Memories STORM
The ground assault of the Persian Gulf War began five years ago tomorrow. Several KU students and faculty fought in the desert. Others fought against the war by protesting here in Lawrence.
Stories by David Teska
Photos by Steve Puppe
five years ago tomorrow, the ground offensive phase of the Persian Gulf War began.
On Feb. 24, 1991, along a front that followed the border that separated Saudi Arabia from Iraq and Kuwait, what Saddam Hussein of Iraq called the "mother of all battles" was about to take place. Since Aug., 2, 1990, Iraq had occupied Kuwait. President Hussein refused to budge despite a massive aerial pounding launched by the United States on Jan. 16, 1991, under the name Operation Desert Storm.
Among the 540,000 troops the United States sent to the region, two were future KU students and one a KU patrol officer. Five years later, they told their stories.
When the ground offensive began in the dark hours of Feb. 24, Spc. Jason Auld said that his team already had been across the Iraqi border several times. Auld, McPherson senior, was part of a U.S. team attached to a division of the French Foreign Legion.
"I was more scared before the ground war started," he said.
He said his team conducted missions into Iraq to gather intelligence on Iraqi positions before the ground offensive began.
Auld said that in the darkness confusion sometimes developed and his team frequently exchanged fire with the Iraqis.
Auld said the Americans and French quickly took one of their objectives, an Iraqi airfield at Al Salman, about 180 miles southeast of Baghdad. When the cease-fire was implemented, Auld said he was deep into Iran.
Another mission of his unit was to interrogate Iraqi prisoners. One piece of information that surfaced indicated that Hussein had passed down a death order for any Iraqi soldier caught using a radio. Hussein feared the radio transmissions would be intercepted, so telephones were used instead.
Auld said that during his team's advance, the members found miles of telephone lines strewn about Iraq positions. Because Auld's unit had deployed to the region two weeks after the Iraq invasion, it was one of the first units to return to the United States.
"We were still shaking sand out when we got home," he said.
But after arriving home, Aud said he wished they had continued on to Baghdad once Iraqi resistance began crumbling.
"We should have gone all the way," he said.
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Four days after his 22nd birthday, Cpl. Scott Padon's Marines unit arrived in Saudi Arabia
Padon s Marines arrived in Saudi Arabia. It was Aug. 14, 1900, just 12 days after the Iraq invasion. Trained as a machine gunner, Padon, Overland Park senior, said he had volunteered to transfer units after another member of his three-man team volunteered.
"My gunner volunteered, and Id be damned if he'd volunteer, and I wouldn't." he said.
Although the two didn't know exactly where the unit was going, rumors at the Marine base at Twenty-Nine Palms, Calif., placed Saudi Arabia high on the list.
When the ground offensive started, Padon said his unit, attached to Task Force Ripper, quickly bolted through the Iraqi defensive line about 2:30 a.m.
Padon said that during his unit's advance the Iraqi army pulled out so fast that some units left behind gas stoves that still were lit.
Padon said his unit took prisoner after prisoner, but the unit was moving too fast to handle the volume.
"We'd do a preliminary search and put them in formation and tell them to march back." he said.
Once in Kuwait, the task force had the job of taking the Kuwait City airport. Afterward, they moved on to participate in the liberation of Kuwait City.
Padon said he stayed in Kuwait City for three to four days after the cease-fire on Feb. 28. Within a week, he was back home.
Looking back, Padon said that he and the other marines in his unit thought the fighting would take longer but that the effort to liberate Kuwait was necessary.
The ultimate destination for more than 10,000 captured Iraqi soldiers was the detention camp where Lt. Cindy Alliss was stationed. Alliss, now a KU patrol officer, and her unit were mobilized out of the Army Reserve. Alliss commanded the garrison of U.S. soldiers who ran the camp, located in the desert 200 miles west of Dhahran, a city on the east coast of Saudi Arabia.
"Everything was worth it," he said.
Alliss said her unit had not been trained for overseas deployment, so building and running a camp in Saudi Arabia presented them with new problems such as how to feed the camp's average population of 3,500 prisoners.
Alliss said her unit's arrival in Saudi Arabia coincided with the start of the aerial campaign on Jan. 16, 1991.
Alliss said that while the soldiers in the unit waited in Dhahrain to move to their camp's location, they went through numerous Sead missile attacks, which sometimes kept them up all night.
