The Gulf War 1991 – Part 3: Land of Darkness

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

You are listening to the third and final installment of a three-part series on the 1991 Gulf War.

If you haven’t listened to Parts 1 and 2 yet, I’d definitely go check those out first. In those episodes, we introduced our cast of characters, established some important plot threads, and really set the stage for what’s about to happen in this finale.

Now, full disclosure - Today’s episode is going to be a long one. In fact, it might be one of the longest I’ve ever done. Suffice to say, we have a lot of ground to cover today, but I’d still like to take a few minutes and look back at where we’ve been so far.

Last time, in Part 2: The Storm, we opened with the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces in the summer of 1990, as seen through the eyes of passengers on a British Airways flight that touched down for a refueling stop in Kuwait City. From their porthole windows, they witnessed the opening hours of the attack, and were quickly captured and taken hostage by Iraqi forces.

From there, we focused on the immediate response to the invasion, specifically from the perspective of US President George H.W. Bush. While initially lukewarm, Bush’s view on the situation quickly ossified into an intense determination to confront Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. In the weeks to come, Bush and his administration assembled a sprawling international coalition to oppose what the United Nations labeled an illegal annexation of a sovereign country.

Meanwhile, A huge task force of American military personnel was dispatched to protect Saudi Arabia and their vital oil fields from any potential Iraqi attack. Operation Desert Shield, as it came to be known, was an insurance policy to safeguard a huge percentage of the globe’s petroleum.

We also spent a lot of time with our old buddy Saddam Hussein as he attempted to navigate the self-inflicted crisis. He had been able to conquer Kuwait in a matter of days, but it had destroyed his reputation in the eyes of almost every government on earth.

As Bush’s coalition grew, and Saddam became more concerned about a military confrontation, he trapped thousands of foreign workers in Kuwait and kept them as hostages, using them as “human shields”. Unfortunately for Saddam, this policy backfired spectacularly, he was obliged to release the hostages after just a few months of pressure.

By the end of 1990, Bush and his Coalition had decided that direct military action was the only thing that could evict Saddam from Kuwait. Operation Desert Storm was going to be the instrument of that eviction, masterminded with meticulous detail by the flamboyant American General, Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf.

By early January, all the pieces were in place. The United Nations gave Saddam one last chance to pull his army out of Kuwait, hoping that the dictator might come to his senses. But by that point, it was clear that nothing short of a full-scale military assault was going to do the job. And so, the final deadline for a withdrawal was set at January 15^th, 1991. If Iraq did not withdraw by that date, the Coalition would attack.

And as the clock ticked down, the world held its breath.

And that is where we left off last time. So, with our minds refreshed and our attention refocused, I think it’s time to get started.

Before we begin, though, I’d like to issue a quick content warning. This episode is going to rely heavily on first-hand accounts from soldiers who fought in the Gulf, which means there’s going to be a lot of profanity. Like, a lot. The air will be just as thick will F-bombs, as actual bombs. Not to mention some pretty harrowing descriptions of violence.

I know that in the past, I’ve been fairly inconsistent about when I do and do not bleep the curse words out, but I think for the sake of authenticity and respect to the primary sources, those quotes need to remain uncensored. We’re all adults here, we can handle it - but if you have kids around, you may want to put in some headphones.

So without further ado, let’s land this bird properly.

Welcome to The Gulf War 1991 –Part 3: Land of Darkness

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It’s the morning of February 28^th, 1991.

We’re on a lonely stretch of highway in southern Iraq. About 70 miles from Kuwait City.

In this part of the desert, nothing moves. The landscape is bleak with a capital “b”. Nothing but flat, endless beige in every direction. A dead horizon under a cloudless, milky-blue sky.  

But suddenly, at about 9:30 in the morning, something breaks the stillness.

A US military Humvee speeds down the highway, kicking up clouds of sand and grit and dust. Cramped into this Humvee, is a small group of journalists. Grumpy writers and dehydrated photographers, hoping to catch a final glimpse of the ground war unfolding across the Persian Gulf.

One of these journalists is a 28-year-old photographer for Time Magazine, named Ken Jarecke (Juh-resk-ee).

Seven weeks earlier, when the United Nations deadline elapsed, and Operation Desert Storm was unleashed against the Iraqi Army, Ken Jarecke and journalists like him enthusiastically leapt into the warzone, hoping to capture the perfect shot, or a career-making story.

But so far, Ken has come up short.

After seven weeks of war in, his camera rolls are as dry as the Kuwaiti desert. Beautifully composed, (but ultimately dull) shots of sullen prisoners and dusty trenches. All but indistinguishable from the same tripe everyone else has been getting in the Gulf. “One picture after another,” Jarecke observed, “of a sunset with camels and a tank”.

The problem is not one of talent, but of access. Since the war began, the US military has imposed tight, draconian controls on the media in the Gulf. Divided into press pools and shadowed by chaperones at every waking moment, the 1,600 Western journalists covering Desert Storm feel more like kindergarteners on a field trip than documentarians on the front line.

And as the Humvee rumbles across the desert, Ken Jarecke knows that the war is pretty much over. A ceasefire has been declared. He’ll have to go back to his editors at TIME Magazine with a boring roll of redundant fluff. The first American war in a generation, and barely anything to show for it.

But what Ken does not know, is that today, on February 28^th, he is going to take the most famous picture of his entire career. A single shot that will become one of the defining images of the Gulf War.

As the Humvee whips down the empty highway, its driver catches sight of something. They squint through the blinding monotony of the landscape, and eventually it comes into focus. In the middle of the road, is a single truck. An Iraqi truck. From a distance, it looks abandoned, but as they get closer, they begin to see shapes scattered across the asphalt. Dead bodies. About half a dozen or more. The Humvee rolls to a stop, and Ken Jarecke leaps out of the passenger seat, camera in hand.

As he approaches the vehicle, he spots a corpse splayed on the ground. It is - or was - an Iraqi soldier. But now, it’s just a bag of meat, liquifying under the Arabian sun. As he gets closer, Ken notices a red-white-and-blue can of Pepsi next to the soldier’s leg. He takes a mental note of the oddly humanizing detail, snaps a picture, and keeps walking.

The next body he finds is another dead Iraqi soldier. The man is on his back, looking up towards the sky with a calm, almost serene expression. In death, the soldier looks peaceful, even “handsome”, according to Ken. But below the neck, he is nothing but a pile of charcoal. A man-shaped clump of embers. The American bombs that killed him had disintegrated his body, but somehow left his face perfectly intact. Ken snaps a picture, and keeps walking.

Finally, Jarecke arrives at the truck itself; the lone Iraqi vehicle in the middle of the road.

And as Ken examines the warped frame of the truck, he sees something sticking through the front windshield. It’s a body, scorched and blackened from head-to-toe, frozen in an eternal pose of panic. As the writer Torie Rose DeGhett described: “Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes.”

Clearly this man, this Iraqi soldier, had been trying to escape the burning vehicle when we died. As Jarecke recalled: “You could see clearly how precious life was to this guy, because he was fighting for it. He was fighting to save his life to the very end, ‘till he was completely burned up. He was trying to get out of that truck.”

It was, of course, impossible to know the man’s full story, his rank, or even his name. As DeGhett writes: “He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. Or he might have been an unlucky man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad.”

Ken snaps a picture of what’s left and returns to the Humvee.

The Army public affairs officer traveling with the press pool, the chaperone, expresses his disapproval of Ken’s photojournalism, saying “What do you need to take a picture of that for?” Ken responds: “I’m not interested in it either. But if I don’t take pictures like these, people like my mom will think war is what they see in movies.”

Eventually, Ken and the other journalists pile back in the Humvee and continue down the network of roads toward Kuwait City. But as they get closer to the capital, the landscape begins to change. Instead of an empty road, they see a six-lane highway, filled with burnt and twisted vehicles. Mile after mile of cars and tanks and limousines. Bulldozers and firetrucks and milk vans. Hundreds, if not thousands of Iraqi vehicles, turned inside out by American bombs, their mechanical guts unspooled across the asphalt.

These are the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait. This is all that’s left of the fourth largest army in the world. An entire convoy, dead & rotting in the sun.

Before the Gulf War, this desert road was known as Highway 80. But afterwards, history assigned a new moniker to it.

The Highway of Death.

Ken’s photograph of the burned man in the truck made its way back to his editors at TIME magazine in New York. It was a stunning, visceral piece of photojournalism – easily on par with the Pulitzer-Prize winning shots that came out of Vietnam in the 60s and 70s. But the managing editor, decided not to publish it. “TIME is a family magazine,” he said. In fact, the picture would not be used by a single American publication or news outlet in the weeks to come. The public, they reasoned, didn’t need to see that.

Other international outlets did run Ken’s picture, though.

The Observer in London and Liberacion in Paris published the photo almost immediately. “The image,” writes Torie Rose DeGhett, “was not entirely lost.” The photo of the burned Iraqi soldier would eventually become one of the iconic images of the war. But the editorial squeamishness of the American press never sat right with Ken Jarecke. As he wrote months later, “If we’re big enough to start a war, we should be big enough to look at it.”

The road to the Highway of Death, and the near-total annihilation of Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait had begun seven weeks earlier, on January 15^th, 1991.

In Washington D.C, President George H.W. Bush spent the last restless hours before the UN deadline walking. He walked and walked and walked- and then he walked some more. All over the White House grounds. And as the lanky Commander-in-Chief prowled the pristine green of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he could not help but reflect on what he was about to do.

He was about to start a war. He was about to send people - young people - to their deaths. And as the clock ticked down, closer and closer to the deadline that would make war inevitable, Bush’s thoughts might’ve drifted back in time; back to his own near-death experience as a pilot in World War 2.

In September of 1944, Bush had been shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire while on a bombing mission in the Pacific. He remembered the panic and the parachute and choking on seawater. But most of all, he remembered his two crewmates who did not make it out of the crash. And now, almost 50 years later, it was his turn to send pilots into the teeth of enemy fire. It was a sinking, sobering feeling. As he confided to his diary:

“It is my decision; it’s my decision to send these kids into battle; it’s my decision […] “People keep coming up, and saying, ‘God Bless you,’ My mind is a thousand miles away. I simply can’t sleep. I think of what other Presidents went through. The agony of war.”

Eventually, the clock struck midnight, and January 15^th became January 16^th. And still, Saddam Hussein’s army had not left Kuwait. Now it was official. Bush’s Coalition – the fragile alliance of nations that he had flattered and bribed and cajoled over the past six months– was now at war with Iraq. For all intents and purposes, the world was at war with Iraq. And now all the President had to do was pick up the phone and give the order. To say the words, and tip the domino that would trigger the death engine, that immense choreography of killing that the US military had been rehearsing for months.

For the men and women who were about to do that killing, it was a big moment too. As the pilot, Buck Wyndham, reflected in his journal:

Here it is—the United Nations’ deadline for Iraq to remove their forces from Kuwait. The news reports said there were large, noisy anti-war protests in Chicago and San Francisco yesterday. I suppose that’s just a small percentage of the US public opinion showing itself, but it’s still disappointing. I have a tough time understanding why people oppose the eviction of a patently evil dictator from an innocent, neighboring country that he invaded, pillaged, and illegally annexed.”

Shortly after the UN deadline elapsed, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney received word from the President. Operation Desert Storm was clear to proceed. For the next few hours, it was out of Bush’s hands. All he could do was occupy his mind with something else. As he told his aides:

“Let’s get some meetings on the economy or something else.”

Far away in Iraq, someone else was having a sleepless night. Tucked away in one of his innumerable Baghdad safehouses, armored in layer after layer of guards and guns and body doubles, Saddam Hussein was preparing to die.

