Waller: Well, I see .. first of all I had watched the preparation for this briefing and I watched the slides being put together and I observe the things that are going into it to .. you know, that are going to be presented at this briefing and I see that General Schwarzkopf is doing his level best to get all of his material to the point where he can master that material and he is one of the world's best at doing that. So he gets up in this briefing and he says, the gates are closed, and I look at him and I look at the other people who are around him and my immediate first sensation is, I don't think so, that may be bullshit, that the gates are closed. But I must confess, I didn't .. I didn't do anything about it. In hindsight I wish I had said no, we ought to recon. with this, we should go on, we should do .. but I didn't.

Q: Why not?

Waller: Because at the time I really believed that we had done enough to cause Saddam Hussein to be put out of office, to be run out of Baghdad on a rail, to be hung from the nearest yardarm or what have you, I just did not believe that Saddam Hussein could have survived that sort of defeat and still be in power, and I was wrong.

Q: Freddy Franks remembers that night, he didn't know this briefing was going on, Medina Ridge was fought, he went and had a look, went up there with the front line guys - got shelled a bit actually - went back, contacted his guys, prepared for a night assault, then there was the friendly fire problem that Ron Griffith rang in and said I've got serious problems with such a small front, said okay, we do it in the morning, Freddy Franks goes to bed thinking that tomorrow he's finally going to engage them, the first, Barry McCaffery likewise says tomorrow .. I'm finally going to engage them, give them what General Schwarzkopf thought, I mean isn't it remarkable that Freddy Franks never got a call from anyone to say is the gate closed? How could it be that Freddy Franks wasn't consulted and asked, are the gates closed?

Waller: You know, I'm at a total loss to understand or appreciate how we could have made .. a statement that the gates are closed if we had not confirmed that with the ground commander. I don't know how it happened, I don't know whether it was one of these things where you're in front of the press and instead of saying I don't know or instead of saying I'll have to check or whatever else, that we sometimes get caught up in giving answers which are very glib or which make good sound bites that sometimes we don't pay attention to what it is we're saying - I don't know the answer as to why we did not consult beyond a shadow of a doubt with the commanders out in the field as to whether or not they had totally encircled the Republican Guard and they were ready to pounce on 'em. Now my impression of all of that, having been in the war room, was that we were making an enormous amount of progress, that we had the Republican Guards with their backs to the river and to the ocean and it was just a matter the next day of policing up what needed to be done, so I don't know why we didn't confirm it with the commanders in the field.

Q: Were you concerned at the idea the war was being ended on a clock basis?

Waller: Absolutely, I was concerned about stopping the war on a clock basis because we were not on rigid, defined objectives, so we have to then look at maps and to say, okay, where do we want our forces to be arrayed, what kind of position should we have 'em in, should they be on certain longitudes and latitudes or should they be along certain grid co-ordinates and so forth and so on, where are they now, where should they be, we want to make sure they're not in a position where they're going to be vulnerable to maybe continued attacks from the other side, so all of these things had to be taken in consideration. We also wondered where is the mechanism for stopping a war or where is that, is that coming from the Pentagon, is it coming from the State Department, what do we say about cessation of hostilities and so forth and so on.

Q: It was a mess.

Waller: Absolutely, it was unbelievable, to be very candid with you, because .. you know, General Schwarzkopf dictated a document, when there was none forthcoming, to his navy stenographer, that was then sent back to the Pentagon, the Pentagon changed 'happy' to 'glad', 'we' to 'they', .. and put in a few fixes, gave it to the State Department and the State Department changed a couple of words and sent it back to us and says, use this, so I think that that is the first time in the history of warfare that the commanding general and chief of the forces dictated the document that was to be used by the coalition forces for cessation of hostilities.

Q: And this document, what, it laid down .. what did it say, I can't remember this document.

Waller: This document talked about when hostilities will be stopped, where the forces will be arrayed, what the buffer zone would look like and what we would do to ...

Q: So just to get you to sum all this up ... you hear the war's going to end and then you guys are saying, well, how do we end it.

