It was, said the battalion’s scholarly executive officer, Maj. Robert Williams, “the chance to do what every cavalry unit wants to do once in its life. Drop the reins and charge.” As the tanks approached Kuwait City, they were stretched out so far they disappeared into a mist thick with smoke from burning oil wells. Their big 120-mm guns swung restlessly from side to side looking like nothing so much as great dinosaurs sniffing for prey. They charged forward in a hail of orange tracers from their turret-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. Out of the mist came the chatter of their light machine guns and the thudding boom of their big guns.
The rolling dunes were honeycombed with Iraqi bunkers defended by light artillery pieces and dug-in T-55 tanks. The Hounds picked off tanks from a mile away. One just ahead of me disintegrated into enormous fragments; the turret, weighing several tons, flew 20 feet into the air like the lid of a giant garbage can. The tracers set off black and scarlet fireballs and brilliant white showers as gas-storage tanks and munitions went up. A strong wind was blowing from behind us, so we rushed ahead wreathed in the black and white smoke from our burning quarry.
Most Iraqis just gave up–or tried to. It was a bizarre scene. The advance was like a giant hunt. The Iraqis were driven ahead of us like animals. But as we streamed forward in a diamond-shape formation more than two miles long and nearly as wide, we had no time to pick up prisoners. Huddled groups of green-uniformed soldiers waving white rags of surrender stood, bewildered, while tanks roared by. They looked like spectators caught on a demolition-derby circuit.
But some fought back. “I was driving along in my hummer [the new version of the jeep], and I saw this T-55 that everyone had passed without hitting because it seemed abandoned,” recalled First Lt. Mark Powell, 27. “Just as I came alongside, this Iraqi jumped on the turret with a rocket launcher on his shoulder and aimed at me. I was dead. Then there was this huge double explosion and I really thought they’d got me. I looked up, and I saw the guy against a wall of bright red flame, with the launcher still on his shoulder. Then he sort of vaporized. Major Williams had seen him and fired, and the two bangs were his gun and the T-55 blowing up.” Williams, a former West Point assistant ethics professor, said only: “I killed my first man today, and I’m not sure I feel very good about it.”
Riding herd on this juggernaut was Lt. Col. Douglas Tystad, Hound Six on the radio. From his lead tank, Hound Dog A1, the lean, self-deprecating South Dakotan talked almost continuously for 10 hours during the initial charge through Kuwait. Tystad’s role fell somewhere between that of Attila the Hun and a primary-school teacher trying to keep in line an unruly group of children–tank crews roaring along on 63-ton monsters with names like Bad Attitude, Born to be Wild and Brain Damage. His radio calls were channeled through Porcupine Six, a Vietnam-vintage armored personnel carrier bristling with antennas that was used as the unit’s communications vehicle. I rode in Porcupine Six, just behind Tystad’s lead tank at the center of the front line. It was easy to see why Tystad’s brigade commander later nominated him for the Silver Star.
The smoky mist made it hard for widely spread tanks to keep formation, and they tended to wander into each other’s lanes. “You gotta keep out east, you’re wandering, now get back where you should be,” said Tystad. Someone radioed that he saw unidentified tanks at 2,300 meters. “Well, move forward and shoot the goddam things.” Two huge fireballs blossomed from tanks barely visible at that range. Another voice described Iraqis in armored vehicles “who look as if they’re trying to surrender.” Tystad replied: “If they don’t get out quickly, you gotta kill them.” But when another young commander wanted to fire a few rounds into a bunker with a white flag “to see if we can shake a few of ’em out, “Tystad commanded: “Don’t be a cowboy, you can’t do that, you gotta respect the white flag.”
We reached our main objective at about 4 p.m. Wednesday: the al-Mutlaa police station, a square concrete blockhouse. It was important because it sits west of Kuwait City on the main Sixth Ring Motorway, which turns into the highway north to Iraq. We couldn’t see it clearly, but thousands of Iraqis were trying to escape up the highway.