"Sometimes we'd go through three or four a night," she said.
Once in the desert, the unit began constructing the camp, often scrounging for supplies such as lumber and bottled water, Alba said. On March 4, 1991, they received their first wave of food monsters.
Alliss said some prisoners tried to hide their unit's identity by ripping off their unit patches. But the camp guards soon learned to distinguish them from the faded outlines left on their uniforms.
Like Padon and Auld, Alliss said that the coalition should have gone on to remove Saddam Hussein as a regional threat.
"I've talked to a lot of troops, and that's what we were there for," she said.
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Five years later, Saddam Hussein still is in power, and Iraq continues to exist under economic sanctions put in place by the United Nations. George Bush has modified his views on how the war should have been orchestrated.
In an interview with reporter David Frost last January, Bush said he underestimated Hussein's political skills and said the allies should have been more forceful in undermining Hussein's political staying power.
Although the coalition achieved its aim of liberating Kuwait, the debate remains whether the war
should have continued beyond its initial mandate from the United Nations.
Lt. Col. Russell Glenn, a seminar leader at the School of Advanced Military Studies at Ft. Lewisworth, served in the 3rd Armored Division during the war. He said that the coalition accomplished the United Nations' mandate and that containing the war probably wouldn't have had an impact on the survival of Hussein's regime.
"It's doubtful the annihilation of Iraq forces would have accelerated Saddam Hussein's removal," Glenn said.
The public's perception was that continuing the war would have resulted in the killing of more Iraqi soldiers, he said. But by the offensive's fourth day, coalition forces were destroying mostly abandoned vehicles.
"It looked like we were shooting fish in a barrel, but that wasn't the case." Glenn said.
official figures state more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians died during the brief war.
American losses were comparatively light at 148. Like all wars, the story of the Persian Gulf War isn't one of the number of bombs dropped or missions flown. It is the story of the people affected by its occurrence.
Since coming back, Jason Aud has had time to reflect on the war's impact on him. People need to remember there was a human aspect to the war's smart-bomb characterization. Aud said.
He said that some soldiers came back to broken marriages, broken homes and to a life forever changed by injuries and the trauma of war.
"It was a real human event," he said. "
February 23,1996
C
indy Ingham became a peace activist to stop the killing.
Ingham, Fort Smith, Ark., graduate student, and her husband, Jay Hilgartner, were involved in the antiwar activities on the University of Kansas campus during the Persian Gulf War. As a member of the campus organization, Voice, Ingham said that students and faculty protested the use of force from the beginning of the crisis.
Their opposition was based on both moral and legal grounds, she said.
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"How can we conduct war-like policies if war is not declared?" Inzham said.
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Unlike Vietnam protesters from a previous generation, Ingham said Voice focused its efforts on opposition to U.S. policy, not on soldiers sent to the region.
"We made a concerted effort to keep it from becoming personal," she said.
Students, professors call Desert Storm immoral and illegal
Allan Hanson, professor of anthropology, started his activist work
during the Vietnam War. Hanson said that he had remained active with the Lawrence Coalition for Peace and Justice, which also opposed the use of force in the gulf crisis. Hanson said his fear of the war widening into another conflict such as Vietnam had motivated him to protest the gulf war.
"We tried to make a statement that the United States should not get into a shooting war," he said.
Ingham said that throughout the crisis students and faculty had maintained vigils on Sunday outside the Douglas County Courthouse and held
forums on different aspects
of the war. One forum speaker was Ted Frederickson, professor of journalism, who spoke on the media violations committed by the military during the war.
You could have labeled the television coverage PNN, Pentagon News Network." Frederickson said.
Because the Middle East doesn't have a history of press freedom, it was easy for the military to censor
press and restrict the media's access, Frederickson said.
"They had no way of getting out what they needed except what the military spoon fed," he said.
Like Ingham and Hanson, Frederickson said he was bothered by the war's violence and destruction and that it was necessary for people to understand that the Nintendo-like image of the war was an illusion.
"When the bombs fell, a lot of people who never had the chance to vote against Saddam Hussein were killed," he said.
Looking back at the efforts of the activists five years ago, Ingham said that people needed to know what their government was doing on their behalf.
"It's your obligation and responsibility as a moral and responsible person to get involved," she said.