Day 1: Sunday, February 24th

When the first Americans had arrived in Saudi Arabia in August the desert had been hot and dry and unpleasant. Since then it had turned cold, clammy and unpleasant, especially at night, with periodic rains turning the desert to mud. The night of February 23rd was cold and overcast, with scattered rain.

In the coastal sector, dawn’s pale light revealed hundreds of vehicles moving out in the controlled confusion of a military operation: M-60A3 tanks, AMTRACs—the ugly, bulky Marine armored personnel carriers that held twenty people—Hummers and trucks. “Hold your breath,” a sergeant called to his men. “We’re going through.”

“Through” meant through the “Saddam Line,” the fortifications separating Saudi Arabia and “K-Mart”—Kuwait. The Marines were expecting heavily armed forces behind berms, minefields, antitank ditches, almost every conceivable type of fortification buttressed with dirty tricks. But they were “good to go.” The central two-thirds of the Kuwaiti-Saudi border were Marine country, with 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions operating as I Marine Expeditionary Force.

The two bends in the Kuwaiti-Saudi border had been nicknamed the “elbow” and the “armpit.”  Maj. Gen. Paul Myatt’s 1st Marine Division pushed across the “elbow” at 4 a.m., moving through the first breach with 3rd Marines (Task Force Taro) and 4th Marines (Grizzly) in the lead. In their wake came 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, and 1st Battalion, 7th Marines (Ripper), 1st Marines (Papa Bear), and 1st Light Armored Infantry Battalion (Shepherd). Task Force Troy, which was a combination of units, had been used as a deception force, continuing activities in 2nd Mar Div’s sector to mask the division’s movement to the west; it moved out with the rest of 1st Mar Div. The first-day objective was al-Jaber Airfield. The Marines were pitted against eleven Iraqi divisions—just about the right odds, one senior officer observed, causing the Army to groan and roll its collective eyes.

At 6:20 a.m. Ripper, commanded by Col. Carl Fulford, found the first minefield and Captain Rick Mancini popped a red star flare. Captain Craig Baker did the same for his company. Obstacle clearing detachments began the tricky task of breaching the minefield. “Team Tank” fired a single-shot line charge, containing 1,100 pounds of explosive to detonate the mines. The men cursed when it failed to explode. Engineers worked to prime it manually and it still refused to blow. Finally, Captain Mancini called one of his three-shot charges forward. It fired, but it had to be fuzed and detonated manually. A plow-equipped M-60 tank moved down the length of the first blast, and another charge was fired to complete the breach. Again, no detonation, more bad words, and an engineer had to go out to manually prime the charge. Lane 4 was cleared around 6:45.

In Lane 3, the one-shot charge blew as advertised, but seven of the remaining eight didn’t. “I wished I was a butterfly,” 220-pound Cpl. James Chapman, told Soldier of Fortune, recalling having to get out and tiptoe through the tulips to light the 40-second fuzes by hand. Sergeant Scott Helm’s tank was halfway through, “proofing” the lane with a heavy roller, when he struck the one that got away. The mine damaged his left road wheel and roller arm. By the time the tank was repaired, the rest of Ripper was outside Kuwait City.

There were more malfunctions at the second minefield, 34 km inside Kuwait, but while it took forty minutes to get through the first one, the Marines made it through the second in eight.

As the tanks of the spearhead moved into Kuwait, they spotted the first T-55s and T-62s, most of them dug in up to their turrets. The Marines fired their 105mm main guns, often at ranges of 500 meters or less—point-blank for a tank. Turrets flipped off, sometimes twenty feet into the air. There would be fifteen to twenty more explosions as ammo “cooked off,” turning the insides of the Iraqi tanks into hell. A T-55 normally carries a basic load of up to forty rounds of 100-mm ammunition. T-62s carries the same number, in the 115-mm flavor.^[16]

“They knew we were coming,” Lt. William Delaney, of 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, told the Washington Post. “We didn’t wait to get closer. We destroyed them—in all, our company got fifteen tanks. It was unbelievable... We just destroyed everything in front of us... If it didn’t have a white flag, we shot it — trucks, vehicles, bunkers... Everybody in my platoon got a tank kill. There were dead bodies all over the place.”

