I sat alone, cross-legged on the cold desert floor and dug out a signal mirror from my rucksack. The amber glow from the morning sun’s rays bounced off the mirror sending brilliant waves of light dancing across the vermiculate patterns of my desert camouflage uniform. Ice Blue eyes in the mirror searched the grimy face before them, while my filthy hands applied the fluffy white shaving foam to my sand-encrusted face. A few passes with the razor, and the wiry patch of hair would be erased from my lip. Who was this manchild in the mirror?
Letting go of the bushy little appendage was necessary, so as not to interfere with the proper performance of my field protective mask. Civilians call it a gasmask. It was during this early morning shave on February 22, 1991 that I began to contemplate the magnitude of the impending invasion that lay just days ahead of us. Operation Desert Shield had morphed into Desert Storm on January 17th and ever since that moment, my unit, Second Battalion/Second Marine Regiment (2/2) had been slowly moving North across the powdery pale wastelands of I Northern Saudi Arabia, towards Kuwait and ultimately Home. Last week we finally reached 2/2’s Assembly Area, the labyrinthine rows of sand berms that Saddam’s men had erected to keep us out of his prize, the tiny nation of Kuwait. Saddam’s Mighty Berms, a series of tall earthen obstacles laced with mines and ringed with razor wire. The berms would have to be breached, if we were to wrestle Kuwait and all of her precious oil from the rapacious grasp of Hussein’s Iraq. I was twenty-one years old then and I was riding the razor’s edge between man and boy. Would combat change me? Was I ready?
I remember that cold February day as if it were yesterday. The entire Battalion was busy making preparations for the ground war to come.
“Brown, are you going to get these target overlays ready for the Skipper?” shouted the Gunny. 2/2’s Weapons Company Gunny was Gunnery Sergeant Ralph D. Tyler. He was a crusty old Vietnam Vet who had a deviant love for red velvet cake and Lucks canned Chicken and Dumplings. Although he was The Gunny, I worked for the ‘skipper’ he was referring to, Captain Pete Jackson, Weapons Company’s Commanding Officer and 2/2’s Fire Support Coordination Officer. As the Battalion’s Fire Support Coordination Center (FSCC) Representative from Weapons Company, I held an officer’s billet, even though I was only a lowly enlisted Lance Corporal, a fact that most senior enlisted Marines despised.
“Yes Gunny, they’re ready,” I replied in the most obsequious tone I could muster.
“What about the Fire Support Plan and those worksheets?”
“Yes Gunny.”
Our verbal waltz continued amidst the martial chaos of our unit’s preparations for battle. To our front, heavy .50 caliber machine guns and Mark 19 automatic grenade launchers covered the gate that the engineers were cutting out of Saddam’s Mighty Berm. Over the course of the next two days, prior to the crossing into Kuwait and into history, I checked, checked, and rechecked my rifle, oiling the bolt the buffer spring, inspecting over and over again the chamber to ensure it was clean and ready to be fed with green-tipped ball ammunition. I inspected my grenades, my IV bag, my Nerve Agent and Cipro pills, as well as my spring-loaded syringes of atropine and 2-Pam Chloride. These pills and syringes would be the only thing that would keep us alive in the event of a nerve agent or anthrax attack. I prayed none of us would need them. I repacked my equipment several times, ensuring quick retrieval of additional grenades and ammunition in my rucksack. I closed my eyes and inspected my ruck to get a sense of where everything was in case I had to quickly find the ammunition under fire and in the dark.
“We are moving into the eleventh and a half dimension, Brown. Don’t get greedy when the shooting starts,” the Gunny barked, and continued to shuffle through the junior Marines preparing their weapons, gear and bodies for war.
“I won’t get greedy Gunny,” I muttered under my breath with the studied apathy of an ancient Stoic.
“Six to nine round bursts, and that’s it! Don’t get greedy when the kill’in starts.”
