ
from his earlier accounts. McCaffrey told the C.I.D. that he understood from
his
brigade commander that "there were a couple or three battalions, near
Rumaila oil
field -- armor, tanks." He was also told, he said, that hundreds of Iraqi
vehicles had
already crossed the Lake Hammar causeway. That fact "sort of surprised me
because I
thought the causeway was down, so I was not quite sure if they were already
over there
or" -- and here McCaffrey added a new element -- "had come out of Basra":
not an army
fleeing its defeat in Kuwait but one looking for a new battle. "It sounds
like another
brigade... headed up toward us." McCaffrey was now claiming he thought that
the 24th
Division was under threat from a large Iraqi military force from Basra, a
regional
center for the Republican Guard. "So we got three chunks," he concluded. "A
piece
north of the river; we have got a chunk in the Rumaila oil fields firing at
us, and
we've got some more back off to the east in a pretty dicey situation."
In the account provided to the C.I.D., McCaffrey was facing a three-pronged
threat --
from the Euphrates, from the infantrymen and tanks already engaging with his
troops,
and from Basra.
He went on, "What was I thinking at the time? Number one was: 'I am not
going to lose
fifteen Bradleys and tanks in one sheet of fire and have one hundred eight
six killed
and wounded. I flat ass wasn't going to do that. I would almost say
co-equally I was
extremely aware of the political implications of a ceasefire" -- that many
were
angered because the American military was not taking the war to Baghdad.
"You can bet
your ass I knew that was part and parcel of it. And indeed I was joking. . .
that if
we make a mistake right now I will be selling ladies' underwear in Sears and
Roebuck
before the week is out.... I would not say that I was reluctant to accept
the
responsibility, but, baby, you'd bet your bottom dollar I knew that was
going on. So I
was pretty keen on knowing what the situation was and making the right
calls." At some
point, he added, "I finally ended up giving instructions -- 'O.K., whack the
guys in
front of you.'
"I was very proud of what we had done," he said. "I was just thrilled with
that. Was I
ready to fight? You are darned tootin'. And, after this battle was over on 2
March, I
again gave instructions and we prepared for an attack to secure the
outskirts of
Basra. So, had I been instructed to do so we would have executed an attack."
There were some war-crime allegations after the war, McCaffrey acknowledged,
and they
were fully investigated, at his insistence. "The bottom line was I said you
may not
drop this action until the soldiers involved understand that the Army fully
investigated this allegation, which was done," he told the C.I.D. "So, my
personal
judgment is that no Iraqis were maltreated or killed or engaged during any
struggle.
Indeed, the opposite of the case, in my judgment."
Near the end of his testimony, McCaffrey summarized his views on the issue
of prisoner
rights and possible war crimes. As a combat commander, he said, he routinely
spoke to
his soldiers about honor. "To a civilian that might sound funny," McCaffrey
added,
"but one of those points [in his speeches] was talking about your honor as a
soldier .
. . When you get out there and you have helpless people in your grasp . . .
If you
kill or maltreat prisoners you will violate international law and create a
terrible
political disaster for us. But that is not important compared to the fact
that you
will violate your honor as a soldier."
Dinkel, who today is the principal of a Lutheran elementary school in Tampa,
Florida,
made clear in a series of interviews that he has had no second thoughts
about the
McCaffrey investigation. "The case was closed once we confirmed that rounds
were
indeed fired," he said. "If I had the assets that McCaffrey had, I'd have
done the
same thing."
Rowell isn't as sure. When he was interviewed, he was the most senior
investigator in
the C.I.D. -- thirty-six years on the job -- and its highest-ranking warrant
officer.
He is now an instructor at the C.I.D.'s training center at Fort Leonard
Wood. "We
never did think we got the whole story on everything,'' Rowell told me.
McCaffrey had
emerged as a hero from the war, and there was "some anticipation that he was
to grow
up and be Chief of Staff. We knew that we have senior military officers
looking at
their careers. There was a lot of sealed lips, and people with amnesia."
Everyone's
story was that the Iraqis fired first, he said, and "We never had
information to the
contrary.... Nothing to prove that they were lying to us."
Rowell said he felt that he and his fellow-investigators had established
that, at
best, only two rounds were fired by Iraqi forces at the 2-7 Scout platoon on
the
morning of March 2nd. But, regardless of his and the others' doubts about
McCaffrey,
he said, the Dinkel investigation "came up with nothing that would have won
a trial.
If you're a two-star general, you can do whatever you want to do, under the
confusion
of war."
STANDARDS AND ETHICS
The mere presence of the C.I.D. investigators, and their questions, posed a
Catch-22
for the men and women of the 24th Division. Those who wanted to tell all
about events
that would tarnish the reputation of Barry McCaffrey -- men like Sergeant
Larimore and
Edward Walker -- found that their firsthand testimony wasn't enough. Without
physical
or documentary evidence -- without some Iraqi bodies -- the C.I.D. would not
consider
pressing charges. Others who would have talked, such as Captain Mike Bell
and his
young colleagues in McCaffrey's assault command post, were not contacted.
