Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

0300 1 MARCH 1991

Another early-morning phone call from Riyadh. I was asleep in my small tent at the TAC.

It was John Yeosock. "There will be cease-fire talks tomorrow," he told me when I got to the phone, "and VII Corps will be responsible to set up the site. The CINC," he added, "also wants recommendations about the best place to hold the talks."

"Let me ask around, and I'll get back to you," I answered. My immediate first thought was that the best place would be somewhere out on the battlefield, where the press and the Iraqi brass could see the extent of the damage to the Iraqi army.

I had a quick huddle with the staff at the TAC to get them into it; and I soon had the corps staff at the main CP in on it as well. It would be a huge task to set up in such a short time, and we obviously wanted to do it right.

Though we didn't have a lot of time, we made calls to the units in the corps to find out their views about sites; and the one that I liked best was the Medina Division HQ that 1st AD had captured on the last day of the war. It would provide a great backdrop, since it would show the abandoned HQ of one of their no-longer "elite" divisions (we figured that by now we had stripped them of any right to call themselves elite); it was reasonably accessible to the media (I figured we would fly them into the final site); and all around it was destroyed Iraqi army equipment. It would perfectly communicate the magnitude of the defeat of Saddam's army to the world.

AT about 0400, John called back to ask for our recommendation, and I told him about the Medina Division HQ. John seemed to like that and said he would pass my recommendation to CENTCOM — but he also asked if we had taken the crossroads in Safwan, as specified in the written order we had gotten the morning of 28 February. I was surprised by the question. I still wondered why anyone placed any significance on that crossroads, since the remaining RGFC in our sector were in front of 1st and 3rd ADs. But an order is an order, and I believed we had done what we had been supposed to do. I told him we did not have troops there physically, but that we had gotten air there to interdict movement, as I had understood the intent.

He told me that would be a problem. Our written orders had been to seize it, and the CINC thought we had it. Safwan was the site the CINC favored for the talks and he had already tentatively told Washington. I repeated that we did not have it.

John told me the CINC wanted to know why his orders had been disobeyed regarding that crossroads.

I was absolutely stunned.

My first reaction was real anger. I thought about the other war that had ended with my lower leg amputated. Now here in this war I was to have my professional character amputated. I was really disappointed with the CINC. To be accused of disobeying an order is to be accused of a serious breach of discipline, especially in wartime. More than the personal injury, though, was the sudden realization that this had been the first communication from the theater commander to VII Corps after the war. No calls of thanks to the troops. No discussion of casualties. No calls to the locker room, as it were, for the men and women who had made this all possible. That anger burned hot for some time.

I have questioned orders, especially ones I considered stupid, or those to which there might be legal or moral objections. I have argued the wisdom of others and suggested alternatives. I have executed orders I did not like, and for commanders I did not like. But once discussions ended and my commander said, "Here is what I want you to do," never had I willingly or knowingly disobeyed a legal order.

Yet I was also a corps commander of 146,000 U.S. and British troops who had just finished a magnificent operation. I could not let the incident overshadow the great achievements of the troops and my responsibility to them. I also was a subordinate, and my superior officer had requested an explanation. I would do as he requested. Then I would let it pass and get on with the mission. We still had lots to do.

We had interdicted the road junction but not seized it. We had done so with attack helicopters of the 1st INF (they had been there for a number of hours, and I later learned they had observed six vehicles pass through but had not fired because they had gotten the panic cease-fire call at about 0720 on 28 February and had never gotten the order to resume the attack). There had been no intent to disobey orders. I had selected tactics to accomplish what I had interpreted to be the intent of the order.

I had gotten those verbal orders from John at about 0330 on 28 February. The written order came later that morning. My interpretation of John's verbal orders to me was for us to stop Iraqi movement through that road junction. My selection of tactics was interdiction with air, and the assumption that the 1st INF attack would probably get there by 0800 if they continued on their attack axis. Stan gave the 1st INF the mission to interdict the road junction, which they did. I and everyone else missed the "seize" in the written order. That was my fault.

Any failure of the corps to seize the road junction was my responsibility, but it was not failure based on disobeying an order.

I never heard any more about it, not then and not since. I never mentioned it to any of the other commanders or soldiers, other than in the 1st INF, since they were involved.

I could never understand why the CINC's first reaction would be to accuse John Yeosock and me of disobeying an order.

1 MARCH 1991

Right after first light, I went to visit the 1st INF, who were across Highway 8, just south of the Kuwait-Iraq border. I wanted to tell Tom Rhame what had to be done to get Safwan and to explain that it was now the site of the talks.

On the way, we saw the wreckage of the Iraqi army that had tried to stop them. We had flown over some of the wreckage the morning of the twenty-seventh. Now it went on much farther. Burning equipment, tanks, BMPs, trucks, air defense tracked vehicles, artillery — it was all there. Some isolated pieces of equipment looked brand new and undamaged. Bunkers, trenches, and vehicle revetments were everywhere.

As we crossed over into Kuwait, we saw the oil well fires. They resembled gigantic torches, with bright orange flames reaching from the ground to a height above our flight path. The flames were topped by thick black plumes of smoke, which spread and merged to form a black gray haze over the entire landscape. Close to them, you could hear the loud, roaring sounds of burning gas and oil. It grew visibly darker the farther we flew into Kuwait. It was Dante's Inferno, Armageddon, hell on earth, you pick it. I had never seen anything on this scale before. We quickly counted twenty-seven wells on fire, and there were many times that many. It was an awesome sight… and an unconscionable act of material brutality against the assets of another nation. I'm sure the Iraqis thought that if they could not have the oil, then no one else would, either.

Though I wanted to talk to Tom Rhame about Safwan, I first thanked him and his troops for their superb efforts during the war. I had given Tom the most varied combat missions and, in the night passage and attack, the toughest, and they had done what I'd asked with skill and courage. They felt good about it. I could see it in the faces, hear it in the voices of the officers, NCOs, and soldiers I saw and with whom I talked. It was a different unit from the one I had visited on the eve of battle. They were now victorious veterans of mobile armored desert warfare. They would never be the same, and they knew it.

Tom had commanded the Big Red One with skill and courage. Like the rest of us, he was a combat veteran of Vietnam, a veteran of the Cold War, and had had extensive command and staff service in mounted units. I enjoyed being around Tom. He was quick off the mark, never backed away from a challenge, and was always upbeat. He and his division were tough mounted warriors. I had always known it, and now the Iraqis knew it as well.

Tom and I huddled so that he could reconstruct for me the last twelve hours of his war. It was then that I learned that he had not received a specific order to seize Safwan. Then we discussed what we had to do now.

"We have to go get the town and the airfield without getting into a fight," I told him. "Try to seize them without firing a shot, but your troops and commanders always have the right of self-defense."

"WILCO, boss," he answered.

That was not the only guidance Tom got about Safwan that day. He received a lot more — from me, all the way to Riyadh. The anxiety level was up in Riyadh. I guess nobody wanted to tell President Bush that our site for the talks was still in enemy hands. At the same time, I also guess no one wanted to conduct a full assault into Safwan, since that might cause casualties, would attract a lot of attention, and violate our "cessation of offensive operations." So the guidance I gave Tom was to secure the town without a fight. Bluff, threaten, do whatever he had to, but get it. I left the details to him.

Later that day, Tom sent his second brigade, commanded by Colonel Tony Moreno, and the 1/4 Cavalry to get Safwan.

In a superbly skilled use of persuasion supported by force, Tony Moreno quite simply told the Iraqi commander to get the hell out of the way or suffer the results. That threat was credible to the Iraqis. They had already seen what U.S. forces had done to their friends, and Tony had the tanks visible to show he meant business. By late afternoon, they were in Safwan and had the airfield… but not before the 1/4 Cav had had to convince an Iraqi RGFC colonel to get out of there, using the same "Moreno" tactics. Moreno's approach had essentially been the same one that President Bush had used to deal with Saddam Hussein in the first place. "Get out of Kuwait, or we are coming in there to throw you out." Saddam had not been convinced, so the Coalition had liberated Kuwait by force. When Tony Moreno used the same threat at Safwan, the Iraqis did not need more convincing. By 1600, they had Safwan, the airfield, and the road junction.

Meanwhile, though the mission had to come first, I still had a driving urgency (fueled by the aftermath of Vietnam) to visit the troops and leaders to thank them for all they had done to win this victory. I also wanted to visit the hospitals and especially to talk to as many amputees as I could. I started the process that day… as did all my commanders. There would be many visits and many ceremonies, which together would put some kind of closure on all that had happened.

Here is one small example: On the way back to the TAC, we visited with Lieutenant Colonel Pat Ritter and his tankers of the 1/3 4 Armor and learned from them about the intensity of the 1st INF's fight to take Objective Norfolk on the night of 26 and 27 February.