“We won’t, Gunny,” several of us replied in mocking unison. But, some of us would get greedy. None of us knew that Highway 80 lay just days ahead of us. Waiting: to change us forever.
I replaced the filters in my gas mask that day, the day before the war began. A nasty little rumor floating around the Battalion suggested that if you used your gas mask as a pillow it would degrade the filters, making them useless in a gas attack. Believe it or not, a gas mask, tucked inside its canvas carrier does make an excellent pillow when sleeping in a fighting hole.
After replacing my filters I had one more provision to take care of. If I was going to be emotionally ready for the assault into Kuwait, I would have to burn my wife’s letters. I had read somewhere that Saddam’s henchmen had used the letters of captured Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War to attack the men’s unsuspecting families back in Tehran. So, in the event of my capture and in order to protect my wife from any reprisals, I chose to burn my most treasured possessions. I held her perfumed letters like a string of delicate pearls in my dirty hands, held a flame to a corner, and stood there, watching the beautiful looping alphabetic arcs of my wife’s handwriting turn black as the flames claimed them. Her precious ashes swayed in the breeze as they fell to earth, it was as if she were waving goodbye to me again. The blackened relics mixed with the shifting lacteal sands at my feet and I could feel her pulling away from me, leaving alone in the abyss—
“Brown!” The Gunny interrupted my dreams.
“Yes Gunny.”
“You like burning stuff? Then get your ass over there and help Lamb burn those shitters.”
“Yes Gunny.”
“Don’t use the god damn tent poles to stir with this time! The Captain said his hooch smells like shit.”
“Roger that, Gunny.”
The most humbling and humiliating experience of my life has to be the burning of a shitter. If I walk on the moon someday, someone will be saying, “Rich Brown? I remember him; didn’t he burn shitters once?” In the days before the invasion we Marines relieved ourselves into the bottom sawed-off half of a 55-gallon drum that was placed under a hole cut into a piece of plywood. When the drum was full of human waste it had to be cleansed by the burning of its wretched contents. First you need diesel and unleaded gasoline; the exact mixture escapes me. Next the burning petrol and the shit must be mixed with Pentecostal fervor if you wanted the wretched experience over with quickly. Stirring the flaming fecal-stew made me heave up my ham and chicken loaf over and over, each time the meal found its way back up my throat, only to be swallowed again. To avoid the foul soup in the shitter and in my stomach, I forced my mind to drift home, to my wife, the smell of her hair after a shower and the long slow curve of her back —
“Brown!” The Gunny cut his way into my dreams again.
“Yes Gunny!”
“Get your ass over here!” “You’re hooching with Corporal Lamb until you assholes figure it out.”
“Yes Gunny.”
“Figuring it out” meant the Gunny wanted Corporal Lamb and me to kiss and make up. The Corporal and I had been friends back at Camp Lejuene, but the friendship had soured badly over the last few months in the smothering lunar dust of Northern Arabia. So much so in fact, that the Gunny was now attempting to force some sort of an alliance between us, by making us share a fighting hole.
That night the Battalion Intelligence Officer had informed all present on watch in the Combat Operations Center (COC), a term for a couple of tents and vehicles enclosed by a makeshift berm, that at 2200 we could expect an Arc Light strike on the enemy positions to our North. B-52s flying out of Diego Garcia would be dropping 15,000 pound BLU-82Bs, also known as Daisy Cutters, and tons of 500-pound bombs; together this mass of firepower would comprise the demoralizing ‘Arc Light,’ intended to render Saddam’s men ineffective, either by death or fear. The Arc Light would make crossing Saddam’s Mighty Berms and into Kuwait the next night just a little safer.
Sgt Mack relieved me from watch in the COC around 2100, and I headed out into the darkness toward the little “Y” shaped fighting hole, our hooch in the earth that Lamb and I had been ordered to share. Nighttime in the desert punctuates my memory with its shroud of complete darkness. Not even the darkest nights back home in the mountains of Tennessee could compare with the desert’s blanket of cold nothingness. As a point of reference - to find our hooch in the dark - I used the ghostly orange glow of Kuwaiti oil well fires spewing promethean plumes off to my immediate North.