“One sabot [high-velocity armor-piercing] round hit the frontal arc of the turret on a T-72,” Lt. Brian Holmberg, of A Company, 3rd Tank Battalion related. “It went through the turret, engine, then out the ass-end.” The Soviet-made "supertanks" might as well have been made of cheese.

The Iraqis in their bunkers could see what was happening. They began popping out of the sand to surrender, first in ones and twos, then literally by the hundreds. The Marines were suspicious at first, remembering the ruse that got the Bad Guys into Khafji. But these weren't the regulars; these were the People's Army. There wasn’t much left in them, and hadn't been that much to start.

“Those guys came out of bunkers,” Lt. Delaney said, “dancing, skipping, singing, with their thumbs up. All some had was white toilet paper to surrender. Every time you saw a POW you were relieved. It was one less guy we would kill or would kill us.”

PFC Cody Ernst was pleasantly surprised when a trenchful of Iraqis surrendered to him without fighting; his M16 happened to be jammed at the time. He was careful not to draw their attention to the fact.

Not every Iraqi surrendered peacefully. Perhaps also recalling Khafji, one pulled the pin on a grenade he was carrying under his shirt, blowing himself up and wounding two Marines. After that, prisoners were ordered to strip to their “skivvies”—Marine talk for underwear.

Lt. Col. Mark Adams’ 3rd Battalion, 11th Artillery Regiment, was providing 105mm fire support for the advancing infantry and tanks. Setting up a fire position is an exercise in frantic, purposeful confusion. The battery’s pieces must be positioned, a baseline established, aiming stakes driven and the guns laid. Communications on the fire control net must be opened and fire missions logged. Ammunition must be unloaded (“ammo humpers” have strong backs and arms), charges selected and rounds fuzed, plus at least a dozen other tasks. The map location of the targets must be plotted against the firing unit’s location and translated into range, elevation and deviation from the base direction of fire. Adams’ batteries were taking no more than five to ten minutes to set up and get their rounds off as the Marines leapfogged forward.

Such Iraqis as fought, fought for only a few minutes before being hit by the artillery and air. Caught in a three-way of artillery, air power and angry Marines, they surrendered.

The tanks paused to re-arm and refuel, then attacked the Emir’s farm, south of Kuwait City, taking out dug-in positions with artillery fire and with Hellfire and TOW missiles helpfully dispatched by Cobra gunships. Then the force raced past burning oilfields, pushing north, by-passing a mechanized force hidden in the smoke. When they ventured out to fall on Ripper’s right flank, Cobras with TOWs again were called in to demolish them.

1st Marine Division went on to take 4,000 prisoners the first day, destroying 21 tanks, with only one person killed in action, nine wounded, three tanks and one light armored vehicle damaged. That night they were poised just outside al-Jaber, near three German-built bunkers capable of holding hundreds of enemy troops. Smoke was pouring from one, the target of an airstrike.

2nd Marine Division—6th and 8th Marines, artillery support from 10th Marines, 2nd Light Armored Infantry, and the Army’s 1st Brigade, 2nd Armored Division—moved out at 5:30 a.m., six columns moving up the paths that had been cleared through the minefields. Because of the heavy fortifications, this was slow movement.

By tradition, 2nd Mar Div always gets the “armpit” assignments, at least in their opinion, so the sector fell to them naturally. Col. John Sylvester’s Tiger Brigade, the Army contingent, held down Maj. Gen. Bill Keys’ left flank, next to the Egyptian and Syrian forces to the west.

The two Marine divisions were infantry, not mechanized infantry. Instead of having four tank battalions, as a mech division has, a Marine division has one regular tank battalion and one light tank battalion. Tiger’s M1A1 tanks were heavier than the Marines’ M-60A3s, with much better armor and larger caliber main guns. They provided a heavier punching ability, should it be required. The Marines’ M60A3s had been built to out-class the T-55s and T-62s; the M1A1s of Tiger Brigade were icing on the cake.