Waller: That's exactly right .. let me ask you this question, you're sitting in the war room, someone says we're going to end the war, and you say, well now, how are we going to do this, what's going to happen, what are we going to .. say, where do we end it, where do we stop it, how do we go about just .. you just can't say everybody stop in place, there's all sorts of things that you must be able to hand the other side and give to them and say here are the parameters, here's where we're going to be, here is the array of forces, you won't cross this line, we won't cross another line, so that document was not readily available. We in Central Command were under the impression that all of these smart people in Washington or in the State Department were working on such a document and would have it ready for us, but that was not the case, General Schwarzkopf dictated that document to his navy stenographer.

Q: It's odd that after all those months of planning no-one had thought about how to end the war.

Waller: Absolutely, no-one had really given .. I mean absolute given a great deal of thought to how the war would be ended.

Q: What were the implications of that?

Waller: Well, it turned out that we were in pretty good shape, we dictated our own things that we wanted, to separate the forces, we were going to be occupying, we were not going to give up the territory where we were, we were going to stay in that particular area until such time as we had come to some formal agreement, that the buffer zone between the two forces would be certain things, that hostilities would resume again if any hostile act were taken toward our forces, we modified rules of engagement so that our forces could protect themselves from any hostile act by the Iraqis and so forth.

Q: And when General Schwarzkopf went to Safwan with the list of things the Iraqis had to agree to, how was that prepared?

Waller: In the same document that Norman Schwarzkopf dictated back were the things that we were going to discuss with the Iraqis at Safwan and there was very little modification to what Norman Schwarzkopf had dictated that was different from what we got back, that was eventually approved by the State Department and, you know, the things that were uppermost in our minds were our POWs and we wanted to make sure that we got every one of them accounted for and that they in turn would, you know, have to take responsibility for their POWs who wanted to be returned to Iraq.

Q: So just to get you to paint the picture for me because the whole world watched that ceremony in the tent in Safwan and I'd sort of imagined all that stuff was drawn up in the White House and so on, how was it drawn up, can you remember watching or listening or being part of it as that list of conditions for the ceasefire was drawn up, how was it done?

Waller: Norman Schwarzkopf said, how do we make this happen, what do we do, and we had a State Department representative in our war room and he said to the State Department representative, what is it we're supposed to do, Mr. State Department rep., and the State Department rep. gave what we called the Iraqi salute, he didn't know, so Schwarzkopf asked for his stenographer to come in and sat him down next to him, he turned in his chair and started dictating to him things that he thought, someone would think of something .. and give him a little note, he in turn would read that note and, you know, phrase a sentence or a paragraph or whatever needed to be phrased in the proposed document, the navy yeoman went off and typed it up, brought it back in, and he made some slight modifications to it and then we sent it off to the Pentagon and the State Department - that's how it was done, nothing magic about it at all.

Q: Barry McCaffery finally got the fight he was looking for, what was it, March 2nd, I can't remember, but it was a couple of days after the ceasefire, what do you recall about that?

Waller: I recall receiving word that the 24th Division had to take some Iraqi soldiers under fire because they had been fired upon and once they had been fired upon, in self defence, and under the rules of the engagement that had gone out, the 24th Division had just absolutely devastated the force that had fired upon them.

Q: Was there much discussion in the war room about what was going on?

Waller: Oh yeah, a lot of discussion about why did that happen and wonder what madman on the Iraqi side would want to fire upon the 24th Division with this overwhelming amount of fire power and they had just been devastated, so it was very difficult to believe that any .. anybody with any sense at all would fire upon the Americans at this time, so you know, we were just wondering how could it happen.

Q: And what answer did you come up with?

Waller: The answer we got, that the 24th Division had fired in self defence, that they were fired upon and they had taken appropriate action to make sure that they were not fired upon again.