Stumbling upon the entrance to our hooch, I knelt down and slowly crawled into it. The quietly muffled sounds emitting from Lamb’s walkman headphones greeted me. He was listening to Lionel Richie again, and did not acknowledge my presence as I slipped off my grenade vest and readied my gas mask to serve as a pillow. In our fighting hole, we slept in our uniforms with our combat boots on. The musky-male odor of Lamb and me mixed in the tight dark confines of our position making me feel almost seasick. Tonight’s seasickness would have to be endured in our little lifeboat adrift in an endless ocean of sand.
Lamb wasn’t a bad guy, just a kid wearing the blood-stripes of a Marine Non-Commissioned Officer on his trousers, a huge chip on his shoulder, and an irritatingly unmasculine lisp on his tongue. He had a beautiful wife waiting at home for him. We all had someone at home, some laying in wait, and some just laying.
The darkened hooch we were ordered into was just a kilometer from Saddam’s Mighty Berm, and the faceless marionettes beyond it. The hole had been dug with a backhoe from Delta Company’s Engineers, which was great; since we had always dug our own before. However, the inept backhoe operator had dug it for two men about 5 foot tall, which meant that Lispy Lamb’s feet and mine were intertwined each night in an unnatural sodomizing embrace. When you despise someone, you do not want to get killed with your legs locked tightly together like a couple of fornicating beagles. Over time we made peace with our unnatural arrangement, although we would never be friends again.
Before I could drift off to sleep, the earth began violently convulsing. Seismic shockwaves from enemy positions exploding to our North sent symphonies of sand cascading down the walls of our position and into my matted hair, face and mouth. During this deadly rain of fire, I began to recognize the rhythmic spasms in Lamb’s legs. He must be defiling himself again, I thought.
“Lamb. Lamb. Knock it off will ya?” I said in marked, hushed tones. But he just continued to unashamedly sin with great hedonistic alacrity. It did not take the B-52’s storm of steel rain to keep me awake, Lamb’s mortal sinning, or the sand that the ‘Arc Light’ sent shaking into my earthen bed to keep me awake that night. Ever since Corporal Richards had called in an aborted fire mission on Iraqi Commandos skulking around in our Battalion Assembly Area – I had not been sleeping well. The very thought of a mustachioed Saddamite – sharpened stiletto in hand and murder on his mind – slithering his way into our hooch just to slit my throat, caused my heart to race uncontrollably. I missed my Bride.
The next night, Feb 23, 1991 we massed in the Battalion’s Assembly Area to conduct our final preparations for the ground assault into Kuwait. Amphibious Tracked Vehicle (AM-TRACK) Crews checked the onboard Halon fire extinguisher system. As the Commanders readied their crews for war, belts of brass were fed into the awaiting trays of automatic weapons and people prayed.
2/2’s Battalion Commander, Lieutenant Colonel (LtCol) Youngs briefed me and the other Marines who would be in his forward command AM-TRACK. The LtCol’s AM-TRACK was the Communications (C-7) variant which meant it looked like a large metal porcupine with all of the antennas sticking out of it. The LtCol attempted to give his FSCC Team a pep-talk before we all boarded the C-7, but his speech was heavily laden with metaphors about being officers and the valor of killing and dying for one’s country. He then went over the last minute changes to our order of battle and told us that since we would be the lead element of the Second Marine Division’s attack our chances for survival would be slim. Corporal Raines and I were the only enlisted Marines on his FSCC team, and the LtCol’s “valor” speech fell on deaf young ears. The LtCol had just dismissed us when suddenly overhead the winds of war shifted. The cold wind blowing out of the North had brought with it an ominous oily black smoke. The murky hue rolled over us and obscured our last sunset as neophytes. This manmade solar eclipse would remain with us for the next four days – if only to hide my terrible deeds.
