Inside the Shield and the Storm

by

In honor of Veterans Day 2021, we look back 30 years at the shortest and, arguably, most successful war in U.S. history. The operations unintentionally spawned immediate satellite coverage of the bombing of Baghdad, Iraq, and the international Coalition’s ensuing ground attack—and thus changed the course of war reporting forever.

For Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the code names for what also became known as “The (First) Gulf War,” combat and support troops from 35 nations bolstered the U.S. joint force, comprising the largest military alliance since World War II. And thanks mostly to harrowing commentary and live camera transmission of Baghdad under nighttime attack, it was also the dawn of what we now know as “the 24-hour news cycle.”

While the international Coalition in 1990–91 ultimately liberated Kuwait from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, instant reports, punctuated by live feeds from the Cable News Network (CNN) in its office on the 9th floor of the Al-Rasheed Hotel in the Iraqi capital city were putting the network on the media map. At the time billing itself as “the only global 24-hour satellite news network,” CNN acknowledges to this day that its first broadcast under fire was “a watershed event.” 

Those old enough to remember that night heard the nervous and hushed voices of CNN correspondents Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett reporting in what’s now known as “real time” on what they were seeing—the early-morning bombing campaign against the Iraqi capital on January 17, 1991. And we were seeing it, too.

Back in Annapolis, just more than a year after I joined the periodicals editorial staff of the U.S. Naval Institute—a publisher begun in 1873 as an open forum for military discussion and headquartered in the top floors of the U.S. Naval Academy’s Preble Hall—I was still learning the ropes of current military operations and affairs. Suddenly, I found myself in the thick of reporting on an unprecedented naval buildup in the Persian Gulf (Operation Desert Shield) and the anticipation that the United States was about to go to war—in a very big way. 

It had been 17 years since U.S. forces were ordered by President Richard Nixon to withdraw from what some journalists and politicians had termed a “quagmire,” the long slog in Southeast Asia known as the Vietnam War. This time, the lion’s share of the officers in charge of the operation were veterans of that bloody, costly, and controversial conflict. And they had a score to settle, not only with Saddam Hussein and his Revolutionary Guard, but the nagging memory of a war some regarded as a mishandled affair from the start, both politically and militarily. And they weren’t about to let it happen again.

In the Nerve Center with the Proceedings Editors

Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Brendan “Mac” Greeley, an A-4 attack aircraft pilot in Vietnam who went on to be a staff writer at Aviation Week & Space Technology, started on the Naval Institute’s periodicals staff just before I did. And he knew as well as anyone the added value of having Vietnam veterans essentially running this show. “We were fortunate in that either Managing Editor [and retired Marine Corps Colonel] John Miller or I had served on active duty with many of the commanders and knew them personally. And Editor-in-Chief Fred Rainbow, of course, also knew most of them.”

To say we were fortunate was an understatement, because none of the traditional news outlets had access to the top brass like these veterans had. I was a pretty good editor with a decade of professional experience, but Fred, John, and Mac expertly orchestrated the coverage and decided on candidates for interviews. “Invariably,” Mac recalled for this story, “they [the Desert Storm commanders] were very forthcoming regarding what worked and what difficulties they had to overcome.” 

One example, Mac recalls, was a fellow aviator, Lieutenant General Royal Moore, who “pointed out that the F/A-18D (aircraft), with its forward-looking infrared (FLIR) capability, proved more survivable over the night-time battlefield than the similarly equipped OV-10Ds. The OV-10s, however, were invaluable for radio-relay duties.” That, as it turned out, was a crucial distinction.

Other contacts Mac had made with on-scene commanders were: 

  • Rear Admiral John Baptiste “Bat” LaPlante’s Navy task force and Brigadier General Harry Jenkins’ Marines operating from the upper Persian Gulf, which flew air strikes and served as a constant threat to Iraqi forces.
  • Major General Mike Myatt praised the recently acquired Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs) for the mobility they gave Marine infantrymen. The inability of Marines to keep up with fast-moving Army units during European exercises in the mid-1970s had forced the Marine Corps to face the issue head-on.
  • Recommendations by a board shared by Marine Major General Fred Haynes led to the adoption of the wheeled LAV. Coordination between Marine Corps aviation and ground units, “with some hiccups,” Mac notes, was one of the overall keys to success. 
  • “Often, the commanders had trained together at 29 Palms, California,” Mac recalls. “General Walter Boomer, overall Marine commander in the Desert Storm operation, had taken his battalion as a lieutenant colonel through a Combined Arms Exercise (CAX) there when I was the air officer. Each night, he would leave his battalion command post, visit the supporting squadron based at the expeditionary airfield, brief them on the next day’s operations, and address their concerns...”