The Marines had also put together their own 13-tank company of M1A1s, using the 110 reservists of Company B, 4th Tank Battalion, one of very few activated line units that saw combat. Called up only in December, the unit was sent to Twentynine Palms, California, for a crash course transitioning them from the M-60A1 to the M1A1. They had all of two and a half weeks to learn the tank before being shipped off to Saudi Arabia. The tanks themselves were borrowed from VII Corps, with “USMCR”—U.S. Marine Corps Reserve—stenciled on the fenders and had to be hastily brought up to snuff with such luxuries as fire extinguishers and on-board spare parts. They were eventually assigned to lead the ground assault against the Iraqis in support of 1st Battalion, 8th Marines.

1st of the 8th Marines started through their gap in the minefield around 6 a.m. Halfway through, Sgt. Bob Trainor’s tank hit a mine, blowing off the left track and damaging the road wheels—the tank equivalent of a flat tire. No one was hurt, and the crew was picked up and brought to safety by Warrant Officer Larry Fritts’ tank. Fritts somehow fit the four men from the disabled tank in with his own crew. This is something like putting both feet into a single shoe; tanks do not have a lot of room on the inside.

15 to 20 km beyond the second minefield, B Company, 4th Tank Battalion, ran into a concentration of T-55s, BMPs, some Toyota land cruisers and dismounted infantry. The Iraqis closed to within about 1,000 meters. After about 15 minutes of fire, the enemy troops started waving white flags. The company took 273 prisoners. That evening they picked up another couple hundred stragglers.

By 11:30 a.m. the two Marine divisions had crossed both breaches and had stopped to regroup, then resume the push northeast. 2nd Marine Division captured an intact Iraqi tank battalion with 35 T-55 tanks the first day, and took 5,000 prisoners, to include a brigade commander, while pushing twenty miles into Kuwait. They lost one man killed and eight wounded.

Along the coast, the Saudi-Kuwaiti-Gulf States force had the equivalent of about eight divisions. The bulk of the force was Saudi Arabia’s I Corps, which consisted of the 4th and 8th Armored Brigades, the 20th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, the National Guard Brigade, and another brigade, plus Kuwait’s 35th Armored Brigade. There were also contingents from Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco, and non-Arab Muslim forces from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Niger, and Senegal.

This force had similar experiences to those of the Marines. Penetrating the Saddam Line was primarily a matter of clearing paths through the mine-field, bulldozing gaps in the berms and driving north.

The Egyptian 3rd Armored and 3rd Mechanized Divisions, and the Syrian 9th Armored Division were on the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border, between 1st Cavalry Division and the Marines. The Syrians were organized and equipped more like the Iraqis than like the Americans. The Egyptian army was in the process of switching from Soviet equipment and structure to Western. Special Forces and U.S. Air Force air control teams provided a pivot point between the air and ground elements that ensured that the T-55s and T-62s being popped were Bad Guys and not Good Guys.

ABC showed us footage of Egyptian artillery crews firing Soviet-made 152mm artillery at the Iraqis. The Egyptians were quick and enthusiastic, well-trained and voluble. They seemed like they were having a good time.

The Egyptian-Syrian force moved out at dawn from just south of the Iraq-Kuwait-Saudi border join. For days, along with the Arabs’ own artillery, B52s and tactical aircraft had been pounding the Iraqis in front of them, destroying as much of the enemy’s artillery, obstacles and fortifications, killing as many of the Iraqi troops, as possible. Those who remained were demoralized and shell-shocked. The Arab Good Guys swept through with just as little hitch as the Marines. The biggest problem they had was in coping with the large numbers of Iraqis rushing to give themselves up. They were actually more eager to surrender to the Pan-Arab forces than to the Americans; Iraqi political officers had been telling them continuously that if they fell into the hands of the U.S. forces they would be tortured to death.

The 1st Cavalry Division was the Army’s equivalent of the Marines waiting on ships to hit the beach. The ground war in the Gulf was rather like the cliche scene in Grade B movies, where someone says, “Over there!  What’s that?”  The Bad Guy (sometimes the hero) turns his head and gets hit with a club. 1st Cav was the diversion, VII Corps the club:

“Hey!  Look over there!” Schwarzkopf says, pointing toward the Cav, followed by heavy application of the VII Corps club.

