The deadline set off more domestic war jitters. “How can the American people support a war, especially after our experience in Vietnam?” a man named William A. Daly wrote to Time in December. “We should tell the government we do not want to liberate a country most of us could not even locate on a map prior to Aug. 2, 1990.”
To calm the jitters, Bush invited Tariq Aziz to Washington and he offered to dispatch Baker to Baghdad. Saddam accepted the invitation for Aziz, then surprised everyone by releasing the hostages in time for Christmas. The move raised hopes that Iraq might yet yield on the other UN resolutions. Bush, however, had stated that there would be no linkage, and it had become almost a litany with the administration. The most that he could do was hint that a Mideast conference might be held after an unconditional withdrawal. “[T]he world doesn’t end after he’s gotten out,” Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s National Security Advisor, told U.S. News and World Report:
There are still the issues that he announced as the reasons for his brutal invasion... But what we’re saying is those have to be clearly separate—no connection, no linkage between the two... Some partial move, some gesture, something which just strings this out in an attempt to avoid doing what he must do to comply is not acceptable.
Saddam was not interested in hints and he was not interested in getting out of Kuwait. He changed his mind about Aziz going to Washington: “If Bush is to repeat the UN resolutions to us,” he said in an interview on Turkish television, “then there’s no point in going there. Any Iraqi concession on Kuwait is out of the question before the Palestinian problem is solved.” He sent word that he would not meet with Baker until the very eve of the deadline. He was trying to stall, not to talk. As Scowcroft said, that was unacceptable.
Saudi Arabia cancelled all exports of jet fuel, diverting it to stockpile supplies for the 2,000 aircraft in the Gulf. Abdul Salam Mohammed Saeed, the Iraqi health minister, charged that the UN sanctions had killed 2,042 Iraqi children under the age of five because of shortages of food and medicine.
Iraq continued thumping the religious tub. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab allies were attacked in Friday sermons in the mosques for allowing non-Muslims to defile Muslim Holy Places.
Baghdad staged mock air raids to prepare people for American strikes and the Iraqi troops in Kuwait continued working on their fortifications. “There’s a chance he’s playing chicken,” a Bush aide told Newsweek, “but each day that goes by leads toward the conclusion that he thinks we don’t have the balls to do it.”
Sam Nunn deepened that impression for Saddam when he spoke openly at his committee’s on-going hearings about cutting the number of troops deployed to Saudi Arabia. Richard Gephardt helped when he suggested that Congress could halt the funding for Desert Shield, which would have left Schwarzkopf’s force high and dry. A few days later he retracted his statement, but the damage had already been done.
The troops in the field were a different lot from their predecessors twenty years before in Vietnam. The primary difference was that they were volunteers, not draftees. They were in the armed forces because they wanted to serve their country, as well as to reap the benefits that the service offered. They were six or seven years older, on average, than were the draftees in Vietnam, and 60 percent of them were married. At Clear Creek Elementary School, in Killeen, Texas, home of 1st Cavalry Division, for instance, all but six of the 739 students were sons or daughters of soldiers.
Most of the troops’ supplies and equipment were new. The venerable C Ration, canned goods preserved in grease and salt, had given way to Meals Ready to Eat, abbreviated to MRE and then re-expanded to “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.” C-rats were interesting, even if some of the meals were phonomenally bad; some others, especially when liberally laced with Tabasco sauce, were actually tasty, and C-ration pound cake was a work of art. It all depended on the luck of the draw. MREs were uniformly uninteresting, mere body fuel.
Steel helmets had given way to a Kevlar replacement that looked like a cross between the World War II German stahlhelm and a football helmet; the old steel jobbie had been heavy enough to compress the neckbones of a strong man over the course of about four hours to the point where his chin would be resting on his navel, but it could at least be used as a wash basin. The new helmet was just a helmet—and was nearly as heavy.
Men cut their hair in “whitewalls”—all the way to the scalp on the sides and back. A bit of longer hair was left up top, occasionally roached into a low-key Mohawk. Keeping the sides as close as possible kept the head cool; leaving the top a little longer gave some minimal protection against the sun. There were a few moustaches to be seen, but U.S. troops generally went clean-shaven. Beards are against military regulations; facial fur breaks the seal on a gas mask.
