Boomer: We were moving very quickly towards Kuwait City and we knew that we needed to move fast in order to be able to accomplish this mission. We were concerned about their artillery, chemical weapons, so we had made a decision to bypass Iraqi forces unless they were so big that they were going to cause us a problems. We didn't really anticipate them being in the middle of this burning oil field and launching an attack from there, which they did. Good move on their part. On the other hand the First Division Commander had acquired some intelligence, which caused him to make them spring that attack early. So we had some things going for us. But there was enough of a force there, so that it was potentially serious.

Q: How tired were you?

Boomer: We were all tired. The young Marines had been training for months in a very unhospitable land. The staffs had been working and planning around the clock for months.

Q: Could you sum up what breaking that counter attack signified?

Boomer: Once we broke that counter attack, we broke their back. That was the last gasp on their part to throw us back out of Kuwait, and from then on we had pretty straight shot into the city, not that there weren't small battles and skirmishes that went on, but nothing co-ordinated on their part. It would usually be tank against tank, platoon against pl

Q:- With the battle still going on, and with tanks still burning , plumes of smoke everywhere, the oil fields, what could you see as you advanced towards Kuwait City?

Boomer: I remember saying to someone if you want a picture of hell, here it is. Black smoke, flames from these huge wells shooting up into the air. The usual chaos of the battlefield, compounded by bad weather. Maybe it's what you should always expect. But we got it, we had it. In spades.

Q: Can you recall for me your first sight of Kuwait City and going into the city?

Boomer: We took Kuwait International airport--the First Marine Division did--and I was able to cross the battlefield that morning and come up behind them pretty quickly, after they had taken the airport--they had wrapped it up about dawn. But then some significant fighting there, through the evening. But I pulled up into the airport, and was beginning to sense we really are there. But I shad not been at the airport very long when I begin to get a little restless, We had made arrangements for the Arab coalition forces to go into the city. It was appropriate for them to liberate Kuwait city. So, that had occurred that morning, after we had isolated the city. And I was sitting there getting a little restless, and wondering o.k., what are we going to do, I'm tired of sitting here, so, I gathered my guys up, my command post, and said we're going to go into the city, and only go check the American Embassy. You know, it's just an excuse to do something at that point in time.

What I didn't realise was that we were essentially the first Americans into Kuwait City, this little command post--mobile command post,which consisted of some light armored vehicles, some jeeps and we had a few cars. Had some reporters linked up with us, who smelled a pretty good story. So we drove into the city. And the outpouring was something I'll never forget. I don't know where all the people came from. I knew that everybody hadn't left Kuwait city, I mean there were thousands and thousands of Kuwaiti citizens still there, but they somehow sensed that, we were driving through, it seemed to me, and they came down into the side of the road, by the thousands literally. And they had Kuwaiti flags, and some had American flags. Some were crying. It was really chaotic. Vehicles that the Iraqis hadn't stolen, or destroyed, they had acquired some of those, so they were driving around us in this mad circle, I felt sure we were going to crush a vehicle. But what they were saying was--and not to make it too dramatic--but it was dramatic, in many cases with tears streaming down their faces, what they were saying was, God bless you America, God bless you we love you. Very very emotional moment, for us, after all of this

Q: What were you feeling?

Boomer: At that point the weight truly was off my shoulders. And I felt for the first time, that I could relax for a moment. Smile, it made all of the weeks, and months before seemworthwhile.

Q: What did you think about Vietnam as you went into the city?

Boomer: I didn't think about Vietnam, as I went into the city. But Vietnam was always lurking in the background for all of us, that had served there. In my case I served two tours. All of my commanders had been in Vietnam, at least two times. And I think what we were committed to more than anything else, was that we weren't going to make the same stupid mistakes, that we made in Vietnam. And we weren't going to do some of the dumb things, that we had been forced to do, as younger officers, we weren't going to tolerate it, and we didn't.

Q:- What else do you remember about that Kuwait City?

Boomer: When I reached the Iraqi convoy that had been stopped, going out of Kuwait. The Iraqis panicked probably on about day two of the attack, and really started to break and run, all their commanders broke and ran. And we caught this convoy trying to escape, Kuwait City, and make its way, back into Iraq, to Basra, and destroyed the convoy. There was not as many Iraqi casualties as people would have you believe because what happened is the convoy, as they were driving up, they could see that in front of this convoy, catching hell from air, and they said this is not for me, so they stopped, bailed out of their vehicle, and went over to the side of the road,

God, they had huge amounts of equipment there, I mean they had the stuff of a very big war machine. The only think they lacked was the guts to fight it.