“Uh, where?” the Republican Guard replies, pitching forward onto its face.

Both Schwarzkopf and Gen. John Tilelli believed that one of Saddam Hussein’s biggest concentrations of troops was just to the north of 1st Cav. Tilelli was to launch a major feint to bring the Republican Guards out of their holes by loudly moving up Wadi al-Batin. When they came out, VII Corps would fall on them and beat them up.

The Cav plunged in and found only light resistance. Several of the division’s companies pushed 20 km into Iraq, encountering only sporadic machinegun and artillery fire. There were small skirmishes. Some of the Iraqis set fire to oil-filled trenches. Many others looked at the M1A1s, turned pale, and surrendered. A mine damaged one tank, but there were no casualties. What the Cav had punched into was pretty flabby.

By the end of the day some thought was given to having the division continue its push up Wadi al-Batin, but it was finally decided to send it west into central Iraq, through a breach in the border already opened up by the 1st Infantry Division.

While the air and ground action was drawing the attention of the international public, Lt. Gen. John Yeosock’s VII and XVIII Airborne Corps had been busy moving west. Maj. Gen. Gus Pagonis was working miracles in orchestrating the logistics operation, but there are limits to everything. Schwarzkopf had to reluctantly ask Washington for permission to move “G”-Day ahead two days, to February 23rd. As it turned out, that was a lucky break for the maneuver units as well. Given the last minute diplomatic maneuvering going on, there is every chance that the ground forces could have been caught rushing to engage and then been caught up short at their start lines in an enormous gaggle.

Generals hate gaggles; they are so unorganized. This statement sounds patronizing and dismissive, but it is not meant to be. All effective military action is built on organization, taking what are basically randomly selected groups of young men and women and building them into an effective and cohesive whole. This is not an easy or a foolproof task, and momentum is as much a key element as are beans or bullets. Start and then stop short once, and the expectation is raised of having to do it a second time.

Additionally, having to stop short in mass confusion would have drawn attention to the gaggle’s location. While the politicians were consulting and considering, a halfway intelligent commander would have been shifting Republican Guards to effectively counter Schwarzkopf’s left hook. Given, say, a week to regroup and shift the enemy’s main forces, the war could have ended up going very differently.

Far to the west of Kuwait City, halfway to the Jordanian border, there were no fortifications. The French 6th Light Armored Division had actually crossed the border on the 23rd, near the Saudi town of Rafah, to get into a better position for the main attack. 6th Light Armored was more than a single division. It was a task force consisting of the division elements, the Foreign Legion and the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne. The mission of the task force was to hold down the extreme left flank of the XVIII Airborne Corps’ sector. They were to push quickly north toward the airfield of as-Salman, near the Euphrates. On the way there they were to capture a small communications center, codenamed “Rochambeau,” which was defended by tanks and antiaircraft guns.

More important than Rochambeau was a two-lane road that would be used to funnel troops and supplies more quickly into Iraq. And still more important than that was the function of screening the corps’ flank all the way to the Euphrates.

The French fired up the engines of their AMX-30 tanks as they moved out, but the noise was not enough to drown out the sound of the artillery. Shells from French and American howitzers split the air, making a sound something like the passage of a high-speed train. The French and the 82nd could hear more artillery to their east, but the attack was stretched across a 300-mile front; what they were hearing was only a small percentage of the thousands of guns firing.

The French moved out, followed by the paratroopers. The men of the 82nd were ready to do something—anything. They had been camped for a month in the desert near a Saudi frontier village, undergoing the peculiar mixture of boredom, anticipation, and familiar routine of a field-deployed force. They were expecting to fight.

It wasn’t quite what they were expecting when they did get it. Intelligence had estimated there were some 2,500 Bad Guys in front of them. They took 2,000 prisoners that first day, almost every one of them without firing a round. “It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen,” Col. Ron Rokosz told the Army Times. “Every soldier I saw surrendered. We could have gone a lot farther, except we had so many POWs.”

