Saddam’s war machine. It was definitely constructed to house military command and control, and it was camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded (though in truth, hardly anything in Iraq was not camouflaged, barb-wired, and guarded). What Black Hole planners did not know was that hundreds of Iraqi civilians were using the bunker as an air raid shelter.
At last, after nearly four weeks of war, Al-Firdus made it to the top of the list. Planners proposed it for the night of 13–14 February; it was approved as legitimate by the lawyer in the plans shop who watched over the legal aspects of target selection (he could and did veto targets), and then it was approved by Schwarzkopf in the evening briefing.
Chuck Horner reflects:
In retrospect, I should have asked harder questions. For one, if we could wait almost a month to strike this bunker, what made it so important now? For another, how was the bunker actually being used to command Iraqi military forces? Since the real reason we were attacking the bunker was almost certainly the availability of F-117 sorties (we’ve got lots to spend; if we don’t use them, they’re wasted), I doubt that anyone could have given me a good answer to those questions. In the absence of a satisfactory answer, I could have erased that target from the list, and hundreds of Iraqi lives could have been saved and a terrible tragedy avoided. But all of that is hindsight. The reality is F-117s hit the Al-Firdus bunker, and we killed several hundred people.
However, the questions I failed to ask aren’t the only questions that need asking here. For instance, why use the bunker as an air raid shelter? To the Black Hole planners and the F-117 pilots flying the missions, it is inconceivable that any Iraqi in Baghdad would want to be anywhere but in his own home during air attacks. American bombs did not hit family homes. Pilots were painstakingly careful to bomb only militarily significant targets. Their bombing was accurate.
Of course, it wasn’t only American bombs that were falling out of the sky; thousands of artillery shells and hundreds of surface-to-air missiles were thrown up each night. All of that lethal stuff had to fall back to earth. In that case, maybe it made sense to seek shelter.
And yet, other questions remain.
When the other bunkers were struck, no civilian casualties were reported. Why did Al-Firdus and not the other thirty-two bunkers contain civilians? Did the local commander, in a goodwill gesture, invite locals into his bunker? Or did he suck up to his friends and superiors by offering them shelter not available to the average Iraqi? Who knows… except maybe Saddam?
There is one certainty in war: you will always face uncertainty. The enemy does his best to hide the answers to any questions you might ask of him. He tries to tell you that he possesses nothing of value. If Saddam had announced that the Al-Firdus bunker was an air raid shelter, and not a command-and-control center, if he had painted a red crescent or red cross on the roof, would we have believed him? We would probably have asked more questions, but it’s likely that the bunker would still have been hit (though if we had known the truth, that target would not have appeared in the Air Tasking Order).
The bottom line in war is you are always operating with half the story.
My first knowledge of the tragedy came from CNN, with pictures of bodies being carried from the smoking shelter. In a way, I was glad we had to endure those terrible scenes. Too often, we look on war as a game or a noble adventure. Certainly war can pursue noble objectives — stopping the murder, rape, and torture in Kuwait being a prime example. Certainly men and women undergoing the most stressful battlefield conditions rise to unheard-of selflessness. But war is still, when you get to the bottom line, killing, maiming, and wanton destruction — humans at their lowest, trying to impose their will on others. War may be necessary, but it must always be detested.
During the 1700 changeover briefing, I told the troops in the TACC: “Nobody needs to feel bad about the bunker incident in Baghdad, but we all should feel bad about the loss of life, anybody’s life, because every life is precious. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Iraqi soldier or a kid in a bunker in Baghdad, we should feel bad about the loss of one of God’s creatures. On the other hand, from a professional standpoint, we have nothing to be ashamed of. The mission was planned and executed flawlessly. The intelligence was as good as there is available. As for the people who don’t understand that war is groping in the dark trying to do dastardly things so the war will be over with, well, I don’t have much time for them. You would sure think modern, educated people would understand that truth, but many choose not to, so to hell with them. We’ll have a lot of ‘weak willies’ to worry about now. They worry about whether they’ll get up in the morning, so to hell with them. You just continue what you’re doing, because what you’re doing is right and you’re doing it very well. We’ve got to get Kuwait back to the Kuwaitis.”
Maybe if I’d had more time to think about it, I wouldn’t have made such a hard-assed speech; but I was worried that people would be overconcerned about the political cost of civilian casualties and try to shut down the air campaign. I was not wrong to worry.
Targeting in the Baghdad area all but stopped, and General Schwarzkopf began to anguish over every target we nominated, denying approval of most of them. Okay, this change was not in fact hard to accept. Most of the known high-value targets had already been destroyed or heavily damaged, and by then our main thrust had turned to destroying tanks, artillery, and lines of communication in the KTO. But a notion sticks in my throat that someone above the CINC had issued guidance based on fear of public opinion polls. This is not a fact, it’s a suspicion, and yes, civilian policy-makers must guide the warriors; but it sends trembles through me. War is political. So be it.
We eventually went back to Baghdad.
The lesson must be that war is not antiseptic, that innocent lives will be lost, that commanders in arms will kill one another. It is important that leaders at all levels do their utmost to minimize death and suffering. It must be an obsession with the commanders and planners, and of everyone who has a finger on the trigger. On the other hand, survival on the battlefield and success in war require decisive action in an ill-defined environment while using the most lethal weapons ever devised. That’s the rub. When the laser-guided bomb slips its release hooks, someone is going to die.
Let the deaths of American, Saudi, and British troops, let the deaths of Iraqi civilians, remind each of us that war is a hateful thing.
