Global Policy Forum

By Anthony Swofford

In August 1990 my Marine infantry battalion deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the country from invasion by the Iraqi army. Iraqi soldiers had invaded Kuwait during the early morning of Aug. 2. For more than a week afterward we sat atop our rucksacks on the parade field at the Marine base at Twenty Nine Palms, Calif., waiting for transportation to Riyadh. From where we sat, the world looked amazingly black and white, with little room or need for diplomacy or cowardice. We were excited to retaliate against Saddam Hussein, to enter combat.

When we finally arrived on the tarmac at Riyadh, everything looked and felt extremely hot, a mirage on high boil, the heat warping the terrain into a violent storm of sand and weaponry and thirst. We spent the next six months living and training in the Arabian Desert, in constant fear of the nerve gas our commanders had warned us Saddam Hussein would use. Even when I slept, the gas mask was there, a reminder of the horrors of sarin gas. To negate the effects of the sarin, we were ordered to take pyridostigmine bromide pills, now considered a possible cause of the mysterious gulf war syndrome. But worse than the pills was the constant ringing in our ears -- "Gas! Gas! Gas!" -- the warning call we practiced at all hours to don and clear our gas masks in less than 10 seconds. Under a gas attack we'd also have to wear Mopp suits, 10-pound charcoal-lined garments that were unwieldy and hot -- and were only available in a jungle-camouflage pattern (not much help hiding in the desert). On Jan. 16, 1991, the American-led coalition against Iraq started the bombing campaign that would, over about six weeks, devastate Iraq's military. Our colonel informed us that Operation Desert Shield had changed to Storm, that we were now at war. Two days later the Iraqis launched a few Scud missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact that my unit operated in the middle of the desert and that Iraq's air force had been destroyed, and with it most of Saddam Hussein's intelligence apparatus, we spent our evenings jumping in and out of fighting holes for Scud alerts that turned out to be false. During the air campaign we traveled around the desert in our Humvees much the way we had prior to the bombing -- bored, tired, dehydrated, anxious and afraid of what the future might bring.

We wanted to live, even though the way we'd been living was unpleasant. We hadn't had proper showers in 10 or more weeks. My friend Troy insisted one morning that I pour a five-gallon water jug over his head while he scoured his body with Red Cross soap. The water and soap and filth poured off Troy and soaked the ground in a large damp circle, and for a moment, while standing in this circle, I thought that I'd somehow been made safe. I thought that with our little ring of water and Troy's simple desire to be clean, we'd created a gap between ourselves and the rest of the desert and the enemy lurking there, and that we could sink into the earth, into our small safe space. But in the distance I saw a Marine tank battalion roaring across the desert, and I knew again that safety had ended months before.

On Feb. 18, when my unit moved to the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, the ground war was imminent. Combat engineers had built a 15-foot-high earth berm between the two countries. On the other side of the berm, we were told, were Iraqi antipersonnel mines. My platoon dug fighting holes in a perimeter around the command post. Before we completed our task, the Iraqis attacked with artillery.

The incoming rounds were confusing, frightening and ineffective. Someone incorrectly called out, "gas." Had the enemy's forward observer walked his rounds 100 yards north he would've scored a direct artillery hit on our command post. But he hadn't. At the border, while we awaited our orders to fight, helicopters outfitted with tape players and powerful speakers flew overhead and played 1960's rock music -- Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, the Rolling Stones -- all day, to harass the nearby enemy. As the music blasted, coalition propaganda pamphlets blew across our side of the border like useless, retired currency.

A few days later, we entered Kuwait and fought the Iraqi Army. The tankers experienced the most combat. At one point, another Marine task force mistook my task force for the enemy. Those devastating tank rounds passed over my head and I watched them explode. For a split second I imagined myself the victim of my own country's firepower. My team leader screamed into his radio handset to stop the friendly attack. One of my platoon mates, a burly Texan, folded himself into a ball and wept and cursed quietly. I knelt, stung by shock, a statue of fear. At least 35 of the 148 United States service members killed during the Persian Gulf war died at the hands of allied forces.

My six-man night patrol passed near enough to an Iraqi troop carrier to hear the troops speaking. We were outgunned, so we listened and didn't shoot. I urinated down my legs and into my boots. The next morning, in my wet boots and useless Mopp suit, I marched 20 miles north from the Saudi border. I put on and took off my gas mask dozens of times for false gas alerts. We marched past Marine artillery battalions busy sending their fierce rounds 10,000 yards north. The men screamed and clapped as each round left their powerful weapons.

From the ground, I witnessed the savage results of American air superiority: tanks and troop carriers turned upside down and ripped inside out; rotten, burned, half-buried bodies littering the desert like the detritus of years -- not weeks -- of combat. The tails of unexploded bombs, buried halfway or deeper in the earth, served as makeshift headstones and chilling reminders that at any moment, the whole place could blow.

On the last day of the war, from a sniper hide I observed a confused Marine infantry battalion attempt to overtake an airfield while smoke from burning oil wells hampered command and control. Across the radio frequency I heard medevac calls, after two Marines shot each other with rifles; on the other side of the airfield hundreds of Iraqi soldiers surrendered, their boots hanging around their necks, white towels and propaganda surrender pamphlets clutched in their hands like jewels. I watched the fallout from the burning oil wells coat my uniform, and I knew that I was breathing into my lungs the crude oil I was fighting for.

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