By nightfall the French and Americans had driven 70 miles into Iraq. The 82nd’s combat engineers set about collecting “keepers”—documents, usable weapons and ammunition— from bunkers, then blowing them up.

Schwarzkopf and Yeosock had gladdened the hearts of Maj. Gen. Binford Peay’s 101st Airborne Division by approving plans for the largest helicopter assault in history. By daybreak, the attack was fully underway, with helicopters from the 101st Airborne Division screening the movement of the corps on the ground. Shortly after dawn, the 82nd’s division artillery opened up with 105mm howitzers, joined by the corps’ organic artillery—MLRSs, which fired more than a hundred rounds into Iraq.

Early in the morning, more than 2,000 of the 101st’s troops were lifted by helicopters fifty miles into Iraq. The Soviets would have termed them an Operational Maneuver Group. The division struck scattered resistance as it hit Objective Gold, but Col. Tom Hill’s 1st Brigade quickly knocked it flat. There were delays caused by the rain, but by midday an operating base had been established and was growing rapidly. Over the next few hours, a steady stream of helicopters brought more troops and slung loads of artillery, ammunition and light vehicles into the objective. CH-47 Chinook helicopters (almost affectionately known as “Shithooks” for some reason) delivered giant rubber bladders holding up 100,000 gallons of aviation fuel apiece.

The base established was called a “Forward Arming and Refueling Point,” abbreviated FARP, which caused giggling among reporters encountering it for the first time. By the time Base Cobra was fully established, the 101st was rearming and refueling (yes, it is often referred to as “passing gas”) from a base fully twenty miles in diameter. It would be used to stage further operations deep into Iraq to cut the main highway connecting Basra and Baghdad.

Along with the helicopters, a 700-truck convoy moved out from Saudi Arabia, hauling men and equipment and supplies to Cobra. By midday, the division command post was set up and the base was in business. Soldiers were sweating as they dug in the sand to fill sandbags for fortifications, the backbreaking, hand-blistering, unglamorous side of warfare.

By the end of the day, most of the 101st was inside Iraq, with one brigade headed toward Objective Eagle, northwest of Nasiriyah. Except for one Blackhawk helicopter that was hit but still flyable—the crew set down in the desert after knocking out the air defense installation that shot it, made emergency repairs, and flew it back home—the division did not lose a helicopter that day.

XVIII Airborne Corps’ most powerful striking force was Maj. Gen. Barry McCaffrey’s 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, fleshed out to its three-brigade wartime configuration by the addition of Col. Ted Reid’s 197th Mechanized Infantry Brigade. The 24th had moved to a position west of the Saudi town of Hafar al-Batin in preparation for the ground campaign. As soon as it arrived, it began sending small units across the border to locate the Iraqis. In the afternoon, the division’s M1A1 tanks and Bradley AFVs rumbled across the departure line, in company with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. The move began in the midst of a driving sandstorm, with high winds that reduced visibility to a few hundred meters.

Reconnaissance units had been probing the border for the past week—and finding nothing. “Not only is there nothing there, there is absolutely nothing there,” 1st Lt. Tom Mathers, an Apache pilot, told Army Times after flying one deep reconnaissance mission. On the 23rd, Lt. Col. Bill Chamberlin led a reconnaissance partrol from the 197th nearly twenty miles into Iraq. When the brigade rolled by the next day, they moved out ahead of it as its screening force.

The 24th had to remain in place while the remainder of XVIII Corps moved out in the start of a giant wheeling movement, to allow them to move north and then begin their swing east. The 24th had less distance to cover, being closer to the center. When their time did come to move out, they happened to be in the middle of a sandstorm. Bulldozers knocked holes in the undefended berms—they were still to the west of the Saddam Line—and the tanks and tracks roared north.

3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment also moved through the berms and raced forward to screen the corps. Their mission was to find the enemy, then to hold him while the heavier armed line units moved up to engage.

As massive as were the movements of XVIII Airborne Corps, they were overshadowed by the scale of Lt. Gen. Fred Franks’ VII Corps’ operations. As Gen. Luck’s troops were moving out to the west, seemingly endless convoys of armored and supply vehicles rumbled through the breaches onto the “Saddam Line.”  At the fighting core were 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, 1st Armored Division, 3rd Armored Division, 1st Infantry Division and the British 1st Armoured Division. They were punching not into Kuwait, but into Iraq itself, cutting off the units in Kuwait so the Marines and the Pan-Arabs could kill them.

