The flare sticking out of the sand burned with an orange glow, a beacon in the cold, wet darkness of early morning and a warning that the Iraqi minefield was 500 meters beyond.
Marine Gunnery Sgt. Barry Shaw braked his Amtrac to a stop at the flare.
On this, the 24th of February 1991, Shaw, a combat engineer with Charlie Company of the 2nd Combat Engineers Battalion, was about to play a key role in launching the ground war into Kuwait.
His platoon`s job was to blast and plow a safe path through the barbed-wire-covered field packed with thousands of mines.
He felt as if the eyes of the entire 21,000-strong 2nd Marine Division were on him, and that was almost literally true. Behind Shaw were nearly 2,000 vehicles: tanks, Amtrac personnel carriers, Humvees, trucks and other vehicles loaded with Marines eager to engage the forces of Saddam Hussein.
Among those waiting were the 60 men of Bravo Company, a reserve tank unit from Yakima, Wash., a close-knit group of friends and neighbors and associates who, only three months ago, were enjoying civilian life. Ready for action in their M1 A1 tanks, it would not be long before they would fight one of the major battles of the ground war.
To ease the tension, Lance Cpl. Lee Fowble, 23, of Edmonds, Wash., played a tape over the tank`s sound system. It was not the ”Marine Hymn,” which an Army propaganda sound truck blared across the battlefield to the delight of some officers, but ”Carnival World” by Jimmy Buffett, the uncommon Key West singer with a common touch. Buffett`s music made Fowble think of a peaceful Caribbean island, not this desolate terrain filled with lethal machines in the hands of men determined to use them.
At this point along the 100-mile-long minefield, a point a few miles inside Kuwait from its southern border with Saudi Arabia and about 30 miles inland from the Persian Gulf, was where the Iraqi hopes to halt the American ground offensive, or at least extract a heavy toll of casualties, would be played out.
The Marines` plan called for six 14-foot lanes to be cut through this minefield and through another field just 2 kilometers beyond the first. There was no way around them. The two belts of mines stretched from horizon to horizon. ”The gates of hell,” one Marine called them.
To Shaw, a 27-year-old Marine from Pulaski, Tenn., the first minefield did not appear overly difficult. Thirty minutes, tops, he thought, especially if the belt was no wider than the 120 meters or so he was told to expect. His team went straight to work.
A plow-equipped M-60 tank in Shaw`s team drove boldly ahead and immediately rolled over a double-impulse mine hidden in the sand, arming it to explode the next time it was touched. Following right behind was an Amtrac, packed with one of Shaw`s breach crews.
The explosion lifted the Amtrac four feet into the air, disabling it and breaking one Marine`s ankles. As Navy medical corpsman dashed on foot to render assistance, Shaw thought that one of the breaching rockets had fired accidentally.
Then he looked at the ground. For the first time, he spotted small engineers` stakes protruding just above the surface, stakes much shorter than the five footers he had been told to expect would mark the minefield`s edge.
”Holy shit,” he said. ”This must be the minefield.” And he was right. It did not start up there where the barbed wire was, more than a football field away, but right in front of his nose.
What a way to start the ground war thought Cpl. Kevin McGuire, 21, of Glencoe, who sat in a Humvee waiting first in line for Shaw`s breach and could see the mixup over the position of the minefield. His weapons company was on the right flank of 2nd Division forces, feeling vulnerable. Miles of open sand separated them from the 1st Marine Division to their right. They were wary of an Iraqi attack from this direction.
To the 2nd Division`s brass, speed was of the essence in breaching the minefields.
Col. Larry Livingston, commander of the 6th Marine Regiment, had studied Iraqi tactics in its war with Iran and discovered the Iraqis would let the enemy penetrate the first minefield, then pound them with artillery to tie them up and inflict heavy casualties.
The Marines already had gotten a taste of artillery. ”Snowstorm,” the radio phrase for incoming rounds, began at 5:29 a.m. with rounds falling harmlessly near the spot from which the Marines had departed an hour earlier. It continued to be sporadic and erratic through the early morning hours-”
close enough to scare you but not close enough to do any damage,” McGuire said.
It had been a thunderous night. Marine artillery batteries, stationed ahead of the advancing column with only light infantry protection, had pounded the Iraqis with thousands of shells.
”It was the most amazing thing to see,” said Staff Sgt. Richard Childs, 36, of Houston. ”The battery on the left fired. Then the one on the right. Rocket launchers in the rear began firing, adding to the crescendo booming across the entire front.”
