I asked Stan to wake me if anything came up, and went to get a few hours' sleep. I think it was sometime past 0100, probably close to 0200. The TAC was still humming and radios were crackling with battle reports. Most of my TAC crew were still at it.
0400 VII CORPS TAC CP
It was still dark when I awoke, but by now the sounds of battle to the east had passed us by. Coffee was welcome. You learn to wake up fast in combat — your brain and senses turn up to maximum right away; maybe they never completely turn off.
Time to change stump socks: the last thing I needed was a blister on my stump. It had held up well, though. My enlisted aide, Sergeant First Class Lance Singson,[45] had gotten me spare cuff straps in case I needed them, and had brought a spare leg. I never used either, but I was glad to have them. As a student at the National War College, I had broken my leg while running on the streets of Fort McNair doing physical training, and done the same thing later as a member of the J-7 Joint Staff — both times landing as though I'd been cut down by a cornerback on a Saturday afternoon. So a spare leg was good to have. By this time the chemical suits were getting nasty. Though we had had no reports of chemical use by the Iraqis, and had not discovered any chemical munitions, we all had been wearing the suits and sleeping in them for almost three days. The charcoal was coming through and getting all over everything.
UPDATE: FRATRICIDE
On this night, we would have the greatest numbers of blue firing on blue.
It is a fact of war, present in every war we have fought. Who does not remember Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville in 1863? The Army chief of ground forces, General Leslie McNair, was killed by blue-on-blue in Normandy in 1944. We certainly had it in Vietnam. In our unit one day, an error with 81-mm mortars brought fire directly onto a unit that had requested fire on the enemy.
The fact of it, though, should not diminish our urgency to eliminate it in the future, however slim the chances. How do we do that? By training the troops, by giving them knowledge of the situations where the probabilities of fratricide are higher, and by simple increased awareness. At the same time, we must not so alarm our troops or leaders that they will become tentative in battle; that would make matters even worse.
In Desert Storm, we tried a few more specialized preventive measures. Some worked better than others. None was foolproof:
Our troops were well trained in identifying enemy equipment, but at ranges in excess of 2,000 meters on a night-vision sight, all you see is a hot spot about the size of one of the letters in this word.
To provide better identification for our vehicles, we tried uniform theater combat markings (which, unfortunately, could be seen only in daytime). And at the last minute, we also got so-called glint tape, which was supposed to be visible through night-vision devices. It did not work. For identification by our own air, we had standard air-ground issue marking panels, but these were not visible from 10,000 feet, where most of our fixed- wing air flew. We tried it by sending Apaches to 10,000 feet; even with optics that were better than the Air Force's, they could not tell friend from foe.
So we did what soldiers and leaders have always done. We relied on discipline, and looked at the risks to various types of tactics in various types of weather, and adjusted accordingly.
In the end, despite all the possibilities for blue-on-blue as the armored formations attacked in close proximity to one another, countless stories emerged about how combat discipline prevented it. Our soldiers and leaders were extraordinarily restrained, and in fact at times that led to severe command tensions in the heat of battle. On many occasions, our troops gave up their range advantage over the Iraqis and closed to ranges where it was possible to make positive ID, even though they were in greater danger from more accurate Iraqi fire. I have already mentioned cases in which units passed Iraqi units, which would then fire on them from behind. When our own units fired back, they occasionally caused inadvertent hits on our own vehicles behind the Iraqis. An enemy force between two friendly units posed similar problems: if one of the friendly units fired and missed, the shot could easily impact on the other friendly unit (that actually happened on the morning of 28 February). Similarly, on the flat desert, rounds traveling at close to a mile a second could easily cross unit boundaries. Finally, if you look through a so-called night sight, it is virtually impossible to tell whether you are seeing an enemy firing at you or a friendly vehicle being hit by enemy fire. We expected our gunners to make that life-or-death judgment in nanoseconds.
In VII Corps during Desert Storm, of the forty-six U.S. soldiers KIA, ten were classified as killed by our own fire. Of the sixteen British KIA, nine were blue-on-blue — the A-10 attack on the Warrior. Other deaths were listed as probable or possible, as they occurred during simultaneous friendly fire and enemy fire, where it was not possible to determine the cause of death. Still, we did our best to find out. A team from AMC (Army Material Command) checked our hit vehicles for uranium residue — a telltale sign that it was from our fire, since the Iraqis did not have that type of ammunition. That team personally briefed me and our commanders.
In every case where there was suspected blue-on-blue in VII Corps, I ordered an investigation. I wanted it done for three reasons: so that commanders could make the proper classification of combat death; so that family members would know what had happened; and finally, so that commanders could make a judgment about
The results of these investigations were all reviewed personally by major unit commanders, by me personally, and by Colonel Walt Huffman, my staff judge advocate, for legal correctness, then they were forwarded to Third Army. It was not until April 1991 (before we left Iraq) that we finished these reviews and forwarded the results. It should not have taken so long to release the information and to tell the next of kin.
None of these thoughts is offered as an excuse, nor are they probably of much comfort to the next of kin. These soldiers died doing what they were ordered to do against an enemy on a battlefield. It does not diminish their status as heroes and soldiers that they died from our own fire or our own munitions. I regret every one of these deaths, just as I regret all the deaths in the corps from every cause.
ACTIONS
During the night of 26–27 February, our attack had gone about forty to sixty kilometers into the Iraqi defense.
BRITISH. The 1st UK had secured Objective Waterloo, and as I had ordered, they were prepared to attack to the northeast behind the Iraqis in front of 1st INF to Objective Denver. They had been impressive in their relentless day-and-night attacks. Since 1200 on 25 February, when they attacked east out of the breach, they had broken the back of Iraqi frontline divisions, primarily by cutting off their heads in the rear; that is, by capturing generals and other senior officers of the Iraqi division leadership who had stayed to fight with their troops. They also had defeated the tactical reserve and prevented Iraqi forces from joining the defense farther north or from interfering with our constant stream of fuel trucks making their way north. I knew I had a decision with the British early that morning. Should I order them north or not? Before I made that decision, I wanted to check the progress of the 1st INF.
1ST INF. The Big Red One had begun passage of lines through the 2nd ACR at about 2200 and finished at 0200. Tom Rhame, Don Holder, and their leaders had done a magnificent job in pulling this off. Eight thousand vehicles of the 1st INF had had to pass through the two thousand of the CAV, and then into battle a few kilometers farther on. The 2nd ACR had established a battle hand-over line and a series of passage points that