For Col. Samuel Rains’ 7th Engineer Brigade, the task was to breach and destroy defenses held by an Iraqi brigade of 3,000 infantry backed by 1,500 assorted troops of other flavors. The Bad Guys were equipped with 45 T-55s and 50 APCs. Their primary defense was a minefield more than a mile deep, backed by trenches that were expected to be filled with napalm and wired with explosives. The plan was to overwhelm the defenses so quickly that the Iraqis would either surrender or be buried alive as tanks and armored bulldozers plowed over their bunkers and trenches. This was hard on those in the forward defenses, but it would save American lives and in the long run would save those of the Iraqis further back.

Combat engineers cut twelve 100-yard lanes through the mess in gaps wide enough to allow M1s and Bradley armored fighting vehicles to enter three and four at a time. The operation was carried out at night, under Iraqi artillery barrages—a combat engineer’s nightmare. But the artillery was rapidly silenced by MLRS counterbattery fire. Once the first gaps were opened, a group of tanks and Bradleys set up defensive positions about three miles inside Iraq to defend the engineers against ground attacks.

It wasn’t a fun job, and the men doing it were not Rambo. “I’d take the bulldozer up the berm,” Sgt. Douglas Plaisted, of the 7th Engineers told Army Times, “and I had no idea if I was going to get blown away or not. Each time I got up on the crest, I reversed as fast as I could. I was soaked with sweat after about two minutes. I got the whole thing done in about two hours, but it seemed like a lifetime.” Plaisted and the others like him were not hung about with bandoliers, wore no headbands and did not bend the rules or go berserk; they were disciplined, dedicated, grown-up men. They continued going to the top of the berm and back again until the job was done, displaying the combat engineers’ own uniquely unheroic brand of heroism.

After the engineers had opened the breach, the corps roared through. First came two brigades of Maj. Gen. Thomas Rhame’s 1st Infantry Division, the infantrymen securing the foothold needed to pass the armored divisions through to probe for the Republican Guard. They were followed by 2nd Armored Division’s forward brigade. The time was just 5:40 a.m. The lead companies passed a clutter of bomb craters, dead camels and unused propaganda leaflets that had been dropped on the Iraqis. Division officers were already discussing whether to move the assault on the main enemy lines back to the 24th, rather than waiting until February 25th.

For 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the ground offensive had started a day earlier, on the 23rd. Radio nets were opened at 1:10 p.m., and at 1:30 210th Field Artillery Brigade, along with three howitzer batteries and an MLRS battery, opened with nine minutes of fire against every suspected enemy position. Immediately afterward, the regiment moved across the berm, with 4th Squadron (Aviation) providing an aerial screen, 2nd and 3rd Squadrons forward and 1st Squadron as the reserve. The lead scouts moved forward, opened lanes, and brought 25mm fire from their Bradleys on suspected positions. The movement gave engineers from 84th Engineer Company and 82nd Engineer Battalion room to cut 43 lanes through the berm for 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions. The two forward squadrons were at Phase Line Bud by 3:30 p.m. The first casualty came when a souvenir hunter tossed a dud Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition, or DPICM, to his track; it exploded, injuring one.

The 24th was supposed to be a quiet day for the regiment. The plan was to move forward just 10 kilometers, to Phase Line Busch. But the rapid advance of the allied forces changed that. Lt. Gen. Franks called Col. Holder at 9 a.m. and asked him about the advisability of advancing the time for the VII Corps attack. After consulting with the allies, Franks set the time for 3 p.m.

By noon, 1st ID had taken hundreds of prisoners and pronounced resistance light. “This is the boringest war I’ve ever seen,” Sgt. Addison Wembley observed. “They just keep dropping their gear and raising their hands. I’ve seen hundreds of them.”  Word was passed back to the division artillery trains to move forward and begin a 30-minute “prep.”