In addition, the Marines were firing projectiles that were rocket-boosted for greater range. The rockets ignite when the shell reaches its highest point.
”You could see little boosters in the sky, these white dots all over the sky like stars, because everyone at that point was shooting,” Childs remembered.
For days, planes, too, had bombed these positions, just as they had done many nights before in what had become known as the nightly fireworks show. The Marines said they could feel the ground shake from the explosions of tons of bombs dropped by giant B-52s.
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It was a daring move to position Marine artillery guns so close to the front, in front of an attacking force. It reflected confidence that they were so mobile that the Iraqis could neither hit nor overrun them.
Marines of the 2nd Division moved out dressed in cumbersome, uncomfortable chemical suits that they all hated. The gas masks made breathing difficult; and when the wearer sweated inside the heavy, charcoal-impregnated protective outer suit, charcoal-darkened rivulets of sweat ran down legs, arms and chest, blackening the body like a West Virginia coal miner coming off shift.
”Chemical attack is expected,” Sgt. Jan Miller, 26, a combat engineer from Los Angeles and one of those who would be breaching the minefield, wrote in his diary. He also wrote that his unit had been told it could expect 50 percent casualties in the minefields.
In the predawn darkness, Cpl. Andrew Hampton, a 21-year-old squad leader from Mt. Vernon , Ill., gathered with the men of his Amtrac behind the giant steel rear exit doors.
”Whoever doesn`t mind, I`d like to say a little prayer to take care of us while we embark on this journey,” Hampton remembers saying. They knelt on the rain-soaked sand. ”It was a time for us to come together one last time. We didn`t know who would be standing a few hours later.”
To surprise the Iraqis, Gen. William Keys, the 2nd Division commander, had chosen a 500-meter wide area between two oil gathering stations as the breach site. The enemy wouldn`t expect an assault to come through such a narrow space, and they had shown that by locating the ”seam” between their divisions, an area of possible confusion, there.
Keys had planned the offensive as a traditional Marine amphibious landing, a speedy cutting through of narrow lanes followed by a branching out to multiprong attacks on Iraqi positions. This Marine assault, however, would take place entirely in the sand.
In the weeks prior to the war, the Marines, who had never breached a minefield of this magnitude before, had rehearsed the operation. Livingston had models of the area built. He had spaced the six lanes far enough apart so there would be enough room for all the units to get through. To make sure the units didn`t bump into each other, he used satellite navigation receivers in lead vehicles.
But would the breaching equipment be up to the task? The experience in training left the combat engineers with much doubt.
The No. 1 tactic was the line charge. A rocket fired from an Amtrac-towed trailer dragged a 100-meter-long cable carrying 350 five-pound blocks of C4 plastic explosives across the minefield. The charges are blown up to detonate mines, thus clearing a path that then can be plowed or raked, and widened. In training though, the charges often didn`t go off and the cable snaked.
The plows and rakes attached to tanks, usually M-60s, weren`t perfect either. Mines would fall between the tines.
To bolster that equipment, the Marines brought in a ”Ninja Dozer,”
named after the Japanese warriors. It was essentially an armored bulldozer.
After Shaw`s team fired off a line charge, an M-60 tank followed, plowing a path, and struck a mine that lifted it two feet off the ground. Those who saw it thought the tankers had been killed, but the hatches flew open, and the four-man crew climbed out. Another M-60 tank tried to go around this tank, but it struck a mine, disabling it as well.
With the lane clogged, combat engineers fired off another line charge to clear an alternate lane, but the line of explosives draped uselessly over a power line.
Groans went up from hundreds of Marines waiting impatiently to get through the minefield. They were sitting atop some of the best high-tech killing equipment in the world, yet it seemed they were still in the Dark Ages when it came to mine-clearing.
A third M-60 ventured out and also hit a mine and was disabled. Finally, a fourth M-60 plowed a lane all the way through the minefield, and everyone seemed relieved.
Capt. Ralph Parkison, 30, from Spokane, Wash., commander of the Bravo Company reserve unit, felt, however, that the lane hadn`t been plowed completely, and so he decided to use one of his M1-A1s to replow the lane. The job fell to Sgt. Robert Trainor, leader of a tank dubbed ”Four Horsemen.”
Three-quarters of the way through, a British-made Iraqi bar mine that had been scooped up onto a bank on one side fell back down into the tank`s path. It exploded and blew parts of the plow and track off. The force of the explosion dislodged a hydraulic hose, and hot fluid spewed crazily inside the tank sending a red mist into the air.
No one could make radio contact with the driver of the tank in his separate compartment, and it was assumed that he had been killed.