Pat told me of the tough night passage, the difficulty they had had just navigating, and the enormous discipline shown by the soldiers and leaders to clear fires so that they would not shoot each other. He and his company commanders and NCOs talked about close-in fighting and about the Iraqi infantry with RPGs. He related stories about short-range tank shots of less than 500 meters and about the enemy firing from the rear. He also told of one of his company commanders who had used the machine guns of his tank to kill Iraqi infantry trying to climb on Ritter's tank. As the troops told me about their battles, I felt the emotion and excitement in their voices. When they talked about what they themselves had done, it was in whispered tones, but when they talked about what others had done, their voices grew louder. It had been a tough night for those tankers. Before I left, I told Pat and his troops how proud I was of them.

SINCE I had not yet had a chance to visit 3rd AD, that night I called Butch Funk. He was feeling good about the performance of Spearhead — as well he should have. They had been relentless and had left in their wake the better part of four divisions, including the Tawalkana. Butch had scheduled an AAR with his commanders on top of the captured underground HQ of the 10th Iraqi Armored Division, and I wanted to attend some of that. There was also to be a memorial service in his CAV squadron, and he asked if I would later award his CAV squadron commander the Silver Star. I told him I would be proud to do it.

I also called Cal Waller to get a reading of the CINC on the Safwan issue and the flap over our pace of attack. Cal was always helpful with reading Schwarzkopf, and he was also candid and did not hold anything back.

When I asked him about the uproar and accusations over the Safwan road intersection, Cal explained, as I had guessed, that the problem was that the CINC was embarrassed: Based on what he had been briefed, he had told the President we had the place for the talks. Then he was told we did not have it.

When I asked Cal about the pace-of-attack problem, he told me that the CINC had been upset over that a couple of days before, but now he was pleased about the whole operation.

All right, I thought to myself afterward, they both make sense now, then chalked both of them off to the spur-of-the-moment pressure of command. It even occurred to me that now maybe the CINC regretted he'd raised the Safwan incident at all.

2400 1 MARCH 1991

As of midnight, our VII Corps SITREP to Third Army said this about Iraqi units:

North of us, out of our sector, approximately five battalions remained in the Basra pocket, conducting screening and hasty defensive operations on the southern bank of the Euphrates River. These units were hastily formed battle groups composed of the Medina, Hammurabi, and Adnan Divisions. We also knew that approximately eighteen battalions of five different divisions had successfully withdrawn to the north bank of the Euphrates River and were probably attempting to consolidate before returning to the Baghdad area. We thought the threat to VII Corps in our sector consisted of scattered forces of no larger than company-sized elements who had either been trapped or bypassed, and who might not have gotten the cease-fire word.

2 MARCH 1991

That morning, I got a quick staff update on the enemy and on our own situation.

Though the Iraqis were in disarray, they were rapidly moving units and equipment out of the theater. They were clearly a beaten army and fleeing as fast as they could. Our SITREP the previous night had gotten that accurately.

Except for continuing problems with unexploded munitions, our own situation was good. In the past twenty-four hours, we had suffered our second soldier death due to our own unexploded munitions, and I therefore put out a message to the commanders to reinforce troop protection. Later, throughout all Third Army, we would adopt the saying "Not one more life."

After the briefing, I gave Stan guidance on our occupation duties, and told him to have some alternatives worked out for me when I got back that night.

Next I ordered the formation of a Task Force Demo (a demolition task force) to destroy abandoned and captured Iraqi equipment more rapidly than we'd been able to do up to that time. I also wanted to be briefed on their actions each day hereafter until we left Iraq.

That day at 1200 was to be the cease-fire meeting at Safwan. We'd had our people there since late the afternoon before to set up the site. All the equipment had been coming in trucks from King Khalid Military City and theater stocks, but they'd gotten jammed up in the traffic mess created by the destruction just north of Kuwait City. The trucks could not get through. That meant they had to transfer equipment to CH-47 helos and fly it in. The site would be ready at noon, but it would be a primitive setup.

At about 0830, I flew into Safwan and talked to Brigadier General Bill Carter, the senior officer there, and grilled him on all the details of the setup. Tom Rhame joined us as we talked. In the Army, when a commander essentially flyspecks every detail, they call it "getting into the weeds." That was what I was doing… and it was different from my usual practice. I usually probe around to determine if an operation has its act together. Once I'm satisfied, I leave the details to the unit that is doing it. On this one, I wanted to go over it all and see how I could help.

As always, things were well organized. At the same time, they let me know there were too many bosses running around giving instructions. I could see that for myself. There were troops from 22nd SUPCOM (Lieutenant General Gus Pagonis's unit), VII Corps HQ, 1st INF, and probably Third Army. Since VII Corps had the mission, I knew I could fix the situation in a heartbeat, and told Carter he was in charge of getting the site ready; he was to take charge and make it happen. It didn't matter what other units were there — as far as I was concerned, they were all in VII Corps territory, and they now belonged to 1st INF, Tom Rhame, and Bill Carter.

After we got the who's-in-charge-here issue straightened out, Bill Carter and the Big Red One took over, and without them — from Moreno taking the site in the first place to Bill organizing it — it would not have happened. But they didn't do it alone. They had a lot of help from Major Dan Nolan, the VII Corps SGS (the secretary of the general staff, the group that works for the corps chief, and that handles all correspondence, information distribution, and protocol), and his crew, plus the troops and equipment from Third Army and 22nd SUPCOM.

They put up a sign that was visible to all those who entered the site: WELCOME TO IRAQ, COURTESY OF THE BIG RED ONE. That was unit pride working… yet it was also a historical fact. I liked that.

While I was there, we got the word that the Iraqis couldn't make it to that day's meeting, so the meeting had been postponed until the next day. We were glad to get twenty-four more hours. The extra time gave the 1st INF more time to prepare the site, and it gave me a chance to continue to visit units.

My first stop was Troop G in 2nd Squadron, 2d ACR, one of the three cavalry troops to make the Battle of 73 Easting so successful. Captain Joe Sartiano gathered the troopers around a tank, and they spoke in whispered tones about what they had done. It is not unusual for those who have seen real combat to talk little about it and almost never in loud locker-room voices or language. This is especially true for those units that have had members wounded or killed in action, as was the case with Troop G.

I almost had to pry stories out of them. They told me about Sergeant Nels Moller, who had been killed in action, and about the heroism of Second Lieutenant Gary Franks and Staff Sergeant Larry Foltz, who when their own vehicle had become inoperative from enemy fire, had crawled through that fire to another vehicle so that they could continue to call artillery on the Iraqis in 73 Easting.

I ended the session by telling them that their actions had found and fixed the RGFC for VII Corps, just as cavalry is supposed to do. Then we had finished the fight they had started with the units that had passed through them. They were now combat veterans and had earned the proud right to wear the 2nd ACR patch on their right shoulder, signifying combat service.

It was when I was about to leave that Staff Sergeant Waylan Lundquist, platoon sergeant of the second (tank) platoon, said that line that I've never forgotten: "Hey, sir, you generals didn't do too bad this time, either."

It was the best compliment a commander could hear. But I also noticed he said "this time"!

My next stop was about thirty minutes south. With Major General Rupert Smith and the British, I found the same attitude as with the U.S. troops: quiet, but pleased and proud with what they had done. Rupert and I compared notes and he confirmed he had been a bit weary of mission changes when, on the twenty-sixth, he did not know if he was to go north to attack in front of the 1st INF, south to clear the zone to the 1st CAV, or due east to Highway 8. Rupert and I laughed about it, but it had not been all that funny then. We also shared a laugh about something else. As radio call signs, we Americans tended to use our unit nicknames to identify ourselves. I called myself JAYHAWK, Tom Rhame used DANGER, Butch Funk SPEARHEAD, and Ron Griffith IRON. That was strange to the British, and so Rupert had selected SUN RAY as his call sign.

At each visit to the 1st (UK), they assembled a battalion and I was able to tell them thanks from their Yank commander for what they had done and explain how their actions had contributed to our overall success. Working with the British had been a highly successful combined operation: American and British troops together again in the desert, just as in World War II. I would forever see and know the UK differently since I had been privileged to command their soldiers in battle. I hoped the people in the UK would feel the same intense pride in their soldiers and what they had accomplished that we did.

From the 1st (UK), I flew back into Saudi Arabia to visit the soldiers in one of our evacuation hospitals. Fifteen minutes south of the border, we arrived at the 312th Evacuation Hospital and landed on their medevac pad, waving off the medics who rushed out thinking we were bringing in casualties.

We had five such hospitals in VII Corps, in addition to the five MASH and five combat-support hospitals. Each had different capabilities for surgical treatment, trauma, and bed space. Normally, you echelon the MASH forward with divisions, place the CSHs farther back, and keep the larger evac hospitals well in the rear. I wanted to visit our wounded and especially to talk to the amputees.

