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.
