Morales’s nightmare never came to pass. Less than five days later allied forces would reduce Saddam Hussein’s military machine to smoldering rubble. Morales’s unit, code-named Ripper, would smash through Iraq’s first line of defense to lead an armored assault on Kuwait City. But on Saturday night none of the Ripper force dared hope for a cakewalk. Sgt. Bobby Bowles of Cloverleaf, Texas, was handing out grenades to his squad before curling up with a well-thumbed copy of the men’s magazine Forum. Lance Cpl. Andrew Hess of Romeo, Mich., kneaded his anxiety by writing poetry. His ode on war began: “Your psychotic illusions/no one understands,/ever since you came home/from that foreign land.” A few Marines listened to George Bush on the radio politely encouraging Soviet diplomatic efforts. But Col. Carl Fulford, the Ripper commander, knew the true score. “Marines have been infiltrating the Iraqi minefields for the last several hours,” he told his men. “The toilet chain has already been pulled, and Saddam Hussein is about to be flushed away.”
The squad moved out shortly after midnight. As dawn broke on a bitterly cold, wet morning, an endless armada of Marine armor unfolded before Iraq’s front line. M-60 tanks churned forward; tiny humbles snapped at the fringes of the fleet like watchful sheepdogs.
Twenty or so grunts were packed tightly into each amtrac, an amphibious tractor with a high profile and thin armor–a target for Iraqi tanks and artillery. Over the deafening throb of the amtrac motor, grunts masked their tension by shouting the Marine Corps hymn and songs from the rock group Megadeth. “Hold your breath,” yelled Sergeant Bowles from a command bubble atop his trac. “We’re going through.” Everyone knew what he meant: breaching the Saddam line, near the L-shaped heel of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. For months, the squad had anticipated the worst–heavily armed forces behind berms, minefields and antitank ditches.
The first defensive line put up no resistance. The Iraqis had fled; the only signs of weapons were a few forlorn dummy tanks constructed to half-scale out of corrugated tin sheeting. A handful of abandoned bunkers lay open to the sky or were flimsily protected by tin roofing and a single layer of sandbags.
It wasn’t until they reached the second defensive line, several miles into Kuwait, that the Marines came face to face with the enemy. Lance Cpl. Scott Cornell had daydreamed many times about this moment. “It will be like the Super Bowl to end Super Bowls,” he said. The actual contest proved no match for Cornell’s imagination. As tanks and TOWs laid down fire, Iraqis began popping up out of the desert floor, first in ones and twos, then in columns of hundreds, in a massive act of surrender. Mindful of the enemy’s feigned surrender at Khafji, when Iraqis suddenly turned on their Saudi captors and opened fire, the grunts were nervous about so many prisoners. But there seemed little fight left in the ragged troops they faced.
Further into Kuwait, Iraqi damage was more palpable. As night fell, dozens of oilfield fires blazed across the horizon. A black, acrid veil enveloped the advancing Marine columns, cutting visibility to a few feet.
The grunts were torn between elation and apprehension. “We still haven’t busted our cherry yet,” warned Sergeant Bowles. Platoon leader Mark Berrigan expressed relief that his men were being “eased” into war. But other grunts wondered aloud if they would get to fire a round in anger or be able to call in an artillery or airstrike against the enemy.
Throughout the next two days, the squad’s progress across Kuwait was halted four times by chemical-attack alerts. “Gas, gas, gas!” a grunt would shout from trac to trac. Squad members, already decked out in cumbersome chemical suits, put on masks and rubber gloves. To make sure there was no lingering gas, one unlucky grunt per trac unmasked while his buddies watched him intently for signs of ill effects. Only later did officers venture that the attacks were probably false alarms.
Task Force Ripper entered the southern suburbs of Kuwait City at dusk on Tuesday, hours after a hasty Iraqi retreat. Allied airstrikes, tank and TOW attacks were devastatingly accurate. Dozens of Iraqi tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers lay smoking in sandpits.
At the threshold of the most lopsided victory in Marine Corps history, the grunts had gotten through with a prodigious armored attack relatively unscathed: one casualty from an accidental discharge of a shotgun. Their thoughts invariably turned homeward. Lance Corporal Hess, the poet, looked forward to the day he could take a “daylong shower, grab a cold Miller draft and a good-looking lady and live the hell out of life.” For Private Morales, coming home meant building his wonder truck. “What I don’t plan on doing is ever going to the beach again,” he said. “I never, never want to see sand again in my life.”