Q: Were you surprised when the hostilities ended?

Boomer: That has become a very important question about the ending of hostilities. I reported back to General Schwarzkopf that we had accomplished our mission, that we had isolated Kuwait City. I've tried to recapture some of that conversation, and I believe, although I'm not certain, I believe that we talked about my capability to move ahead, and General Schwarzkopf knew that we were capable of doing this, and had given it some thought, in fact if you look on my battle map you'll see how I was going north towards Basra. So we were prepared to do that, and I think I told him that we were, but I also emphasised to him that we had, indeed accomplished the mission that he'd given us to do. Kuwait, and Kuwait city, was free of Iraqis.

Q: Why the assessment, in the beginning especially, that the Iraqis were ten feet tall?

Boomer: I'm not sure exactly why we credited them with as much ability as we did, in the beginning, except that, it's really stupid to underestimate your enemy, you're right, we did underestimate., the North Vietnamese, er, so we certainly didn't want...

Q: Surely you overestimated their capability entirely?

Boomer: We did overestimate in the beginning their capability. But, you need to keep, a couple of things in mind. One, it's very very stupid, to underestimate, your enemy. We underestimated the North Vietnamese. We believed that the Iraqis had had some success in their battles with the Iranians. And looking back on it, we didn't know enough about those battles, we should have known more about them. They came down into Kuwait with huge numbers of troops and equipment, massive numbers of tanks, massive numbers of artillery pieces. And you simply can't look at that, and not be concerned about it, and that's what we were faced with in the beginning. So as we looked at this picture and we saw, x numbers of divisions there, all these pieces of equipment, we took a pretty conservative approach, and I think that was correct, I find no fault with that.

Q: And why did you guys slice through them so easily?

Boomer: Well for several reasons. As time went on, we began to discover that, the Iraqi division that we thought had x numbers, of soldiers in it, was not up to strength, that they were maybe at 50% strength, but it took some time to learn this, in fact it took, a couple of months to learn this. We begin to watch them and we weren't seeing them train, we were training every day, to the point that I had to call our guys off a little bit, in terms of training, and say wait a minute, let's not wear ourselves out, we're getting tired, from training. I watched them every day, and we couldn't see them train, our intelligence didn't indicate that they were training. They begin to surrender in small numbers, at first, and then begin to surrender in bigger bunches, and we finally just intervened in this process, and began to interview these P.O.W's, ourselves, just how they had wanted to do that, but that finally became intolerable, and we said no.

We're beginning, we're beginning to get some clues about how badly they wanted to fight, and they all were saying the same thing, every P.O.W. said the same thing. I don't know why I'm here, in Kuwait, I do know I don't want to die here in Kuwait. Add to that what we learned, about them in Khafji, and soon we're beginning to put the picture together, but this doesn't happen overnight. So I think the number of troops that we called for was correct. It's been criticised now after the fact as being way too many, didn't need them all, well we didn't need them all. But Swchwarzkopf didn't know that in the beginning, I didn't know that it was going to turn out to be as easy, as it was in the beginning. So I make no apologies for that piece of it at all.

Q: In retrospect did the Army need to be there?

Boomer: In retrospect the Army needed to be there. I would not have wanted, to even think about doing this with just the Marines. Because remember this huge Republican Guard was sitting over here to the west and I didn't have to tackle them. Somebody had to either destroy them, or keep them fixed in place for me to be able to get to Kuwait City. Now the original plan was for me to keep all those troops in Kuwait City, occupied, destroy and defeat them. So the Army doesn't have to deal with them, as they're attacking the Republican Guard. But had the Republican Guard been free to attack us, as we went into Kuwait, it could have been a whole different story,we would have been tremendously outnumbered. So it was absolutely essential that the Army be there.

Q: Why was it that the U.S. Army as Freddy Franks and people would freely admit, why weren't they able to decisively engage with the Republican Guard?

Boomer: The war stopped too soon. It's my belief that if General Franks had had another three days, he would have destroyed the Republican Guard, entirely, he would have wiped them off the face of the earth.