All his life, Saddam had been a gambler. He’d gambled with his own life, and the lives of others. He’d gambled on the weakness of his enemies and the strength of his own stomach. And time after time, the roulette wheel of fate had landed on his lucky number. But this time, things were different. This time, he had picked a fight he could not win. As he confided to a French diplomat at the time: “I know I am going to lose. At least I will have the death of a hero”

But what choice did he have? What option was there, except to stand and fight?

To the pundits on CNN and CBS, it seemed inconceivable that the dictator of Iraq, facing the combined military might of the world’s last superpower and all its faithful friends, wouldn’t just back down. Was he suicidal? Was he insane? Why wouldn’t he just pack it up and go home? After all, how hard would it be to pull his troops out of Kuwait, take the slap on the wrist, and let the world go back to the way it was? They do not understand, Saddam thought.

For him, there was no going back. This was existential. It was stand and fight, or roll over and die. As Ephraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi write in their biography of Hussein:

“Wherever he looked, the choices seemed bleak. Unconditional withdrawal would most probably damage his position beyond repair. The economic plight which pushed him to occupy Kuwait had not only remained but had been significantly aggravated by the sanctions. Iraq's political system had not become kinder, and the nation's patience with its leader would soon be running thin. Plots were certain to lurk around each corner.

[…]Saddam's mind had been made up. War, it is true, would not have been his first choice. However, caught between the hammer and the anvil, between the certain demise attending an unconditional withdrawal and the hazardous opportunities and possible rewards offered by an armed confrontation, the choice seemed self-evident.

For the cameras, however, Saddam was all tough talk and big smiles.

He assured an apprehensive Iraqi public that when the “Mother of all Battles” arrived, their country would emerge victorious. But privately, he seemed torn between denial and defeatism, unable to reconcile the competing impulses of fear and pride. The terrible truth was, he didn’t even know if he’d be alive a week from now. As the UN deadline came and went, all Saddam could to was hunker down and prepare to weather the storm.

800 miles south, in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, the architect of Saddam’s destruction was putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece.

Forty feet beneath the earth, in a windowless bunker filled with maps and screens and satellite feeds, General Norman Schwarzkopf gathered his lieutenants and dispelled his doubts. George H.W. Bush may have been the Commander-in-Chief, but down here, in what historian Rick Atkinson described as the general’s “fluorescent netherworld”, 'Stormin Norman’ Schwarzkopf was God.

And he could be a cruel, exacting god. Mistakes were punished. Ambiguity was lambasted. Incompetence was a four-letter word. As Atkinson writes: “Even for men who had seen horrific bloodletting in Vietnam, no Asian jungle was more stressful than the endless weeks they spent in Norman Schwarzkopf’s Riyadh basement.”

But now, after all that time, after months of meticulous planning and vicious interservice debate - Operation Desert Storm was ready. Every “I” had ben dotted. Every “t” had been crossed. Every “x” had been marked. After twenty long years, after all the slander from the press and second-guessing from politicians, the stain of Vietnam was about to scrubbed from the uniform of every military man and woman in America. Schwarzkopf’s final words to the soldiers in the operation were characteristically curt and to the point:

“Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines of the United States central command. Our cause is just. Now you must be the thunder and lightning of desert storm. May God be with you, your loved ones at home, and our country.”

When he was done, Schwarzkopf extended his mighty hand…and clicked a button on a tiny cassette player. In a scratchy, warbly tone, the song “God Bless the USA” filled the bunker. Privately, the General considered the tune cloying and “blatantly chauvinistic”, but it seemed to fit the moment, and his boys needed the boost. Even still, the confidence in Riyadh was palpable. As the pilot Buck Wyndham reflected: “The plan was masterful and powerful, and it occurred to me that if all went well, we absolutely could not lose.”

And so, on January 17^th, 1991, 26 hours after the UN deadline had elapsed, Operation Desert Storm began.

It was a cold, clear night in Baghdad. Most of the city – about 4 million people - were asleep, the confident proclamations of their dictator still ringing in their subconscious. But just before three o’clock in the morning, an odd sound broke the silence.  

It was barking. All the dogs were barking.

All across the city, dogs – mutts and pets and street hounds - started howling at something up in the sky. Their owners stumbled out of bed, and realized something was very, very wrong. After months of tension, after all the threats and sanctions and dreadful anticipation… the Americans had arrived. 30 seconds later, the city erupted in light and sound. Thousands of Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries began firing blindly into the black. As Rick Atkinson writes:

“In vivid fountains of red and orange and gold, antiaircraft fire boiled up with an intensity that initially mesmerized more than it frightened. Missiles corkscrewed skyward, or streaked up on white tubes of flame. Antiaircraft rounds - 57 mm then 100 mm - burst into hundreds of black and gray blossoms. Scarlet threads of gunfire stitched the air, woven so thick as to suggest as solid sheet of fire. Yet for all its volume the shooting seemed unguided, the Iraqis were flinging up a random barrage in hopes of hitting something.”

An Iraqi woman named Nuha al-Radi remembered her experience on the outskirts of the city:

I woke up at 3 a.m. to the barrage of exploding bombs. I let out a huge groan that I can still hear. I couldn’t believe that war had started. I went out on the balcony, the sky was lit up with the most extraordinary firework display – the noise was beyond description. My dog, Salvador Dalí, was chasing frantically round the two houses looking up at the sky and barking furiously.”

Downtown, a trio of CNN reporters who had been covering the runup to war provided the first televised reactions to Desert Storm:

AUDIO: “Something is happening outside. Um, the skies over Baghdad have been illuminated. We’re seeing bright flashes all over the sky.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhrtL_XVv3s

The view from downtown Baghdad seemed to be pure chaos, but the Coalition’s opening salvo had been choreographed down to the smallest detail.

15 minutes earlier, an attack squadron of Apache helicopters, humming through the pitch black in complete radio silence, descended on Iraq’s early-warning radar stations. Within seconds, they’d punched a 20-mile gap in Baghdad’s defensive perimeter; and through that gap, poured hundreds upon hundreds of American aircraft.

Nighthawks and F-15s and B-52 bombers streamed into Iraqi airspace, and as they approached the city, the glow of its lights became visible from the air. “This does not look like a city that’s hunkered down and ready to be bombed,” one pilot commented, “It’s lit up like Las Vegas out there. Then, all of a sudden, every gun in the place goes off. I didn’t know there were that many bullets in all the world.”

The American pilots flew through a hailstorm of flak and bullets and missiles, but for all the sound and fury, the Iraqis weren’t hitting anything but cloud vapor. They could not stop the thousands of bombs that were plummeting down toward their city. And onto those bombs, the American crews had painted messages that their targets would never see. Messages like “Special delivery for Saddam” and “The cure for Iraqnophobia”and “Eat this, raghead.”

The citizens of Baghdad watched as flames bloomed across their city’s skyline. Key government buildings, including the Ministry of Defense and the Presidential Palace, were transformed into smoking crags of concrete. Meanwhile, Tomahawk missiles launched from American battleships in the Gulf targeted the city’s electrical grid. The missiles broke open before impact and scattered long spools of carbon filament that short-circuited the generators. To the untrained eye, it would’ve looked like the sky was full of Christmas tinsel. As historian Jim Corrigan describes:

“Thousands of wriggling carbon snakes now descended on five generating plants around Baghdad,creating showers of sparks and sizzling blue arcs before the system seized. Block by block, Baghdad went dim, lit only by burning government buildings and the staccato flash of artillery.”

“Shortly after that we lost all electricity,” remembered Nuha al-Radi, “I needn’t have bothered with putting the lights out. The phones followed suit and went dead. I think we are done for, a modern nation cannot fight without electricity and communications.”

For everyone in Baghdad – Americans above and Iraqis below – January 17^th was a very, very long night. Some Coalition soldiers could hardly believe it was happening at all. “I didn’t think it would happen,” One Marine commented, “All those deadlines, all that talk. It’s a real motherfucking war. Bombs and shit.”

On the first night of the war, the military might of the Coalition had been amply demonstrated, but as the sun rose over Baghdad the next day, Saddam Hussein revealed himself to be alive, well, and defiant as ever. As he sneered in an open letter to Bush: “If you are hoping that Iraq will yield to you after the air strikes, then you are deluding yourself.”

The air war had begun. And for everyone involved, there were many long nights ahead.

Back in Washington, George H.W. Bush was starting to relax. He was getting updates every hour from Riyadh, and the picture beginning to form was one of unmitigated success. Of all the hundreds and hundreds of American planes that had flown into the jaws of Baghdad’s defenses, only one had been shot down. For an old WW2 pilot like Bush, casualty figures that low were nothing short of miraculous.

Operation Desert Storm had only just begun, but all things considered; President Bush was feeling pretty dang good. “Euphoria” was the word he used in his diary.

That euphoria, however, would not last. A few hours later, Bush received an urgent message from his National Security team. They had a new problem. A big one.

Saddam Hussein had launched missiles at Israel.

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It’s January 18^th, 1991.

Less than a day after the Coalition’s attack on Baghdad.

We’re in the city of Tel Aviv, the cultural and commercial capital of Israel. Nestled on the Mediterranean coast, with its breezy beaches and picturesque skyline, Tel Aviv feels very far away from the war raging in Iraq and Kuwait.

Seabirds are cawing in the sky. Bikes are zipping down the alleyways. Street food is sizzling in the stalls. In other words…it’s just a normal day, and most Israelis are trying very hard not to think about Saddam Hussein, or George Bush, or Operation Desert Storm.

But then…the first Iraqi missile falls on the city.

Buildings vibrate. Windows shatter. People start screaming. And just as the smoke begins to clear, another missile falls. Then another. Then another. Before long, the sounds of seabirds have been replaced by the wail of ambulances and police sirens.

Israel has been attacked.

And when Israel is attacked, it goes to war.

In the fifty years since its creation in 1948, Israel’s core defense doctrine had been one of deterrence. If you hit us, we will hit you back so hard and so fast that you’ll regret ever pulling the trigger. And for the most part, it worked. Israel developed a reputation as a small, but scrappy enemy, willing to go as far as necessary to ensure its survival.

Most Arab governments, including Saddam Hussein’s, did not recognize Israel’s right to exist, but they could not deny its resilience and zeal. Some even lived in fear. As the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, confided to a peer: “Israel is our number one nightmare. It has 200 nuclear war heads and 47 atom bombs. Its people are crazy.”

And so, when Iraqi missiles careened into Tel Aviv, it was all but assured that the Israeli Defense Force - the IDF - would unleash a blistering retaliatory strike.

And that, is exactly what Saddam was hoping for.

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Back in the fall of 1990, Israel had not been invited to join George H.W. Bush’s coalition against Iraq. And there had been a very specific reason for that. Most Arab nations – including, most crucially, Saudi Arabi - would absolutely, 100%, never ever ever agree to join any alliance that included Israel. The enmity was too old. The hatred, too deep.

By lobbing ballistic missiles into Tel Aviv, Saddam was setting a trap. He was hoping to force Israel’s hand, to bait them into joining the war, which would, in turn, fracture the carefully assembled Coalition. As historian Jim Corrigan writes:

Experience told him {Saddam} that any attack on Israeli soil would draw a swift counterattack, thus making the Jewish state a de facto member of the coalition. Arab nations suddenly would find themselves allied with a sworn enemy in a war against fellow Arabs. The coalition would disintegrate.

Back in the United States, the Pentagon was in panic mode.

“Our biggest concern,” growled Colin Powell, “is that the goddamn Israelis are going to come into the war and the coalition is going to fall apart.” George Bush agreed, writing in his diary that very same day: “The big problem is how to keep Israel out, and it is going to be almost impossible. Cheney wants to let them go, and go fast. Get it over with.”

