As twilight approached on February 23, 1991, U.S. Marine Colonel James A. Fulks was getting desperate. Although the ground campaign of Operation Desert Storm would not begin for more than twelve hours, Fulks had nearly twenty-seven hundred U.S. Marines a dozen miles inside of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and had orders to move that night through the first of the two thick minefields the Iraqi army had planted just to the north. After days of searching, however, his scouts still had not found a path through the mines. Now Fulks was preparing to order a rapid and potentially dangerous effort to clear a way through the deadly obstacle belt.

At about the same time ten miles to the east, Corporal Michael Eroshevich was hunkered down in a small, hastily dug hole on the edge of that same minefield, trying to stay unseen until night fell. The twenty-one-year-old marine was tired, cramped, cold, and a little nervous about his unit’s exposed position.

Fulks’ marines, designated Task Force Grizzly, and Eroshevich’s unit, Task Force Taro, commanded by Colonel John H. Admire, had marched into Kuwait two days earlier. Alone, with no tanks and few heavy weapons, the fifty-three hundred marines were vulnerable to an attack by any of the five heavily armed Iraqi divisions waiting on the other side of the mines. Admire recalled that ‘We were essentially up there alone.’

Admire and Fulks had orders from the First Marine Division commander, Maj. Gen. James M. ‘Mike’ Myatt, to infiltrate through the first minefield well before the start of the ground war. They then were to march farther into Kuwait to shield the breach of those mines by Myatt’s two powerful mechanized regiments the next morning. In the midst of the most technologically advanced conflict in history — the so-called Nintendo War — most of the marines in the two task forces marched the twenty miles from the Saudi border to their blocking positions, carrying their gear on their backs or pulling it in crude handcarts.

According to Fulks, the risky infiltration ‘was part of our strategy in the division to be very aggressive.’ The idea was to mentally overwhelm the Iraqis, who had shown little ability to respond quickly to changing conditions. The Task Force Grizzly commander, who had conceived the infiltration plan months earlier while he was the division’s operations officer, conceded that initially ‘it was not a very popular idea.’ But it embodied the boldness that enabled two marine divisions to punch through the Iraqi minefields on ‘G-day,’ February 24, jump-starting the allied ground assault that ended with a crushing victory in one hundred hours. That attack was the culmination of the largest deployment of U.S. Marines in history, which had started six months earlier, just days after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s army overran Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

President George Bush, backed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, quickly decided that the West had to respond forcefully to Iraq’s aggression, which threatened neighboring Saudi Arabia and much of the world’s oil supply. But the allies could not effectively help unless Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd was willing to accept an army of Christians flooding into the home of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina. After a briefing in Jeddah by Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and U.S. Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, Fahd agreed on August 7 to accept allied troops.

Bush immediately ordered forces to the Persian Gulf under the label Operation Desert Shield. Air force fighters, army paratroopers, and navy aircraft carriers started arriving the next day. The Seventh Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB), commanded by Maj. Gen. John I. Hopkins, began flying into Saudi Arabia on August 14, while three ships of Maritime Preposition Squadron (MPS) 2 sailed toward the gulf with the unit’s heavy weapons, vehicles, and supplies. Within two weeks, 15,248 marines were deployed in the desert north of the Saudi port of Al Jubayl, learning to cope with 110-degree heat and talcumlike sand that covered their bodies and fouled their weapons and equipment. According to Lt. Gen. Walter E. Boomer, who as commanding general of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) would lead most of the U.S. Marines’ Gulf War contingent, ‘The quick arrival of the 7th MEB and the MPS squadron must have put Saddam Hussein on notice that our president was serious about defending Saudi Arabia.’

As more marines arrived from their bases in California, Hawaii, and Okinawa, Hopkins’ brigade was integrated into Myatt’s First Division. It was the first time a full marine division had deployed overseas since Vietnam. At the same time, helicopter, fighter, and attack squadrons of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, under Maj. Gen. Royal Moore, flew from air stations in California and Arizona to occupy airfields prepared by marine engineers and navy Seabees.

Myatt organized his division into five task forces with different capabilities and purposes. The first was Task Force Shepherd, which would use its nimble eight-wheeled light armored vehicles (LAVs) for screening and scouting. Myatt then formed two assault units, Task Force Ripper, commanded by Colonel Carlton W. Fulford, and Task Force Papa Bear, led by Colonel Richard W. Hodory. In anticipation of a fast-moving battle in the desert, these units were equipped more like army mechanized brigades than the usual marine light infantry regiments. Each assault force had two infantry battalions plus combat engineer and reconnaissance units. For the mobility essential in desert warfare, each had two companies of thinly armored, tracked assault amphibious vehicles. Ripper also had two companies of M-60 main battle tanks, and Papa Bear had one. Task Forces Taro and Grizzly were more typical marine units, with two battalions of infantry but no tanks or armored vehicles.