“You can’t buy that kind of teamwork,” Mac affirms.

The Coverage Begins

The earliest issue of the Naval Institute’s monthly Proceedings to cover Operation Desert Storm was March 1991, which came off the presses in late February. And we immediately had been in “all hands on deck” mode, calling on columnist Dr. Norman Friedman to start on the Naval Institute Press book, Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait, which was billed as “the first comprehensive assessment of the war in the Persian Gulf” to be published and has stood the test of time with its expert analyses. Of its 424 pages, 183 of them are devoted to endnotes and appendices Dr. Friedman included to support his narrative.

One piece of the Proceedings war coverage was my interview with retired Vice Admiral William P. Lawrence, a former Naval Academy superintendent who had been a prisoner of war at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” after being shot down over North Vietnam. He had been a prisoner for nearly six years (most in solitary confinement) before being released and returned home.

After hearing (and seeing) that shot-down and captured U.S. aviators, including Navy Lieutenant Jeffrey Zaun, whose battered face had appeared on the cover of the February 4, 1991 issue of Newsweek, were being used by the Iraqis for propaganda purposes, Editor-in-Chief Fred Rainbow agreed with me that our readers would be interested in the thoughts of a former POW.

Admiral Lawrence didn’t address the newsweekly’s photo specifically, but he did comment on the Iraqi government’s ploy in general: “Wars today have a stronger propaganda element than any in history...When you’re fighting a totalitarian nation such as Iraq, which does not conform to the traditional rules of warfare, you know its leaders are going to use every device at their disposal to advance their cause, particularly from a propaganda perspective.”

When asked about seeing the images of U.S. POWs on television, Admiral Lawrence lamented: “It brought back painful memories of my own POW experience in Vietnam. Somehow, I had hoped that the Iraqis were a bit more sophisticated and advanced, perhaps, than the North Vietnamese. But I realize that they aren’t, that they’re fundamentally the same.”

As for the prisoners themselves, Lawrence said, “I think most people in the world know that their public statements were obtained under coercion. So it shouldn’t reflect adversely on the men being held...It’s important that POWs resist giving military information and making propaganda statements...By resisting, a POW establishes a credibility with his captors that he’s not an easy mark, and they’ll be less prone to come back again to exploit him for something else. They want to keep POWs alive and reasonably healthy because of their hostage value.” 

When asked what advice he would offer to a prisoner of war, Lawrence made three points: “Take your survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training seriously...Number two would be to do your absolute best to maintain physical fitness and good health...The third thing, of course, is to have faith in yourself, your fellow POWs, your country, and your family.” 

General Boomer’s War (and Ben Bradlee’s Version)

When this story was coming together, we went straight to retired Marine Corps General Walter Boomer, whose home phone number in South Carolina I had kept in my old-time paper Rolodex.

Aside from the operational plans he spearheaded with his Marines, Boomer had decided that press coverage of the Gulf War would benefit from first-hand, embedded reporting. Why? At the time, that strategy was seen as either a brilliant move or a huge mistake. “After Vietnam,” he pointed out, “the military in general was wrongly maligned, which prevented any kind of respect from emerging.” So, he decided to go straight to the press covering the war to help right that wrong. At first, he said, “I had no idea how much it was being watched at home. I talked to my wife on the phone, and she told me ‘everybody is watching it on TV.’” 

At that point, he went to great lengths to accommodate the reporting. “We had a better understanding of the media and invited them to embed themselves with Marines. We had a more lenient policy in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and the Marine Corps had more respect for reporters.” 

In an interview with reporter Molly Moore’s former boss at the Washington Post in the December 1995 issue of Naval History magazine, I had asked the late Ben Bradlee what he thought about Boomer’s accommodation of his reporter four years before in Desert Storm. In his best Boston accent, Bradlee replied, “Boo-mah! God knows what she did to Boo-mah! She assigned herself. She went with his Marine group, and they were out of touch with the world for two or three days. The general said, ‘I can’t get hurt by this, because she can’t file anything.’ And they became buddies.”

General Boomer has a more detailed and thus different account of how Ms. Moore’s ride with him transpired. “When the attack on Kuwait was imminent, we contacted the five major TV networks and the major U.S. newspapers,” Boomer recalled for this story. “Even though she still felt stuck in the rear, Molly Moore from the Washington Post was the only reporter who responded affirmatively to join me personally as the commanding officer. 

