This book is not designed to be a history. That’s left to others. It is one man’s view of a war he never thought he would fight. My view. An artilleryman’s view.

When I entered the US Army in 1973 as a freshly minted second lieutenant from the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, America was in the waning years of the Vietnam conflict. When the selective service draft that recruited soldiers for the war ended on January 27, 1973, America committed to a volunteer Army, even as the Cold War still loomed before us. I was a member of...

For a Virginian, the panorama of the resplendent Blue Ridge Mountains or the vast and placid waters of a calm day on the Chesapeake Bay count as two of the most beautiful sights God created. But on a sunny winter day in January 1989, this US Army major first beheld the endless plains of Kansas, another masterpiece of His hands. Their expanse seemed to go on forever, inviting my eye to survey the enormous blue sky above and ahead. Even when the horizon was broken by the Flint Hills east of Fort Riley, home of the 1st Infantry Division (1ID)...

To most soldiers in the US Army in 1989, Fort Riley, Kansas, located 125 miles west of Kansas City, was a place in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, it sits about two and a half hours southeast of the geographical middle of the US at Lebanon, Kansas. But “nowhere” was “somewhere” for the people of the two great communities of Junction City, on the western boundary of Fort Riley, and Manhattan, just east of the fort and the home of Kansas State University. One economic brochure boasted of the positive impact Fort Riley had on the surrounding region, contributing $568,722,015...

On June 6, 1944, when COL George Taylor of the 16th Infantry Regiment bravely rallied his soldiers off Omaha Beach to destroy German positions entrenched above the surf and sand where many young 1ID soldiers lay dead or dying, you might say he exemplified the motto of the division: “No Mission Too Difficult, No Sacrifice Too Great, Duty First.” He was not the last “Big Red One” leader since World War II to inspire his men ahead of a fight. There would be others in the months to come.

In 1989, the first time I met the commanding general of...

Like those we routinely witnessed over Fort Riley, a foreboding tornadic sky gathered—uneventfully—over the Middle East in the early months of 1990. Then tensions escalated sharply into the year. As I was recovering from my battle with the annoying “no-see-ums” of Fort McCoy, Fort Riley was abuzz that summer with talk of US Army deployments to Saudi Arabia.

In February of 1990, Saddam Hussein’s saber rattling included demands that US warships leave the region.¹ But few of us detected the approaching storm. After all, I had watched Saddam closely during my time as a Middle East analyst in...

It was January 10, 1991. “Ironic” was the word that came to mind as I boarded a commercial Boeing 747 with several hundred of my troops and took my seat as the aircraft commander in the first-class section. It was a duty that fell on the senior officer aboard, and I was that person.

It had been a relatively short ride—a bit over an hour—on I-70 from our assembly point at the MAAF on Fort Riley to Forbes Field in Topeka, Kansas. When we arrived, we gathered in a large hangar where we waited to board the aircraft....

“Sir, get up,” a voice hovering above my head spoke urgently, prompting me to lift myself abruptly out of my sleeping bag. I squinted at my watch and saw it was just after 0230, January 17, 1991. MAJ Cardenas, the DIVARTY S-3, had just received notification to immediately get into our basic layer of chemical-defense clothing, or as we called it, our MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture) gear. Almost right away, I reached for a transistor radio I had brought to tune in the US Armed Forces Network (AFN) radio station operating in Saudi Arabia. Maybe they knew what the...

The DIVARTY TOC, which was my base of operations, was positioned 60 kilometers east-southeast of the town of Hafar al-Batin in a central area of TAA Roosevelt. The TAA was a large, oval area shaped like the sideways letter “D” with its flat side parallel to the deadly Tapline Road that ran southeast to northwest just south of us (see map 7.1).¹

It was a huge area, encompassing roughly 1,150 square kilometers of flat desert with sparse vegetation, and it was big enough to house the entirety of the BRO, providing ample separation between units in case of air strikes...

After the extended reconnaissance to our forward positions on February 10, we took some time on February 11 and 12 to recover. PFC McGary worked on our Humvee to keep it in top condition while I caught up on several staff actions that had gone unaddressed amid the activities of recent days. Staff work is omnipresent in the Army, even in a combat zone. But on February 12, my paperwork was interrupted when COL Dodson issued another FRAGO that we would be leaving the next morning for another reconnaissance of the forward area near where we would mount an eventual...

I awoke early on the Sunday morning of February 24, 1991, and was totally focused. But my senses were punctuated with a degree of anxiety and uncertainty about what we would face once we entered and passed through the breach that the BRO would create in the Iraqi defenses. Nonetheless, the 1ID would do its duty. It always had. The BRO had a tradition to uphold. The division’s CPT Idus R. McLendon of C Battery, 6th US Field Artillery fired the first American shot in World War I on October 23, 1917, near Bethelemont, Lorraine, in France. The BRO in...

The early morning fog hung heavily over the DIVARTY TOC on February 26, 1991, as my driver, PFC McGary, and I crawled out of our fabricated sleeping loft in the back of our Humvee. I quickly made my way to the TOC to get an update on the plan for the day and to find a hot cup of coffee. When I entered, everyone was making final arrangements to pack up equipment and begin a long cross-desert road march—possibly in excess of 70 kilometers before we were done—to a position deep inside Iraq. Traveling that distance guaranteed that...

On March 1, just 48 days since we had arrived in Saudi Arabia, I awoke wondering what the day would bring. Once I was dressed, I stepped from our tent and looked eastward into what seemed to be Dante’s inferno on the far side of the coastal road, the “Highway of Death.” The smoke and fire from sabotaged oil wells to the east of us continued unabated. The atmosphere surrounding us was malodorous from burning oil, and I wondered if we would stay there for long or look for a more hospitable location, where the air was breathable. In a...

We arose before sunrise on Thursday, March 21, at the intermediate position we had occupied the afternoon before. Our movement out of Kuwait was in two phases. The first was a relatively short move, only 15 kilometers southwest. On the second leg, I would precede the convoy westward toward the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, then swing northwest back into southern Iraq. Our eventual destination that day would be TAA Allen, named after MG Terry de la Mesa Allen Sr., who commanded the 1ID in North Africa and Sicily during World War II. It seemed appropriate to name it after him since the...

The morning of April 16 was a red-letter day for the DIVARTY Redlegs. Soon we would depart Iraq. Unlike the Crusaders who sought to occupy the Middle East in the 12th to 14th centuries, we were ready to leave it behind. Our focus was riveted on returning to Fort Riley and the herculean work ahead. It was truly a remarkable effort that got us here in the first place, and it would be no less of a complicated, detailed, and maddening effort to retrace our steps back to Kansas. It would be a long march for sure, but we were...

Much has transpired in the Middle East since the 1ID landed in Saudi Arabia and rolled across the Iraqi sands to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army and his vaunted Republican Guards during Desert Shield/Desert Storm. In 2003, the US would again invade Iraq, even as we were simultaneously engaged in combat with the barbaric Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But the second war in Iraq was much costlier in blood and treasure for the US and its allies. From 2003 to 2018, the US experienced 4,493 killed and 32,292 wounded.¹ During Desert Storm, American casualties were considerably less with 382...