While the marines of the First MEF were moving into defensive positions in the desert, fifteen thousand more leathernecks were sailing for the gulf aboard ships. And tens of thousands of soldiers of the U.S. Army’s Eighteenth Corps and hundreds of U.S. Air Force warplanes and support aircraft flooded into Saudi Arabia and neighboring nations. Military forces also came from Great Britain, France, and several Arab countries.

As their military strength in the Persian Gulf region grew, the allies began to shift their focus from the defense of Saudi Arabia to an attack against the Iraqi army in Kuwait. General Boomer recalled that he and his commanders ‘began to think and talk among ourselves about offensive ops as early as October.’ By November, President Bush was doing the same with his advisers. He ordered Schwarzkopf to begin planning for an offensive to liberate Kuwait. At Schwarzkopf’s request, Bush authorized additional deployments that nearly doubled the U.S. troops in the gulf in order to provide the combat power required to defeat an Iraqi force estimated at more that six hundred thousand men. The reinforcements included the U.S. Army’s Seventh Corps, with two divisions from Europe and two from the United States. Boomer’s First MEF was strengthened by the Second Marine Division and the Second Marine Aircraft Wing from bases in North and South Carolina.

The Second Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. William M. Keys, was augmented by hundreds of reservists, including B Company, Fourth Tank Battalion, from Yakima, Washington, which was the first marine unit to get modern M1A1 Abrams tanks. In all, Bravo Company had fourteen of the powerful armored vehicles. The Second Division was also reinforced by the army’s First Brigade, Second Armored Division — the ‘Tiger Brigade’ — with their M1A1s and Bradley fighting vehicles. When fully assembled, the division had 20,500 personnel and 257 tanks, including 185 Abrams, some 170 of which belonged to the Tiger Brigade. ‘It was probably the heaviest marine division, with the most combat power, ever to take the field,’ Keys recalled. The First Division, meanwhile, had 19,500 marines and sailors and 123 of the older and less potent M-60A1 tanks. With his air and support units, General Boomer would command about seventy thousand marines and navy personnel at the start of the ground war. Counting U.S. amphibious forces in the Persian Gulf (some twenty-four thousand marines commanded by Maj. Gen. Harry Jenkins), the corps had nearly ninety-four thousand men and women in the Gulf War — more than in the biggest battles of World War II.

Just after midnight on January 16, 1991, Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm, with attacks into Iraq and Kuwait by allied aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from navy warships and submarines. Marine aircraft joined the air war the next day, with pre-dawn strikes against targets in Iraq and subsequent attacks against enemy troops in southern Kuwait.

The First Division later used its 155mm artillery in a series of combined-arms ‘raids’ with marine aircraft, aimed mainly at the estimated twelve hundred artillery pieces arrayed against them in Kuwait. The much-feared Iraqi artillery would have little effect during the ground war. The Iraqi army, however, staged poorly coordinated multiple attacks into Saudi Arabia on the night of January 29, triggering a three-day fight known as the Battle of Khafji.

The initial attacks by Soviet-made Iraqi T-62 and T-55 tanks and BMP armored personnel carriers against U.S. Marine border posts were stopped by marine LAVs equipped with 25mm guns and TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided) anti-tank missiles, attack helicopters, and marine and air force fighters. But two LAVs were destroyed by friendly fire, killing eight marines and wounding others.Another Iraqi armored column survived air attacks to occupy the abandoned Saudi town of Khafji, trapping two marine recon teams. American commanders realized that U.S. forces should not dominate a fight in which Saudi territory and Arab pride were at stake. According to Colonel Admire, ‘We decided we would be the supporting force’ during the recapture of the town. The attack to liberate Khafji and to rescue the trapped marines was conducted by Saudi and Qatari units, backed by marine aircraft and artillery.

Although a relatively small engagement, Khafji had a major impact on the planning for the ground war. The Iraqis’ poor coordination and lack of aggressiveness persuaded the marine commanders that the attack into Kuwait would not be as difficult as they had feared. ‘At that particular point, there was a significant psychological change in all of us,’ Task Force Taro commander Admire recalled. ‘We realized that if we hit the Iraqis hard and fast, they would back down. There was no fight in them.’ According to Admire, the successful counterattack by the previously untested Arab troops also emboldened their commanders to offer to make their own attack up the coast highway during the ground war, instead of following the marine assault. That allowed Boomer to move the focus of his attack about eighty miles to the west, into the area of Kuwait known as the ‘elbow,’ and to revise his battle plan.

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