I was angry to learn that they had no Purple Hearts to award at the hospital. Normally, Purple Hearts are awarded in the hospital, as soldiers are too quickly evacuated from their parent unit to receive them there. A Purple Heart for wounds in combat is a badge of honor for risking your life for your country. I wanted them awarded, and I wanted them now. We got that squared away with a few calls to the right people.

Our wounded soldiers were getting world-class medical care. The staff of our hospitals there would have made any hospital in the U.S.A. proud. Many of the doctors were Vietnam veterans. Our oldest hospital commander had first served as a private soldier in the North Africa campaigns and then, after he had become a doctor, as a surgeon in Korea, Vietnam, and now here.

The troops were hurting from their wounds and full of questions about their fellow soldiers and their unit. I talked to all the amputees in that hospital and tried to share my own experiences with them. I was immensely proud of these young soldiers and those I had visited earlier. They were not from another planet. They were American soldiers who had given it the best they had. All I wanted to do was say thanks, as I remembered my fellow amputees in the ward in Valley Forge so long ago.

I flew in silence most of the hour and fifteen minutes back to the corps TAC 200 kilometers into Iraq.

At about 1830, soon after I got back to the TAC, I got a call from John Yeosock.

"Fred, the CINC wants you to escort him to the talks at Safwan tomorrow," he said.

"Me? You sure about that?" That was a real shocker. The CINC wants me to escort him? I had to get this one straight.

"I'm sure."

"WILCO." I'd be there.

3 MARCH 1991

I was up before first light.

This would be a big day.

Our troops had reported they would be ready when General Schwarzkopf arrived, and I depended on that. After a quick update that told me the situation was otherwise quiet in our part of occupied Iraq, we left at 0715 for Kuwait City and the airport, which by now was back in limited use. The CINC would not arrive before 0930, and it was only a forty-five-minute ride, but I wanted to look around some and to give ourselves plenty of time. Since this was the CINC's first visit north of the Saudi border and to the battlefield, I also wanted to preview what I might show him on our thirty-minute flight from Kuwait City airport to Safwan.

On the way to the airfield, we flew over the so-called Highway of Death, just north of Kuwait City. There was a lot of wreckage there, to be sure, but what impressed me first was not so much the volume of destruction as the great numbers of civilian vehicles in and around the military trucks — the Iraqis had been using them as transportation to haul out their aggressor's loot. I spotted very few combat vehicles. The next thing that struck me was the sheer visual impact of it all. If a target analyst had examined this scene, he would have seen it the way we just had, but if you read about it in a newspaper, you'd likely come to the conclusion that it had been like shooting fish in a barrel — an un-American way to fight a war; and so the sooner ended, the better. If I had known that this was the impression people were getting in Washington, I would have realized at the time that the war would not go on much longer. The impact was too powerful.

I wanted the CINC to get a good look at all of this, and especially at what VII Corps units had done.

Farther north, where the British and 1st INF were across the highway, we had seen combat vehicles, tanks, and BMPs, damaged, abandoned, or destroyed. When we cleared the road later, we had to use both the 1st and 9th Engineer Battalions. Following that cleanup, until the mess on the roads around Kuwait City got cleaned up, we used half the four-lane divided highway for about two weeks as a C-130 strip for resupply. Otherwise, in order to reach the 1st INF, they drove all the way through the desert.

As we made our way toward Kuwait City that morning, we flew by other burning oil wells. Hundreds were visible. It was fortunate for us that we were west of the oil fields, since the wind generally blew from west to east, and the smoke stayed out over the Gulf (years later on a trip to India, I learned that they had gotten some of the smoke even that far away). On some days, the wind did blow the other way, and it was like night where we were.

(I even asked our doctors about it, but they predicted that the greasy air would not cause any long-term effects for our troops. Breathing the stuff was about the same as breathing big-city smog, they told me.)

We also flew over the destruction in the desert that had been delivered by the 1st INF as they cut a swath through the Iraqis to Highway 8.

Finally, we came to the coast and passed over the elaborate defenses the Iraqis had built to stop the amphibious landing that never came. On the beaches they had laid out complex obstacles: wire entanglements, concrete tetrahedron blocks, steel tangles, and probably mines (although I could not tell that from the air). To prevent helos from landing, they had erected thousands of telephone poles.

On a later visit to Kuwait City, we visited the abandoned Iraqi III Corps HQ (it was this corps that had been meant to defend against the Marine landing). I saw an elaborate twenty-by-thirty-foot terrain board set up, in color, with terrain relief, and a scaled replica of the beach area, complete with overlaid military grid. I could just picture the commander and all his subordinate commanders and staff going over their defense in precise detail. That deception by our Marine and Navy forces afloat essentially tied down a whole Iraqi corps. It was masterful.

Since all of this was on the eastern part of the city, we would not fly over it with the CINC on the way to Safwan.

We landed at Kuwait City International Airport. As you might expect, it looked as if it had been in a war. Hangars were wrecked, their roofs caved in; there were holes in the walls of other buildings; and wrecked Iraqi vehicles. Except for pitted marks here and there, apparently from cluster bomb munitions, the runway itself was not damaged. But we were careful to stay on the runways or taxi aprons and off the grassy areas in between, because there still might be unexploded ordnance in there.

At 0930, General Schwarzkopf arrived in a modern civilian Gulfstream jet. It taxied over to our command Blackhawk and stopped, then the CINC came out and down the stairs, and I saluted.

I was a bit uneasy; not only was this a big day, but just the day before he had accused me of disobeying an order; and he had expressed displeasure to John Yeosock at our VII Corps attack tempo early in the war. Despite all that, I was determined to leave the personal stuff out of it and to focus on the day's mission and show him as much as I could of what we had done out here. I figured the last thing we both needed was for me to be taking up time with personal business between the two of us… though if he wanted to talk about it, I was ready and more than willing.

Neither issue came up, not then, not ever, in any of our meetings or correspondence.[54]

FOR the flight up to Safwan, we had arranged a visible show of force. I had a company of Apaches (from our 2/6 CAV 11th Aviation Brigade) to escort us, three on each side of our Blackhawk. We also had ordered Tom Rhame to do the same at Safwan. We wanted to demonstrate to the Iraqis that we had plenty of combat power left if they had a mind to restart anything. From what I had seen of "Moreno" tactics, the Iraqis respected a credible show of force.

As we took off, I let the CINC know I wouldn't bother him with a lot of chatter, since I knew he had a lot on his mind, and that we would fly lower and slower than usual, so that he would have a chance to look around. The conference site was ready, I added, and described the general setup.

"The Iraqis better not ask for much today," he said, "because I'm not in a charitable mood. I'm not in a position to give them much, and they're not in a position to demand much." From that I concluded that he and Washington had the day's events pretty well figured out. I made no attempt to question him on any of it, since it was none of my business unless the CINC chose to discuss it. He did not.

As we flew over the burning oil wells, he was as shocked as the rest of us by that tragedy. "What would possess a people to do something like that?" he wondered aloud.

Shortly after that, we circled to get a closer look at the "Highway of Death." He had nothing to say. Then we went a little west of Highway 8, so that I could point out the destroyed Iraqi equipment. It stretched as far as we could see, and it impressed him. When we reached it, I pointed out the area of the 1st INF division attack, and explained how they had come out of the west after their night attack and laid waste to the Iraqi army all the way to Highway 8. The scene was the same behind the British and the 1st and 3rd ADs, I added.

He was clearly pleased. "Just like we planned it, Fred," he said.

After the CINC said that, I figured that all the problems and confusions of the previous four days had gone away; and I never expected to hear of them again.

SAFWAN 3 MARCH 1991

We landed on the airstrip about 500 feet down from the tents where the meeting would be held, so that we would not blow them away. General Schwarzkopf quickly got off the helicopter. We drew a crowd of maybe a hundred media people, with cameras and microphones at the ready.

To my surprise, there was Gus Pagonis, in complete combat uniform, to greet the CINC. Not Tom Rhame, not Bill Carter, not Tony Moreno. Then, as the cameras rolled, Gus and General Schwarzkopf strolled to the tent area, with Gus carefully explaining the largely VII Corps, mostly 1st INF, setup. I quickly fell in on Gus's left.

I was shocked to see Gus grab the CINC and squire him away. Though 22 SUPCOM had certainly supplied some equipment, this was not a 22 SUPCOM (that is to say, a Gus Pagonis) mission. The Big Red One and VII Corps had taken the site from the Iraqis; they'd organized it and set it up; they'd done the work. VII Corps had fought through the RGFC to get here. First INF had fought all night through Norfolk, and had captured Safwan just the day before. It did not seem right to me. I wanted the spotlight to shine that day on our troops who had fought through more than 250 kilometers of desert and destroyed the better part of eleven divisions to get to this site. I flat missed that one.

