Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

Eleven M1A1s were damaged, and four were destroyed; sixteen Bradleys damaged, and nine destroyed; one Apache damaged, and one destroyed.

I say again: It was fast but it was not easy.

Let no one equate swiftness with ease.

It was a total team effort, as we'd known it would be. I was humbled to have had the privilege to lead such a magnificent armored corps into battle. Their battlefield achievements had come about because of twenty years of rebuilding, and because of their courage and selfless sense of duty. That I had been permitted to return to battle with that Army after we had both been badly wounded was something more than I could ever have dreamed of.

LOGISTICS

The logistics dimension in such a short period of time had been staggering. Modern mounted warfare is fast and lethal, and consumes an enormous amount of supplies. Our logisticians kept the corps constantly sustained, and many entire armies cannot do that. They operate for a while, then pause for days, weeks, or even months, to allow their forces to resupply. That such was not the case with VII Corps was a testament to the skill and hard, brute force work done by VII Corps logisticians in all units.

Fuel and ammunition had been transported by corps soldiers mostly in truck convoys over the trackless desert. Led by junior officers and NCOs with few navigation devices and few radios, the convoys had rolled day and night. They had moved in rain and in driving sandstorms in which it was difficult to see the vehicle in front. They'd come upon bypassed Iraqi units and soldiers and captured them. They'd gone through minefields and our own unexploded munitions. At times, they'd gotten closer to the combat action with their fuel and ammo vehicles than normal practice would dictate.

Here is an account from the 125th Support Battalion, 1st Armored Division, from the day they almost ran out of fuel: 'When the convoy [forty-two fuel trucks] arrived at the refuel site [Nelligen] they found that the other two brigades had taken everything and no allocation had been saved. Prior to first light [around 0400] on the twenty- seventh, enough fuel arrived for nineteen HEMMTS. Those fuelers left immediately for our location [about 100 kilometers away] under Major Dunn's control. He raced at speeds of over fifty mph across the desert to get us fuel. One tanker was lost, as it turned upside down when rolling over a ravine. No one was hurt, but we lost 2,500 gallons of fuel. The battalion commander… went back to meet them. SPC Spencer [the battalion commander's driver] later recounted topping sixty-five mph as his HMMWV left the ground when hitting even the smallest bump. [Sometime along the way] the second HEMMT convoy drove into a minefield. [One] vehicle ran over one of the mines, and it exploded,' damaging the vehicle but not wounding anyone. Later that morning, the convoy reached the 1st Brigade and refueled them with enough to continue the attack on 27 February. 'After distributing the newly arrived fuel to the combat battalions, we began movement through the log base [an Iraqi logistics base that the Medina had been defending and 1st AD had overrun]. Everywhere you looked there was total destruction. Ammo pits were burning and exploding, sending shrapnel flying through the air; trucks were overturned and ablaze; trailers full of supplies also were on fire. Moving the BSA through all of this in formation was nearly impossible.' (The BSA — brigade support area — was where logistics units supporting 1st Brigade gathered and set up.) 'Company-sized units broke into smaller columns and moved through. It took almost all day to re-form the BSA on the eastern side of the complex. As we moved through the area, the BSA captured some 146 EPWs. [And] there was a harrowing moment when one prisoner ran from the holding area to kiss the hand of the soldier who had just thrown him an MRE from his truck. There were no contemptuous victors, only compassionate soldiers.'

The 2nd COSCOM work to supply the VII Corps before, during, and after the war had been an extraordinary achievement, one that has to rank in one of the all-time feats of logistics in the history of the U.S. Army. Expanding from a base of fewer than 8,000 soldiers in Germany, the COSCOM had grown before the start of the war to fifty battalion-sized units, in five brigade-sized organizations, with a total of over 26,000 soldiers (an armored division with attachments normally had less than forty battalion organizations). Their operations had begun on 8 November, the moment we were notified to deploy, and they had not stopped until we redeployed. They'd simultaneously deployed themselves, expanded by a factor of almost four, and built an infrastructure in the desert that had kept the corps supplied. It was austere, but it worked.

During the VII Corps eighty-nine-hour war, the COSCOM had moved 2.6 million meals, 6.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, 2.2 million gallons of aviation fuel, and 327 major assemblies, such as tank engines. Every day, they moved 4,900 tons of ammo. To do this, in addition to the transportation assets of each division, they used 1,385 tractor trucks, 608 fuel tankers, 1,604 trailers, and 377 five-ton trucks, organized in 11 petroleum companies, 13 medium truck companies, 8 HET companies, and 4 medium/light truck companies. These transportation assets had been augmented by the CH-47 helos of the 11th Aviation Brigade and by C-130 airlift drops by CENTAF.

Within the COSCOM was the 332nd Medical Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General Mike Strong, a physician from the Reserve component. My VII Corps surgeon, Colonel Bob Griffin, served as Mike's chief of staff and organized the staff of the brigade. They had fifteen hospitals, which provided world-class medical care to our soldiers. They'd arranged the medical support in bands of increasing medical capability, depending on how close you were to the action. In the band closest to the action were the medical assets of the divisions, augmented by five MASHs (mobile army surgical hospitals) from the medical brigade. In the next band were five combat-support hospitals, which augmented the surgical capability of the more forward and mobile MASHs and provided more beds. Back in Saudi, along Tapline Road, were the five evacuation hospitals. Of all our medical facilities, these had the most complete surgical and nursing capabilities, and were used to stabilize patients before evacuation from theater, or to keep patients until they recovered and could return to duty. During the war, the brigade recorded 1,768 admissions and 960 air evacuations. The list of professional medical personnel either called to active duty or already on active duty could fill the pages of a medical Who's Who. One hospital commander was a sixty-seven-year-old, physically fit orthopedic surgeon who had begun his service in North Africa as an enlisted soldier with the British in World War II. He wanted to continue to serve, and that he did. Many of our medevac pilots were Vietnam veterans who had stayed in the Reserve component and were proud to answer the call again.

Brigadier General Bob McFarlin and all the logisticians of the 2nd COSCOM, the divisions, and separate corps units were heroes in my book. 'Forget logistics and you lose,' I have said on many occasions. I might add that one should not forget the logisticians, either. They were magnificent. Nothing got in their way.

OPERATING SYSTEMS

The Army uses the term battle operating systems to describe the seven parts of a tactical force that must work in harmony and in the right combination to ensure victory. These are maneuver, fires, logistics, command, mobility and countermobility, air defense, and intelligence.

In Desert Storm, all elements of the VII Corps made these work. Though I have put most of my focus on elements such as maneuver, fires, command, and intelligence, there were many others:

• The engineers of Colonel Sam Raines's 7th Engineer Brigade continually built and maintained thousands of kilometers of MSRs (main supply routes), opened and marked lanes through minefields, built several airfields, and destroyed Iraqi fortifications.

• Colonel Rich Pomager's 14th Military Police Brigade processed over 20,000 prisoners, operated the many EPW compounds, and provided route security on the thousands of kilometers of corps MSRs.

• The corps signal units of Colonel Rich Walsh's 93rd Signal Brigade ensured communications within the VII Corps, as well as with Riyadh and with units processing arriving soldiers and equipment through the ports and airfields. Signal soldiers and MPs operated in small units that often were isolated from their parent unit for extended periods. The successful completion of their mission was a tribute to their small-unit leadership.

• The 7th Personnel Group, commanded by Colonel Jo Rusin, linked our wartime replacement soldiers with equipment, or, where necessary, moved individual replacements forward to units where and when they were