Yet for all the terror they provoked, the weapons that Saddam had launched at Israel were crude and antiquated. They were projectiles based on an old-school Soviet design, commonly known as the Scud missile. That’s S-C-U-D….Scud.

Now “SCUD” may sound like the name of a schoolyard bully or a venereal disease, but in reality, it is a 40-foot ballistic missile capable of traveling 400 miles in any direction. At that range, Iraq could hit almost any city in the Middle East. Riyadh, Tehran, Kuwait City,  Jerusalem – you name it. But the Scud had an Achilles heel. And that Achilles heel was accuracy. The Scuds were not guided by heat or satellite or lasers. Essentially, they were the ballistic equivalent of closing your eyes and chucking a dart in the general direction of the board. As “Stormin Norman” Schwarzkopf commented:

“Saying that Scuds are a danger to a nation is like saying that lightning is a danger to a nation. Frankly I would be more afraid of standing out in a lightning storm in southern Georgia than I would standing out in the streets of Riyadh when the Scuds are coming down.”

As they say, lighting never strikes twice. But Iraqi Scuds had struck six times in one day, and the Israelis were not about to let it happen again. American diplomats spent the opening week of the air war begging, pleading, and placating…in an effort to keep the IDF from launching an attack and splintering Bush’s coalition. As one American said to his Israeli counterpart:

“We are going after the SCUDs full bore. There is nothing that your air force can do that we are not already doing. If there is, tell us, and we’ll do it. We appreciated your restraint, and please, don’t play into Saddam’s hands.”

Ultimately, the Israelis agreed to hold their forces back… for now. But they were deeply resentful of the situation. As one Israeli politician said at the time: “I feel like a small child who has been told to sit in a corner and behave”

Across the Arab world, some people felt that the Scud attacks against Israel were long overdue. Justified, even. As a Palestinian housewife told a journalist: “Let them give the Israelis a taste of what they have been inflicting on us for years.”

But Scuds were not just a concern for Israeli civilians. US soldiers in Saudi Arabia soon became intimately familiar with the four-letter-word. The threat of a Scud missile dropping onto a sleeping barracks or a crowded mess hall was constant. American soldiers lived in fear of that one lucky shot – what pilots liked to call “the golden BB” - that would fall from the sky and incinerate them in their beds. With the constant drills and warning sirens, “Scud” became a synonym for anxiety and exhaustion. As the Marine Anthony Swofford remembered:

“Once the air campaign begins, I never sleep through the night. Three hours is the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep I experience […] If a Scud alert doesn’t interrupt our sleep, someone screaming from a nightmare or wide-awake anger and fear will awaken the entire hootch.”

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Scuds was finding them. While American bombers pounded Iraqi positions day and night, they also desperately searched for the mobile launchers that Saddam’s army used to fire the missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia.

But finding a Scud launcher in the open desert was a bit like finding a needle in a needle stack. The Iraqis could park their trucks, launch a Scud, and be gone in six minutes. “Shoot & scoot”, the Americans called it.“It’s anybody’s guess,” Anthony Swofford observed, “how many launchers are combat capable.” Naturally, the vain and fruitless Scud Hunt took its toll on the pilots as well. As Buck Wyndham wrote in his journal:

“Now I’m really pissed off. Saddam’s Scud missile crews certainly know how to interrupt a night’s rest. The Alarm Red siren seemed particularly loud and annoying tonight. It’s hard to describe the sound. The first few seconds after it blares across the base and wakes you up are like a 10,000-volt shock of AC power flowing directly into your brainstem. […] I cannot wait to fly again. I’m gonna get those bastards. You do not screw with me when I’m sleeping.”

Israel’s restraint had “shuffled Saddam’s cards”, as one historian put it, but the dictator was determined to continue baiting the Americans, peppering them and their regional allies with Scuds in an attempt to provoke a full-on ground offensive.

Saddam was not stupid; he knew he could never win a fight against the United States military, but if he could bleed them dry and conjure up that old Vietnam feeling, he might be able to force a ceasefire. According to Karsh and Rautsi:  

“Saddam's war strategy was geared toward a single goal: drawing the coalition into a premature ground offensive in Kuwait that would bring the war to a quick end, even at the cost of many Iraqi lives. Such an encounter offered him his best chance of inflicting heavy casualties on the allies, thereby driving the disillusioned Western public opinion to demand an early cease-fire.”

General Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants wisely chose not to take the bait. For now, the only Americans fighting in Iraq and Kuwait would be doing so from the cockpit of a plane.

Despite the constant threat of Scud attacks, life for American soldiers in Saudi Arabia assumed its own kind of rhythm. Its own kind of ugly normalcy. To pass the time, they played volleyball or soccer or solitaire. They watched movies on the VCR and scribbled letters back home. Some soldiers even formed bands to play live music for each other. Buck Wyndham remembered playing a small concert at one point:

“The audience seemed to really like us. The crowd favorite was clearly our version of Eric Clapton’s song, Cocaine, sung with new lyrics and entitled “Hussein”. One verse was: There’s a man in Iraq His mind is off the track: Hussein. He’s a leader of fools. And he don’t play by the rules: Hussein Are you blind, are you blind, are you blind, Hussein?”

Ultimately, the US soldiers did anything and everything they could to keep their minds off the unrelenting discomfort of soldiering in the Arabian desert. And it wasn’t easy. The showers were freezing. The food was freeze-dried. And the sand was everywhere. As Anthony Swofford wrote:

“The desert is in us, one particle at a time—our boots and belts and trousers and gas masks and weapons are covered and filled with sand. Sand has invaded my body: ears and eyes and nose and mouth, ass crack and piss hole. The desert is everywhere. The mirage is everywhere. Awake, asleep, high heat of the afternoon or the few soft, sunless hours of early morning, I am still in the desert.”

The drudgery would’ve been slightly more bearable if they’d been able to enjoy some of the creature comforts of home. But that too, had been stolen by the desert. At the outset of Desert Shield, Stormin’ Norman himself had ordered a complete and total ban on alcohol, gambling, and pornography. It was a directive designed to placate the extremely conservative Saudis, but American soldiers still resented being marooned in what they called “The Land of No Fun.”

Not only was Saudi Arabia devoid of ‘fun’, it was absolutely crawling with pests. Scorpions and snakes and palm-sized camel spiders. But the most hated pest of all…carried a notebook, a tape recorder, and a press badge. Operation Desert Storm was the first real war in a generation, and the Western media did not want to miss their chance to document it. 

“1600 journalists had massed in Saudi Arabia,” Rick Atkinson writes, “roughly four times the number in Vietnam during the late 60s. Unlike Vietnam however, where reporters could roam unescorted into the field and file uncensored dispatches, in the gulf they were subject to controls similar to those imposed during the Korean War and WW2.”

The wretched experience in Vietnam had taught the US military to be extremely distrustful, bordering on hostile, towards the press. Old war dogs like Schwarzkopf harbored the notion, writes journalist John MacArthur, that “an uncensored American press had “lost” the Vietnam War by demoralizing the public with unpleasant news.” It was not a new sentiment. One assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson had famously complained that coverage from a particular journalist had been “more damaging to the US cause than a whole division of Vietcong”

After all, nothing kills enthusiasm for a war like dead bodies on the TV screen. As one Navy public affairs specialist put it:

“When relatives of servicemen see their boy, or someone who could be their boy, wounded or maimed, in living color, through imagery right in front of them, that tends to erode their support for their government’s war aims.”

This time, the Pentagon decided, things would be different.

The press would be tightly controlled. Every syllable, every pixel, every drop of ink coming out of the Persian Gulf would be vetted and approved by the US military. No more snooping reporters, no more embarrassing exposes, no more demoralizing pictures of dead or dying Americans. To borrow a crude saying, the press were to be treated like mushrooms. Fed shit and kept in the dark. And that disdain for the press trickled all the way down to the rank and file. As the pilot Buck Wyndham admitted:

We weren’t exactly enthusiastic about talking to them. Most military pilots consider journalists—especially journalists in a war zone—a distraction at best, and a potential liability to national security at worst. Most of us don’t really like having outsiders around while we’re trying to do our jobs. Especially outsiders who might get the story wrong, or misquote us. A misquote in print is forever. Because of this attitude, we gave what must have been some of the least-helpful interviews ever suffered by representatives from National Public Radio, the Washington Post, Cox Wire Service, and the Associated Press. I felt kind of sorry for them.

Any soldier who was too forthcoming with the press was quickly reminded of the potential consequences. As the NBC correspondent Gary Matsumoto recalled:

“Whenever I began interviewing a soldier, this (press attaché officer) would stand right behind me, stare into the eyes of the soldier, stretch out a hand holding a cassette recorder, and click it on in the soldier’s face. This was patent intimidation”

Anthony Swofford remembered an argument between a fellow Marine and his Sergeant on the subject of talking to the press.

“Kuehn says, “This is censorship. You’re telling me what I can and can’t say to the press. This is un-American.” As we begin arguing about the gag order, Staff Sergeant Siek arrives. He says, “You do as you’re told. You signed the contract. You have no rights, you can’t speak out against your country. We call that treason. You can be shot for it. Goddamnit, we’re not playing around. Training is over. I’m sick of hearing your complaints. Tell your complaints to Saddam Hussein. See if he cares.”

It was a far cry from the fist-pumping ads and feel-good slogans that had attracted would-be recruits in the first place.

AUDIO: [:46 “It makes me feel like I’m part of something really special. Be all that you can be….and I’m not the only one ”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms9pxvEbILs

US soldiers were expected to “Be all they could be”. But forbidden to ‘say all they could say.’

In Riyadh, there was only one man doing the talking. One voice ringing loud and clear and confident across the airwaves back to the United States. And his name was General Norman Schwarzkopf. With his flamboyant style and football-coach demeanor, Desert Storm could hardly have asked for a more magnetic spokesman. This was a man, writes Rick Atkinson, who could “swagger sitting down.” The general was “the most theatrical American in uniform since Douglas MacArthur.”

One Newsday writer even speculated that Stormin’ Norman might be in the running for Sexiest Man of the Year, 1991.

Striding into the press room in crisp desert fatigues, Stormin Norman was the redemption of America’s military made flesh for the cameras. Armed with an array of charts and maps and video footage, Schwarzkopf dazzled the press corps day-after-day, translating arcane Army jargon into digestible snippets for the folks back home.

While American planes turned Iraqi tanks into scrap metal, Schwarzkopf transformed bone-dry strategy into damn good television. The Riyadh press conferences became, one writer observed, “Nintendo military briefings”. As Jim Corrigan explains:

For television viewers at home and around the world, the air campaign seemed precise, effortless, and almost risk-free. It looked like a high-tech romp carried out by mysterious stealth fighters and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Viewers saw grainy, black-and-white footage of laser-guided “smart” bombs plunging through doors or down air ducts, and they assumed a new video-game style of warfare had arrived.”

Most reporters knew better, of course. The “cheerfully antiseptic” depictions of what was happening in Kuwait and Iraq were a misrepresentation at best, and a lie at worst. As one reporter grumbled:

“They fed us a steady diet of press conferences in which they decided what the news would be. And if somehow, after all that, we managed to report on something they didn’t like, they would censor it out. It amounted to recruiting the press into the military.”

AUDIO: You can’t handle the truth!

Schwarzkopf’s briefings were amplified by the slick graphics and breathless coverage of a new rising American media giant. The Cable News Network.