Under Tom Rhame's orders, Bill Carter and the troops had done a magnificent job. We had our show of force. Meanwhile, the 1st INF had arranged to meet the Iraqi delegation at a designated pickup point. They then put them in our HMMWVs, and drove them on a route that took them through a canyon of M1A1 tanks and Bradleys, spaced about twenty meters apart, with soldiers at their crew positions in full battle dress. The airfield was ringed with tanks and Bradleys, also with soldiers at crew stations (two battalions and the cavalry squadron were there). Apaches and CENTAF A-10s were flying overhead, and an additional Apache company was parked on the airstrip. We wanted to be sure that the Iraqi delegation and any other Iraqi units watching got a firsthand look at our combat power.

There was no way they could have missed the sign WELCOME TO IRAQ, COURTESY OF THE BIG RED ONE proudly displayed in front of three Big Red One M1A1s.

The airfield ran generally southwest-northeast. The strip itself was macadam, about 50 feet wide and 3,500 long. Halfway to the northern end of the strip and on the left were a pair of tents, where MPs would search each member of the cease-fire delegations for weapons. Next to these tents was a separate tent for General Schwarzkopf; in there he could talk to anyone he needed over the secure comms we had set up. Next to his tent were the actual negotiation tents — two standard U.S. Army field tents hooked together. Inside was a standard government conference table, with chairs around it, as well as seating for all the other members of the Coalition who were present that day. On the other side of this arrangement was a VIP tent, where senior Coalition officers could go for short breaks. Directly across the airstrip from the negotiation tent were the three 1st INF M1A1 tanks, with their WELCOME TO IRAQ sign. Next to the tanks was an area for the media, with an MP cordon, to keep it under control.

It had been forty-two hours since 1600 on 1 March, when Tony Moreno and his second brigade, and Bob Wilson and the Quarter Horse (1/4 Cav), had secured the site.

General Schwarzkopf seemed very sure of himself as he looked around, chatted briefly with the troops, and waited for the Iraqis to arrive. He knew what he wanted to do. That had been apparent to me on the ride up there in the Blackhawk. One of those he greeted was a senior Saudi general, with a clean Kevlar helmet and goggles on top. This, I learned, was Lieutenant General Khalid, the commander of JFC-E and JFC-N. In large measure, General Khalid had been the real glue in the Arab part of the military coalition.

When the Iraqis rode up in our HMMWVs and got out, they gave him a salute, which General Schwarzkopf returned. Through an interpreter, he explained the setup and the first order of business: they would be searched and would have to surrender any weapons. He would also be searched, he explained. They agreed and that formality was accomplished. General Schwarzkopf then led them into the tent, followed by the Coalition delegation.

When I started to enter, I got stopped at the door by the CENTCOM security troops. My name was not on the CENTCOM list, they told me. "I'm going in, name or no name," I told the MP at the entrance, and in I went.

None of the CENTCOM component commanders, Boomer, Arthur, Horner, or Yeosock, was present at Safwan that day, nor was Gary Luck, though all the Coalition allies were there. I knew some, such as Peter de Billiere of the UK and Saleh Halaby of Egypt, but most I did not.

I found an empty seat in the back by the entrance. Gus Pagonis had a front-row seat, but neither Tom Rhame nor Bill Carter was in there.

It was hot in the tent, and I could hear nothing of what was said at the table; I had a hard time staying awake. General Schwarzkopf seemed to be doing most of the talking, and the Iraqis were very still. They nodded now and then but said little.

It was clear to me what was going on. This was a battlefield meeting of the commanders of the opposing forces, to agree on the separation of forces; later, more detailed strategic-level talks would determine the Iraqi penalty for their aggression against Kuwait.

After about an hour, they took a short break. As the Iraqi generals walked by me, I looked into their eyes. These men had the coldest-looking, most impassive expressions I have ever seen on military officers — Vietnam, Warsaw Pact, NATO, Korea, anywhere.

That day I wrote in my journal, "No compassion in the Iraqis' eyes — none. They are ruthless and we should not let them up before we get what we want. Fear they have mistreated our POWs. We must hold them accountable for that. I'd attack to Basra if they did harm POWs."

As they passed, I tried to figure out who these Iraqi officers were. They wore no name tags. Were they RGFC? That did not appear to be so, since they did not wear the red Republican Guards' armbands. Much later, I found out their names: Lieutenant General Salah Abdoul Mahmoud, III Corps commander, and Lieutenant General Sultan Hashim Ahmad, chief of staff of the Ministry of Defense.

I was also still curious to find out how this event had come about in this particular place. Who had picked the site? Was the site important to the objectives to be achieved? What did we want to accomplish here? Who had decided on the Iraqi level of representation? How much negotiation room did General Schwarzkopf have? Who had decided what he would say?

At the time, I assumed the answers to all these questions had been tied together between State and Defense in Washington, and approved by the President. I did not give it much further thought. Later, I would.

After the break, I stayed outside for a while, since I could not hear what was being said anyway, and talked with Lieutenant Colonel Bob Wilson and Command Sergeant Major Cobb of the 1/4 Cavalry to hear their accounts of the war.

Later, I went back inside and did my best to catch some words, but without any luck. I dozed off from time to time, embarrassed that an obviously historic event, taking place right there in front of me, would not stimulate me more.

General Schwarzkopf seemed to be on top of his game, and I was confident he would do for us what was right. We had done our part.

The talks ended and the tent emptied. They had lasted about an hour and a half.

Afterward, General Schwarzkopf and Lieutenant General Khalid held a session with the media, right in front of the Big Red One tanks and their sign. It was skillfully done (I do not recall that Khalid answered any questions), but I was sorry to see that there was no mention of 1st INF or VII Corps, or introductions of any of the soldiers or leaders.

After the press conference, I lost track of General Schwarzkopf for a time, and walked over to talk to some of the soldiers and to tell Tom Rhame and Bill Carter thanks for the great job. While I was talking to them, Toby grabbed me. "General Schwarzkopf wants to see you in his tent," he said.

The CINC wanted me to listen as he reported the results of the talks to General Powell, and also as he gave General Luck his orders, to make sure he did not leave anything out. That way Gary and I would have the same set of orders to implement. (At this point, both Gary and I knew more than our boss, John Yeosock.) I took rapid notes.

Here is a summary of what I wrote:

First was the issue of Iraqi helicopters. At Safwan, the Iraqis made a simple request that they be able to fly from Baghdad to Basra in order to implement the agreement. Since we not only had cut Highway 8 but had also forbidden them any use of military air, they needed some way to get back and forth. No Iraqi helicopters were to be shot down if they had an orange panel on their sides. The helicopter agreement was nothing more than that, and only in that context — a matter of command and control to implement the cease-fire. And that is what General Schwarzkopf agreed to. I do not think he was fooled by the Iraqis that day. He knew exactly what he was doing with that specific request in those circumstances. Later, the Iraqis took advantage of their ability to fly the helos, when they saw we would not do anything about it, and used them to kill their own people. But I think that occurred to them later. That we did nothing then is an entirely different issue.

Then there were a number of other provisions.

There was to be a demilitarized zone two kilometers wide to separate the forces. John Yeosock and Steve Arnold had drawn it on a map used by General Schwarzkopf, and the Iraqis agreed to it.

There were rules of engagement:

• The intent was not to engage if Iraqi forces were trying to get away;

• Vehicles and helos flying an orange panel would not be engaged;

• We were not to get into big battles if all the Iraqi were doing was trying to get out of the theater;

• Bypassed Iraqi units were to be allowed to leave;

• We were to be on weapons hold unless the Iraqis showed clear hostile intent; and

• The Iraqis were not to be allowed to remove ammunition.

General Schwarzkopf also said we would not give up one square inch of Iraqi territory until the permanent cease-fire was signed (and I assumed we got what we wanted). He instructed us to set up a meeting point for radio communications with the Iraqis, and where the two sides could meet to settle any disputes (we subsequently did this at the by-now well-known road junction north of Safwan). General Schwarzkopf emphasized that all forces were to have the right of self-defense. He told me nothing of POW exchanges but I knew that one of his highest priorities was to ensure the safe return of our POWs.

The orders to implement the agreement were now clear to me. General Schwarzkopf had gotten approval from Washington, and Gary and I had what we needed to implement the cease-fire and to remain in Iraq. We would not give an inch until the Iraqis agreed to a permanent cease-fire and to whatever the UN wanted them to do. The CINC was clearly pleased with the way things were going.

(It occurs to me now that it would have been simple on the afternoon of 26 or 27 February for the three of us, plus John Yeosock and Chuck Horner, to have had a similar quick orders group meeting about the end of the war. That way, the CINC could have issued orders about it, and we all would have been clear about their execution.)

I left the tent and waited for the CINC to get ready to leave.

Various members of the media were still talking to soldiers. When my public affairs officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Gleisberg, noticed Tom Brokaw of NBC among the correspondents, he asked him if he wanted to talk to the commander of the main attack. He did, so we chatted a short while, and I outlined what VII Corps had done. Since they already had their story for the day, however, it didn't end up in his report.

