Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

pipeline.

This mission also went without a hitch.

As it turned out, the Iraqi Army was so physically and psychologically beat up when the ground war started that their minefields and trench lines proved to be of little value in stopping the Coalition advance.

The ultimate Iraqi environmental madness, the setting on fire of Kuwait’s oil fields on or about the twenty- third of February, still burns in Chuck Horner’s memory:

I have never seen anything so senseless, so evil, so offensive to mankind. Picture if you can dense, black, oily, greasy smoke boiling into the air from a thousand fires. The desert sand is awash with black oil topped with violent red and orange flame balls. Bright orange flames spew upward at each wellhead, with ugly rivers of burning oil spilling into low ground and creating lakes that belong in hell. Angry pillars of dense black smoke rise upward until they are caught by the winds aloft — some days at a few hundred feet, other days at thousands of feet — and then driven by the winds for thousands of miles. As you fly over the area, you gaze down on a solid mass of foul-smelling smoke stretching downwind as far as you can see. When you break out under the overcast, you are inside a dark wilderness.

In Riyadh and Abu Dhabi the sky has a greasy overcast and the air smells of soot. Airplanes flying over Kuwait come back with oily soot all over them, and their canopies have to be cleaned so the pilots can see.

After the war Kuwait City looked like a biblical wasteland. The concrete block houses were all burned out, with black smoke smudge over every window. Everything else was stained with greasy black soot. White cats were black. White cars were charcoal-colored.

What can I say, except to condemn the Iraqis who planned and perpetrated this outrage on our planet? How evil can you get?

Though I’m sure Iraqi citizens who lost loved ones to our bombs have felt similar outrage, to an objective viewer the Iraqi revenge on Kuwait — the Iraqi outrage to the world’s environment — can never be forgotten, and it must not go unpunished. We must find ways to prevent similar despoliation in future armed conflicts.

12 A Day in the War

CHUCK HORNER

3 February 1991

0300 I go to bed, extremely tired but feeling good. The war is going well.

0345 I wake up to Scud sirens going off in Riyadh. I lie there and think, Should I get up, put on chem protection, and go to the shelter in the basement? Well, assuming the Scud is aimed at the RSAF building next door: since it will be coming from the north, and since my bedroom is facing south toward the RSAF headquarters, and since I am on the top floor, and since the Scud will have a parabolic not a vertical descent, then the Scud is liable to come through my room en route to the RSAF headquarters, and I will be killed. The RSAF headquarters, on the other hand, will suffer little damage, since most of the blast will be confined to my room.

Better yet, the Patriot at Riyadh Air Base, about half a mile to my north, may hit the missile before it gets to me, which means only debris will hit me.

About then, I hear the sonic booms of two Patriot missiles taking off to the north, followed by the pop of the intercept.

Now I am going back to sleep. I always do after Scud alarms. I guess staying in bed is more attractive than making sure I save my life.

? 0415 The phone beside the bed goes off, and I answer, “General Horner, how may I help you?” (Old habits drilled into me at the fraternity house in Iowa City die hard.) BeBe Bell, General Schwarzkopf ’s executive officer, is on the other end.

“General Schwarzkopf wants to talk to General Yeosock,” he says. Though Yeosock usually sleeps at ARCENT headquarters in Eskan Village south of town, he had a late night at MODA and stopped here for rest.

“Okay, hold on, I’ll get him,” I answer. “By the way, how are things going?”

“Don’t ask,” BeBe says.

So I slide out of bed and go to John’s door about thirty feet away. I knock, open it a crack, and hear snoring. “John, it’s BeBe on the phone. The CINC wants to talk with”—thinking “at”—“you.”

John wakes up immediately, sits up on the edge of the bed, and says, “Thanks, I’ll take it in the living room.”

As I turn, I hear John light up a cigar.

I stop in the head and relieve myself, then shuffle back to my room. When I get there, the phone is still resting on the table by my bed, and I can hear Schwarzkopf talking — yelling — at John. I wonder why he bothered to use the phone. All he had to do was open a window at MODA (about one and a half miles to our south) and we all could have heard him. I put the receiver on the hook, but I can still hear John answering the CINC’s questions in the living room.

I fall asleep admiring John’s resilience and patience.

? 0530 My alarm goes off, and I can hear someone making coffee in the kitchen — either John or his aide, Major Fong. My new aide, Major Mark (Hoot) Gibson, is down in the UAE flying combat missions.[67]

I’m glad John has stayed over; I don’t often have a chance to talk with him.

I hit the shower and shave there, then I’m into my desert fatigues in an instant. They are draped over a chair by the door, and I don’t change them that often. Everyone else is just as grimy, and it is a pain in the ear to put all the stuff I need into the pockets of the new uniform — billfold, security badges, handkerchief, atropine syringe — all the stuff you carry around when you are involved in a war.

? 0550 As John and I drink coffee and listen to the CNN news, he goes over the latest CINC tirade. It seems that late last night, after John had left for home, Freddie Franks had sent in a message that pissed Schwarzkopf off. John explains both sides of the problem and how he is going to take care of it.

It seems to me that John has two problem children, Fred and the CINC, and as a result, he isn’t having much fun.

? As far as I can remember it, the crisis that night had to do with Fred’s attempts to get the reserve force assigned to him (the First Cavalry Division — the force that was to be kept available during the opening of the ground war if anything went wrong). Fred felt that he needed the reserve from the start, to ensure that the main attack went well. The CINC wanted to keep it under his command until he knew that the attack on Fred’s right flank (the Northern Area Corps — the Egyptians and Syrians) was going okay; then he would give it to Fred to reinforce the main attack. Schwarzkopf was worried that an Iraqi counterattack into the Egyptians and Syrians could create problems that the reserve had to fix, in which case Fred would have to go it alone with his VIIth Corps and the British (that in fact should have been enough).

I’m guessing at this, but I suspect that Fred sent out a message to Third Army (Yeosock, his immediate boss) explaining that he needed the reserve forces assigned to him immediately — a perfectly reasonable request. Unfortunately, VIIth Corps messages too often had information addressees that included the Department of the Army, the Joint Chiefs, the commanders in Europe — a whole host of people who would like to second-guess Schwarzkopf.

In other words, it wasn’t Fred’s reasonable request that sent Schwarzkopf through the roof; it was the