The Hounds soon stopped that. In the smoky twilight, the lead tanks opened up on Iraqi armor grouped outside the station. An Iraqi T-55 tank immediately blew up in a great fountain of white fire. Secondary explosions went on for an hour. Next to go was an armored personnel carrier. Then a line of fuel tankers spewed flame and oily smoke across the other burning vehicles. Orange and green tracers swept the buildings and armored vehicles now scattering off the road. Then, in the middle of this mayhem, there was a sudden lull, as if everyone had decided to reload at the same time. As soon as the firing stopped, a middle-aged, balding man in a long Kuwaiti robe walked toward the U.S. tanks. He strolled over to the nearest Bradley armored personnel carrier, gestured his thanks to the driver, then walked off down the road as the firing broke out again. At its peak, the scene looked like something out of a medieval artist’s vision of hell, a great backdrop of leaping flames against which we could see the tiny figures of men frantically trying to escape the fire.
That night we mourned our own casualty, S/Sgt. Harold Witzke, the battalion’s master gunner. While the Hounds blasted the police station, Witzke and a group of men set up the battalion’s Tactical Operations Center nearby. As he was inspecting the perimeter, Witzke was shot dead by a sniper from inside an adjoining junkyard. He had taught most of the battalion gunnery skills and was known as both a “stud,” a man to be admired, and a “mentor,” a man to be learned from. He was 28 years old, with a wife and two children in Copperas Cove, Texas. The battalion’s operations sergeant major, a tough little veteran named Luis Montero, paid him a soldier’s tribute: “You could ask him to do anything, night or day, and he’d just do it. You never had to check on him.”
Witzke died fighting. Many of the Iraqis killed at the police station died dishonorably–while fleeing with everything they could plunder. That was clear when we went back the next day to see the damage the Hounds had wrought. It was terrifying.
The initial shelling had blocked the road off, and a vast traffic jam of more than a mile of vehicles, perhaps 2,000 or more, had formed behind it. Allied jets had then repeatedly pounded the blocked vehicles. As we drove slowly through the wreckage, our armored personnel carrier’s tracks splashed through great pools of bloody water. We passed dead soldiers lying, as if resting, without a mark on them. We found others cut up so badly, a pair of legs in its trousers would be 50 yards from the top half of the body. Four soldiers had died under a truck where they had sought protection. Others were fanned out in a circle as if a bomb had landed in the middle of their group. I saw no Kuwaiti civilians among the dozens of corpses.
Most grotesque of all was the charred corpse of an Iraqi tank crewman, his blackened arms stretched upward in a sort of supplication. He lay just a few yards from a grandiose monument to Saddam. It was a sort of shrine, 15 feet high, bearing two portraits of Saddam in colored tiles–one showing him in a suit, the other with him dressed as a Kuwaiti in flowing white robes and headdress. “I’m going down there later with 50 pounds of C4 [plastic explosive] and I’m going to blow the goddam thing sky high,” said the Tiger Brigade’s commander, Col. John Sylvester.
Apart from military vehicles of all kinds, there were private Kuwaiti automobiles, Kuwaiti police cars, orange school buses, trucks and ambulances. Many obviously were stolen; they had been hot-wired. Nearly all were piled with loot. There were trucks filled with carpets and furniture, cars packed with video recorders, tapes, radios, television sets, boxes of men’s underwear in original wrappers, women’s jewelry, hundreds of bottles of perfume, books, cutlery, children’s toys, medical equipment, bunches of artificial flowers. There was even a rosary, probably stolen from a Filipino servant in what is a very Muslim country. One of the ambulances was piled high with AK-47 rifles. Marine Brig. Gen. Paul Van Riper looked disgustedly at the tangled wreckage. “This was an army that came to Kuwait for one reason,” he said. “To loot and pillage.”
In his tent afterward, Sylvester said that the battle had gone exactly the way he had outlined in his Commander’s Intent, the description of an attack given to subordinate officers before a campaign begins. “It [was] to be a quick, violent action, resulting in decisive delivery of overwhelming firepower on the enemy,” he said. Sylvester’s own Intent could be used to describe the whole of this extraordinary campaign; never before has such overwhelming firepower been delivered so decisively in so short a time. Harried relentlessly by men like the Hounds, Saddam Hussein’s Mother of Battles was never allowed time to give birth.