I think the 24th, having probably less clearly defined lines as to precisely where it was that they were supposed to be, had one interpretation of where their lines were and the Iraqis having an interpretation of where they could or could not go, probably inadvertently decided they wanted to save as much of their equipment and head down the causeway with hopefully not being fired upon, maybe when they were challenged someone didn't fully understand what was going on and decided to fire and that was a mistake because the 24th Division overwhelmed them.

Q: In the end the Republican Guard weren't destroyed, Norman Schwarzkopf blames Freddy Franks, Freddy Franks sort of blames Norman Schwarzkopf, what do you, Cal Waller, who played a big part in all of this, how could it be that the Republican Guard wasn't destroyed and was able to get two divisions of armour out ... why was it that the Republican Guard wasn't destroyed?

Waller: I think there's several reasons .. why we didn't do this. Number one, we stopped before we had completed the mission that we had established for the forces going into, we never once said to anybody that your mission is going to be complete as soon as we kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait, that was not what we told our forces. We said to our forces that we wanted to close with and destroy the Republican Guards and that was the overriding mission that most of our forces thought. When we decided that we were not going to let that mission play out for however long it had to play out, we changed the overriding mission of our forces, we gave them a change in mission, therefore we did not close with and destroy the Republican Guards. The other reason is - and this should be a lesson to all politicians, to all future leaders, I'm in the twilight of a mediocre career and I look back with hindsight as a commander in the military and I can say to all of the future commanders out there, you must ensure that you understand what your mission is and you must live by mission accomplishment to the best of your abilities and when your mission has been changed you should make sure that everyone who gives that order understands the implication of what a mission change means.

Q: What you're saying here is that the politicians moved the goalposts, the politicians changed the mission, and people wonder why the army didn't achieve the mission, the army could have achieved the mission but the politicians stopped the war too soon.

Waller: What I'm saying is, is an analogy to a football game, is that the goalpost didn't change but we changed the goal line, instead of leaving the goal line where it always should be and always is, we built a new line, we said that you have made a touchdown by the goal line being on the 20 yard line instead of being on the 10 yard line.

Q: I like the thing that you changed what made a touchdown, I mean the original touchdown was destroying the Republican Guard but suddenly it was Kuwait City, as you say, putting positive spin ... did the goal change and who changed it?

Waller: I think .. I think the goal was changed just as we changed in the mind of all of those great young men and young women who were fighting out there, they expected to reach the goal line, but when we said, no, we have accomplished what we set out to do by kicking Saddam Hussein .. out of Kuwait, it was confusing to them, they said wait a minute, I thought we were going .. this was our mission was to close with and destroy the Republican Guards enemy if it meant going all the way to the corner of this country, which would have been pushing the Republican Guards back to the ocean and to the river. Now all of a sudden here we are miles from that location and we were saying to these outstanding young men and young women, forget that, we're now going to change and you have succeeded because you have kicked him out of Kuwait.

Q: So you were pretty bemused about this as well?

Waller: At the time, as I have said before, I said, well, okay, what's the sense in going on, maybe we have accomplished the mission by kicking Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and certainly he has suffered a devastating defeat and therefore he shouldn't survive if he's had such a defeat, but I was wrong.

Q: Was Norman Schwarzkopf reluctant to fight this war as some of the politicians think?

Waller: I think politicians who say Norman Schwarzkopf was reluctant to fight this war are sadly mistaken. Norman Schwarzkopf didn't want to enter into another military war where the resolve of the people was not to stick it out, so he was concerned, you know, the ghost of Vietnam, entering into a conflict not having the support of the people concerned him, but once we saw the overwhelming support from the people of America who were behind all of the coalition forces, who gave so much of themselves, Norman Schwarzkopf realised that this was not the same .. and he was up for the task. Now no commander, not even Norman Schwarzkopf or anybody else in my estimation, unless it happens to be a madman, enjoys war and Norman Schwarzkopf was reluctant to go charging off and saying, yes, I'm going to send all these young men and young women out there come hell or high water, it's just not his nature, he was very concerned about his soldiers and I think his soldiers responded very well to the bear ..they loved him.