AUDIO: “This is CNN” (4:21:04) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTfpaTvrWXE

These days, CNN is a wobbly shadow of its former self…. but back in the 90s? Back in the 1990s, CNN was more than news. It was a global obsession. Founded in 1980, the Atlanta-based network ushered in a new paradigm of television journalism.

As the world’s first 24-hour news network, CNN was able to cover the biggest stories as they happened, minute by minute. It was the gold standard for the latest, breaking news – available in 95 countries and watched by almost every world leader who mattered, from Margaret Thatcher to Fidel Castro. George H.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein had very little in common, but they both watched CNN. As one journalist observed:

CNN has changed news. Before CNN, events were reported in two cycles, for morning and evening newspapers and newscasts. Now news knows no cycle. When a plane has crashed, or shots are fired in school, we expect to see it immediately on all-news channels. We don't depend on the Big Three broadcast networks. The turning point came shortly after CNN's 10th birthday, when Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett and John Holliman provided play-by-play of the 1991 Gulf War from a Baghdad hotel. The Gulf war proved how CNN had changed the world. U.S. military leaders chose their words carefully during televised press briefings, knowing that Saddam Hussein was watching CNN, too.

So when the Gulf War began, millions of thumbs clicked millions of remote controls across the country. And they all clicked straight to CNN. And what they saw, was a very different kind of war. This was not an ugly, bloody, muddy fiasco like Vietnam. This was a war of precision. Perfection, even. Where laser-guided missiles and smart bombs hit the right target, at the right time, every time. Where the good guys always won, and only bad guys died. As one writer put it: “Only flawless missions displaying dead-on accuracy were released, with audio recordings of cursing, hyperventilating pilots primly excised”

“This was war stripped of its passions,” said the French writer Jean Baudrillard, “its phantasms, its finery, its veils, its violence, its images, war stripped bare by its technicians even, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics, as though with a second skin.”

In other words, what Americans saw at home, was a fake war. A clean, digitized, guilt-free video game war. As historian Rick Atkinson put it, “The technology also distorted, even perverted, the American concept of combat, which quickly came to be seen as surgical, simple, and bloodless. War was none of these and never would be.”

This bizarre disconnect between the ugly reality of war and the chest-thumping jingoism blaring into American homes was perhaps best exemplified by a brand-new product that began popping up in stores around the country starting in early February.

Desert Storm trading cards.

Baseball card companies like Topps and Pro Set began manufacturing their own collections of trading cards inspired by the crisis in the Persian Gulf. Priced at just 75 cents a pack, the cards featured public figures like Stormin’ Norman, Saddam Hussein, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell. Military hardware was also represented; Apache helicopters, Scud missiles, and F-117 nighthawks were traded and swapped in lunch rooms across the country like Pokemon cards.

“They’re the most popular cards I’ve sold in a long time, said one card shop owner.

AUDIO: You collect Desert Storm trading cards?

It all helped contribute to a relentless hoo-rah media atmosphere that seemed to defang or even obscure the truth about what was actually happening on the ground.

One news graphic director at NBC couldn’t help but dislike the way CNN and his own network characterized the conflict: “It was a little too…Top Gun-y…I was concerned about my children and the way it made war look fun”

In Baghdad, however, the war looked very, very different.

AUDIO:  {8:05) “We have no argument with the people of Iraq. Indeed, for the innocents, caught in this conflict, I pray for their safety” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ6qpFpIFkY

--- MUSIC BREAK ---

It’s February 13^th, 1991.

We’re in the city of Baghdad.

Or to be more precise, what is left of the city of Baghdad.

Four weeks earlier, on the first night of the war, hundreds of American bombers had dropped a deluge of high explosives onto the city. And then they came back the next night. And the night after that. And the night after that.

For residents of the capital, a month of war had effectively turned the clock back 200 years. The bombing campaign, Rick Atkinson writes, had “reduced the Iraqi capital to 19^th century privation. The city lacked running water, telephone service, garbage collection, and electricity. […] Without power, Baghdad’s two sewer treatment plants no longer functioned, and millions of gallons of raw waste poured into the Tigris.”

Day after day, Iraqi civilians woke up to screams and stench and new fires to put out. “The steady destruction of the capital’s most prominent landmarks was evident to everyone,” Atkinson continues, “Every morning the city skyline was altered, reduced.”

Many Baghdad residents, like the writer Nuha al-Radi, could not understand why this was happening to them: “The one thing that no one bet on was that Baghdad was going to be bombed and hit like this. They were supposed to be freeing Kuwait. Maybe they need a map?

If Nuha had been able to walk up to Norman Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants, and ask them point-blank why their home was being so relentlessly attacked, she would have received a clear and clinical answer. As historian Bernard Trainor put it:

“The strikes in and around Baghdad were an effort to both shut down the Iraqi command structure and to create the conditions for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow by destroying the levees of power and stripping away the security forces that the Iraq leader depended on for his own survival.”

One Air Force commander put it a bit more simply: “That’s the head. That’s the brain. That’s where the missions and orders come from.”

President Bush had plainly told the cameras that the US had no argument with the Iraqi people. And General Schwarzkopf himself resented any intimation that the misery being inflicted on Baghdad was in any way intentional, saying: “We are not, not, not, not, not deliberately targeting civilian casualties, and we never will. We are a moral and ethical people”

Well, it sure didn’t feel that way in Baghdad. As Nuha al-Rudi wrote in her journal at the time:

Depression has hit me with the realization that the whole world hates us and is really glad to ruin us. It’s not a comforting thought. It’s an unfair world. Other countries do wrong. Look at what Russia did in Afghanistan, or Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus, or Israel taking over Palestine and Lebanon. Nobody bombed them senseless the way we are being bombarded now. They were not even punished. Iraq has had many high and low peaks in its long history, we have certainly become notorious. This will be neither the first nor the last time. ‘Too much history,’ as Sol always says. At least Baghdad is now on the map. I will no longer have to explain where I come from.”

Twenty-seven thousand air raids on us so far. Is the world mad? Do they not realize what they’re doing? I think Bush is a criminal. This country is totally ruined. Who gives the Americans the license to bomb at will? I could understand Kuwait doing this to us, but not the whole world. Why do they hate us so much?”

As the bombs continued to fall, life got progressively worse in Baghdad.

“Municipal water processing plants, pumping stations and even reservoirs have been bombed, “wrote former US Attorney General Ramsay Clark, “Electric generators have been destroyed. Refineries and oil and gasoline factories and filling stations have been attacked. Telephone exchange buildings, TV and radio stations, and some radio relay stations and towers. Many highways, roads bridges, bus stations, schools, mosques, and churches, cultural sites and hospitals have been damaged. […] We are raining death and destruction with our technology on the life of Iraq.”

In hospitals, Rick Atkinson writes,

“Physicians boiled dressings from one patient to use on another, when generators failed, surgeons operated by lantern, candle and flashlight. Cases of sepsis, dysentery, hepatitis and other diseases soared. When morgues overflowed, health workers reportedly buried the dead in hospital gardens.”

For all the talk of surgical strikes and bloodless precision, the explosives being dropped on Baghdad were often wildly inaccurate. The smart-bombs and laser-guided missiles that news anchors gushed over – only accounted for about 7% of the bombs being dropped. And they only hit their targets about 60% of the time. The rest of the bombs were the same good old-fashioned explosives that American B-52s had dropped on the Vietnamese jungles. And they only hit their targets about 25% of the time.

As one historian put it: “Precision bombing became a comical oxymoron”

The smart-bombs may have been great for Public Relations, but if the average American taxpayer knew just how much they cost, and how rarely they hit their mark…they might’ve felt a bit differently. As Colin Powell commented on the much-hyped, but only 50% accurate Tomahawk cruise missiles:

“Jesus. Every time you pull the trigger it’s another 2 million dollars”

Needless to say, it all took a heavy toll on Baghdad residents, both physically and psychologically. Even the local animal life was not immune to the effects of the air war. “The birds have taken the worst beating of all,”Nuha al-Radi wrote, “They have sensitive souls which cannot take all this hideous noise and vibration. All the caged love-birds have died from the shock of the blasts, while birds in the wild fly upside down and do crazy somersaults. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the orchard. Lonely survivors fly about in a distracted fashion.”

Sanitation and hygiene didn’t fare much better in the siege conditions. “My hands and nails are disgusting,”wrote Nuha al-Radi, “Everyone has a sooty face. No one bothers to look in the mirror anymore.”

As the weeks passed and the bombing campaign dragged on and on, international observers started to raise concerns. This was becoming excessive, they said. Overkill. As one Russian visitor to the city explained: “How much more blood do they want? I don’t know if there is anything in Baghdad left to bomb. They have cut out the liver and the kidneys, gouged out the eyes and pierced the ear drums of Bagdad, once a healthy, flourishing being.”

By mid-February, even the brass back in Washington were beginning to express a discomfort with the ceaseless destruction of a major population center. At best, this was a case of diminishing returns. Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, started to worry that all they were doing was “making the rubble bounce.”

But for the most part, the Bush Administration held firm.

The Iraqi army was still dug into Kuwait. Saddam Hussein was still alive and in power. And until one of those things changed, bombs would continue to rain on Baghdad.  As President Bush put it: “There’s another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam, the dictator, to step aside.”

An Air Force commander named David Deptula said it a bit more callously: “Hey, your lights will come back on as soon as you get rid of Saddam.”

But for the average Iraqi citizen, that was a bit like asking them to land on the moon. As one civilian commented: “We all hate Saddam. We always thought he was a bad man. But this war is worse than Saddam. Why has it gone on so long?”

The truth was, Schwarzkopf and Cheney and Powell and Bush had little reason to change course until their military objectives were achieved. 85% of Americans polled said that they approved of George H.W. Bush’s decision to attack Iraq. It was one of the highest approval ratings any American President had enjoyed since Pearl Harbor.

But then, on February 13^th, something happened in Baghdad. A terrible mistake that changed everything.

Just after midnight, a pair of American F-117 Nighthawks took off from a base in Saudi Arabia, bound for Baghdad. Their target was a military bunker in the heart of the city. A command & control center filled with some of the most important leaders in the Iraqi security services. The CIA had identified the bunker as a target earlier that month, when satellite images revealed that the building’s roof had been painted in camouflage, and there were large numbers of military vehicles parked outside.

On February 10^th, the bunker was designated a priority target, and 48 hours later, American stealth bombers were closing in fast. But if the satellites had been able to look just a little closer, they would’ve noticed a small sign outside the building. A sign that read, in clear bold letters, “Public Shelter No. 25.” This was not a military bunker; it was a civilian refuge, packed with hundreds of women and children, just looking for somewhere safe to spend the night.

Earlier that evening, the children had enjoyed sandwiches and cuddled up to watch few grainy VCR movies on flickering TVs. Bruce Lee and Clint Eastwood were some of their favorite movie stars. And then, after the movies were over, they went to bed, blissfully unaware of the two stealth bombers closing in on their location.

At about 4:30am, the Nighthawks arrived. A 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb plummeted through the air and punched a hole in the reinforced concrete. Moments later, another bomb fell, burrowing down into the interior and detonating in the belly of shelter.

“The lucky ones died instantly,“ wrote Rick Atkinson, “Screams ripped through the darkness, muffled by tons of shattered concrete and the roaring inferno that enveloped the shelter’s upper floor. Sheets of fire melted triple-decker bunk beds, light fixtures, eyeballs. One survivor, Omar Adnan, a 17-year-old whose parents and three younger sisters perished, later described the conflagration. “I was sleeping and suddenly I felt heat and the blanket was burning. Moments later, I felt like I was suffocating. I turned to cry and touch my mother who was next to me, but grabbed nothing but a piece of flesh.”

