The paratroopers managed to form a line across the valley, with the 105s behind them in a reverse slope position, and held firm as the Iraqis advanced. The Peshmerga coalesced around them, like ice freezing around starter crystals in a glass of freezing water. Meanwhile, they began calling in accurate fire support from the Air Force. It was textbook infantry tactics when facing a superior mechanized unit, and it worked; the Republican Guard was stopped cold in its tracks and withdrew to lick its wounds. What they don’t show on the sand tables, though, is the price you pay for this. That short battalion had been outnumbered over three to one, facing most of the 1st Brigade, 6th Nebuchadnezzar Mechanized Division, and so far we had a casualty count of over twenty dead and over fifty wounded, and it was expected to end up even worse.
For three nights in a row I spent a couple of hours after dinner in the Situation Room. Kurdistan was seven hours ahead of us, so by dinnertime the day’s events would be over. While American troops had night vision equipment, the Peshmerga didn’t, and we still didn’t have anywhere near the strength to start any night assaults. That was still going to be one of the big issues with this war. Hussein had smartened up a lot. He wasn’t letting us get ready for six months and then attack him at our leisure. So far he was the one calling the tune, and even as we pounded him from the air, he had ample combat power to hurt us and the Kurds.
I had gone back up to the Residence on Friday the 17th after getting the latest from the Situation Room and hearing about Azwya. My basic instincts were to get in Air Force One and go over there, but I knew that was simply stupid. I was an out of date battery commander; trying to take control at a headquarters would have been as stupid as Johnson calling some kid in the Delta. Marilyn caught my mood and simply sat quietly in her recliner reading near me. Stormy was dozing next to me in mine. The phone rang about 8:15, and I grabbed it from the coffee table next to me. “Hello?”
It was a pleasant alto voice. “Mister President, this is Colonel Dillard in the Situation Room. We’d like you to come down, sir. The Iraqis have launched missiles.”
I swore softly, and Marilyn looked over at me. “I’ll be down in a couple of minutes, Colonel.” I hung up.
“Problems?” asked Marilyn.
I smiled and shrugged as I stood up. “Just the usual. You know the end of the world and western civilization as we know it.”
“Let me know if I have to be worried.”
I leaned down and kissed my wife, and then slipped a pair of shoes on and headed downstairs. Once in the Situation Room I grabbed my usual spot at the head of the table and looked at the others. A woman in a Marine uniform with eagles on her epaulets was facing me. “Colonel Dillard, I presume?”
“Yes sir, thank you for coming.” She flashed a map of the Middle East onto the big screen. “Approximately fifteen minutes ago, we had eleven launches of either Scud or al Hussein missiles from Iraqi territory. Two were launched at Kuwait, three at Turkey, and six at Israel.”
The map had red stars in what I assumed were impact points in the three countries. “Did we get any of them?” I asked. I remembered back during the Gulf War the Patriot missile batteries blew the things out of the sky left and right. During the run up to this war, I was cruelly informed that the performance of the anti-missile systems was extremely overhyped.
“We got some, sir.” A few of the red stars turned blue. “One of them was hit by a Patriot battery over Kuwait City, and the other impacted in the desert. There were no chemical signatures. Three were targeted at Incirlik. Again, one was shot down, one impacted in a deserted area of the air base, and one hit in downtown Adana a few miles away. Again, there were no chemical weapons signatures detected. Israel was targeted by six missiles, and the Israelis managed to knock down two of them. The other four landed in what appear to be relatively uninhabited sections near Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa.”
“Four?! That’s all we got? Four?”
“That’s way better than we did the first time, sir, back in ’91,” she answered defensively.
“Jesus Christ!” How much money had we wasted on this stuff? “So, what’s the results? Please, for the love of God, tell me the Israelis didn’t nuke Baghdad!”
That actually got a small smile from them. “No sir, not yet, anyway.” The map changed to a close-up of Kuwait. “The Kuwaiti impact was a desert area, and there were no casualties.” We switched to the Incirlik area. “One missile hit an empty transient taxi area and exploded. There were no casualties or damage, but they probably have to fill in the hole. The second impact was much worse. It landed downtown and hit a hospital. We are still getting reports, but there appear to be massive civilian casualties.”
“Oh, shit! And Israel?” They were the real wild card in all this. If they responded, the game went into extra innings and nobody knew what would happen.
“From what we could see by satellite, nothing major was hit, at least in Israeli areas. One of the missiles smacked outside of an apartment complex in a Palestinian neighborhood. The Israelis don’t consider that to be a big problem, which does not endear them to the Palestinians,” she reported.
I scratched my head. “But no chemical warheads?”
An Air Force major piped up at that. “No, sir,” he said. “We are seeing no chemical signatures, and all intelligence and BDA is pointing to conventional HE warheads.”
I turned to face him. “Why not? Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but they have chemical weapons, and Hussein has proved any number of times that he doesn’t mind using them.”
“I don’t think he can, sir. I did a brief tour at the Aberdeen Proving Ground and learned some about them. Chemical agents are actually pretty nasty stuff. They are toxic, corrosive, volatile — you just don’t want to mess with them. The best way to use them is actually by airplane. You rig up planes like giant crop dusters, like we did with Agent Orange in Viet Nam. They called it Operation Ranch Hand. However, the planes are easy to shoot down, and it isn’t exactly secret. The next easiest way is to load them into artillery shells, which is what they have been doing. The toughest is to load them into a missile. It’s hard enough to shoot missiles, and figuring out how to disperse the chemicals when they get there is tough. The payloads are small. The only chemical payload worth doing, I was told, is nerve gas, and they either don’t have it or aren’t using it.”
“Huh. Makes sense, I guess.” I had never really learned too many of the details on this stuff. Yes, we had some training back at Artillery Officer’s School, but you really don’t get more than an intro. Nasty shit! “Is the Vice President still in Ankara? I am going to have to talk to him” I had sent John McCain to Ankara yesterday to talk to Erdogan and hold his hand. That was looking prescient right now.
“Yes, sir. It is 0340 Ankara time.”
I picked up the phone and asked to speak to the Vice President, and then hung up. They would track him down half way around the world. “How are they doing this?” I asked.