When we attacked, I took a small command post into Kuwait following right on the heels of the 2nd Marine Division; therefore, she had a very personal and close-up look at the battle as it unfolded. She is a great lady, and she wrote a great book, Woman at War...Some of my fellow officers from other services did not trust the media and did not even want them there. But I had great faith in the troops, and I thought the American people needed to know what the hell their Marines were doing.”

General Boomer, as a Vietnam veteran, closed our interview by stressing that the most important lesson he learned in Operation Desert Storm, which no one seemed to have learned in Southeast Asia, he said, was that “the goal should be to accomplish the mission—and come home.”  

An Army Tank Commander’s Take

For this commemoration, we also went to a 1989 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Scott McKechnie, who was a history-major-turned-tank-platoon-leader. “All graduates at that time received a bachelor of science degree, and I was only one or two classes from being a mechanical engineer,” he told us. He was in the lead battalion of the First Armored Division, one of the first tanks into Iraq for his sector of the front that was part of the VII Corps sweep into Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. 

We wanted to know how West Point prepared him for a war so soon after graduation. “West Point is mainly a leadership school that trains you to be an Army lieutenant,” he said. “The Army, I think, documents three major battles in Desert Storm. I was involved in the battle of Medina Ridge as a tank commander and tank platoon leader. We shot up a number of Iraqi tanks and vehicles in the battle, which in hindsight was quite scary.”

When the air war started, McKechnie’s unit was in the port of Jubail, which was protected by Patriot missiles, so the thoroughly reported SCUD missile attacks were not an issue, he said, despite several air-raid warnings. “We were frankly pretty exposed, had a SCUD hit the port area,” he recalls. “It could have done extensive damage.” He also was involved with capturing prisoners, but, he says, most of them “looked terrible—not dressed well, fatigued, and scared.”  

When the war was winding down, McKechnie said, “We were told of the pending cease-fire the night before the end of hostilities, that the war was over at 0800 the next morning. The 1st Armored Division had a massive artillery bombardment sent in on suspected Iraqi positions before then. We were still on edge, though, as we suspected that some Iraqis may not have gotten the word on the armistice.”

Today, 30 years later, he still regrets that “we hadn’t finished the job with Desert Storm in 1991. I was not surprised to see us back in there in 2003. I think we had so many forces in the first Gulf War that, had we gone to Baghdad then, any subsequent insurgency would have been crushed instantly. We had probably three times the troops as were used in the 2003 invasion, which allowed for an insurgency.”

A Veteran’s Gulf War Take-Aways

Rounding out veteran McKechnie’s Desert Storm reminiscences, he detailed seven “take-aways” from his experiences in Kuwait and Iraq those three decades ago:

1. It would be crazy for any foes to take on the U.S. military in a straight conventional war, especially in the open desert. All of our weapon systems excel in that terrain and environment. The enemy was outgunned in every sense of the word. 2. That was probably one of the few wars in which the United States was, in retrospect, totally ready for. We had just rebuilt the U.S. military to confront the Soviets in Europe. Saddam Hussein picked one of the worst times to start a conflict with us. 3. It was very much a miracle that we did not suffer a larger number of casualties. The entire 1st Armored division lost one killed in action during the war. We lost more troops in training accidents, which is a testament to how well-trained and well-led the troops were. 4. U.S. troops were and still are the best-equipped and best-trained in the world. In fact, one of the major problems we had with our allies was their lack of capabilities in logistics, vehicles, weapon systems. As such, this slowed us down and put some of our own troops at risk. I would say that this was even more the case for the second invasion in 2003. 5. The U.S. Army in wartime is totally different in peacetime. In wartime, troops are highly motivated to get done whatever we ask of them. Units were at full strength, the sense of purpose was high, and resources were plentiful. This is simply not the case in the peacetime Army, and it’s one of the reasons I left the service. 6. For decisive or unconditional victory, you need troops to seize and hold the ground. 7. In retrospect, the number of forces used in this operation was much more than what was needed.

Postscript

In closing, virtually anyone can assume the title “veteran” after certain amounts of longevity amassed in a profession or a pastime. But the title simply of “veteran” is reserved for those who’ve served this country in the profession of arms. The phrase “Freedom Is Not Free” became a mantra, and U.S. citizens would do well to be reminded of it. Just a simple “Thank you for your service” to veterans you encounter this November 11th means a great deal.