Some common understandings did emerge. General Peter Barry, the C.I.D.'s
commanding
officer, assured me that by the time the investigation shut down some of the
Army's
senior leaders realized that there was "a certain element of truth" to the
allegations
made by the anonymous letter writer. "Whoever wrote the letter had detailed
knowledge," Barry said. "But establishing the criminality is difficult."
The issue of what to do about McCaffrey became an early litmus test for
General Gordon
Sullivan, the Vice-Chief of Staff, who in mid-1991 was weeks away from
becoming Chief
of Staff. Dinkel's voluminous report cleared McCaffrey of any criminal
conduct. It was
left to Sullivan to decide whether to refer many issues deal ing with
military
standards and ethics to the Army Inspector General's office. The most
important of
these dealt with the March 2nd assault and the proportionality of
McCaffrey's response
to the putative Iraqi attack. Did McCaffrey violate the rules of engagement?
Sullivan chose not to press these questions. McCaffrey had been cleared by
the C.I.D.
of any criminal wrongdoing, and that was that. He would explain later to a
colleague
that McCaffrey was an "honest-to-God" hero who had moved his division
farther and
faster than any other general in the war. McCaffrey also had the strong
support of
General Schwarzkopf, whose headquarters staff in Saudi Arabia was quick to
publicly
endorse the March 2nd attack. (Schwarzkopf reiterated his confidence in
McCaffrey's
attack this spring, telling me that "the information that was relayed to me"
made it
clear that the 24th Division had been fired upon by the Iraqis "and, for
that reason,
the 24th ID [infantry division] attacked those troops.") Colin Powell, the
Army
general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also defended
McCaffrey's
offensive. "They fired on us," he told the reporter Patrick Sloyan, of
Newsday. "It
was their mistake." Later in 1991, according to a senior aide to the Joint
Chiefs of
Staff, "Colin, like others in Washington, heard the stories" about
McCaffrey's
problems with the C.I.D. and asked Gordon Sullivan about it. "In the
language of the
Pentagon," this person said, Powell "received reassurances" that McCaffrey
had been
unblemished by the inquiry. Colin Powell told me that he had no "specific
recollection" of asking about McCaffrey, but added that he invariably made
inquiries
about an officer he was considering for an important post, such as McCaffrey
was to
receive.
Later in 1991, the Army got a new Inspector General -- Major General Ronald
H.
Griffith, who, like most generals, knew through the Army grapevine that
McCaffrey had
emerged from the war under intense investigation. "If it had come up to us,"
Griffith
told me, "the first thing I'd do is go to Sullivan and say, 'Chief, we've a
got a
problem.' " But nothing; showed up. "I can't understand how the system could
break
down like this," Griffith, who is now retired, told me. "If it had come up
to the
I.G., I'd have known of it."
In his four years as Inspector General, Griffith said, he learned that "the
guys will
go out and do the investigations and if they determine they can't
substantiate the
allegations, the chief" -- referring to the senior agent -- "will call me
and say,
'Sir, we can't find anything but there's a whole lot of stuff out there that
you can't
go to court with.' So you have to ask if you want to know. A lot of officers
didn't
want to ask about Barry McCaffrey, because you knew what the answer would
be" --
something negative. (One senior C.I.D. officer laughed on being told of that
comment,
and said that the Army's generals "didn't need to ask the C.I.D. about
McCaffrey. They
knew.")
McCaffrey continued to serve as commanding general of the 24th Division at
Fort
Stewart. Some of his fellow-generals have offered me theories about why the
Army
decided not to press its investigation further. "They'd just won a war and
didn't want
to shit in their mess kit," a retired major general told me.
A public controversy over McCaffrey's action might have raised questions
about the
over-all conduct of the Gulf War, they point out, and, at the least, raised
public and
congressional doubts about the advisability of permitting the military to
conduct a
war without independent press coverage. In the Gulf, the American military
had tried,
to an unprecedented degree, to wage a war, judge its success, and tell the
world's
press what to write about it.
By early 1992, McCaffrey, by then a lieutenant general, was serving as an
assistant to
Colin Powell. (The general who replaced McCaffrey at Fort Stewart quickly
donated his
predecessor's camels to a Savannah zoo.) His promotion, and the assumption
that he
would soon be promoted again, caused consternation inside the Army -- with
most of the
complaints aimed at General Sullivan, the Vice-Chief of Staff. A year later,
a group
of Gulf War generals banded together to successfully lobby Sullivan not to
name
McCaffrey deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, one of the Army's plum
assignments.
The internal bickering also kept McCaffrey from being named commander of the
Army
forces in Europe -- a job he had eagerly lobbied for.