After we finished, NBC gave the troops a wonderful gift. Because they had not used all their rented satellite time, Brokaw made available what they had left to soldiers so they could call home. The troops quickly lined up. Because of that generosity, I still watch Tom Brokaw's evening news.

RETURN FLIGHT

At about 1430, we got back in the Blackhawk and flew to Kuwait City with the same escort. Once again, it seemed to me that General Schwarzkopf felt good about the day's events. He had apparently gotten all he wanted from the Iraqis, and had his forces positioned in Iraq for any future operations if they were required. If not, we were positioned to leave as soon as a permanent cease-fire had been obtained.

Once more, we looked over destroyed Iraqi equipment. We had bypassed a large quantity of equipment and ammunition during our attack, I told him, and had started to destroy it, but because of the enormous quantities, and because of our lack of EOD personnel,[55] I was not sure we would get it all done.

"I don't want any Iraqi equipment left in working condition," he told me. "Let me know if you need any more help."

There was not much more talk.

I saluted the CINC as he boarded his C-20 to head back to Riyadh.

It had been a good day. We flew back to the VII Corps TAC CP in Iraq to begin our occupation phase.

OCCUPATION

Later that day, I briefed all the commanders except Tom Rhame, whom I had briefed at Safwan. I used the notes from my session with General Schwarzkopf.

I did not foresee it then, but we were about to enter a seventy-day occupation period. In this time, we captured and processed more prisoners than we had in the eighty-nine-hour war, and our soldiers and units conducted massive humanitarian work for the indigenous population as well as for refugees and displaced persons. This period ended for VII Corps on 9 May 1991.

In its intensity of concurrent activities, it was not unlike the period before the war. We had to make more command judgments without precedent or guidance than in any period I had ever experienced. It was also a time for emotional reflection, as my commanders and I made it our focus to visit hospitals and memorial services, and to listen to soldiers describe their combat actions, or the selfless actions of their fellow soldiers. It was a time of lessons learned, for the next time. Finally, it was a time of redeployment, and for ceremonies to say thanks and to remember.

IMMEDIATE MISSIONS

There are many things to do after the shooting stops. Despite the urgency everyone feels, you do not just declare a halt, cease firing, and then turn around and go home. The speed with which units can switch from all-ahead full-speed combat to post-combat operations is a matter of both command will and the discipline of soldiers. Our soldiers again proved to be superb.

Meanwhile, as I later learned, our national security team at home was more focused on getting the UN resolutions approved than on the meeting at Safwan. They considered it to be a matter of cease-fire arrangements between combatants, nothing more, nothing less, and to be left to the theater commander.

As a result, some senior civilian policy officials in DOD were not even aware that the talks would happen until the last minute, and when they found out, they tried to offer some alternatives to the structure of the talks. But by then General Schwarzkopf had sent the terms he and his HQ had drawn up to the Joint Chiefs, who had approved them, and the meeting was about to be held.

According to an account in Secretary of State James Baker's book, The Politics of Diplomacy, on a subsequent visit to Saudi, Baker and Schwarzkopf discussed amending the terms of the talks in light of developments in Iraq. The option was to have a permanent demilitarized zone in Iraq to be monitored by the UN, one perhaps as large as the existing ground under the current no-fly zone. We were already there on the ground and would only have to turn it over to the UN. It was late, however, and a great deal of momentum had been generated by the idea of getting the troops out and getting them home, and so nothing was changed.

The same attitude toward a quick withdrawal pervaded the theater at CENTCOM HQ, except that the CINC had made it perfectly clear that we were not to give up "one square inch of Iraqi territory" until our POWs were returned and the Coalition had what it wanted from a defeated Iraq. Here, at least, we were using the battlefield victory to gain the strategic objectives we wanted.

Meanwhile, Third Army had its hands full. Even before the cease-fire had gone into effect, they had formed a task force (named Task Force Freedom) to rebuild Kuwait, appointed a commander, Major General Bob Frix, and gotten special funds from the Department of the Army (the U.S. Army was appointed executive agent for the job). After the Coalition had kicked out the Iraqis, they rolled into Kuwait City and went to work.

In occupied Iraq, it was a different story.

The demilitarized line and force separation were meant to be short temporary measures, and as a result, there was absolutely no intention in CENTCOM to order us to do anything that would indicate or otherwise cause us to establish what might look like a permanent presence in Iraq. I welcomed that. Along with the rest of my commanders, I was anxious to get our troops out of Iraq and back into Saudi, then home. But things did not work out that way.

This was a strange period for us. We had no formal occupation mission. In fact, since I had initially figured, along with John Yeosock, that the permanent cease-fire would happen about two weeks after the Safwan talks, and then we would leave, we concentrated at first on lessons learned, on the safety and security of our troops, on enforcing the DML (demilitarized line) provisions the CINC had set out, and on destroying Iraqi equipment and ammo as fast as we could. Simple. Mission accomplished.

Then predictions changed. Two weeks became extended to 18–22 March. Then longer. Then I stopped asking. Meanwhile, XVIII Corps was pulling out in accordance with the "first-in, first-out" policy (units were supposed to go home in accordance with their arrival times; we enforced this policy hard in VII Corps). Their withdrawal was completed on 22 March. That meant that we took over the zone previously occupied by both corps, an area about the size of Kentucky. After the XVIII Corps departure, the troops of VII Corps were the only ones left in Iraq.

During this time, we had no orders from Third Army or CENTCOM, other than rules of engagement to enforce the DML. The in-theater intent remained that we should not do anything to suggest permanency. But things in Iraq could not remain the same while everyone waited for the cease-fire. Permanent residents of towns and villages began to appear, as did refugees. Food and water were in short supply. Except for what we could provide, there was no law and order. Likewise, without us, there were no medical facilities. That made for some difficult choices for us in VII Corps. We could not stand idly by.

Meanwhile, I stayed at our TAC CP in Iraq. I was not leaving as long as we had VII Corps in Iraq.

During those weeks, we spent considerable time going over the battles we had just fought to get it all accurate and to learn for the next time. You must also learn from success.

I directed each unit to conduct an AAR of its unit actions while it was all fresh in everyone's mind and we were still there on the battlefield, which everyone did within two weeks after the end of the war. On 11 March, we did a complete VII Corps AAR at the TAC CP, with all senior commanders in attendance. For that, my TAC crew built a terrain-scaled replica of our attack zone, which included phase lines and markers in the sand for positions of major unit movement. I did eighteen hours of interviews with the VII Corps historian, Major Pete Kindsvatter. My major unit commanders and I attended a Third Army AAR at King Khalid Military City on 12 March, notable for the time differences on unit locations, which further confirmed my suspicions that the map-posting accuracy in Riyadh had been short of the mark and might have accounted for some of the situational misunderstanding. Some CENTCOM times had been as much as twenty-four hours off on the Third Army battle reconstruction. I even found out later that CENTCOM had been in the habit of posting unit locations on the map by the locations of unit command posts, an error of fifty kilometers or more in some cases, since the CPs would sometimes be that far behind.

Both 1st AD and 3rd AD went back over their battle areas to look at what had been destroyed by air and what their units had destroyed. As best as both units could determine, about 15 to 20 percent of the damage had been done by CENTAF; the rest had come from direct-fire systems, artillery, or aviation. Third AD meticulously counted every destroyed tank in its sector and came up with 603. Of that number, fewer than 100 had been by air. In his AAR, Butch Funk confirmed the 9th and 29th Brigades of the Tawalkana in his sector, as well as the 10th and 12th Iraqi Armored Divisions. In some cases the Iraqis had abandoned perfectly functioning pieces of equipment, which we either took back to Germany as display monuments or blew up. First AD methodically reconstructed the Battle of Medina Ridge, locating each Iraqi vehicle by GPS, and recording its orientation vis-a-vis the attacking 1st AD, and what had killed the vehicle. Their statistics of that fight are accurate beyond doubt. I personally spent the better part of an afternoon with Joe Sartiano, H. R. McMaster, and Lieutenant Colonel Mike Kobbe going around the 73 Easting battle step by step.

The previously mentioned booklet, "The 100-Hour War: How the Iraqi Plan Failed," assembled by a team headed by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Kirk from VII Corps G-2 in a little more than thirty days, and from a variety of sources, remains the most definitive account of what the Iraqis were trying to do in our sector. One Iraqi infantry unit commander said, "You attacked us with the same NATO force that was designed to attack the entire Warsaw Pact, and the entire earth shook." He got all that right, except the part about attacking the Warsaw Pact. An Iraqi brigade commander said, "I stood and looked to the west, and all I could see for as far as one could see were tanks and more tanks; tanks everywhere." One Iraqi general said, after he was captured, "I will never forget the way we were treated. Your soldiers are heroes."

One area where we failed was in capturing the combat in video and still pictures. Since many of our battles were in bad weather, rain, blowing sand, and at night, they would have been difficult to capture on film in any event, but we could have done better. I regret that the video legacy of Desert Storm gives a poor to erroneous impression of the war that the soldiers and Marines fought on land.

