Eyewitness (38 page)

I was lowered onto the floor in the casualty reception; within seconds, medics and nursing sisters were surrounding me and cutting off my clothes and boots. With long, bent-handled scissors I was rapidly divested of my trousers and boots and socks. A doctor took my vital signs and asked if I had been given any morphine or painkillers and how long it had been since I had eaten; and then he left. I was left lying on the floor stark naked except for my dog tags, resting on the other bottom half of my clothes. I must have been a pretty gruesome sight as I hadn’t washed for several weeks. I was too tired to feel embarrassed and was now beginning to feel cold and starting to shiver. Shock was finally arriving. Now that I was safe and sound in the security of the hospital my system was letting go.

X-rays were required; so I was lifted up off my stretcher on the floor by three male medics and put on a trolley and wheeled into the X-ray room. I was carefully moved around into various positions and then wheeled into the waiting room outside the operating theatre. After a minute or so the anaesthetist, Dr Kelly, arrived to prepare me for surgery. I had met Dr Kelly when I had last been in Vung Tau: his parting words to me then were, ‘I hope I don’t see you again,’ explaining that if I did see him again it was more likely to be exactly in the position in which I now found myself. Now he told me that I had lost a lot of blood and that before I went into surgery I would need at least two units of blood – probably some more later. He asked me how I felt and I replied with a more honest answer, something like ‘awful’; he said he would soon fix that situation. He returned with a big needle and after swabbing my arm gave me an injection of morphine. The effect of this drug on my system was sensational. Within minutes I was feeling no pain, I felt carefree and when the initial hit of the drug swept over me it was akin to an orgasm. I could see why people got addicted to the stuff. I now broke out into a session of jibbering like a drunk and a medic stayed with me during this time no doubt to keep me safe. Events at this time blurred into one another but I recall the surgeon coming up to me and showing me my X-ray and saying I had been shot with a bullet and a safety pin. The bullet was resting to the right of my left lung and on the third rib down, while Mick O’Sullivan’s safety pin that had been holding my sleeping-bag silk around my shoulders had somehow come undone and had worked its way into the hole in my back. Sometime I was also given a wash-down, then I was cleaned up ready for the operating theatre.

Dan McDaniel was wheeled past me into the operating theatre. He gave me a drunken-looking grin, the effect of his pre-op injection, as he went past. Dan had 60 mm mortar shrapnel pieces in his back and wasn’t looking too bad. Before long I was wheeled into the chilly air of the operating theatre and as I came under the bright lights I looked across at the other table and saw surgeons dropping pieces of shrapnel into a stainless-steel bowl. I asked if we were allowed to keep our shrapnel and bullets and was told most assuredly so. I was given the compulsory count-back from the number ten after a needle was inserted into my forearm; I made it all the way back to eight before darkness descended upon me.

Tony Clifton

Tony Clifton was born in Melbourne in 1937. He began work as a reporter on the Benalla
Standard
in 1956, moved to the Melbourne
Herald
in 1958 and went to London at the end of 1960. He worked in Fleet Street for ten years, mainly for the London
Sunday Times
, and reported from Biafra. He was then was hired by
Newsweek
magazine to cover South-East Asia from Hong Kong at the beginning of 1971. For
Newsweek
he reported the Indo-Chinese war from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos until the war’s end in mid-1975. Later in 1975, he was posted to the most peaceful country in the Middle East, Lebanon, to cover politics and business in the region, but had been there only a few weeks when the Lebanese civil war broke out, delivering a war that could be reported, for the most part, without straying more than a kilometre from home. He says, ‘It was certainly the only war I reported from the front-lines where I was able to go to the front during the day and sleep in my own home and my own bed in the evening.’

Clifton interrupted the Beirut war with frequent trips to Iran to cover the fall of the Shah and the return of Khomeini, and then covered the Iran–Iraq war from the fronts of both sides. He was later posted back to Hong Kong, London, San Francisco, New York and finally New Delhi. The last serious war he covered was the 1991 Gulf War. Occasional forays into the front-line were enmeshed if not embedded in the way contemporary conflict is covered. Clifton wrote in 1991:

There are more than 700 press people registered with the US military’s Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran. No more than about a hundred get anywhere near action at any time. That hundred is divided into a dozen small groups, then chivied, corralled, controlled and censored by press officers, who have virtually no experience of war and even less experience of the press or its needs …

The problems were clear the day the war began. Reporters waiting on the carrier
John F. Kennedy
to question pilots coming back from the biggest air campaign since World War II were handed a list of suggested questions. The first was, ‘How do you feel?’ At least they got to ask questions. I needed to interview a noncombatant officer stationed 800 yards from my hotel. A J.I.B. officer said no. He had orders: no ‘unilaterals’ (interviews by non-pool individuals). ‘In fact, as I read it,’ he said, ‘you are not allowed to say “Hi” to a soldier in the street. That would be a unilateral.’

If you’ve been around a while you yearn for Vietnam, where you could go where you liked and report what you wanted. You even get nostalgic for the good old days in Iraq – when I covered the Iran war I got to the front, got to see the commanding general in the field, even got to talk to Saddam Hussein, whose interpreter almost fainted in trying to devise a polite translation of ‘Do you fear assassination?’

Clifton says he is now semi-retired in Melbourne and very glad he’s too old and too out of shape to cover the current Iraq War. His passionate book about the civil war in Lebanon,
God Cried
, with photographs by Catherine Leroy, was published in 1983.

*

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, 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 vaporised. 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, selfdeprecating 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 channelled through ‘Porcupine Six’, a Vietnam-vintage armoured 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 centre 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 2300 metres. ‘Well, move forward and shoot the goddam things.’ Two huge fireballs blossomed from tanks barely visible at that range. Another voice described Iraqis in armoured 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 armour 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 armoured 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 armoured 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 US tanks. He strolled over to the nearest Bradley armoured 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 dishonourably – 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 2000 or more, had formed behind it. Allied jets had then repeatedly pounded the blocked vehicles. As we drove slowly through the wreckage, our armoured 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 coloured 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 jewellery, 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.