At the Army hospital in Fort Gordon, Ga., two wounded soldiers described the incident to her. During an attack on Jalibah air base, an Abrams tank from the 24th Division mistook Wes’s maneuvering Bradley fighting vehicle platoon for Iraqi armor and fired. The incident, which wounded or killed 11 soldiers, occurred in “clear light with visibility from one to two miles, with no enemy incoming fire,” one day before the cease-fire, according to a bitter eyewitness. Yet 24th Division officers at Fort Stewart, Ga., refused to comment on the story Mrs. Lambert was told. “The matter is under investigation, " was the official response. It was not until four months later that Lt. Col. Raymond Barrett, the commanding officer of Hutto’s battalion, called to tell the heartbroken mother what she already knew: her son was killed by his own comrades.
“Friendly fire”–or fratricide, as the military calls it–is a battlefield fact of life. Six months after the gulf war, a painstaking Pentagon accounting found that at least 35 out of 148 American fighting men and women killed and 72 out of 467 Americans wounded in the conflict stemmed from 28 separate incidents of friendly fire. In percentage terms, this is a higher rate than in any other major conflict fought by Americans in this century. In addition, nine British soldiers died when their Warrior armored personnel carrier was hit by U.S. fire last Feb. 26. And in incidents Pentagon officials decline to comment on, U.S. ordnance caused casualties among Arab allies. In one case in mid-February, the Saudi Army’s Eighth Brigade was hit by Marine Corps A-6 aircraft 12 mile inside the “no fire” line near the Saudi-Kuwait border, with eight killed and 12 wounded. According to a source who witnessed the incident, the Saudi commander refused to complain to the Americans because “I don’t want to lose U.S. air support.” In another case, U.S. helicopter gunships coming to Saudi aid during the Jan. 30 battle for the town of Khafji struck a Saudi armored unit and wounded seven soldiers.
Fratricide is as old as war itself. During the French and Indian War, George Washington reported 400 casualties after panicked musketeers sent repeated volleys into their own ranks. In 1863, Stonewall Jackson was killed by his soldiers as he galloped back into Southern lines. French Gen. Alexandre Percin claimed that his Army lost more than 75,000 soldiers to its own artillery fire during World War I. Military historian Col. Trevor Dupuy says probably 10 percent of the 962,927 American casualties in World War II were the result of fratricide; in one horrifying incident, U.S. bombers blasted American ground troops at St-Lo in France, leaving 757 casualties. The Vietnam War saw fratricide jump up to somewhere between 15 and 20 percent because of the close-in jungle fighting, the poorly led and trained soldiers and the Americans’ reliance on heavy firepower. In one fight at Dak To in 1967, paratroopers suffered 42 dead and 45 wounded from USAF bombs that missed their target. In the supposed cakewalk in Grenada in 1983, four U.S. Navy A-7 aircraft strafed a paratrooper command post, inflicting 17 American casualties. During the 1989 invasion of Panama, NEWSWEEK reported that up to 60 percent of the 347 American casualties may have been because of friendly fire, which the Army later denied.
Casualty by fratricide is a subject I know well. In Korea from 1950 to 1953, my infantry units were shot at, strafed and bombed by everything in the U.S. arsenal except the atomic bomb all the way from Suwon to the Yalu River and back. Vietnam was even worse, thanks to wall-to-wall artillery massed at every enemy hiccup and, frequently, so many planes in the sky that you could barely see the sun. Sometimes in Vietnam my boys and I dodged more American stuff than enemy fire. And while I was covering the war in the Persian Gulf, a pair of U.S. A-10 Warthog aircraft zoomed in and dropped two 500-pound bombs within the friendly position. The bombs fell 200 yards from where I was standing, and an attention-getting shard of red-hot steel slammed down at my feet. “Friendly fire isn’t friendly,” remarked a nearby Green Beret, Capt. Ed Carter.
In the wake of the gulf war, a few more cases may yet emerge. But unquestionably, the military has already made the most accurate accounting of fratricide incidents in the history of war. Each battle death was checked out by a team of officers. If the death occurred in an armored vehicle, the vehicle was inspected to see if it was hit by U.S. antiarmor rounds, depleted uranium projectiles that leave a distinctive radiation mark. (Most of the 35 U.S. armor losses were of this kind, and the irradiated vehicles have been shipped to a treatment center in Barnwell, S.C., for decontamination.)