At 2 p.m., soldiers donned their chemical gear. At 2:30 p.m. all of VII Corps’ artillery assets opened fire on the Bad Guys, pounding them with 105mm and 155mm artillery and with MLRS rockets. 42nd Field Artillery Brigade alone fired off 2,500 rounds and 215 rockets in the course of the barrage, which lasted nearly five hours.

Long before the barrage was finished, the armored divisions were moving. The assault coordinated the movement of the armor with the artillery barrage so the Iraqis could crawl from their bunkers to see heavy tanks bearing down on them. The lead tanks soon discovered that the expected minefields didn’t exist and that the trenches were mostly empty. Shortly after 5 p.m. the lines had been penetrated and the tanks were in the Iraqi rear. There were no U.S. casualties and few Iraqis killed or wounded; part of the enemy force had surrendered and part had run from the field.

2nd ACR’s 2nd Squadron moved north and began to encounter dug-in dismounted infantry. F Troop’s lead platoon was the first to make contact, forcing the surrender of a platoon-sized element. 3rd Squadron’s L Troop fought a series of nine engagements along its boundary with 1st ID against tanks and personnel carriers, the westernmost parts of 26th Infantry Division. The hardest part was coordinating the flank; L Troop needed to shoot across the boundary with 1st Infantry Division, and neither unit wanted to shoot each other. That meant getting closer to the Bad Guys than they wanted and it meant slowing fire authorizations.

The sight of the moving force itself was enough to dismay an enemy; it takes about 30 minutes for a single armored division to go by. It must have seemed to the Iraqis that there were armored vehicles as far as the eye could see in any direction.

2nd Armored Cavalry’s 502nd Military Intelligence Company had a first-rate crew of linguists—trained in German, Czech and Russian. To interpret during interrogations of Iraqis, the company used Kuwaiti students. One 2nd Squadron scout platoon took a battalion’s worth of prisoners, to include a lieutenant colonel who reported all his artillery had been destroyed. The condition of many of the prisoners, most of them conscripts, was horrible. Some 1st Squadron soldiers gave their spare boots to barefoot EPWs.

Maj. Gen. Ronald Griffith’s 1st Armored Division—“Old Ironsides”—began moving out at 2:34 p.m., with elements of 1st Battalion, 1st Cavalry Regiment in the vanguard of its 22,000 soldiers and 9,000 vehicles. A nasty sandstorm forced the cancellation of planned air strikes in support of the division’s jump. More serious was the fact that three kilometers beyond the border soldiers from C Company, 6/6th Infantry hit a swamp. They weren’t expecting anything drastic, but the damned thing did its best to bog down every one of the company’s vehicles. As soon as the first was cleared, they hit a second.

Once clear of the swamps, however, the attack became little more than a road march behind 2nd Cav. Most units reported little or no contact. Griffith called a halt just north of Phase Line Apple that night, 30 kilometers into Iraq, so the division’s flanking units—3rd Armored Division to the east and 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to the west—could catch up with it.

2nd Cav received a report of an infantry battalion at Objective Merrell; A-10s and F-16s destroyed numerous tanks and promted the surrender of hundreds of prisoners. The objective was cleared by F Troop between 5:30 p.m. and midnight. Around 11 p.m., E Troop killed thirty dismounted Iraqi infantry.

During the night, 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions moved up to within 15 kilometers of 2nd Cav’s rear. 3rd Armored Division ended the day without significant engagements and with no combat losses—boring road marches interrupted by pauses to police up surrendering enemy troops. The division’s 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry, took 70 prisoners alone.

They were a drop in the bucket. The allies took about 15,000 prisoners in the first day of operations, the equivalent of one entire full-strength division, two of the understrength Iraqi divisions currently deployed. Perhaps twice that many, at a conservative estimate, had run from the field. Hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces were knocked out of action.

The Republican Guard had kept its casualties minimal by digging it its tanks when the bombing started. They had sat there, encased in sand, for forty days and forty nights. But tanks, APCs and other military vehicles are finicky beasts; they develop ailments unless they are run up every day. Sand coats parts that do not like friction, and moisture finds its way into electronics. There are times when it seems a soldier or Marine is a slave to his transportation; “motor stables” eats up a large part of every work week. Once the tanks were buried, it would have taken the Iraqis a very long time to resurrect them. That was time they did not have. They rode into battle against the allies on some very sick beasts.