As rescue workers poured into the ruins to look for survivors, they found that the residual heat from the blast literally melted their plastic gloves. And inside the shelter, they found the monstrous results of the type of warfare that CNN and Schwarzkopf liked to depict as clean, precise and sanitary. According to Atkinson:

“Bodies lay in grotesque piles, fused together by the heat. Limbs and torsos were strewn across the floor. Eighteen inches of water flooded one corridor, the surface covered with a skim of melted human tallow. (that’s fat)”.

As news spread across the city, the sickening reality of what had happened began to sink in. As Nuha al-Radi wrote in her journal:

“They hit a shelter, the one in Amiriya. They thought it was going to be full of party biggies but instead it turned out to be full of women and children. Whole families were wiped out. Only some of the men survived who had remained to guard their houses. An utter horror, and we don’t know the worst of it yet. The Americans insist that the women and children were put there on purpose. I ask you, is that logical?

->

Casualty figures are always tough to pin down, and the sources vary, but it’s generally believed that about 400 people were killed in the shelter attack. Possibly more. Back at Desert Storm HQ in Riyadh, the mistake was clear, irrefutable, and deeply demoralizing. As one commander commented: “Boy, did we fuck up.”

The political fallout in the corridors of power was swift and severe. Up to that point, the military had been given a very long leash to prosecute the Air war. From now on, Washington would pick the urban targets. And downtown Baghdad was essentially off limits.

Publicly however, the Bush Administration continued to insist that the bunker-slash-shelter had been a legitimate military target. Whatever the case, the American public didn’t seem particularly bothered by the loss of life. In one ABC poll, 8-out-of-10 Americans said they blamed the Iraqi government for the tragedy. Nevertheless, planners in the Pentagon did not want to create the conditions for a repeat performance.  As Colin Powell remembered:

“After something like this, we did not need another situation where large numbers of civilians were getting killed. We were a month into the war, and our concentration was shifting to the battlefield.”

In other words, the air campaign had run its course.

It was time for the ground war to begin.

On February 23^rd, President George H.W. Bush informed the American public that the war in the Persian Gulf was about to enter a new stage. After six weeks of air strikes and cruise missiles and cluster bombs - the ballistic equivalent of multiple Hiroshimas…Saddam Hussein had still not withdrawn his army from Kuwait.

AUDIO: I have therefore directed General Norman Schwarzkopf, in conjunction with coalition forces, to use all forces available, including ground forces, to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait. https://www.c-span.org/video/?16734-1/persian-gulf-ground-war-announcement

In Saudi Arabia, American infantry grunts like Anthony Swofford got the word. After scraping by on three hours of sleep and living in fear of SCUDs dropping from the sky…They were going in. They were actually going to fight.  

For some soldiers, it was a relief. Anything was better than sitting around, lifting dumbbells in the desert. But for others, the news of the impending ground assault felt like a stone in their gut. “Thousands of soldiers scribbled final letters home, writes Rick Atkinson, “groping for words to convey the fearful exhilaration that seizes an army on the eve of battle. Many settled for: I’m scared and I love you.”

In a letter to his girlfriend Maria, a Lieutenant Alex Vernon of the 24^th Infantry Division, poured his fears onto the page: “I cannot handle this. I am not cut out for it. All I want to do is cry. Nothing makes sense. I think I wrote earlier that knowing the plan set me somewhat at ease, because I knew something. Well, I was wrong.”

Others, like Lance Corporal Anthony Swofford, experienced a certain degree of bitterness, and a disdain for the high-minded ideals that had brought them to die so far from home:

“I don’t care about a New World Order. I don’t care about human rights violations in Kuwait City. Amnesty International, my ass. Rape them all, kill them all, sell their oil, pillage their gold, sell their children into prostitution. I don’t care about the Flag and God and Country and Corps. I don’t give a fuck about oil and revenue and million barrels per day and U.S. jobs. I have a job. I’ll walk the rest of my life. I’m a grunt. I’m supposed to walk and love it. I’m twenty years old and I was dumb enough to sign a contract and here I sit, miserable, oh misery oh stinking hell of all miseries, here I sit in the hairy armpit, swinging in the ball sack, slopping through the straddle trench of the world, and I can hear their bombs already, Mr. Times, I can hear their bombs and I am afraid.”

Fears of Saddam’s chemical weapons also preyed on the American infantrymen. Visions of nerve agents and noxious fumes and soldiers clawing out their own throats. Saddam hadn’t let one off the chain yet, but now that he was backed into a corner, everyone assumed he’d get desperate and do something stupid. As Swofford continued:

In my dark fantasies, the chemicals are gassy and green or yellow and floating around the warhead, the warhead on its way to me, my personal warhead, whistling its way to the earth, into my little hole. I too think of All Quiet on the Western Front. I can’t remember if chemicals were used in the book or the movie, but I know that during the early years of the Great War nerve gas killed tens of thousands, and I don’t want to die that old terrible way.”

But in spite of all the natural jitters that plagued the American troops on the eve of the ground war, Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants were extremely confident. As one commander boasted to  to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney: “I’m not worried about a thing. The force is fully modernized. The logistics are in place. The planning has been done, thousands of hours of planning. The troops spirit is tremendous. In my judgement, we’re going to take the Iraqis apart in ten days to two weeks.”

The Saudis, meanwhile, were delighted at the gung-ho attitude of their protectors. With any luck, the Iraqis would be kicked out of the Gulf in a matter of weeks, and everything could go back to normal. As one Saudi citizen commented: “The American soldiers are a new kind of foreign worker here. We have Pakistanis driving taxis and now we have Americans defending us.”

All across the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the Coalition ground forces coiled into a great mailed fist. A billion-dollar battering ram of tanks and artillery and infantry that was going to put Saddam’s army out of its misery.

“Brown streams of dust boiled from beneath each tank and truck,” writes Rick Atkinson, “hundreds of tanks and trucks, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Wave followed wave in an inexorable flood of steel, roiling the desert calm with the shrill creak of armored tracks and the whirr of turrets / swinging towards imaginary targets, as crews raised their tubes and fixed their sights and in their mind’s eye killed and killed again”

“Jesus,” said one soldier, “it’s like being in the middle of the Spanish Armada.”

At about 4 o’clock in the morning on February 24^th, 1991, the Coalition ground forces crossed the Saudi border into Iraq and Kuwait. And as the tanks pushed deeper into the Iraqi lines, they saw what six weeks of airstrikes had done to the fourth largest army in the world.



The dreaded fortifications – the miles of barbed wire and trenches and oil pits, had all been scattered like driftwood. “The desert looked like a giant rake had gone over it,” wrote one historian, “There was bomb debris everywhere. Nothing was a straight line.”

American soldiers soon encountered wave after wave of Iraqi troops. But to their surprise, most of those troops… had their hands up. Saddam’s army was surrendering in droves.

Before the war, one US military handbook had described the Iraqi military as “one of the best equipped and most combat-experienced in the world…distinguished by its flexibility, unity of command, and high level of mobility.” Conventional wisdom said that this army - according to the always-colorful Anthony Swofford - was “full of elite fighters who learned how to throw grenades when I was barely off the tit.”

Well, that was not what this was.

This was a rabble. A broken, hollow force.

The Coalition’s air forces had done their jobs very well indeed. In the six weeks preceding the ground offensive, the Iraqi Army had essentially been bombed into submission. “The Gulf War,” said the French writer Jean Baudrillard, “was won in advance.”

In the wide-open Arabian desert, there was simply nowhere to hide. “The terrain,” writes Atkinson, “magnified both the effects of air supremacy and the Americans’ technological advantages. In Iraq, the Army had found their perfect killing field.”

Iraqi soldiers peered up into the blue, hoping and praying for air support – but it never came. The Iraqi Air Force, wanting to save their hardware and fight another day, had ironically fled into the open arms of their old enemy, Iran.  “American pilots joked,” writes Atkinson, “that Iraqi planes now bore bumper stickers that warned, ‘if you can read this, you’re on your way to Iran.”

As a result, American planes owned the skies over Kuwait, and Saddam’s army was never, ever safe. During the day, they were strafed and bombed and butchered. At night, American planes using infrared systems were able to locate Iraqi tanks in the pitch-black and pick them off like carnival targets. As one captured Iraqi general remembered:

“In the Iran-Iraq War my tank was my friend, because I could sleep my soldiers in it and keep them safe from Iranian artillery. In this war, my tank was my enemy.”

In General Schwarzkopf’s command bunker in Riyadh, the dwindling strength of the Iraqi army was represented by a series of colored flags on a huge paper map. According to Atkinson:

Each Iraqi division in Kuwait and southeastern Iraq was represented with a small paper sticker. A green sticker marked a division judged to be 75% to 100% combat effective, with most of its equipment unscathed and the unit’s fighting capacity largely intact. A yellow sticker represented a division 50 to 75% effective, and a read sticker meant that the division was less than 50 percent intact and no longer considered a serious threat […Slowly by inexorably the map became a vivid mosaic, as green began to give way to yellow, and yellow to a bright and bloody red”.

As Colin Powell had put it: “Over a period of time they’ll shrivel like a grape when the vine’s been cut.” By the time the Coalition’s ground forces moved in, most soldiers in the Iraqi Army had been reduced to starving vagrants with rusty guns. They’d had enough. And they did not want to die for Saddam out here in the desert. As Karsh and Rautsi describe:

“Within less than forty-eight hours of fighting, the backbone of the Iraqi army had been broken. The apparently formidable line of defense in Kuwait, the so-called “Saddam line,” collapsed as allied forces pushed through the Iraqi lines and stormed into Kuwait. Iraqi troops were surrendering en masse: by the end of the first day of fighting some 14,000 prisoners of war had been taken, and by the end of the second day this number had exceeded 20,000 and was growing by the hour.”

On one occasion, a group of Marines were making their way through a Kuwaiti irrigation field, and one of the Americans accidentally discharged his rifle. At the sound of the gunshot, a group of terrified Iraqi soldiers jumped out of their hiding spot in a nearby thicket and put their hands up.

“None of our fears materialized,” remembered one Marine commander, “They were never that good. We made them into something they weren’t.”

It was not long,” wrote one historian, “before the jokes circulated: “For sale, Iraqi rifles. Only dropped once.” “A modification work order was directed for all Iraqi tanks. Backup lights were installed.” “Did you hear about the new store chain in Iraq? Target.”

The morale of the fourth largest army in the world was not just low, it was subterranean. One captured Iraqi general blamed Saddam himself, saying: “I remember him saying that Americans would not be able to stand the loss of even hundreds of soldiers, and that Iraqis would be prepared to lose thousands. Our soldiers heard this too. It had a very bad effect you see, for they figured out he was talking about them.”

One American soldier marveled at the sorry state of the Iraqi equipment, the rusty weapons and magazines jammed with sand: “These bastards would’ve gotten about two magazines off before their weapons failed. Jesus, this wasn’t an army, it was a pack of assholes with some rifles.”

But not all the Iraqis were surrendering or demoralized or inept. Many were hardened, extremely capable, and willing to die for their country. And they expected the same of their fellow soldiers. As American infantrymen began to process the thousands upon thousands of prisoners, they noticed that some were limping. Apparently, their officers had cut their Achilles tendons, to keep them from running away and forcing them to fight.

The true believers, however, died quickly. The Coalition forces made short work of any resistance. As Anthony Swofford remembered: “Over the radio we hear of an occasional Iraqi tank squad making the poor decision to fight rather than surrender. Some of the tank battles last less than five minutes, as long as it takes the marine gunner to sight, aim, and send that hell downrange.”

One soldier said that killing Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait was so easy that it was like slaughtering “tethered goats”.