Q: Should it have gone on, in your opinion, should the war have gone on longer?

Boomer: Well in hindsight yes, it should have. You know but that's Monday morning quarterbacking again. I don't know why the president decided to stop the war when he did.

Q: And at the time that you were sitting there in Kuwait City, when you heard the president announce hostilities were going to cease. What did you think?

Boomer: I wasn't too puzzled, because remember I didn't have the complete picture as to what had taken place in the west. I knew that we had done what we had been asked to do. Kuwait was liberated. So, it didn't seem totally illogical to stop the war at that point in time. On the other hand now, knowing that, there was still a big chunk of the Iraqi army left, untouched, we should have continued, but, I don't know how you know those things.

Q: Do you remember the victory parade in Washington...or in New York?

Boomer: I guess I had always seen pictures of tickertape parades, in New York, and we marched right down that canyon with today's version of the tickertapes floating down, people on the sides of the street cheering. It was a good feeling, not so much personally, well it was a good feeling personally. But, the greatest thing about it was that the American people were recognizing these youngsters for having gone over there and done a great job. There there weren't any victory parades after Vietnam.

Q: You must have thought about Vietnam and the relationship between the military and the U.S. public as you walked down?

Boomer: I did. And it was evident that this was a new era, but we'd worked very hard in the intervening years to become the best military force in the world, and for Marine soldiers, sailors, airmen, had worked very hard, those of us that were senior had spent our lives really or a good piece of our lives, involved with this. And this was the pay off, and we were able to demonstrate to the American people that, you know your dollars did go for something.

We came out of Vietnam as a force that was not something that America could be proud of, not that the the youngsters in Vietnam hadn't performed well, I have very strong feelings about the people that went to Vietnam and those who died there, were wounded there, those who acquitted themselves so well there. So that's not what I'm talking about.

But I'm talking about the force as a whole, came out of Vietnam in not very good shape. And that then was coupled with all the unrest that was occurring in our country at the same time. So we really had in the early 70's only the shell of a fighting force. It was truly in horrible shape, and I don't think the American public realised how bad it was. But we knew, so we began to rebuild, and work and train, and we understood full well that we had almost come full circle, and the Gulf War was the proof of the pudding. As short as it was. And, despite the fact that the Iraqis really didn't fight as you would have expected them to even if they had, we would have won. So yes it was the end I guess of a long journey, probably a good way to express it.


Q: Norman Schwarzkopf, could you describe his style of leadership?

Boomer: General Schwarzkopf is a very bright guy, and a very complex individual. He gave me the greatest gift that any commander on the battle field can be given, and that is a mission, I understood his intent, and then he walked away and left me alone. I mean that's what you want to see in your commanders. That's what I hoped, people saw when they looked at me. So I'll always be grateful for that. Now did he have a temper, yes, but those things become unimportant, at least to me in the scheme of things. What was important to me, was accomplishing the mission. And accomplishing that mission without getting a lot of Marines killed. And I wanted a guy that would support me, a guy that would let me do it. Not try to micro manage me, as we were micro managed in Vietnam. And he met all those tests. So, no complaints, in fact a degree of gratitude.

Q: How big a problem is friendly fire?

Boomer: People ought to talk about friendly fire, I mean it it ought to be examined, laid open, discussed, and that is in fact what's going on internal to the military, we have spent since the Gulf War thousands of hours, trying to solve this problem. Friendly fire isn't new. I experienced it in Vietnam, I mean I was shot at in Vietnam by friendlies. So, this is something that we have experienced, and is always a problem in a chaotic situation, and, battle is always chaotic, and the winner is the guy who can make some sense out of the chaos.

But there is a new dimension now to the battlefield, and that is the missile. And the missile changes this whole friendly fire scenario. I mentioned that I had been, on the receiving end of friendly artillery. Well of course artillery can kill you, but you can also survive that, I mean a piece of that shrapnel misses you. Missiles don't miss and therein lies the problem. In this chaotic battle field, you launch that missile, and you've launched it, mistakenly, but it's going to hit. And when it hits, everything around it, everything in that vehicle, is going to be destroyed. Whereas you could have fired an artillery round, dropped a bomb, 50 feet from it, or maybe even closer than that, which you would consider a successful attack, and everybody survives. Am I making sense? You don't survive the damn missile, because the thing hardly ever misses.