The Saudis provided 18-wheel refrigerated vans that supplied fresh fruit, milk, and cold drinks. The troops consumed water, also provided by the Saudis, at the rate of twelve two-liter bottles per trooper per day. As expected in the desert of a place that had been nicknamed the “Tragic Kingdom,” there wasn’t enough for some essentials; grunts in the field were getting by on a single shower a week, if they were lucky. “Hell, our smell will scare the Iraqis off if nothing else does,” one Marine quipped to a Newsweek reporter.
Besides their own distinctive odors, the troops had some company in the “empty” desert. The occasional wild camel would wander into camps at night, leaving neat little round souvenirs of its presence to step in. There were lizards and large black beetles, three different varieties of scorpions, two kinds of poisonous pit viper, and the deadly adder. There was also the occasional Saudi, generically nicknamed “Abdul” or “Bedouin Bob.” He would occasionally stop and trade for a few fresh eggs or maybe a goat. And of course there were occasional stops by members of the press, universally referred to by the Americans as “media pukes,” by the British as PONTS—Persons Of No Tactical Significance.
There were subtle differences among the line troops that the media often missed. Infantry, tankers and artillerymen spend a fair amount of time disparaging one another, as do the Marines and the Army as groups, and the Marines and the Navy. The Navy referred to the Marines as “bullet stoppers,” and the Army referred to them as “self-propelled sandbags.” Tankers were referred to as “tread heads,” and helicopter pilots were “rotor heads.” The artillerymen were, of course, “cannon cockers.” Infantry of both the Marine and Army varieties were “janitors,” based on the belief that picking up cigarette butts is the only skill they learn that can be translated into a civilian career.
To while away the idle evening hours, there was “Baghdad Betty,” dishing out propaganda for the troops, the successor to Tokyo Rose and Hanoi Hannah. “Her English isn’t all that good,” Sgt. Robert Anderson observed to a U.S. News and World Reporter. “Some nights you can’t figure out what the hell she’s going on about.”
10-hour days, six days a week, were spent in training or in equipment maintenance. There was always dust to be sucked into machinery’s filtration systems, with the accompanying danger of clogging up the works. There were lessons on the enemy, his equipment, his tactics and his capabilities. Looming large, there was his willingness to use chemical weapons.
In Germany and the States, CBR (Chemical-Biological-Radiological) training had been a tedious fact of life. In Saudi Arabia, troops took it more seriously, even if they liked it less. The U.S. chemical suit is made of charcoal-impregnated layers which in theory allow the body’s own vapors to escape while keeping chemical agents out. They are also hot, even in Europe, where temperatures are reasonable. While buttoned up, there is no way for the wearer to go to the toilet. They are more comfortable than the Soviet version—which is made of rubber—but that is their single virtue in the mind of any wearer not actually under a gas attack. The venerable M17 protective mask is made of rubber, keeps chemicals out, and keeps sweat in just as effectively. It comes with a rubberized hood to make things even more stifling.
It was apparently the British who invented the abbreviation SLUD — what happened in the event of an attack with nerve gas. The victim was said to simultaneously Salivate, Lachrymate (weep), Urinate, and Defecate until he mercifully died empty. SLUD could also be used as a verb, as in “to be SLUDded.” The Americans, who had recently seen the movie “Ghostbusters II,” referred to it as “getting slimed.”
The US chemical suit is supposed to be good for up to two weeks after the package is opened. Once the air war started and the SCUDs started flying, bringing with them periodic chemical alerts, the training suits were put away and the real ones taken out of their plastic baggies. After a couple weeks CENTCOM announced that the suits would be good for longer than fourteen days. They never said how much longer, which caused a bit of worry.
2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment was set up by mid-December outside the port of al-Jubayl at an intermediate staging area they had nicknamed Camp Fly, in honor of the predominant local fauna. The troops had hurried to get to Saudi Arabia, and in classic Army tradition were kept busy picking up cigarette butts while waiting for their tanks, AFVs—armored fighting vehicles—and other equipment to arrive by boat.