“I’ve never seen such destruction,” wrote Anthony Swofford, “The scene is too real not to be real. Every fifty to one hundred feet a burnt-out and bombed-out enemy vehicle lies disabled on the unimproved surface road, bodies dead in the vehicles or blown from them. Dozens, hundreds, of vehicles, with bodies inside or out.”

The most surreal sight in Kuwait, however, came into view as the Coalition moved deeper into the country:

The horizon was on fire. The sky was black, even in the middle of the day. According to one historian: “Gripped by anger and despair, and determined to preserve the appearance of doing something, Saddam set the Kuwaiti oilfields on fire.”

Iraqi engineers had rigged the hundreds of oil wells in Kuwait with C4 explosives, and with the ground offensive looming, they had blown the charges. The resulting landscape was ripped from the pages of Tolkien. Mordor come to life.

“Saddam,” wrote one historian, “began torching Kuwaiti oil wells, oil lakes and fire trenches, ultimately destroying upwards of 800 installations. The motivation behind this has never really been established, but in all likelihood, it was a scorched earth policy. In addition to being a means of punishing the ruling al-Sabah family of Kuwait, it would create a massive smoke screen to inhibit coalition airstrikes, compromise precision-guided weapons and overhead satellite surveillance, and at least partially screen Iraqi military movement. At the same time, Iraqi engineers opened the taps on oil pipelines into the Gulf, creating the largest oil spill in history. Up to 336 million gallons of oil was dumped into the Persian Gulf, ostensibly to prevent not only a suspected U.S. Marine amphibious landing but also simply as an act of ecological terrorism.”

Flying over the oil wells, it was like something out of Dante's Inferno, with thick, black oilfield smoke, a littered battlefield, burning tanks, aircraft flying around_ very surrealistic. You almost had to slap yourself into reality to go out there and do your mission.

“I still have trouble coming up with adequate words to describe the oil wells,” wrote Buck Wyndham, a US pilot, “Imagine the prototypical image of Hell—the one you pictured as a kid, with bubbling cauldrons of flame and smoke. Now make those fires into raging towers of jet-propelled fire, shooting skyward. But forget about the sky, or any sense of open space. Blot out the sky and sun completely. Surround yourself with acrid, black blankets of choking smoke. Weave in a barren, sandy landscape, stretching to infinity, full of fires, smoke, and power lines. Now you’ve got some idea of what the place was like.”

The air was so thick with oil, that it fell like rain on the advancing Americans. Anthony Swofford recalled the hallucinatory experience:

            “The sky blackens like midnight, even though it’s only seventeen hundred.”

“The flames shoot a hundred feet into the air, fiery arms groping after a disinterested God. We can also hear the fires, and they sound like the echoes from extinct beasts bellowing to reenter the living world.

“I look at the sky and the petrol rain falling on my uniform. I want the oil in and on me. I open my mouth. I want to taste it, to understand this viscous liquid. What does it mean? Kuehn (a fellow soldier) says, “Swoff, you better close your mouth. That shit’s poison.” I keep my mouth open, and drops of oil hit my tongue like a light rain. The crude tastes like the earth, like foul dirt, the dense core of something I’ll never understand. I don’t swallow the oil, it sits on my tongue. When I can no longer stand the taste, I wipe my tongue on the sleeve.”

Far away in Baghdad, even Iraqi civilians like Nuha al-Radi eventually felt the impact of the oil fires:

“We had the black clouds with us again today and it rained. What are we breathing? All our houses are streaked with huge black drips, dripping from the parapets of the roofs. It’s the new fringed look. We might start a fashionable trend in external house patterning.”

As the hours passed, the oil burned, and the POWs multiplied, the Coalition pushed deeper and deeper into what the Marines began to call “the land of darkness.”

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

It’s February 24^th, 1991.

We’re in Washington D.C., at the Saint John’s Episcopal Church, one block from the White House.

It’s just after 7 o’clock in the morning, and the church is filled with Sunday worshippers.

The stained glass is gleaming in the sunlight, the organ is droning a faithful melody, and George H.W. Bush is sitting in pew number 54, clutching a prayer book. Every American President since James Madison had prayed in this exact same spot. And this creaky, uncomfortable little bench had been an oasis of calm for many wartime Presidents: Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson during World War 1. Lyndon B. Johnson during Vietnam.

And now, it was Bush’s turn.

Over the course of his life, Bush had spent a lot of time in pews like these. He had closed his eyes, clasped his hands together, and prayed. Like most religious men of his generation, he had sent countless requests up into the cosmos, asking for health, wealth - and more recently - decent poll numbers. The results were mixed. Sometimes his prayers were answered. Other times, they were not.

In 1953, Bush had whispered many prayers for his 3-year-old daughter, Robin. Earlier that spring, the little girl had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of Leukemia. Bush and his wife Barbara threw everything they had at the disease, all their resources, time, and energy. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. The disease worked fast, and by the fall of that year, all that was left of Robin was an empty hospital bed and a little gravestone in a Texas cemetery.

It had been almost 40 years since Robin died. And now, in February of 1991, Bush was praying for a very different sort of deliverance. 6,000 miles away from Saint John’s Episcopal Church, a war was raging. Other people’s children were dying. And as Commander-in-Chief, he had sent them there.

But at one point during the Sunday service, Bush’s concentration was broken by something being pushed into his hands. It was a small, handwritten note, passed forward from the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, who was seated in the pew behind the President. Bush unfolded the note, and silently read the words. It said:

“Mr. President, things are going very well.”

It was just one sentence, but it spoke volumes. In that moment, those 33 letters gave Bush more comfort than the thickest prayer book ever could. The ground war was not going to be the bloodbath that everyone had feared. This was not going to be Vietnam all over again.

As Dick Cheney remembered: “We had assumed that the toughest part of the ground war, in terms of casualties, would have been the early hours of that conflict and, in fact, what we were finding was that the air war had been enormously effective and decimated the Iraqi forces and that they, in fact, were collapsing in front of us.”

Bush was so relieved, that he was moved to tears. “I felt myself choking up […],” He reflected later that day,“It’s going to be quicker than anyone ever thought. All the talking heads, and all the worst case, and all the Congress and their pusillanimous views, look, now, to be wrong. God, I hope so, because it means American life.”

Things were going better than expected, but despite the President’s sense of relief, American life was still ebbing away in the Gulf. And to everyone’s surprise, the largest and most dramatic loss of life didn’t happen on the battlefield at all. It happened 250 miles away from the front, in a small town in Saudi Arabia called Dhahran.

For almost two months, American soldiers had lived in fear of Scuds, the famously erratic long-range missiles that Saddam had been lobbing into Israel since the war began. General Schwarzkopf had dismissed them as “pissant weapons” that were less dangerous than a Georgia lightning storm. Well, on February 25^th, 1991 – the second day of the ground war - one lucky Scud finally found its mark.

At 8:20 pm, US Army soldiers were having dinner in a makeshift barracks building. Some of them played poker, Trivial Pursuit, or wrote letters home. A few seconds later, a Scud came down through the roof. As one historian wrote: “The Scud, possibly the only Iraqi missile that failed to break apart in flight, smashed through the center of the metal roof. For an instant, the force of the penetration caused sheet metal and I-beams to buckle inward, folding over the solders like closing petals on a tulip.”

“A shock wave,” writes Jim Corrigan, “flung twisted metal, flaming cots, and torn bodies more than 100 feet in every direction.” 28 US soldiers died, and more than 100 were wounded. For the US, it was the deadliest day of the entire war.

It was a horrific event, but it paled in comparison to what had been happening in Baghdad. In the capital, falling bombs were nothing new.

“This war is unbearable,” one citizen told a foreign reporter, “Baghdad is no longer a city. It has become a desert. It is high time we withdraw from Kuwait” As the news of their army’s complete collapse filtered back to the capital, Iraqi civilians began to wonder aloud when this would all be over. As Nuha Al-Radi wrote:

Nights and days full of noise, no sleep possible. What will happen to all of us now? For forty-odd days and nights – a biblical figure – we’ve just been standing around with our mouths open, swallowing bombs, figuratively speaking, that is. We didn’t have anything to do with the Kuwaiti take-over, yet we have been paying the price for it. Meanwhile Our Leader is alive and well – or not so well, we do not know.”

Saddam Hussein was most certainly alive, but he was not well. Somewhere in Baghdad, deep in a reinforced bunker, the President of Iraq was shaking with rage. Six months ago, he’d been the leader of the fourth largest army in the world. Now, he’d be lucky if he could salvage enough men to ward off the inevitable revolution that was sure to come in the wake of this defeat.



In the gloom of his bunker, Saddam did not look like the same confident autocrat that had spit in the eye of the world’s last superpower, or promised victory in the “mother of all battles”. Weeks of hiding underground and moving from safehouse to safehouse had taken its toll. He was 30-pounds thinner; he looked tired, haggard, and exhausted. But he still had enough energy to be very, very angry. As an Iraqi General named Wafic Al Sammari recalled:

“Saddam was very upset. He was deeply depressed, and for reasons known only to himself, he accused five top-ranking officers of betrayal, and then ordered their execution. The sentence was carried out immediately by his personal guards.”

All his life, he’d been surrounded by traitors and cowards and idiots. People who did not have the stomach for power. Weak men, who when confronted with ruin, let themselves be swallowed up by pride and swept away by circumstance. Drowned in the undertow of history. Well, Saddam was not going to be that person. Somehow, someway, he was going to navigate this catastrophe. One way or another, he was going to survive.

That day, the 25^th of February, a message went out on Iraqi state radio: “Orders have been issued to our armed forces to withdraw in an organized manner to positions they held prior to August 1, 1990. This is regarded as practical compliance with UN Resolution 660. Our armed forces, which have proven its ability to fight and stand fast, will confront any attempt to harm it while it is carrying out their order.”

“Saddam’s order,” wrote one historian, “granted permission to his troops to run for their lives.”

In Kuwait City, the occupying Iraqi soldiers realized that they had three choices. 1) Fight the Americans and die. 2) Surrender to the Americans and face the consequences. Or 3) Get the hell out of dodge and run back to Iraq.  Most of them chose door number three.

“What began as an evacuation,” writes Said K Aburish, “turned into an unorganized stampede”

It was an evacuation, it was a retreat, but it was most definitely not a surrender. By refusing to officially acknowledge defeat, Saddam Hussein was trying to salvage his army and his public image at the same time. As he said later in a speech to the Iraqi people:

“Applaud your victories, my dear citizens. You have faced 30 countries and the evil they have brought here. You have faced the whole world, great Iraqis. You have won. You are victorious. How sweet victory is.”

 Many Iraqis saw right through the delusional façade. As Nuha al-Radi bitterly reflected:

“Our national radio continues to broadcast our victorious state, it’s utterly disgusting. Their line is that we fought against thirty nations and are still here, which is true – until one looks at the condition we’re in.”

Back in Washington, George H.W. Bush was seething. Saddam had lost, and now he was trying to skirt the consequences. To cheat the hangman. “Nobody wants to use the word surrender,” Bush wrote in his diary, “That doesn’t go over well out there, but I’ve never heard of a war where there’s not a winner or a loser.”

“He is not withdrawing,” Bush told reporters, “His defeated forces are retreating. He is trying to claim victory in the midst of a rout.” The Coalition, Bush affirmed, would “continue to prosecute the war with undiminished intensity.”

Undiminished intensity.

That was the music to the ears of Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants in Riyadh. With the gro, Schwarzkopf had started to get nervous that the Coalition would become a victim of its own success. The Iraqi army was retreating faster than US forces could kill or capture them.

