Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

and there were chairs along the walls for straphangers (like him). An overhead slide projector sat on a small table near the right forward edge of the main table, and a portable screen was parked a few feet away in a corner of the room.

While the CINC stepped out to find a breath mint (their mouths being in full rebellion against the previous night’s coffee and stress), Horner was alone until the first attendee entered. He knew the face… it was remarkably youthful; the man looked to be about seventeen years old. True to his Iowa upbringing, Horner did as his mother taught, crossed the room, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, Dan, I’m Chuck,” to the Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle.

Even as his good humor and graciousness took hold, Quayle, like Cheney, probably figured, I don’t know who this odd general is, but I wonder how he made it past sergeant. He shook Horner’s hand, smiled warmly, and said, “Good to meet you, General,” without adding, “Dumb shit,” for which Horner mentally thanked him before retreating to a chair along the wall. He was soon joined there by Admiral Grant Sharp, who sat next to him.

Meanwhile, the rest of the high-level invitees entered the room — Secretary of State Jim Baker; CIA Director Judge William Webster; White House Chief of Staff John Sununu; National Security Adviser General Brent Scowcroft; Dick Cheney and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who sat immediately behind him; and a few others.

Last came President George Bush, chatting with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf. Bush was dressed in slacks and a windbreaker, looking young and refreshed for a man who carried the burden of the nation. When the President appeared, Horner searched carefully for what detractors called his “wimp” factor — the limp, willowy New England boarding-school boy with high-toned, squeaky voice and goofy gestures. Nothing of that showed. To the contrary: the man Horner saw was a commander in chief, cordial, polite, but in charge. Not bad, Horner thought, thinking over his initial impressions of both Cheney and the President. If we have to go to war, the civilian leaders we’ll be working for can do the job. He also remembered that the President had himself been a fighter pilot in the Navy in World War II, and knew what it was like to get hit and shot down. He was not surprised when, later, the President approached the day’s deliberations with the visceral knowledge that comes from being shot at and hit.

As he passed through the room, Bush walked past Horner’s chair and graciously reached for his hand, and Horner managed with surprising clarity, “Good morning, Mr. President, I’m Chuck Horner.”

He added to himself, Hooray, I didn’t screw that one up.

Soon the President, Powell, and Schwarzkopf took seats at the table and the meeting began.

The first business was a brief run-through of the CIA’s estimate of the situation in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf region, which was given by Judge Webster. Since Schwarzkopf had better and more recent firsthand information, based on the telephone calls to his major trapped in the hotel across from the American Embassy in Kuwait City, he jumped in with it, clearly loving the fact that he could one-up the CIA.

Score one for the CINC, Horner thought to himself. But shit, is this a tennis match? The obvious maneuvering left him cold.

Schwarzkopf was then officially introduced. As he started his briefing, Horner said two quick prayers: first, for the CINC, that his message would be accurate, accepted, and lead to the right actions. Second, that he himself would not doze off after two F-16 flights the previous day and a night without sleep.

The first prayer was answered when Schwarzkopf proved to be as effective as Horner expected, as he used map outlines to show the possible axes of Iraqi attack — most likely down the coastal highway toward Dhahran — and the ways ground forces could be employed to stop it.

And it didn’t take God long to answer the second prayer. Horner was soon in front of the slide projector, walking his way though the air component briefing. Though he was nervous, years of briefing very difficult generals about his failure to keep jets from hitting the ground and killing their pilots made this one easy. First, he talked about the size of the force they’d need (as it turned out, this would be about 30 percent of the actual war power finally deployed or at their disposal).[24] Then he talked about how long it would take them to reach the Gulf and how soon they’d be ready to fight, if it came to that: about thirty-six hours to put the force in place, and another day to take the munitions out of prepositioning storage or off of ships on the way to the Gulf from Diego Garcia. Following that, he discussed the types of missions that would be flown against which targets, in the event the Iraqi Army came across the Saudi border (including types and amounts of munitions, sortie rates, levels of success expected, and possible losses). There would be, of course, direct attacks against the lead elements of the Iraqi armoredforce, but the strategy was to trade space for time, and therefore to attack the logistical support of the attackers — the fuel, ammo, food, and water supplies. As a result, while U.S. forces might seem to be losing in head-on engagements on the ground, the Iraqi Army would be starving itself to death, and at some point — a week or two? — their attack would grind to a halt and U.S. air would then attrit the remnants in the desert wastes of Saudi Arabia.

Following the briefing, questions were asked — the kind where the questioner already knows the answer but wants to let everyone else around the table see that he’s present and accounted for. For the most part, however, these questions were not relevant, or even intelligent. “How are you going to give close air support to the Arab allies?” Answer: “The same way we give close air support to anybody else.” To Horner, the procedure was more interesting than the questions themselves. First, Horner gave Powell and Schwarzkopf a chance to field the question, while they in turn waited for Cheney. Horner felt he looked a little dense standing up there, waiting ten or twenty seconds for the senior leaders to finish their waltz.

The silliest, most shallow queries mostly came from Chief of Staff John Sununu—What’s this idiot doing here? Horner asked himself — but later, while watching CNN, he saw that the same “dumb” questions were the ones the reporters were asking, and his respect for Sununu grew. Sununu had simply been doing his job.

Meanwhile, Horner could see that Colin Powell was growing nervous that Horner was making “too good” a case for airpower — he had always found Powell easy to read — but the Chairman had such control of the meeting that he never came right out and said it.

At the first break in the questions, Horner took the opportunity to return to his seat against the wall to watch the debate that followed, primarily between State and Defense, the real centers of gravity that morning. Between those two, there was considerable staking-out of positions and ill-concealed hostility:

STATE: “Let’s not rush into overt action that might make matters worse. We need to know more about what is going on over there.”

DEFENSE: “We better get involved and ready to take action before matters get worse.”

All of this discussion was open, freewheeling, and acrimonious in ways that set Horner wondering. Such open conflicts would never occur in a military conference, in which everyone bows to the senior officer and to the position they feel the commander has in mind. Yet he liked it. He liked to see people looking at the problem from a variety of angles. In the military, he thought, it’s too easy for everyone to back what they think the commander wants. So if you guess wrong and the boss is stupid, you strike out on two counts. Horner called such things “school solutions”—like giving an answer in a classroom because you know the teacher endorses it.

During the discussion, the President scarcely spoke. He seemed detached, even lost in deeper contemplation, as the talk whirled around the table. It was clear that he wanted to hear what people had to say and didn’t want to cast his shadow over the examination of the issues.

When he finally began to speak, two overriding concerns emerged: first, how to use military force against the Iraqis while keeping down the loss of life, and second, how to bring in other nations to form a coalition against Iraq (and thus avoid the arrogance of Vietnam). Chuck Horner easily identified with both concerns. It would have been hard for anyone who’d fought in Vietnam not to.

When Bush began raising the loss-of-life issue, Horner could see in his face and body language that it wasn’t perception, or spin, or bad headlines he was worried about. It was about people bleeding and suffering. His personal anguish over the killing was unmistakably visible, and it wasn’t just a question of U.S. lives, but of everybody’s — U.S., Allied, and even Iraqi.

Horner — already in tune with those feelings — was pretty sure that Schwarzkopf felt the same way, but