Sgt. Larry Foltz, a 2nd Squadron artillery observer, one day turned over a rock at Camp Fly, to discover a large black scorpion. The creature was immediately named Spike, given a home in a little washbasin filled with sand, and fed all the flies he could eat.
It was a happy, contented existence for a scorpion, with no work to do while the troops were moving out to their first home in the desert, named Tactical Assembly Area Seminole. By December 20th the entire regiment was in the desert. Seminole was named after the regiment’s first campaign, in 1836 against the Seminole Indians. The place was about 100 km east of Hafar al-Batin, the joint of the Iraq-Kuwait-Saudi borders, in an area where Bedouin Bob was in the habit of dumping his dead livestock. The troops set to work clearing away dead camels and sheep, then started training again, emphasizing battle drills, gunnery and maneuvering at the platoon, troop and squadron levels—a cavalry troop is the same as a company, a squadron the same as a battalion; only cavalrymen think they are different.
While at Seminole, 2nd Cav was augmented and task organized with units including the 210th Field Artillery Brigade, the 82nd Engineer Battalion, the 214th Military Police Company and the 172nd Chemical Company, all of which together formed Battle Group Dragoon, over 8,000 strong.
1st Infantry Division—the “Big Red 1”—was putting itself together, marrying its men with its equipment at the ports of Jubayl and ad-Dammam. Brig. Gen. Rutherford was handling the job of task-organizing for the division’s mission, breaking the brigades down into their component battalions and then tailoring task forces. This was not remotely a new concept; U.S. troops are trained and organized for just this type of flexibility.
Because of the 1st's difficult breaching mission, it was decided to add a combat engineer battalion to each of the maneuver brigades. 2nd Brigade, which would have the main effort, would get two. The division’s own 1st Battalion, 1st Engineers, was supplemented by bringing the 9th Engineer Battalion from Aschaffenburg, Germany; the 588th Engineer Battalion from Fort Polk, Louisianna; the 317th Engineer Battalion from Frankfurt, Germany; and the 176th Engineer Group of the Virginia National Guard. Once everything was on hand, the division began training, building a mock barrier system that was actually tougher than anything the Iraqis were likely to have constructed.
The first elements of 2nd Armored Division (Forward) began leaving for Saudi Arabia from Germany on Christmas Eve. The brigade’s 4,300 soldiers numbered as many as 1st ID’s 1st and 2nd Brigades combined, which had about 2,100 each. They were quartered at a tent city near al-Jubayl to await their equipment, which they named the Dew Drop Inn. The dew became rather heavy as torrential winter rains began on January 12th, flooding the makeshift living quarters with up to eight inches of water.
The venerable Bob Hope was invited to entertain the troops in Saudi Arabia over Christmas. Because of the Saudi sensibilities he wasn’t allowed to bring his usual entourage of dancing girls. “What bothers me is they don’t want any entertainment and they still invited me,” he admitted.
Reverend Browning and representatives from 18 churches in the U.S. started a “pilgrimage of peace” to the Middle East on December 14th in an effort to avert war. Browning said that the trip was the first time American churches had campaigned against a war before it began. The objectives of the journey included meeting with political and religious leaders to discuss the crisis, to “demonstrate solidarity with the people of the region,” and to underline the churches’ commitment to all UN Security Council resolutions on the Middle East, to include not only Iraq-Kuwait, but also Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, and Cyprus. The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ, was critical of the U.S. government’s efforts to “isolate” the disputes, choosing to act on one but not on others. Members of their churches back home were in many cases critical of the “peace mission,” and were uncomfortable with the thought of their “solidarity” with Iraq.
Probably sighing patiently, Bush spent twelve days at Camp David over Christmas, for a while talking to Mikhail Gorbachev and other foreign leaders, then to friends, staffers, and members of Congress. Then he took some time to think by himself. When he came back, he had made up his mind. Saddam might think he was bluffing, but the stakes were too high to throw in his cards.
“For me,” he said later, “it boils down to a very moral case of good versus evil, black versus white. If I have to go, it’s not going to matter to me if there isn’t one congressman who supports this, or what happens to public opinion. It it’s right, it’s gotta be done.” No one made any remarks about what a wimp Bush was.