“The Iraqi forces,” Dick Cheney gloated, “are conducting the Mother of All Retreats”

But every moment that the defeated Iraqis got closer to home, the window of opportunity was closing. The UN resolutions had expressly not given them a mandate to pursue Saddam’s army into Iraq. The mission was to kick them out of Kuwait, end of story. And Schwarzkopf began to worry that a large portion of the Iraqi army would escape back to Baghdad and live to fight another day. As he remembered:

“I was repeatedly calling up my subordinate commander and telling him, “We must attack. We must attack. We must make contact with the enemy. They’re running away on us, and we must gain and maintain contact to keep them from running away.”

Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had once expressed the Coalition’s war aims a bit more viscerally:

“I don’t want Saddam Hussein to walk away with his army intact. I want to leave their tanks as smoking kilometer fence posts all the way back to Baghdad.”

Well, on February 26^th, the Coalition identified its golden opportunity. That day, CENTCOM received intelligence from the Saudis that a huge convoy of Iraqi forces from Kuwait City were fleeing back home along a six-lane road called Highway 80. As Jim Corrigan writes:

“Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers were heading north toward Basra, part of an enormous convoy that included commandeered luxury cars and public buses. The invaders were leaving, and taking as much of Kuwait as they could drive or carry. Stolen vehicles brimmed with electronics, jewelry, artwork, and household furnishings. Six months earlier, Iraq’s army rolled triumphantly down Highway 80, and now they fled via the same route.”

American radar aircraft quickly corroborated the intel from the Saudis, and shortly after, Coalition pilots were ordered to intercept the convoy. To “stop it at all costs”.

The first American plane to make visual contact with the Iraqi convoy did so in the middle of a thunderstorm. As Corrigan writes:

“Webbed lightning flashed continually and heavy turbulence rattled the cockpit. Rain sheeted so thickly that the plane’s targeting radar couldn’t reach the ground. Yet through it all, they could see a shimmering river of headlights that stretched for miles across all six lanes. It looked like rush hour in a major American city.”

In a literal desert storm, the Coalition had found their final killing ground.

Swarms of American aircraft descended upon the Iraqi convoy. “B-52s, Marine Harriers, F-15s, just about anything with wings and a bomb rack”, wrote one historian. Out in the Gulf, on an American aircraft carrier called the U.S.S. Ranger, jets shrieked off the flight deck to the tune of the famous “William Tell” Overture.

Composed by an Italian in the 1800s, it gained new life as the theme song for the popular American television series The Lone Ranger. Many of the commanders in Desert Storm had grown up with it. To them, It was a musical shorthand for heroism and justice. To them, it seemed appropriate, as the Iraqi convoy blackened and twisted and melted into the asphalt of Highway 80. That piece, if you’re not familiar, sounds something like this:

AUDIO: William Tell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIbYCOiETx0

As the jets and bombers closed in on their prey, the pilots felt a kind of intoxication. A sense of righteous anger. One Air Force Colonel said that he’d convinced the pilots to “put hate in their heart, and go out and stop the son of a bitches from getting out of Kuwait.”

As we dove out of the clouds,” one pilot remembered, “the picture was absolutely astounding. There were thousands of headlights heading on every road that led north out of Kuwait City.”

Down on the ground, over the roar of diesel engines and grinding tank tracks, the fleeing Iraqis would’ve heard a weird sound. An uncanny crackle in the air. As one US airman explained: “Unlike the way they say in the movies – you know, the way you hear it in the movies – the bombs don’t whistle in.  They crackle, because they’re slowing down and crackling through the sound barrier.”

After that crackle, came a series of explosions that blew out ear drums and turned vehicles into molten metal. The front of the retreating Iraqi column was hit first, creating a chokepoint and causing a traffic jam that extended for miles. The Iraqis were trapped, and it quickly turned into slaughter.

Cluster bombs and missiles raked the convoy, fusing skin with seat leather, evaporating bone marrow, and melting sand into glass. Soldiers were cooked alive in their car seats. Those who ran into the open desert were dismembered by 30mm cannon fire.

“There were many wounded people on the road,” one Iraqi soldier remembered, “some without arms or legs. They were just stranded there half-dead. When they saw our car, they started to crawl towards us. We didn’t have space for them. With all the strength they could muster, they were throwing themselves at the side of the car. The windows were smeared with blood. We had no space. We had to drive on.”

The view would’ve looked much different from in the air. As Buck Wyndham reflected on his combat experience:

“A mile or two up in the air, in the sunny, air-conditioned comfort of the cockpit, there is no sensation of real violence below. The explosion of an armored personnel carrier down on the desert is no more than a silent, brief flash of light, followed by a plume of black smoke.”

All that killing power, unleashed by a simple squeeze of the trigger. It was exhilarating. As one pilot remembered:

“There’s just nothing like it. It’s the biggest Fourth of July show you’ve ever seen, and to see those tanks just ‘boom,’ and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them … they just become white hot. It’s wonderful.”

For two days and nights, wave after wave of American planes bombarded Highway 80. Every hunting cliché in the book was used by the pilots to describe the situation. Fish in a barrel. Sitting ducks. Turkey shoot. “It’s almost like hitting the jackpot,” one F-15 weapons officer said, “I mean, there are vehicles all over the place. It is a very lucrative target.”

As the convoy of moving vehicles and living human beings slowly transformed into a procession of charred roadblocks, the shadow of doubt began to creep into the minds of some pilots. As reflected:

“One side of me says, 'That's right, it's like shooting ducks in a pond.' Does that make me uncomfortable? Not necessarily. Except there is a side of me that says, 'What are they dying for? For a madman's cause? And is that fair?' Well, we're at war; it's the tragedy of war, but we do our jobs."

For most, however, this was seen as justice. A cathartic coup-de-gras for an army that had brutalized a defenseless nation for six long months. As one Kuwaiti citizen name Kamel Awadi said:

These people who left Kuwait at the last moment were the security forces of Iraq, the people who really controlled the city. They were the most brutal, most vicious people in Kuwait. . . . We have no pity on them, because they had no pity on anybody."

“It was like a robbery," said one American staff sergeant, “It was like we were the police force, and these guys got caught trying to burglarize a house."

“They made us come here and do it,” another said, “They should have listened to the President and left.”

General Schwarzkopf himself was quick to rationalize what soldiers were starting to call the Highway of Doom, The Highway to Hell, or simply – The Highway of Death:

“This was not a bunch of innocent people just trying to make their way back across the border to Iraq. "This was a bunch of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught."

The world’s press, however, saw it differently. It was “sickening,” wrote one British journalist, “to witness a retreating army being shot in the back.”

A retired US admiral agreed: “They are routed. And the senseless killing of fleeing troops does not contribute in any way to the successful conclusion of this war.”

“Even in Vietnam,” one intelligence officer commented, “I didn’t see anything like this.”

Some British pilots outright refused to get in their planes and participate in the entrapment.

Back in Washington, some members of Bush’s administration were beginning to worry that the slaughter of the retreating Iraqi army was bordering on excessive. Chief among them was Colin Powell. As one historian described the Chairman’s state of mind:

Legally, he knew, the allies were on solid ground. The law of war permitted an attack on enemy combatants whether advancing, retreating, or standing still. The Geneva Convention of 1949 forbade the killing of an enemy clearly trying to surrender, a prohibition admirably observed during the Gulf War. […] Yet politically and morally, the chairman had qualms…”

“This is over,” Powell said, “All we’re doing is killing people.”

The Secretary of State, James Baker agreed: “We have done the job. We can stop. We have achieved our aims. We have gotten them out of Kuwait”

During the second day of the Coalition’s attack on the convoy, Wednesday afternoon, George H.W. Bush gathered his advisors in the Oval Office. Colin Powell made his recommendation clear:

“It’s clear that the Iraqi army is broken. If anything, they’re just trying to get out. And I can report to you that they are well on their way to being out. In fact, we’re crucifying large numbers of them.”

Bush considered this. “Do you want another day?” He asked.

“By tonight,” Powell answered, “there really won’t be an enemy there. If you go another day, you’re basically fighting stragglers.”

“We don’t want to be seen as piling on”, added a member of Bush’s national security team.

Powell told the President that he believed that now was the time for the Coalition to display “chivalry in war”.Continuing to massacre a defeated army was “un-American”.

Bush nodded. It was time to end it.

Shortly after, General Schwarzkopf received a call in Riyadh.

Colin Powell informed the General, Rick Atkinson writes, that “the shooting would stop at midnight Eastern Standard Time, precisely one hundred hours after the ground war had begun. Bush and Cheney each took a turn on the phone to offer congratulations. “Norm”, the Secretary said, You’ve done a hell of a job.”

Schwarzkopf hung up the phone and shared the news with the rest CENTCOM commanders. Some of them were not pleased. Saddam’s army was beaten and broken, but it was still intact. Just a few more days, and they’d be able to crush it completely. The dictator would have no army left, which would ensure his downfall at home.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” one said, “Why a cease-fire now?”

Schwarzkopf shrugged, “One hundred hours has a nice ring to it.”

“That’s bullshit,” the man replied.

Schwarzkopf turned away. “Then you go argue with them.”

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

AUDIO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsloijZirG4

“Good evening. It was the biggest victory celebration the nation’s capital has seen since World War 2. The men and women of Operation Desert Storm paraded proudly through Washington today in a jubilant, official ‘welcome home’.

AUDIO (1:51) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDv0ZG0AFDw “On the wide boulevards just a few blocks from the White House, 8,000 Desert Storm troops were moving out, and once again it was General Norman Schwarzkopf who set the cadence, leading the way as far as the Presidential box, where he spent the rest of the parade as cheerleader and spotter for a clearly delighted George Bush.”

It's June 8^th, 1991.

Three months after the end of the Gulf War.

We’re in Washington, D.C - and it feels like the summer of 1945 again.

The air is thick with confetti and optimism. The skies are striped with white contrails from American jets, gleaming like brush strokes against the blue. The streets are filled with rows of soldiers in desert fatigues, led by beaming commanders and showered with adoration from the crowd.

For the hundreds of thousands of people attending the Gulf War victory parade, it’s a perfect moment, on a perfect day, honoring a perfect victory. Even the weather is in lockstep with the troops on parade, clocking in a temperate 78 degrees. And in the middle of it all, President George H.W. Bush is truly, deeply… unsatisfied.

As he waves to the crowds and shakes hands with a smiling General Schwarzkopf, his mind is elsewhere. A President’s brain, after all, is 20 pounds of problems in a 3-pound bag, and on that perfect day, Bush’s was no different.

He was restless. He was distracted. But mostly, he was just tired.

Right now, the American people loved him. They sang his praises and cheered his name. But in the world of domestic politics, approval ratings shifted like sand dunes. As Bush observed: “I know that these euphoric…ratings, nothing like it since Truman after World War II, are nothing, they go away tomorrow. […] The euphoria is up there on the war, but when it wears off, we’re going to be facing these humungous deficits and the economy is still down, down, down,”

In fact, George Bush wasn’t even sure if he wanted to run for President again at all. “The basic thing is I’m tired,” he told his diary. “So life goes on, and I’m thinking to myself at this moment, I’ll probably get over it, I want out, I want to go back to the real world….I want to get out of this, I want to walk into the drugstore at Kennebunkport; build a house in Houston; or teach at the library at A&M, with less pressure.”

But amidst the fog of fatigue, there was something else weighing on the President’s mind. A frustrating piece of unfinished business. And its name was Saddam Hussein.

“I don’t feel euphoria,” Bush said, “Hitler is alive. Indeed, Hitler is still in office, and that’s the problem.”