CNN on Monday broadcast a taped interview with Major Marie Rossi, one of the pilots working the 101st’s operation. Rossi was an intelligent, articulate woman, professional and, we suspect, a bit irritated that the interviewer couldn’t come up with more original questions to ask her. One question was how she felt, as a woman, about flying her missions into the combat zone. “I think,” she responded, “if you talk to women who are professionally in the military, we see ourselves as soldiers. We don’t really put it into perspective as men versus women. What I’m doing is no greater and no less than the man who’s flying next to me or the men that are flying ahead of me. So I don’t see it from your perspective. This is just my job and this is what I’m expected to do and this is what I trained to do and want to do. So, as a woman, for me it’s not unusual. I imagine that for somebody back home who’s not in my position it seems odd.”  Major Rossi was killed in a helicopter crash two days later.

There were reports from the Kuwaitis, false as it turned out, that Failaka Island had been taken and that U.S. paratroopers had been dropped into Kuwait City, where they were meeting little resistance. There were reports from Radio Baghdad, also false, that the Iraqis were repelling the allied offensive on all fronts. “Kill the attackers,” Saddam Hussein exhorted his troops: 

Kill them with all of your might... Fight them with your faith and love. Fight them in defense of everything that is free and honorable and every innocent child and all the values of military honor and manhood. Fight them!... You will vanquish them and you will have glory and honor for your people and your army and your nation.

A later report from Baghdad Radio stated that the assaults were failing and that the fighting was heavy. The allies were “suffering and yelling in their blood and shame.”  The Iraqis again called for “Arabs, Muslims, and people of honor” to attack U.S. and allied interests world-wide.

Peter Arnett showed street life in Baghdad and interviewed a man in the street: “We will try again if we are defeated now,” the man stated, “we will try again, and again, and again.”  Then again, he was in Baghdad, not wearing a uniform.

Cuba and Yemen, predictably, denounced the ground offensive. Yemen called it “unnecessary and unjustified.”  Japan pledged support and politely hoped the war would be over quickly. Queen Elizabeth, in a very unusual move, went on television to address British troops, expressing her nation’s pride in them.

There were demonstrations in support of the troops in the Gulf in the U.S. So were there anti-war protests. 2500 people demonstrated against the war in Los Angeles. 250 people attended an anti-war rally in front of the White House. Drum-beating protesters gathered outside the church where President Bush went to worship and two were arrested for making too much noise.

Dick Cheney had announced a 48-hour news blackout when the offensive had started. It was a short 48 hours. General Schwarzkopf briefed the press on the results of the first day’s offensive, stating that all first-day objectives had been reached. With the exception of one engagement between the Marines and Iraqi armor, contact had been light. There were 5,500 EPWs to report—not all the results were in yet—and there were reports of many more white flags to be seen that hadn’t yet been rounded up.

NBC interviewed retired General Ghazi Twaissi in Amman, an expert on the Iraqi forces. Mary Hartmann asked him why the Iraqis hadn’t thrown up a stronger defense. The general said he couldn’t say if they had or they hadn’t; Baghdad was claiming they were, the allies were claiming they weren’t, and the truth probably lay somewhere in the middle. Iraq was claiming attacks only on a six-division front, that only screening forces were engaged and these weren’t expected to maneuver. The Republican Guard, the strategic reserve, was not yet committed.

The retired general’s opinions are easy to understand in light of the trust Jordanians still had in Saddam Hussein. One young fellow interviewed stated that “I will fight for Saddam and sacrifice my blood, because I am fighting for an Arab cause, a Palestinian cause.”  Of course, he still hadn’t packed to leave. He may have changed his plans.

The networks showed us footage of the prisoners, hundreds of them. One showed an Iraqi soldier sitting on the ground, staring dully at the camera. Another showed an injured Iraqi kissing his captor. The support of the Jordanians and the Palestinians was not contributing significantly to the Iraqi army’s operations.