McCaffrey got his fourth star in 1994 and an unwanted assignment, according
to his
aides, as commander-in-chief of the Southern Command, then based in Panama
City, which
was responsible for all American military forces in Central and South
America. In
1996, he retired from the Army to join the Clinton Administration as the
director of
the Office of National Drug Control Policy -- the White House drug czar. The
appointment was widely seen as one that would boost Bill Clinton's standing
with the
military in an election year and put a hero of the Gulf War to work on
America's other
war. McCaffrey's new war is in Colombia, where he is the Administration's
most
enthusiastic supporter of a greater American military presence to counter
the
increasing strength of anti-government guerrilla groups.
There was no hint when McCaffrey joined the Cabinet of any lingering
questions about
his actions in the Gulf War. Leon Panetta, then the White House chief of
staff, told
me that he and his colleagues put McCaffrey through "the normal vetting
process" and
learned, to their surprise, that Panama was going to be his last Army
assignment.
"There were problems in his career -- problems of speaking his own mind,"
Panetta
recalled being told. "He'd rubbed some of his commanders the wrong way. He'd
pissed
off people." But that was all. There was no suggestion from anyone in the
Pentagon
that the issues surrounding McCaffrey were any more serious than that.
James Manchester left the Army after the war and attended Rensselaer
Polytechnic
Institute, in Troy, New York, on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. He was
planning, after
graduation, to join the Marine Corps. Like many veterans, he was still
troubled by his
war experiences -- even as he prospered academically. "Everything was going
good," he
said. "But everything was not good." One afternoon, while browsing in the
school
library, he ran across Major Jason Kamiya's history of the 24th Division,
which was
published after the war -- to McCaffrey's satisfaction. The history stated
that a
Scout platoon from Ware's battalion -- Manchester's unit-had been "engaged
by Sagger
missiles" from the Iraqis and also received "direct fire from T-72 tanks"
before the
American counterattack. Manchester went into a funk. He stopped sleeping. He
eventually resigned from the R.O.T.C. program and wrote a letter to his
R.O.T.C.
battalion commander, telling what he knew about the shooting of prisoners
and the
origin of the McCaffrey offensive. The letter was forwarded, with his
permission, to
the Judge Advocate General, in Washington. A few weeks later, he was
interviewed by
two Army officers, who arrived with a tape recorder and a warning that he
would be
wise to black out his name on the complaint to avoid possible
recriminations. "I told
them everything," Manchester said. The interview lasted several hours. A few
months
later, on April 7, 1994, the Army's Office of the Inspector General wrote
him what it
called "a final response" to his allegations.
Manchester had accurately described, the letter said, an incident in which
both Iraqi
prisoners and his Scout platoon had been fired upon by fellow-soldiers in a
battalion
task force. "Another soldier" -- presumably a reference to Edward Walker --
had
reported the incident at the time, and a "thorough and timely" AR15-6
investigation
had been conducted. The letter went on to tell Manchester that the
investigation had
discovered "no evidence of Iraqi EPW injury or death," because his calls for
a
ceasefire had "served to notify the task force" that the prisoners as well
as his
Scout platoon "were in the zone of fire." The 1st Brigade's investigation
was reviewed
by legal officers in the 24th Division and by the C.I.D., the letter added,
and
"deemed technically and legally sufficient." Therefore, it concluded, there
was no
need for further inquiry, "because no proof was available a war crime had
occurred."
Manchester had not been summoned by that investigation, the letter went on,
because he
had already left the Scout platoon. (Manchester did leave the Scouts shortly
after the
war, but he remained on active duty at Fort Stewart until July 31, 1991 .)
There was a
striking omission in the Army's review: the American combat unit that fired,
and
managed not to strike one Iraqi, was not identified. The letter spoke only
of "unknown
elements" of the 24th Division.
As for March 2nd, the Army informed Manchester that its earlier C.I.D.
inquiry had
produced an eighteen-volume report that contained the sworn testimony of a
hundred and
eighty witnesses. "The totality of evidence supported the finding that the
Iraqi
forces had initiated hostile actions," the letter said. "It was concluded
that the
responding use of force was appropriate to safeguard U.S. forces and within
the
allowable limits of the ceasefire rules of engagement." Manchester was also
told that
the account of the battle in the 24th Division history that triggered his
letter "was
not accurate." Major Kamiya had compiled the history "from his memory and
his personal
notes" and was not privy to the C.I.D. investigation.
Manchester graduated first in his class and is now a senior manager at a
successful
high-tech communications company. He remains convinced today that the Iraqis
did not
initiate the battle on March 2nd. "I was as patriotic as they come," he told
me. "I
was a gung-ho ass-kicking Commie-hating patriotic son of a bitch. I hated
the Arabs.
We all did. I dehumanized them. Did the Iraqis commit war crimes in Kuwait?
Did they
retreat back into Iraq to commit war crimes against their own people? The
answer is
yes to both questions. But does that make March 2nd justified? There have to
be
limits, even in war. Otherwise, the whole system breaks down."

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