Three months earlier, on March 3^rd, 1991, a ceasefire had gone into effect in the Persian Gulf. As the pilot Buck Wyndham wrote at the time: “Sometime during the night, I heard on the radio that General Schwarzkopf met with some Iraqi Generals in a tent near Safwan, Iraq today. The Iraqis agreed to comply with all of the United Nations resolutions, and both sides signed a cease-fire agreement. It looks like the war’s over.”

As Schwarzkopf traded signatures with the chastened generals of the Iraqi army, the scale of the Coalition’s victory was still hard to believe. Operation Desert Storm had exceeded the expectations of even the most jingoistic optimists. Less than 150 Americans had been killed in action. By contrast, the Iraqi casualties numbered in the tens of thousands. Even more had been captured. Simply put, the Coalition had wiped the floor with the Iraqis. The fourth largest army in the world had been smeared across the highways, buried in the desert, or clapped in handcuffs.

For old war dogs like Norman Schwarzkopf, the Gulf War wasn’t just a victory. It was redemption. Vietnam had stained the reputation of the American military. And Kuwait had polished it to a brilliant brass shine. “For Norman Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants,” writes Rick Atkinson,” this war had lasted not six weeks, but twenty years.”

In the West, the only complaints came from the press corps, who were frustrated that it had all happened too fast. The ground war had ended before they could sharpen their pencils or change their camera lenses. “The trouble with this war,” said one Washington Post editor, “was that it was so fucking fast.”

“The war was the largest armored movement in history,” said another, “and essentially no one saw it…there are no pictures of it. There’s nothing.”

For the Iraqis, the ceasefire came not a moment too soon. “I’m sure they ended the war when they did because of the ‘turkey shoot’ outside Kuwait,” wrote Nuha Al-Radi, “Too much gore even for the eyes of television viewers and bad publicity for the Allies.”

Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, was elated. With the swish of Schwarzkopf’s pen, the pressure evaporated. The Americans’ long leash had finally run out of slack. “Saddam felt himself to be a great, great hero,” one Iraqi intelligence officer remembered bitterly: “He started to say, "We won. We won." His morale was from zero to 100.”

But Saddam quickly realized that he had bigger problems on his hands. The Americans may have sheathed their swords, but there were other knives emerging from the dark. As the writer Con Coughlin put it:

The greatest threat to Saddam’s survival was not Operation Desert Storm, but the nationwide revolt that followed it. For once Saddam’s rhetorical flourishes made little impact on a nation driven to the depths of despair by the catastrophe that had been inflicted on it by his ill-conceived adventure in Kuwait. For the first time in Iraq’s modern history, the people rose in strength against their despotic leader.

“I loved President Saddam,” one woman in Baghdad told a journalist, “but now I have hate in my heart for him. How can I not? There were six men in our family. My brother-in-law was killed in Kuwait. My two brothers are missing. My third brother is a prisoner of war in Iran. Our country is destroyed. And for what?”

Driven by decades of grievance, months of privation, and a now-or-never sense of opportunity, Saddam’s enemies came out of the shadows. The country exploded into a full-on revolt. It began in the Shia-dominated south, with Army deserters and Shiite rebels joining hands in common cause to throttle Saddam’s wobbly government.

Then the North erupted into rebellion. The Kurds, an ethnic group that Saddam had targeted with chemical weapons and treated with genocidal disdain, believed that now was their moment to secure a long-denied nation of their own. As they mobilized for battle, the fighters clung to their rifles, their Qurans, and the words of one President George H.W. Bush.

As recently as March of 1991, just days before the official ceasefire, Bush had urged the Iraqi people to “put Saddam aside” and that by doing so, they would open the door to “the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations”.

The rebels, particularly the Kurds in the North, heard those proclamations and assumed that they would have America’s support in a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This was it. This was the moment. It was finally, finally happening. In the holy Shia city of Karbala, a T-72 tank fired a shell right through the eyes of a portrait of Saddam Hussein. The dictator’s days appeared to be numbered.

The rebels were confident that they would have President Bush’s support. But they were wrong. As Rick Atkinson writes:

“In summoning the nation to war, Bush had described Saddam Hussein as “worse than Hitler” and painted the conflict as a struggle between good and evil. But when it came to waging war against the new Hitler, the allied armies, as it were, stopped at the Rhine.”

In the weeks to come, Iraqi hearts sank as the Bush administration clarified its position. “We don't intend to get involved in Iraq's internal affairs,” said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater.

The bitter truth was, the Kurds and Shiites were just the wrong kinds of rebels. The Shiites had long been associated with the fundamentalist regime in Iran, so the US was not exactly eager to help install a new government that would align with their old enemies in Tehran. And as for the Kurds – well, the Kurds were historically opposed the Turkey, which was a vital US ally.

“We would have preferred a coup,” admitted National Security Advisor Brent Snowcroft.

“I made clear from the very beginning,” Bush told the press, “that it was not an objective of the coalition or the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein. So I don't think the Shiites in the south, those who are unhappy with Saddam in Baghdad, or the Kurds in the north ever felt that the United States would come to their assistance to overthrow this man...I have not misled anybody about the intentions of the United States of America, or has any other coalition partner, all of whom to my knowledge agree with me in this position.”

Some of the people Iraq would’ve begged to differ. As a young man named Mustafa Aziz recalled: “They thought, we’ve got American backup. We’ve got the West’s backup, we can do this. I mean, Saddam’s weak, we’ve got the backup, people are willing to fight.”

Even some American soldiers did not agree with their Commander-in-Chief on leaving Iraq to its own devices. As Buck Wyndham wrote at the time: “There is still a huge, nagging hole in our hearts because we let Saddam go. Many of his Republican Guard troops have now retreated, and I’m sure they will regroup. I think we will someday regret not continuing this war for a few more weeks.”

Well, the Republican Guard, the elite core of the Iraqi army, did regroup. And their retribution against the Kurdish and Shiite rebels was ruthless even by Saddam’s standards. In the holy city of Karbala, helicopter gunships, tanks, and infantry butchered the disorganized rebel militias with ease. Hundreds of people were summarily executed. When Saddam’s guys were done, the city looked like it had been “hit by an earthquake”, according to one journalist.

With the Shiite insurgency dismantled in the south, Saddam turned his attention to the Kurds in the North. In a matter of weeks, they too had been crushed. By the end of April, two million Kurdish refugees were crashing like waves against the borders of Iran and Turkey.

“The victorious Allies,” writes Con Coughlin, “who had only two months previously been toasting their triumph over Saddam, now had to deal with a humanitarian disaster for which they were mainly responsible. Backed by UN Security Council Resolution 688, which authorized humanitarian organizations to aid the Kurds and banned Iraqi aircraft from flying north of the 36th parallel, the embarrassed Allies launched Operation Provide Comfort, with transport aircraft and helicopters delivering tons of relief materials, including food, clothes, tents, and blankets.”

In the end, the 1991 uprisings failed. This had been their one big shot to overthrow the Iraqi dictator, and without American support, the moment had passed. The opportunity died on the vine, along with tens of thousands of civilians. Many of the Iraqis blamed the US just as much if not more than they blamed Saddam. As Nuha Al-Radi wrote:

“I have been saying all along that Bush and Saddam are alike. They both carried out their threats. They bombed and we burned. Now Bush is also handing out medals; soon he will be giving away cars as presents. His speeches are now studded with heavy, sycophantic clapping. History, I think, will not see Bush as a hero but as a destroyer. […] I hope everyone who had a hand in this disastrous mess falls into the burning oilwells.

Back in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein enjoyed a well-deserved cigar and reflected on all that had happened.

He’d done it. He’d actually pulled it off.

His regime was nearly toppled by civil war, Baghdad was more of a crater than a capital, and the Iraqi army was a shadow of its former self…but by God, he’d done it. He’d survived. With all the power of all the nations of the Western world arrayed against him, with a citizenry that would sooner skin him than salute him…he had summoned all his cruelty and cunning and improvisational genius to somehow, someway stay in power.

Saddam’s name means “one who confronts”, and he’d been doing it all his life. He’d confronted the bullies in his childhood town. He’d confronted rivals in the purges. And now he’d confronted the world’s last superpower, and lived to tell the tale.

The ultimate irony of the Gulf War was that while Saddam Hussein’s Presidency would survive the trials and tribulations of 1991, George H.W. Bush’s would not.

Back in the United States, the dopamine rush of victory in the Gulf gave way to more material concerns. As the 1992 Presidential election loomed, a combination of domestic factors swiftly deflated Bush’s stratospheric popularity – just as he predicted. As Americans went to the voting booths that fall, their minds were very far away from Iraq, Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein. Instead, they were more focused on high taxes, inflation, and Ross Perot.

In the end, Bush lost the election. His Democratic challenger, Bill Clinton, won by a significant margin.  

“At first I had a feeling of a burden being lifted,” Bush dictated late on Election night, “and then I saw the hurt in the kids; they’re crying.”

Despite the private sense of relief, being a one-term President tends to sting. “It was terrible,” Bush later recalled, “God, it was ghastly. Your whole life is based on trying to accomplish stuff, and losing hurts. It hurt a lot.”

When asked what he was going to do now, Bush joked that his plan was to get “very active in the grandchild business.”

It was not obvious at the time, but the geopolitical impact of the 1991 Gulf War was nothing short of seismic. “Consequences of Desert Storm rippled outward in unimaginable ways,” writes Jim Corrigan, “The original deployment of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia—and their continued presence after the war—was viewed by Islamic fundamentalists as a desecration of sacred soil. One wealthy and influential Saudi radical, who spent much of the 1980s fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, needed a new enemy to rally his followers. Osama bin Laden used the U.S. military presence to focus his newly formed Al Qaeda on the United States.”

AUDIO: “And the rest, is history”https://movie-sounds.org/download#L3F1b3Rlcy80MS9hbmQtdGhlLXJlc3QtaXMtaGlzdG9yeS5tcDM=

The subsequent attacks by Bin Laden on the World Trade Center in 2001 served as a convenient excuse for another, much younger President Bush to settle old scores with Iraq’s seemingly unkillable dictator. The results were nothing short of disastrous, not only for Iraq but for the world. And as for Saddam? Well, his long reign came to a close at the end of a rope.

But that is a story for another day.

It is worth noting, however, the words of one Dick Cheney in the spring of 1991. Back in those dewy days, as the Secretary of Defense, he urged the elder Bush, H.W. to absolutely not get embroiled in a Sisyphean struggle in Iraq. Exceeding their UN mandate, and Invading Saddam’s home turf in an attempt to dethrone him would be nothing short of catastrophic:

If we’d gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein—assuming we could have found him—we’d have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground some place. He would not have been easy to capture. Then you’ve got to put a new government in his place and then you’re faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq? Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shiite government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up, how many casualties are you going to take through the course of this operation?”

Ten years later, Cheney felt a bit differently. He was, of course, instrumental in orchestrating the second war against Iraq in 2003, which helped uncork….well, all of this. But like I said, that’s a different story for a different day.

As we wrap up this series, I want to give the last word to someone who was not a President or a Politician or a Dictator or a Soldier. I’d like to give it to Nuha Al-Radi, the woman in Baghdad who’s been our glimpse into what life was like there during the Gulf War.

The conflict in Kuwait seemed to have cured her of any naivety about the world. She resented the US for bombing her home, but could not ignore her own country’s role in the crisis. She was of two minds about it all, deeply torn:

Perhaps I simply couldn’t believe that in this day and age leaders could be so childish and/or plain stupid as to think that war could solve any issue. I underestimated the destructive instincts of man and the agenda of the forces allied against us. Not that we are angels, after all we did the first wrong. But one cannot rectify one wrong by another of even bigger proportions.

At least that’s what I thought.

This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

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