“Brown did you put the target overlays on the map in the C-7?” Captain Jackson said in his maturely measured tone. Captain Jackson was a “Mustang,” which meant he had been an enlisted Marine - like me - before being selected to join the officer ranks. Standing erect on the ramp that led into the C-7, the Captain must have had the weight of the world on his mind. Tomorrow, he would be 2/2’s single releasing agent for the most lethal munitions the earth had ever seen.
“Yes Sir I did… Sir, begging the Captain’s pardon….” I uttered these words with great sycophantic flair, while bounding up the C-7’s lowered back hatch to occupy a position just in front of him. The Captain had remembered to ask about the maps, but he had forgotten something important to me—
“What is it Brown?” The Captain’s reply was laced with indifference. His eyes scanned the horizon beyond me, as if to purposefully avoid my gaze.
“Sir, will the Lance Corporal be getting his Kenny G cassette tape back soon?” I loved speaking in third person to officers. It drove them nuts.
“No Brown. I gave you my Wilson Phillips. We traded.”
“We did?”
The Captain and I, along with the other members of the FSCC team loaded into the tight, incarcerating interior of the LtCol’s C-7, were ready to launch.
At 0530 on the morning of Feb 24, 1991, we crossed the blood meridian of Sadam’s Mighty Berms into Kuwait accompanied by an exceptionally loud version of the Marine’s Hymn playing through the loudspeakers of the Army’s Psychological Operations Unit vehicles. The Lestrygonian Iraqis seemed unimpressed with our Homeric Hymn. To illustrate their disdain, they threw their long range artillery down upon us. In the event that any of those artillery rounds contained chemical or biological agents, our bulky chemical suits were supposed to protect our bodies. Heavy rubber boots covered our black leather boots. Gas masks covered our faces and rubber gloves protected our hands. Inside the belly of the C-7 the eerie red glow of interior lights cast long macabre shadows across the human cargo. The glossy black eye lenses of the gasmasks made eye contact impossible. This was a good thing, as fear is contagious.
We led the 6th Marine Regiment through the battle of “The Ice Tray” on the night of February 25th. The Ice Tray, a small built up area, was named because of its appearance from the air. We pushed those Iraqis that did not desire to fight us to the rear of our convoy and focused on the day’s mission ahead. Soviet-built FROG missiles rained down upon us from the oil-blackened sky. Taking The Ice Tray meant we had secured Division Objective One and could now remove our gasmasks.
As the sun rose on the morning of February 26th, LtCol Youngs received yet another change to our order of battle. Within moments, we had begun a feverish race for Division Objective Three, the cloverleaf intersections of Highway 80 running in and around the small coastal town of Al Jahra, just ten miles west of Kuwait City. The cloverleaves were of great tactical significance. Seizing those asphalt quatrefoils would seal off the escaping Iraqi Army, now trying to flee from the raped spread-eagle body of Kuwait City.
During our fevered race, OV-10 observation planes of the 3rd Marine Air Wing spotted a vast tide of escaping Iraqi vehicles making a run for Highway 80, the central route towards Iraq and Home. Inside our C-7, the FSCC Air Officer; Captain Scott, a helicopter pilot by trade, had just taken a call from the OV-10s circling above. I will never forget that frantic call.
Artillery units attached to the 6th Marines prepared to support our mission to seize the cloverleaf intersections of Highway 80, by readying their artillery tubes with DPICM, HE and WP rounds. DPICM is an extremely lethal artillery-delivered munition. Once fired it scatters its grenades in midair above its target. The grenades then fall to earth stabilized by drag-ribbons, slowing and arming each grenade’s warhead in order to saturate its target with a deadly steel shower. High Explosive (HE) and White Phosphorus (WP) when mixed on a target in combat is gruesomely referred to as “Shake and Bake,” because the blasts from the HE shakes the men, while the incendiary WP bakes them. It is one of the most barbaric forms of death yet devised by man.
