And when the troops began their attack of Kuwait and Iraq, they did it in the worst damned weather we encountered during the entire war, with rain, fog, low ceilings, and blowing mud.

Because our troops were ready, and the Iraqis debilitated, we began a ground offensive that turned out to be over more quickly, with fewer casualties, than anyone had ever dreamed. So in the end my weatherman wasn’t wrong—the weather was good enough to start the ground war. He just got the numbers wrong, as the weather was for the most part ghastly—zero ceiling, zero visibility.

THE GROUND WAR

At four o’clock on the morning of February 24, 1991, the ground war to free Kuwait began.

That night I had checked into the TACC early. The weather reports were horrible—cold, fog, rain, and drizzle, with blowing winds.

As morning approached and we waited for progress reports from the BCE, the room was filled with tension, even dread. Yet we were also relieved. For airmen, this moment marked the last spurt in a long and difficult struggle. And we were quite simply exhausted.

I tried to imagine what the Marines were going through as they picked their way through the barbed wire and minefields, always waiting for an artillery barrage to rain down on them, which they could only take or retreat.

I knew that the Marines and the Eastern Area Corps were going to give us our best clue about what was really going on. Out to the west, it was going to be more difficult to track the XVIIIth Airborne Corps and French Army, as they became strung out over miles of desert. Though they did not have to confront the massed defensive works that faced Walt Boomer, Gary Luck had problems of his own. Primarily, he had to take his forces and their logistics tails deep into Iraq before the Iraqis discovered they were there, and then he had to place his forces in position to cut off retreat of the forces facing Fred Franks’s VIIth Corps, the British, and the Northern Area Corps (Franks’s main attack was scheduled for launch on the twenty-fifth).

We were, of course, also aware that the Iraqi Army had crumbled, and that Saddam had desperately tried to escape the battlefield and occupied Kuwait. Hours before the attack, the Russians had delivered a desperate message to Washington, promising unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, if they were allowed a twenty-one-day cease-fire. No way. Because we wanted their army destroyed, we would not permit them to leave with their equipment, so our response was: “You have twenty-four hours to clear out, not three weeks.”

As early as February 20, Army Apaches flying strikes against Iraqi targets in southern Kuwait had reported that the noise of their helicopters had brought Iraqi soldiers streaming out of their bunkers to surrender. These prisoners reported that whole units were prepared to surrender en masse, and were just waiting for our attacking army. Even so, there was plenty of Iraqi Army left to inflict casualties on Coalition ground forces.