We recorded all our lessons learned, as well as made notes for what needed to be improved for the future. We learned that our soldiers, training, organizations, doctrine, and equipment were as able as we had thought they were. It was also a vindication of the Total Army concept that included the Reserve component.

There were also some things we needed to look at for the future of land warfare. I thought Desert Storm represented a transition war (in fact, all wars are transition wars). A lot of the old methods bear repeating in the future, but also some of the new ones. I also thought our possible enemies of the future were watching this war and taking notes. If they ever confronted the United States on a battlefield, they would attempt to stay away from some of our strengths — and take note of our weaknesses. All that meant to me was that we could not stand still and rest on our laurels. We would have to continue to maintain the edge. I filed it all away in my own notes to look at after we had some more time and perspective.

In some of the other actions we started during those days:

• I wanted to get the story told of what the corps soldiers had done in our eighty-nine-hour war, and so made sure there were many interviews with soldiers in the media and in unit publications.

• I had training resume. Not that I had to remind anyone; after the war, commanders instinctively turned to training. We had lots of ammo, plenty of targets still to shoot at, and plenty of real estate. Each unit set up its own target area and began training again. You have to keep your edge. If Saddam had decided to start something again, or if the rules changed, we were ready.

• We continued to destroy the Iraqi equipment we had bypassed in our attack.

We had one ally in all this. When XVIII Corps left, the French left a company-sized aviation unit with us, under my tactical control, and it was of great assistance to us in the western part of our sector. At one point, I asked the French commander when he was going home. "When you do," he answered. "We will stay as long as you need us." That they did. Like the British, they were terrific allies.

DESTRUCTION OF ENEMY EQUIPMENT

This task was vast, and went on from the beginning of the war on 24 February until we left Iraq for good on 9 May. Each unit was given the task of destroying the enemy ammunition and equipment in the area it had been assigned for occupation duties.

Because I was aware that it would require a total corps effort, I directed Task Force Demo to be formed on 2 March, and gave the mission to Colonel Sam Raines's 7th Engineer Brigade. Sam formed a special composite unit, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Mark E. Vincent from an M577 in the VII Corps TAC CP in Iraq.

At 1500 on 2 March, they briefed me at the TAC on their concept of the operation, and I approved it on the spot. For the next seven weeks, this task force went about destroying Iraqi equipment and munitions and supervising the work done by our divisions, the 2nd ACR, and even the 11th Aviation Brigade in their sectors. It was an enormous effort.

Each day, I got a report on the previous day's destruction. Extensive records were kept of what was destroyed and its GPS location; specific areas were designated, and each day's mission ordered within those areas. Thus, all units knew who was working where, and safety was maintained. In the entire operation, not one U.S. soldier was injured.

In seven weeks, the task force supervised the destruction of equipment equivalent to that of two Iraqi MECH/armor divisions. EOD personnel cleared thousands of unexploded or unexpended munitions, and — in a humanitarian effort — fenced off hazardous areas around populated sites. A total of 6,622 targets were destroyed, worth, we estimated, about $1.2 billion.

The task force did not examine each of the munitions before exploding it, but we were sensitive to the possibility of unexploded Iraqi chemical munitions, and to my knowledge, no one ever detected any release of Iraqi chemical agents. If such agents had in fact been released, the chemical alarms in use with the troops would have detected them. During the time of the mission, no mission-caused illnesses were reported, except for one soldier who got a mustard gas blister on his arm.

We even destroyed an Iraqi gunboat. One day, Tom Rhame called and said, "Boss, we've got an Iraqi gunboat just off the coast by Umm Qasr. We'd like to destroy it."

"Is it occupied?" I asked.

"No."

"Go ahead."

A few 120-mm tank rounds later, the gunboat went to the bottom of the Gulf.

Near Umm Qasr on 10 March, the 1st INF uncovered a huge cache of cruise missiles, Exocets and Silkworms. The unit not only destroyed the concrete facility that housed them, but set off the missiles in a spectacular explosion near the coast (they used remote fusing from five kilometers away).

HUMANITARIAN OPERATIONS

It was in the area of humanitarian operations that we were least prepared, and experienced the most frustrations — and, in the end, the greatest satisfaction — of anything we did in the postwar period.

We were genuinely surprised by the magnitude of this mission.

Immediately after Desert Storm, there were few civilians in the VII Corps sector. The largest towns were Safwan and al-Busayyah. When Moreno and the Big Red One had taken it, Safwan had been largely deserted, while al-Busayyah was now mostly rubble, and completely abandoned. Shortly after the beginning of the XVIII Corps withdrawal on 9 March, and while the talks continued at the UN, a civil war broke out in the south of Iraq, when the Shi'ite Muslims in the region rebelled against the Baghdad regime.

As a direct result of that civil war, and the Iraqi government's indiscriminate and deliberate acts of violence against the civilian population along the Euphrates, a large number of refugees began arriving in the VII Corps sector, starting on about 15 March. Many of these refugees were drawn to Safwan, the only significantly built-up area in U.S.-occupied Iraq, and refugees thought that from there they would have quick access to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (Safwan was only a few kilometers north of the Kuwaiti border). Soon after the war, however, both of those countries closed their borders to these refugees, and VII Corps faced a growing refugee population.

That meant a real command problem for me, of escalating proportions. I felt we needed to do something.

The day after XVIII Corps moved back to Saudi to begin redeployment, I came to this realization: I am the senior American in occupied Iraq. Orders or not, as American soldiers and according to the laws of land warfare and the Geneva Convention, we have responsibilities in an occupied country. So we acted.

I assembled the VII Corps civil affairs officer and G-5, Colonel Art Hotop, and VII Corps SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman. "Picture this on the day we leave," I told them. "What should we have done as an occupying force in a foreign country up to that time? We will use your determination as the basis for what we will do until we leave." They laid out the normal responsibilities of an occupying force, such as law and order, medical care, the clearance of unexploded ordnance around populated areas, and the provision of emergency food and water.

Though occupation duties had not been part of the mission we had been ordered to execute, for the next seventy days, VII Corps performed them de facto. Afterward, the official VII Corps report to ARCENT, CENTCOM, and the Department of the Army said, "While occupying Iraq, U.S. forces incurred certain legal obligations under international law. VII Corps has aggressively sought to meet these obligations."

For most of us, it was our first experience at occupation duty and large-scale humanitarian assistance.

How did we accomplish it?

We had already divided the occupied area into unit sectors, with each unit responsible for its particular sector — usually where the individual units had ended the war. Thus, 1st INF Division was in Safwan. The remainder of the units, however, were still in the desert, where there was no populated area, and so we shifted them. First we moved the 1st CAV into the area south of the Euphrates that had been vacated by the 24th Division. Next, we put 2nd ACR in the west, and the 1st INF northwest of the 1st CAV along Highway 8. South of them we assigned the entire western sector to the 11th Aviation Brigade, with the French regiment (it was actually battalion sized) under their operational control. When the 1st CAV left, soon after the departure of the XVIII Corps, we assigned the 1st AD to Highway 8 west of Basra. And when 1st INF left to fill the more western area, we assigned the Safwan area to the 3rd AD.

Our work fell into two periods. The first lasted from the beginning of the refugee influx, on about 15 March, to the signing of the UN-sponsored peace treaty, on 12 April. The second lasted from 12 April to 9 May, when all refugees under U.S. protection were settled in a camp in Saudi Arabia.

With the beginning of the refugee movement and the return of the indigenous population, Safwan's population returned to its prewar size of about 11,500. Soon, more than 8,000 refugees arrived, with no place to go, and began to build temporary shelters for themselves on the southern outskirts of town. The other towns of significance along Highway 8 (in what had been the XVIII Corps sector) were ar-Rumaylah and as-Salman, each with about 2,500 people. About 300 people returned to al-Busayyah, but they soon left again.

About 200 kilometers west of the corps TAC, about eighty kilometers north of the Saudi town of Rafha, and just north of the Saudi-Iraq border, the Saudis began a settlement similar to the one in Safwan, which we eventually called Rafha I, after the closest Saudi town. Gathered there were close to 12,000 people, with all the worldly possessions they could bring with them, including automobiles.

While this population and refugee movement was beginning, on 7 March, 1st INF helped to transfer 1,181 Kuwaiti citizens formerly held in Iraq back to Kuwait. During the time up to the cease-fire, we also processed more than 25,000 additional EPWs — Iraqi military who were either escaping the civil war or who otherwise wanted out of Iraq (we stopped this after the signing of the cease-fire agreement on 12 April).

At the corps TAC, I established a special task force to run this operation, consisting of the G-5, Colonel Art Hotop; his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Nick Marsella; two lawyers, Captains Dan Smith and Jorge Lorenzo; and a logistician, Major Bob Corbett. To command the civil affairs operation, we had Colonel Bob Beahm, commander of the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade out of the Reserve component. Each division commander ran operations in his sector. In Safwan, Butch Funk put Colonel Bill Nash and the 1st Brigade in charge of the town.

