Home > Gulf War Diary > "Cease Fire"
For the next 13 days, we pulled occupation duty in Iraq. This duty was not pleasant -- boring, uncertain, and dangerous. There was much uncertainty -- would hostilities resume? When would we pull out of Iraq? When would we go back home? As is always the case in the interim period between the end of a war and redeployment, it was a leadership challenge trying to keep soldiers' morale up. There were four specific problems that sapped soldier morale: complacency, uncertainty, the anticlimactic nature of the war's end, and souvenir hunting.
After a war, soldiers tend to let their guard down and become complacent. However, it was still a dangerous battlefield for us out there in Iraq. Our occupation sector had previously been the TAA (tactical assembly area) for the Iraqi Republican Guard Tawakalna Division. As a result, there were still lots of unexploded surface munitions on the ground; Iraqi minefields, cluster bomblets from B-52 strikes, and DPICM bomblets from artillery strikes. A soldier from Alfa Battery, Private Roger Valentine, lost his life when he encountered an unexploded MLRS DPICM bomblet. Moreover, there were still a lot of isolated Iraqi units out there, some of which had either not been informed of the cease fire, or did not care. One night, for example, we were alerted to engage a renegade Iraqi tank company.
I learned first hand how dangerous it was a few days after the cease fire. I was out one day surveying an abandoned Iraqi cantonment area with my driver, Specialist Malone. While checking out the area, I looked at my watch, and realized that I was about to be late to Private Valentine's memorial service, which was being held that day at Alfa Battery's position. Since I was running late, I decided to drive a straight line from my current location to Alfa Battery's position, rather than take the MSR (main supply route). That turned out to be a mistake, which came damn close to costing me my life.
As we were heading to Alfa Battery's position, I heard Malone ask in his Texas drawl, "Sir, what are those rods sticking out of the ground?" I looked up and saw numerous mounds of dirt with small metal rods sticking out of the ground, spaced about one every 10 square meters. I got my binoculars out, and scanned the area. With the binoculars, I could tell that the metal rods were actually detonating rods sticking out about 6-12 inches from the ground. Those were hastily buried anti-tank mines. We had wandered into a minefield, alone, miles away from the closest American unit. I immediately shouted, "STOP THE VEHICLE, MALONE!" Malone came to a screeching halt, and gave me a quizzical look. I explained the situation to him, and then called the TOC to let them know that I would be late for the memorial service.
My first course of action was to get out of the vehicle and ground guide the vehicle around the anti-tank mines. This minefield had obviously been laid by the Iraqis in an extremely hasty manner. It was not very dense; only one mine every ten meters or so. I had one foot out the door of the vehicle when I remembered that soldiers generally do not lay just anti-tank mines; they usually lay anti-personnel mines as well, to kill the engineers or infantrymen who dismount from vehicles to clear the anti-tank mines. It occurred to me that the Iraqis might have forgotten to do that, but I was not about to risk that.
Malone and I ended up leaning out of our respective doors to look for mines as we drove out of the minefield at five miles per hour. The carriage of the HMMWV had enough clearance to roll over the anti-tank mines without touching the detonating rods and setting off the anti-tank mines. What I was concerned about was one of the front wheels rolling over a mine and sending us sky high. Malone watched the left front wheel, and I watched the right front wheel. It took about 15-20 minutes to get out of the minefield, the longest 15-20 minutes of my life.
By the time we got to Alfa Battery, the memorial service had already started. All of the brass were there; the Division CG, the ADCM (Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver), the DIVARTY Commander, and, of course, the leadership of 3-82 FA. The Division Chaplain was delivering a sermon as I drove up. I tried to take my place as inconspicuously as possible, but both General Officers noticed me, the DIVARTY Commander shot me a dirty look, and the battalion commander sneered at me and pointed at his watch.
Apart from the excitement created by incidents like that, occupation duty was pretty boring. There was really very little to do. We could not move anywhere (unless absolutely necessary) because of the unexploded surface munitions strewn across the desert floor. That kept us from doing any meaningful training. There were no recreation facilities this far forward. Boredom and complacency quickly lowered the soldier morale that had been sky high during the war, and it was a leadership challenge trying to keep the troops pumped up.
We had a mission to clear a four square kilometer area, which helped morale by giving us something to do, but that took only three days. "Clearing an area" involved policing up any stray Iraqi soldiers, collecting and destroying Iraqi small arms and ammunition, burying any Iraqi corpses we came across, and destroying or disabling any serviceable Iraqi vehicles we came across. We also went through bunkers looking for anything that might have intelligence value, such as overlays, OPLANS, Orders of Battle, etc.
