Though most Scuds did little damage, there were still bad moments. One that fell in Israel caused a large number of injuries, another destroyed the school attended by General Behery’s children, and another fell in the street outside RSAF headquarters (it was immediately attacked by souvenir hunters). A piece of molten metal from this Scud (or from the Patriot that intercepted it) burned a hole through the roof of the RAF administration building and dropped sizzling onto a desk where a pair of Brits were having a late-night cup of tea. Finally, and tragically, in the waning moments of the war, during a period when the Patriot battery defending the city was off-line, a Scud slammed into a warehouse in Dhahran where U.S. Army transportation troops were sleeping. Over twenty-five troops were killed and nearly a hundred injured—the largest numbers of allied casualties from a single Gulf War event. In fact, Scuds killed more U.S. troops than were killed in any single engagement during the eight months of war on the sea, six weeks of war in the air, and four days of war on the ground (a total of about seventy-five soldiers were killed by the Iraqis, and another seventy-five were killed by blue-on-blue).

The failure to stop the Scud threat was Chuck Horner’s greatest Gulf War failure, the one area where airpower could not secure and maintain the military initiative.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

A major and largely unsung obsession shared by Chuck Horner, his planners, the Coalition pilots, and the President of the United States, was to prevent needless civilian casualties—collateral damage, in the military euphemism. Military targets and military personnel were fair game, but ordinary Iraqis were not responsible for the criminal acts of their rulers. They had a right to live in safety, as far as humanly possible.

Chuck Horner will never forget George Bush’s anguish in August at Camp David as he contemplated the deaths that would follow the decisions he’d been forced to make—an anguish, Horner is convinced, that was the right response to the actions he was taking. Horner himself has felt similar pain many times. The needless death of civilians had to be avoided.

On the whole, Coalition airmen successfully followed this course. On two occasions, they failed:

The first, simply, was a tragic mistake. During an RAF strike on a bridge, the guidance system of a laser-guided bomb failed, and the bomb fell into a nearby marketplace, killing or injuring several Iraqi civilians. Since the target was legitimate, and reasonable measures had been taken during an attack on a legitimate target, no blame could be attached to this tragedy.

The second was more complicated—the attack on the Al-Firdus command-and-control bunker.