Meanwhile, Ron Griffith established a series of checkpoints along Highway 8 leading toward Safwan. At these checkpoints, troops of the 1st AD both screened and assisted Iraqi civilians and others moving through the area. Checkpoint B, about eighty kilometers west of Basra on the way to Baghdad, soon grew into a sizable way point, complete with medical treatment facilities.

On 27 March, I visited Lieutenant Colonel Steve Smith and 1/7 INF, who were manning Checkpoint B and providing medical help. Inside the medical treatment tent, I saw Major Dr. Rodriquez, U.S. Army, obviously dog-tired, but continuing to treat Iraqi civilians (General Powell later awarded him the Humanitarian Service Medal, on our recommendation). He was treating a little two-year-old girl named Nura, who had a gunshot wound in her shoulder, and another little boy, about six or seven, with a wounded leg.

There was an enormous crush of refugees needing medical treatment, brought about by the countless atrocities committed by the Iraqi army upon its civilians. What I saw with my own eyes confirmed reports we had been getting from about 24 March of atrocities in Basra and all over the south — reports of people hanging from lampposts, mass executions, and starvation.

Afterward, I called John Yeosock to tell him, "It's bad enough that this is happening at all. But why are we so slow to react? Let's get observers into the Iraq side of the DML," I went on, "and get the UN to help us with displaced persons."

"I'll see what I can do," John answered.

I then asked my SJA, Colonel Walt Huffman, to start collecting evidence about atrocities from the Iraqi people for whom we were providing care; and Walt had the 1st AD make video- and audiotapes of their firsthand accounts, with their permission. This information was collected according to the rules of evidence, and sent to Third Army a few weeks later. From there it went to CENTCOM and the State Department, for further analysis and use.

The 3rd AD ran Safwan. They not only supervised the refugee camp, but essentially reopened the town: they established law and order. They cleared unexploded munitions within the town and to a distance of 500 meters outside it. They opened schools… and even got textbooks and school lunches. They reopened medical clinics, using both our own medical supplies and some captured from the Iraqis (one of our first sergeants told me he and his troops particularly enjoyed using Iraqi medical supplies to stock the civilian health clinic in Safwan). According to our doctors, the health treatment we provided to the over 8,000 people in the camp near Safwan dramatically improved the overall health of the refugees there. By the end of April, daily requests for medical assistance were few.

On 22 March, on a visit with Bill Nash and Butch Funk to the Safwan health clinic, I asked CW4 Joe Hatch, the 3rd AD head physician assistant, if I could do anything for them (his assistant was CW2 Ben Beaoui, who spoke Farsi).

"Get us some baby food!" he answered, holding up an infant. "This baby will die soon if we don't get it food and get it treated."

We got them the baby food via C-130s, and the child survived. For his work in that clinic, General Powell awarded Joe the Humanitarian Service Medal.

WITHDRAWAL

At 0230 on 13 April, Toby woke me for another middle-of-the-night phone call from Riyadh. At a little past midnight (our time) of the day before, the peace treaty and the UN resolutions had been signed. This phone call was from ARCENT: the President had ordered us to move the rest of our troops out of Iraq by 19 April. I did not mind being awakened for that call at all.

I had estimated it would take us five days to get out of Iraq, and that was the time we had. We swung into action, with first-in, first-out still my rule. First out of Iraq had been the 2nd ACR, on 9 April. On the twelfth, we moved the 1st AD, followed on the fifteenth by the 1st INF. By the nineteenth, everyone was out, including all of our own equipment. At each stage, our units had moved into redeployment assembly areas near KKMC, where they had begun the tedious procedures necessary to prepare the vehicles and equipment for shipment back to Germany or the U.S.A.

Since the UN-sponsored treaty included no provision for the protection of the refugees who had fled the Iraqi civil conflict and who (rightly) feared government reprisals, I asked Major General Greindl (the Austrian commander of the UN force) what he planned to do about them. "Since that's not in my orders," he informed me, "I can't do anything."

"General, we have a problem," I said. "We are not leaving until we get this settled. We are not abandoning these people to Iraqi government atrocities."

That same day I told John Yeosock we had a responsibility to ensure the continued protection of the refugees, and he ordered us to protect the refugee sites. In fact, during this period, John constantly went out on a limb for us in order to authorize our humanitarian activities. "Fred, do what you think is right," he told me again and again; and he backed us up.

Meanwhile, on 7 April, we had changed command in 3rd AD. Much to his, and my, disappointment (since he would not be with us for the redeployment and homecoming in Germany), Butch Funk was pulled out of command to become the deputy J-3 on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. He was replaced by Major General Jerry Rutherford, who had been an ADC in the 1st INF. I assigned to Jerry Rutherford the mission with 3rd AD in Safwan.

In the western part of our sector, 2nd AD (Forward), which I had pulled from the 1st INF, replaced the 11th Aviation Brigade (the French remained). I assigned the protection mission to them.

Under Jerry Rutherford, 3rd AD continued to provide assistance to the refugees at the camp in Safwan and to the inhabitants returning to the town, as well as protection to a second camp just over the Kuwait border that was run by the Red Cross.

Our protection mission put us in an awkward situation, since U.S. troops were no longer supposed to be in Iraq after the treaty went into effect. In order to avoid that, the plan was for the governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to take in the refugees. But that plan did not work; both governments initially refused to take in any Iraqi refugees.

Meanwhile, John Yeosock had been talking to officials in the Saudi government, and on 17 April they committed to building a camp sixty kilometers north of Rafha in Saudi Arabia, just south of the Iraqi border. This timely and compassionate move by the Saudi government was widely reported in Arab regional newspapers, but not, to my knowledge, in the West.

The Saudis then hired a contractor, who told us it would take them sixty to ninety days to build a camp.

"No way," I said. I didn't want us to have to wait around while they took their time to build the camp. "Our engineers will build a temporary camp, if you will agree to build a more permanent one." They agreed, and from 21 to 27 April, our engineers built Rafha II. Our temporary camp was roughly 1.4 kilometers by 1.1 kilometers. Around its perimeter were placed twelve 5,000-gallon water bladders that our engineers kept full. Our engineers (the 588th out of Fort Polk) also placed bottled water and food inside the camp, as well as 250 wooden showers and 250 latrines. These were urgently needed.

In the meantime, we notified Iraqi refugees at both Safwan and Rafha I that we were setting up the temporary camp inside Saudi Arabia, and camp leaders were allowed a visit there. They then had to make a choice: since the U.S. force was leaving soon, they had to make up their minds whether they wanted to stay in Iraq or go to the new camp, with the Saudi government's promise to build a more permanent camp. Most decided to leave. We gave those who chose to stay in Iraq seven days' worth of food and water.

The Kuwaiti government erected a fence around the Red Cross site with the only exit into Kuwait. The government of Iran accepted some 350 refugees a day from this camp flown out of Kuwait City International Airport.

Our VII Corps official report says:

"Movement of refugees from Rafha I to Rafha II began on 28 April. 11,500 refugees were moved, with the final closing of refugees in Rafha II on 8 May. Refugees from Rafha I were allowed to bring automobiles across the Saudi border and park them outside the camp… During the period 28 April to 7 May, a total of 8,430 refugees were flown by USAF C-130 aircraft from Safwan to Rafha," a distance of about 500 kilometers. For all those going to Saudi, our personnel soldiers made new ID cards with photos. It was a masterful operation by both 3rd AD and CENTAF. Likewise, 2nd AD (Forward) did a superb job in moving refugees to Rafha II.

I vividly remember, during the transfer, scenes of U.S. soldiers digging into their own belongings and providing food, blankets, or even Army sweatshirts. As our report puts it, "The individual soldiers' generosity is evidenced by the number of government-issued blankets among the refugees and the U.S. Army sweatshirts hanging from the arms of the children."

The results were staggering: almost 20,000 refugees were resettled. Safwan was reopened as a village, with civil affairs soldiers helping local inhabitants regain self-sufficiency. Total meals of all types distributed during this entire period reached well over a million. Tons of flour, rice, and beans were distributed. Over 1.5 million gallons of water were produced, and close to a million gallons of bulk and bottled water were transported and distributed. Seven hundred cases of baby food were provided. In the hospitals we set up for the Iraqi people, corps doctors, nurses, and medics treated 29,450 Iraqi patients, with 601 of these evacuated to Saudi for further treatment. Many of them were returned and reunited with their families.

Our last message on this operation closed with the words: "The same soldiers and leaders who a short time before had relentlessly attacked and destroyed the Iraqi army in sector turned to and accomplished this humanitarian mission with compassion, discipline, and pride in being American soldiers. Doing both so well is a mark of who we are and what we stand for. JAYHAWK. Franks."

RESIDUAL FORCE

But we were not done.