One day, when clearing our area, we came across an abandoned Iraqi 2S1 artillery battalion. The 2S1 is a Soviet-made self-propelled 122 mm howitzer. We were stunned by what we saw; apparently, the entire battalion must have gotten into trucks and "bugged out," because there were 18 howitzers, in mint condition, still parked in their positions, with nobody in sight. Moreover, the command post bunkers contained a wealth of data that had potential intelligence value; maps, overlays, battle plans, etc. Caches of small arms and ammunition were stockpiled all over the place. We started looking around to survey the area to see what needed to be turned in and what needed to be destroyed in place.
As my First Sergeant, Jim Pape, was tooling around a sand dune in his HMMWV, he saw, much to his surprise, an Iraqi soldier urinating into the side of the sand dune. The Iraqi soldier, as astonished as he was, started fleeing on foot back toward his bunker. 1SG Pape pursued in his HMMWV, while simultaneously calling on the radio to get some "back up." He rounded up SFC Roy Woods, the battery motor sergeant, and some of his mechanics, and covered the entrance of the bunker that the Iraqi soldier had jumped into. Then, 1SG Pape pulled a smoke grenade out of his HMMWV, pulled the pin, let the spoon go, and tossed it into the bunker. Within 30 seconds, white HC smoke was billowing out of the bunker. Even sooner than that, not one, but five Iraqi soldiers fled the bunker!
1SG Pape and his people immediately took them into custody. The Iraqi soldiers were extremely scared and panicky; they got down on their knees and pled for mercy in Arabic. My people told them to shut up, lay down on the ground, and spread their arms. Once we got past the language barrier and got them to comply with that order, my troops started searching them. While this was going on, one of the Iraqis started shouting something out in Arabic into the bunker. "Shut the f*** up!" One of my alarmed soldiers said, worried now that there was yet another Iraqi still in the bunker. A few other soldiers moved closer to the mouth of the bunker, training their M16A2s into the mouth of the bunker.
Meanwhile, the wooden overhead cover of the bunker caught fire, apparently ignited by a mattress that had been set on fire by the fuze function of the smoke grenade. This finally motivated the last Iraqi into the bunker, a true fanatic, to come out and surrender. After having sat in that bunker for about ten minutes, sucking down HC smoke, that Iraqi soldier was obviously suffering from severe smoke inhalation. To say that his eyes were bloodshot was an understatement; his eyes were blood red. He was heaving, wheezing, and seemingly gasping for every breath as if it were his last. Fearing that he would die, we loaded him and the other EPWs into a 1/4 ton trailer, and took them to the EPW collection point at the BSA (brigade support area).
Enroute to the BSA, I called in the report to the TOC: "Six Iraqi EPWs, one Iraqi casualty, zero US casualties." That apparently got everybody's attention: the next voice I heard on the net was LTC Knight's, wanting to know what happened. I gave him a brief description of the incident, and told him that I would give him a more detailed report later, in person.
By the time we got to the EPW collection point, the Iraqi was going into heart failure. There was chaos in the prisoner pen, with on--looking Iraqi soldiers watching their dying comrade and chatting nervously in Arabic, and a MP asking me "What happened, sir?" in a somewhat accusatory manner. The Iraqi died sooner thereafter.
As I suspected, there was an inquiry. I had to write a sworn statement, as did other soldiers involved. The concern was that we had potentially violated rules of engagement (ROE); when the cease fire went into effect, our rules of engagement had changed from wartime ROE to peacetime ROE, the major difference being that under peacetime rules of engagement, we could use lethal force only in self-defense. Of course, in this particular case, we had used appropriate restraint, and, quite frankly, it was not our fault that the dead Iraqi had decided to stay in the bunker when 1SG Pape chucked the smoke grenade into there. We were cleared of all wrongdoing.
Other commanders were not so fortunate in the performance of their duties. One infantry company came across a bunker system. Their commander decided that the best way of clearing that particular bunker system was with fragmentation grenades. His soldiers were running from bunker to bunker, yelling "FIRE IN THE HOLE" as they chucked frag grenades into the bunkers. Meanwhile, a battalion commander from another unit was driving down the nearby MSR (main supply route), and heard the loud, distinct WHOMP! of frag grenades going off. He decided to investigate, saw American soldiers doing this, and put a stop to it. When the lieutenant colonel found the company commander, he gave him an ass chewing, the likes of which that young captain had probably never received. After that, he told the company commander's brigade commander, and the company CO was promptly relieved of command.
