At any rate, fire trenches were part of the extensive defense system near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The plan was to force Coalition ground troops to penetrate and be channeled through as many casualty-producing hazards as possible before they engaged the Republican Guard and selected armor units. As they were slowed and channeled, Iraqi heavy artillery was scheduled to make mincemeat of them.

Though the trenches themselves may have been intended as a surprise, the Coalition’s control of air and space ended that hope, and taking the trenches out of action actually proved to be fairly easy. Sometimes the oil in the ditches could be ignited simply by having Warthogs strafe them. Keeping them from being resupplied with fuel, however, proved to be a little harder. Each set of trenches was fed by buried pipelines from a common pumping station, usually five or so lines to a station. The pumping stations were then connected to a major east-west oil line to the north.

The pipelines and pumping stations were attacked in mid-February—far enough ahead of “G day” (which was still undetermined) to allow other countermeasures if these attacks failed, but close enough to prevent repair.

A dozen F-117 aircraft were given the job; and it must have seemed like a milk run next to the missions over Baghdad. Ten of them would hit the fire-trench pumping stations, while the final two would drop the master oil pipeline.

This mission also went without a hitch.

As it turned out, the Iraqi Army was so physically and psychologically beat up when the ground war started that their minefields and trench lines proved to be of little value in stopping the Coalition advance.

The ultimate Iraqi environmental madness, the setting on fire of Kuwait’s oil fields on or about the twenty-third of February, still burns in Chuck Horner’s memory:

I have never seen anything so senseless, so evil, so offensive to mankind. Picture if you can dense, black, oily, greasy smoke boiling into the air from a thousand fires. The desert sand is awash with black oil topped with violent red and orange flame balls. Bright orange flames spew upward at each wellhead, with ugly rivers of burning oil spilling into low ground and creating lakes that belong in hell. Angry pillars of dense black smoke rise upward until they are caught by the winds aloft—some days at a few hundred feet, other days at thousands of feet—and then driven by the winds for thousands of miles. As you fly over the area, you gaze down on a solid mass of foul-smelling smoke stretching downwind as far as you can see. When you break out under the overcast, you are inside a dark wilderness.

In Riyadh and Abu Dhabi the sky has a greasy overcast and the air smells of soot. Airplanes flying over Kuwait come back with oily soot all over them, and their canopies have to be cleaned so the pilots can see.