Thus, during the confusion at the Battle of Al-Khafji, a USAF A-10’s Maverick hit a U.S. Marine armored vehicle, a Marine A-6 bombed a Marine convoy, a Marine gunship attacked a Saudi National Guard armored car, and an unknown aircraft strafed Saudi troops who had wandered into a free-fire zone. Later in the war, a pair of Air Force A-10s attacked two British armored personnel carriers, Army Apaches destroyed two Army APCs, and our airmen destroyed two more British armored vehicles.

Lives were lost in each of these tragic events.

Though all were great tragedies, when placed against the total of air-to-ground attacks, their numbers were quite small—especially compared with other wars. Moreover, we must also weigh in the lives of friendly ground forces saved because air attacks on the Iraqis were so devastating. Of course, no saving of friendly lives makes any loss of friendly life “acceptable” to a commander. Mistakes happen, to be sure, but every effort should be made to prevent needless killings.

★ The officer I tapped to work the fratricide-prevention problem was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Bob Phillips and his fighter Weapons Tactics Team. Joe Bob and his team of eight fighter weapons school instructors had arrived early in February, after General “Tiny” (six feet four and three hundred pounds) West, the commander of the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, had offered them, both to augment our staff in Riyadh and to capture Gulf war experiences. They’d come not as experts—“We’ll tell you how to win this one”—but as field hands. After the war, they could go home to train others, using what we had learned in the only school for combat—war.

With typical fighter-pilot confidence and enthusiasm, Joe Bob and his team went to work. They had a big question to answer: if we had four incidents at Al-Khafji, how many would we face when five corps were unleashed on the Iraqis?