After we completed clearing our assigned sector, I conducted property inventories. These inventories had two purposes: First of all, to pass the time with something constructive to do, and secondly, to get a handle on my property. I was "signed for" (financially accountable for) about 20 million dollars of government property; I wanted to know what equipment I still had, and what equipment was missing. During peacetime operations, if a soldier or commander is missing property that he's signed for, he buys it. In wartime, the Army is usually much more lenient about writing off missing property as a "combat loss," if the accountable officer can offer a reasonable justification for having lost that item of property. At this juncture, I wanted to know what I was missing and why I was missing it. I was able to kill about four days with the inventories. Surprisingly, I had very few property losses; mostly camouflage nets that had fallen off vehicles during the attack into Iraq.
In addition to boredom, another morale killer was uncertainty, compounded by a lack of comprehensive and accurate information getting down to the troops. Soldiers had a lot of questions for which there were no good answers. Would hostilities resume again? How long would we stay in Iraq? When would we finally go home? Now that the war was over and Kuwait was liberated, many young soldiers, unaware of the political complexities of the situation, had a hard time understanding why it was necessary for us to stay in South West Asia. The bottom line was this: The situation was fluid, and the leadership did not know the answers to those questions. We were all starved for quality English language news broadcasts. We could not get AFN this far forward. We were able to get Voice of America (VOA) and British Broadcasting Service (BBS) broadcasts on our short-wave radios, but the Iraqis periodically jammed those broadcasts. It was almost as if the Iraqis knew what effect this would have on our morale.
Performing occupation duty in Iraq contributed to a "hollow feeling" we had -- whereas we savored our historic victory, we still could not help but feel that we did not "finish the job." This hollow feeling was not helped by the fact that Iraqi units, to include the remnants of the Iraqi Republican Guard (the same units that we would have enveloped and destroyed had it not been for the premature cease fire), were savaging the Kurdish and Shi'a rebellions that arose as a result of our swift victory.
Another soldier problem we had was "souvenir hunting." Iraqi weapons and ammunition were all over the place, and many soldiers wanted to bring home an AK-47, pistol, bayonet, or, worse yet, even an unexploded item of ordnance. The Theater commander's position on this was clearly stated: no captured weapons or ammunition of any type would be brought back to the United States as personal souvenirs. Units were allowed to bring back captured weapons to display in their museums back at home station (for example, we brought back an Iraqi 2S1 howitzer), but individual soldiers were not permitted to do this. Most soldiers had a lot of heartburn with this policy; therefore, there were many incidents of "selective disobedience," with soldiers squirreling away pistols, assault rifles, bayonets, and other contraband. In some units there were soldiers who were even stupid enough to try to smuggle unexploded ordnance, and they usually ended up killing or maiming themselves in the process. In one infantry unit, a soldier put a cluster bomblet in the left cargo pocket of his DCU. When he brushed up against a tracked vehicle, the bomblet detonated, blowing his leg off. Another soldier in another unit attempted to disassemble a DPICM bomblet, presumably to satisfy some sort of intellectual curiosity. Of course, the soldier had no idea what he was doing, and died when the bomblet went off in his face. Needless to say, the commanders of those outfits had a lot of explaining to do. It's tough to tell a parent or spouse that Johnny died AFTER the war because he was playing around with something he was not supposed to, and his officers and NCOs did not have enough common sense to tell him to stop.
I knew that if I did not get control of this problem ASAP in my unit, it would eventually get out of control, and jump up and bite me in the butt. Therefore, I had some of my soldiers dig an "amnesty pit." Then, I had a battery formation, and told my soldiers that, if they had any contraband, they had 24 hours to throw it in the amnesty pit, no questions asked. After that, they would face UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) action if they were caught with any war souvenirs. The next day, I conducted a "health and welfare" inspection, otherwise known as a "shakedown." My officers and NCOs searched everything in the battery; all vehicles, connexes, footlockers, containers, and duffel bags, looking for Iraqi weapons and ammunition. There were a few soldiers who had not heeded my advice, and they ended up losing rank and pay for their temerity.
As the days rolled by, we started hearing news of U.S. soldiers returning home to a hero's welcome. Most of those soldiers were from the 82nd Airborne Division or 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized). Those divisions had been in South West Asia since the early days of the deployment in August 1990, and therefore went home first. That was CINCCENT's "first in, first out" policy. This was the only fair way to manage the redeployment schedule, and we understood that intellectually. However, on an emotional level, many soldiers could not help but feel a little jealous seeing fellow troopers going home to a hero's welcome while we were still stuck in the Iraqi desert. From a commander's standpoint, this made my job even harder, because it hurt soldiers' morale, attitude, and, ultimately, their job performance. Finally, on March 12, 1991, though, our Iraqi occupation duty came to an end. We received our new marching orders -- to pack everything up and move to Assembly Area Killeen, northwest of Hafar Al Batin.