The U.S. Army’s enormous tank unit, “The Tiger Brigade” was supposed to occupy the high ground of Mutlaa Ridge overlooking Highway 80, but they were stuck in a minefield and were still hours away. Lieutenant General Keys, Commanding General of Second Marine Division wanted to stop the mass exodus of Iraqis, in order to allow time for the Tiger Brigade to take up their positions on the Mutlaa Ridge, which was designated as Division Objective Two. If we could slow the column of Iraqis moving along Highway 80, we could ensure that they would never harm anyone again.
“Brown, do you have any tubes full of 155 DPICM on standby?” The Air Officer shouted, as he jumped out of his seat, clutching his headset anxiously. The OV-10s had reported the Iraqi exodus.
“Yes Sir.”
“I am going to relay some coordinates to you, and I want that DPICM. Then I want an HE/WP mix traversing and searching the target area. You got that Brown?” The Captain ordered as his eyes darted around menacingly. “I’ve got a flight of AV-8’s rolling in and I want that shit gone when they get there. Got it?
“Yes Sir
“Standby, here comes the lat/long… 29° 23′ 3.12″ N, 47° 39′ 6.48″ E. Shake ‘em and bake ‘em Brown!”
“Got it Sir,” I muttered, while quickly scribbling the digits onto the laminated index card in front of me. I hastily handed the card to Captain Jackson. He reviewed the coordinates scrawled across the card, checked his maps and then slowly nodded in my direction. It was as if he already knew what the consequences of his decision would be. So, with his permission, I called in the coordinates over the artillery communications net.
For the next hour, we calmly and methodically raked the traffic soaked stretch of Highway 80 with witheringly accurate fire. As the AV-8’s headed back to rearm, refit and refuel, we used other aircraft to carry-on with our gruesome occupation. Front door SEADs - back door SEADs; sheets of jagged steel rained down on the blood soaked pavement. On and on we worked until the bloody-show was finally called off with the arrival of the Tiger Brigade. From their elevated battle positions, the Army Tankers got the first glimpse of the twisted and smoldering carnage that would become known around the world as The Highway of Death.
Gunny Tyler and I smoked a cigar at the news of the United Nations cease-fire. He shared an experience he had had when he was a young Marine in the Ashua Valley of Vietnam. The Gunny had watched his enemies fall like tall grass before the scythe and he told me to make peace with those lost souls out on Highway 80, or their ghosts would haunt me forever. But, I had never actually seen any of those men fall. I never saw their faces, or their bodies twisting upon the earth in their final moments of agony. In dreams, he said, they will someday visit me and I must try and make peace with them.
But I am afraid.
In the sleep to come, and dreams to follow, we all walk naked in a single file line to be hosed off. To be cleansed. Our bare spectral bodies march forward with only the soot blackened boots on our feet and our weapons clutched tightly in guilty hands. The high-pressure hose washes most of the charcoal stains away forever. There is one stain that even in my dreams the water can never wash away, one only the Archon hosing us down can see: The crimson-stained memories of those men whose lives were forever lost on that dark night out on Highway 80.
The Gunny was right. Eighteen years later, I do see them, all of them. I see them running Home to their families, to their wives, their children and their futures. I see them as loving fathers and I see them as friends. Somewhere Gnostics pray in honor of those whose whereabouts will never be known, those whose lives ended in a hellish baptism of fire and blood. I wish we had never met that night, on Highway 80. I wish we had never met as enemies.
Someone asked me recently how I have managed to “deal” with my memories of Highway 80. I did not know what to say. And now that I have my answer it is reserved only for me. On the coldest of nights and only in my dreams I stand out on a blackened stretch of Highway 80. I stand alone shivering, as if I am waiting for something to happen.
The Ghosts of Highway 80 and I will someday meet: I pray we will meet as friends.
R. Richard Brown, an active duty Marine Chief Warrant Officer, lives in Beaufort, South Carolina and works aboard MCRD Parris Island.
