Among the thousands of frightened US Marines out there in the dark on the night America invaded Iraq, Kyle Brisebois, a veteran at 33, should have been one of the cool, confident father figures to the younger men. He kept his head, but the hours of combat and chaos he saw in the fight to take Iraq’s oilfields from Thursday to Friday were worse than anything he had experienced in the 1991 Gulf war.
His account to The Observer was one of the first to reveal the intensity of that first night across the border, and the blunders and breakdowns which are the bleak, farcical reality of war.
‘It was a nightmare,’ he said yesterday, spitting regularly from a plug of chewing tobacco as he waited on a motorway bridge near Basra, preparing to move west. ‘It was the worst fucking night of my life.’
Brisebois, a staff sergeant, commands an M1 tank in the Marine’s 5th regiment, which drove deep into Iraq in one of the first moves of the invasion. It became clear yesterday how the 5th and another Marine regiment, the 7th, with helicopters and British artillery, had broken the will to fight of the Iraqi division which held the keys to Basra.
The city is now effectively there for the US and British to enter at a time of their choosing — if they choose to enter it at all.
Brisebois’s tank was one of a platoon of four attached to a unit of Marine infantry charged with seizing the Rumaila oilfields, one of the richest prizes in Iraq. They set off in the darkness. No sooner had they charged through the breach in the sand wall marking the border between Kuwait and Iraq than one of the tanks broke down and had to be left behind.
Not long after that, the hydraulics collapsed on two of the tanks, including Brisebois’s. Corrosive fluid from a broken hydraulics pipe poured over Brisebois’s gunner, Corporal Adam Finch. ‘It was going all over him. He was getting burned,’ Brisebois said.
Well inside Iraqi territory, in darkness and at the height of an attack, the two other tanks drew up in a defensive position while Finch climbed out of the tank, stripped off his clothes, changed and got back in. ‘In the middle of the night, he went bare-assed in the middle of the combat zone,’ he said. ‘I was thinking: How the hell am I going to explain this if he gets shot?’
To make things worse, the thermal imaging system on Brisebois’s tank — the equipment which enables the crew to see in the dark — went on the blink. Amid the chaos, the platoon fell behind the infantry, and when they went on after them they got lost. In a minefield.
‘I had night-vision goggles on and I looked down and I could see the round shape of landmines. They were all around the tank,’ Brisebois said. ‘It took us about 50 minutes to manoeuvre out.
All this happened before they were involved in any fighting. As they approached the oilfields, they were operating under constraints: they were free to kill any Iraqi soldiers in their way, but were only allowed to use their small calibre machine gun, and only certain kinds of ammunition in the tank’s big gun, for fear of harming the most precious thing out there: the oil installations.
As they approached a built-up area within the oilfields, they saw an American military vehicle, an M113, of a type sold by the US to Iraq when Washington and Saddam Hussein were on friendly terms. The tanks poured fire on the vehicle and on two men they saw trying to hide nearby. The Marine infantry joined in, firing grenades from automatic grenade launchers.
The platoon came under fire from a piece of ex-Soviet heavy artillery, and saw a four-barrelled anti-aircraft cannon. It could have done fatal damage to one of their tanks, but for some reason it was firing blindly into the air. Despite their breakdowns, the US tanks destroyed it with ease, killing the crew.
Even with the breakdowns and near-disasters that befell their platoon, the Marines outgunned the Iraqis. One Marine lieutenant died of his wounds after a firefight in the battle for the Rumaila oil installations, but many more Iraqis were killed, and hundreds surrendered.
‘They were coming out with white flags and the infantry would come in between the tanks and the prisoners of war and round them up,’ Brisebois said.
The battalion to which his platoon belongs captured between 300 and 400 prisoners. The story was the same across the whole front between Kuwait and Basra, where an Iraqi mechanised division, the 51st, was thinly spread out.
That the Iraqis’ morale was already rock bottom, even before the attack, was shown not only by the speed with which they surrendered or abandoned uniforms and fled, but by their pitiful attempts to defend their homeland and their equipment. The lessons of the 1991 Gulf war — that parking tanks behind revetments of sand was like gift-wrapping them for US attack helicopters to destroy — was not learned.
In some cases, the Iraqis may have felt it did not matter because they had no intention of being in their tanks when the helicopters hit. A still-smouldering burned out tank I came across parked beside the motorway from Kuwait to Basra yesterday had no sign of charred bodies or uniforms inside.
Bridges have not been blown. Roads have not been mined. The US and Britain have freedom of movement along the extensive system of motorways in southern Iraq.
There were some signs of resistance: yesterday morning one Marine captain said he understood a fierce tank battle was being waged between Zubair, where the 51st is headquartered, and Basra, despite the formal surrender of the division on Friday night.
But with British and US artillery pounding the location of the battle, and Marine Cobra helicopters circling in fours through the smoke of burning oil pipelines, the Iraqis appeared to have no chance. The 51st appears to have been caught in a pincer movement as the 7th Marines moved in from the east and the 5th Marines from the west, supported by the mobile howitzers of the British.
Standing among a tense, tired cohort of dusty men and armour, preparing to move west and north towards Baghdad, Lt-Col Mike Oehl, commander of one of the Marine tank battalions which made the initial push into the south, said his unit had moved about 84 kilometres in that first night, the furthest ever for a Marine armoured battalion.
‘My battalion attacked in a big sweep to the south-west and got in behind the 51st,’ he said.
The commander was under no illusions about the vast technical superiority of the US and British troops over their Iraqi opponents, and unromantic about the ease with which they are crushing the Iraqis. ‘Arguably, it isn’t a fair fight, but I’m all for unfair fights.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â