As the signing of the cease-fire came closer, there began to be talk that we would have to leave a residual force in Kuwait, and I was informed that it was true when Secretary of Defense Cheney visited on 7 May. He told me the Kuwaitis wanted us to stay until the end of the year, but that the President would decide that, and that another force would replace the brigade as soon as possible. He also made it a point to visit the soldiers who would have to stay.

The brigade Jerry Rutherford selected to remain was a composite 1st Brigade commanded by Bill Nash (made up of units from other brigades). Because the decision had come so late, some of the soldiers were on airplanes about to leave, and we had to get them off and take them back to their equipment in Kuwait. It was not a good time for the troops. They had come on no notice, trained hard, won a great victory, done unexpected humanitarian work in and around Safwan — and now this.

I told 3rd AD to pick out a spot for the brigade that had something more than temporary facilities. Bill Nash looked around and recommended a place north of Kuwait City called Doha that had large warehouses for troop shelter and a large hardstand for equipment storage. It also had running water. Jerry Rutherford agreed, and after I took a look, I said that is it, move in.

By this time, CENTCOM HQ had departed the theater and were back in Tampa. John Yeosock departed with ARCENT on 10 May (John had been in-country from the first in August 1990). The CINC left Gus Pagonis in command of CENTCOM forward.

On my last day in-country, 11 May, I flew the 400 kilometers from King Khalid Military City to Kuwait to visit with the soldiers whom I had ordered to stay. I wanted to look them in the eye and explain why. It was not an easy meeting. They were hostile at first and had many questions: Why had they been told at the last minute? What about their families in Germany? Who would tell them? What else after this? How long? I told them we had won a great victory, and that, in the judgment of our government, a residual force was needed to continue to ensure that it lasted. It was a matter of trust. The soldiers accepted it, and said OK, we'll get on with it, it's our duty. It only intensified my sense of urgency to get them home. I told them we'd have them out in thirty to forty-five days, which was going out on a limb, because at that point we did not know who was coming to replace them. I also told them I would personally talk to their families in Germany.

That night I burned up the phone lines with Lieutenant General Denny Reimer in Washington, along with General Gordon Sullivan, to get a replacement force named fast. Sully promised me that he and General Vuono were dedicated to getting the 3rd AD troops out as quickly as possible. Earlier, there had been talk about sending the 199th Light Armored Brigade from Fort Lewis, Washington, but I was against it because they would have to bring their own equipment from Fort Lewis and they would take forever to get there. I had proposed the 11th ACR out of Germany, and General Butch Saint had agreed. They would be here the fastest of any unit, and they were a perfect match for the equipment and the mission.

One of the first things I did when I got back to Germany was to visit the families in Giessen whose military spouses had remained in Kuwait while the rest of the VII Corps had gone home. They were just as hostile as the brigade had been in Kuwait. I could not blame them. Yet all they wanted was some straight information. I identified myself as the one who had made the decision on the brigade of the 3rd AD, and explained the reason. Like their military spouses, they accepted it without question.

Who could ask for anything more of soldiers and their families? I was almost overcome with emotion when I saw how resolute they all were and willing once again to do what they had to do. I promised them their spouses would be home within forty-five days.

They were home in thirty-six.

FULL CIRCLE

It was a time for closure.

VII Corps had many ceremonies, and the individual units had their own.

In early March, as a gesture, all units in the theater were ordered to pick representatives to go home early. Our commanders and command sergeant majors selected soldiers by lot, and on 8 March we assembled them in formation at Al Khubar Village. Our VII Corps band and the troops in their new desert BDUs (we finally got them in time for the troops to wear home!) were all together. It was an emotional day, as all these ceremonies proved to be. This was the first.

General Schwarzkopf attended, as well as Lieutenant General Cal Waller, to say farewell to the soldiers and to tell them thanks. I met General Schwarzkopf that day at the airfield and escorted him all day, including at the formation. Not a word passed about any of the incidents of the war. During the ceremony, he said, "It was a helluva job on the part of VII Corps all the way around… I'm proud of them. The country's proud of them. The world's proud of them. And they should be proud of themselves."

My message was, "No matter what is written, said, or shown about what happened here, your courage, heart, toughness, teamwork, and willingness to take the fight to the enemy without letup in bad weather, day and night, will be forever stamped in these desert sands… You are the best we have… You are all heroes and I am enormously proud of each and every one of you… I have been honored to be in your ranks and privileged to be given the responsibility to lead you in battle."

It was a message I would tell to as many VII Corps soldiers as I could reach, and at each departure ceremony in Saudi, as individual major units of the corps departed.

We arrived home on 12 May to a brief ceremony at the Stuttgart Airport attended by, among others, Ambassador Vernon Walters, SACEUR Commander General Jack Galvin, and Lord Mayor Rommel of Stuttgart. Our arrivals back home in Germany were short on ceremony and long on hugs with spouses, family members, and friends. Denise was waiting for me, as well as Margie, Greg, Jake, and Mickey when we arrived at Kelly Barracks. There was the national anthem, then more band music, and big cheers from the family members on the floor of the gym, who were waving yellow ribbons and U.S. flags. I never hugged and kissed Denise so much as I did at that reunion. Similar scenes went on all over VII Corps and Germany, with "Proud to Be an American" and "From a Distance" by far the most popular songs played.

On 31 May at Kelly Barracks, we had the most emotional ceremony of all. In the small soldier chapel there, amid the stained-glass windows, we paid tribute to the lasting memory of those who had lost their lives in Desert Storm. VII Corps Command Sergeant Major Bob Wilson[56] and other CSMs read the roll of all the soldiers who had died, one by one. There was neither a sound nor a dry eye. It was a profoundly moving moment, and spurred a vow from us all to remember them that day and every day.

On 27 June at Kelly Barracks, all units who had been members of the VII Corps Desert Storm team—900 soldiers and commanders, including the British, with their own band, and the French — assembled to honor the corps. Special guests included Ambassador Walters, General Sullivan (the new Army Chief) and General Butch Saint. It was a particularly windy day, with gusts of over forty knots (which perhaps reminded some of the desert winds and sandstorms through which we had fought), but the color guard would not let the flags drop, and their hands had to be pried off the flagstaffs after the formation. We awarded medals to deserving soldiers for valor and humanitarian service, and to civilians and those who had done so much at the VII Corps Base operation in Germany.

General Colin Powell flew over specially to attend the ceremony, and spoke warmly and emotionally to those assembled. In part, he said, "Thank you for your magnificent victory in the Gulf, and I also want to say thank you on behalf of the liberated people of Kuwait and others in the Persian Gulf region whose security you have ensured by your gallantry in action… You have raised the levels of warfare to new heights. You fought a war of complexity and integration that no one has ever seen before. You were at the top of the profession of arms… You have made America proud again. You have made America feel good about herself again. You have made America realize that there is nothing we can't do if we put our hearts to it, if we put our minds to it, and if we put our muscles to the task before us. You have shown that the armed forces of the United States, and especially the JAYHAWK Corps, are the best and brightest of the nation." Following the ceremony, he stayed to greet as many people as possible in the open reception, then flew straight back to Washington. It was another reminder to me of the difference between Desert Storm and Vietnam. General Powell's leadership was one big reason.

In September 1991, Denise and I were invited back to our hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, for a parade and other ceremonies to honor all Desert Storm veterans from Reading and Berks County. My dad came and sat on the reviewing stand with us, as did the Pennsylvania adjutant general, and a World War II Medal of Honor winner. It was a wonderful event, arranged in part by those who had gone before, our fellow Vietnam veterans who themselves had not had such parades. Following the parade was a large celebration at the Reading Municipal Stadium — the same arena where I had played football and baseball as a boy.

There were other parades as well, in New York and in Washington, as I have written before. They were at once different and the same. For the rest of my life, I will remember the generosity of our fellow citizens to our soldiers who went and did their duty.

In New York, the parade was more intimate. We were closer to the people than on the broader Washington, D.C., streets. Ticker tape fell as we marched through the canyon of office buildings. Looking right and left, all we could see were the faces of America, all ages, all backgrounds, most waving small American flags and smiling and yelling. As we marched proudly down those New York City streets, we reached out and shook hands and said our own thanks to our fellow citizens who had come to honor us so. I only wished all the VII Corps soldiers could have been there (we'd brought only representatives of the units back from Germany).

In Washington, after the 4.2 miles down Constitution Avenue and the enormous outpouring of emotion from our fellow Americans, Denise and I returned to the quiet place — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We touched the names and remembered friends, relatives, fellow soldiers who are never forgotten. Never far away. This one was for you, too, the memories of heroes who did what our country had asked and had not had this day.

Now there were more friends. Other members of our Army family. Soldiers of VII Corps talking quietly with their own families, and the next of kin of those who, like before, had not returned. Proud. Confident. Remembering.

It was not like before. Not like after Vietnam.

"Don't worry, General, we trust you." I'll never forget that.

Trust reunited.