Some of the stories are hair-raising. During a night attack on Feb. 27 Oust hours before the end of the war), an American tank came upon another American tank under attack by Iraqi infantry. Looking into the night through thermal sights that “see” heat images in the dark, the tank’s gunner mistook the heat generated by the Iraqi infantry for the hot flash of a tank firing its main gun. A five-hour bloodbath ensued-ironically, the war’s longest fire fight–in which six Americans died, 25 were wounded and 10 armored vehicles were knocked out. At Khafji in late January, well before the ground phase of the war began, 11 Marines were killed by fratricide in two incidents. In one, an Air Force A-10 aircraft missile malfunctioned and hit a Marine armored vehicle. In the second, a Marine TOW missile ripped into a Marine light-armor vehicle. Unexploded U.S. ordnance also proved dangerous to the allied forces in the gulf. Seven soldiers from the Army’s 27th Engineer Battalion were killed trying to detonate dud combustible bomb units (CBUs) dropped by American aircraft, but their deaths, and many other CBU-caused casualties, are not recorded as part of the Army’s friendly-fire report. Like the body-count figures of the Vietnam War, casualty figures have been juggled. Saudi units also took casualties from exploded CBUs– 12 killed and 22 wounded in one unit alone.
One of the great hazards of modern warfare is the sheer velocity of battle. In the gulf, armored units moved day and night during the fourday ground attack, covering distances equal to the one between Bull Run in Virginia and Gettysburg, Pa. In a desert environment without identifiable terrain features, it was easy to get lost and stumble unexpectedly into a friendly unit, moving at high speed and with cannons ready to fire. In such a case, the tendency on both sides is to shoot first and ask questions afterward.
The problem is exacerbated by the inadequacy of identification measures. As an Army report dealing with battle accidents put it, “We can shoot farther than we can see.” In the gulf, visibility was often obscured by rain, sandstorms and the smoke from oil fires. The fact that fighting takes place at long ranges by both tanks and aircraft using standoff techniques makes everything more dangerous. At these distances, tank gunners looking through thermal sights and pilots flying at 200 mph, using precision munitions, can easily mistake friend for foe. This is what happened to Army Lt. Col. Ralph Hayles while on a night mission in his Apache helicopter. Visibility was zero. He was flying in a sandstorm to interdict Iraqi armor reportedly approaching a U.S. force. The ground force’s commanding officer, Col. David Weisman, ordered Hayles to fire. All Hayles could see on his scope was “two hot boxes” about “2,000 meters in front of the deployed U.S. force.” He fired two Hellfire missiles-destroying two U.S. armored vehicles, killing two soldiers and wounding six. Hayles said later that “the heat signatures of the vehicles were broken by duffel bags [that] made the vehicles look like Iraqi armor.” (Under other circumstances, Hayles would have won a medal for daring such hazardous weather. This time, he found himself foreed out of the military for violating his general’s orders forbidding battalion COs to engage in combat.)
Not all cases of mistaken identity ended badly. In one incident, an armored unit roared up on the dug-in U.S. 37th Engineer Battalion. The paratroopers didn’t know if the tanks, which were blanketed with dust, were friend or foe. They knew they were not American. The troopers went to “stand-to,” set their antitank weapons and coolly waited until they could see the whites of the tankers’ eyeballs. At the last second Lt. Col. Robert Holcomb spotted the French Tricolor flying from an antenna and sounded, “check fire.” Good leadership and well-disciplined troops prevented a disaster.
When I came home from my second Vietnam tour in 1967, I was so concerned about the friendly-fire casualties I’d witnessed that I wrote a Pentagon paper about the problem. Gen. James K. Woolnough classified it the moment it hit his desk. It was, he said, “A most thorough, provocative and dangerous document. If we are really as bad as all this infers, all of [our] commanders’ comments on how well trained our troops are are rendered false.” Like most large institutions, the military is sensitive to criticism, and if it can keep bad news within the family, it does. Many soldiers who served in the gulf feel that the lack of candor about fratricide and the delays in informing families smacked of a cover-up. Others blame the slow bureaucratic process of an organization that takes a while to admit mistakes in hopes that in the meantime, the public will lose interest.
Inside the military, the interest has been haphazard. Army Maj. Gen. Jerry Harrison complained in a recent briefing paper that “Fratricide has never been included in the BDP,” or Battle Development Plan, a document describing what the Army thinks it will need in future combat situations. The reasons are several . As one officer points out, development of “Identification– Friend or Foe [IFF]” technology has never been a high budgetary priority because it “has not had a constituency like the B-2 bomber. [There is] no kickback to Congress.” Also, says a major general, “In peacetime … the attitude is, we can only afford so much. We’ll fix it later on.” In the gulf war, the fix took the form of painting an unobtrusive and hard-to-see inverted V on the sides of American and allied vehicles, as well the traditional fluorescent topside panels for identification from the air. Neither device was visible through the Americans’ thermal sights. “The Pentagon has tended to look at fratricide from the standpoint of World War II and not future wars,” says William Lind, a military reformer with the Free Congress Foundation.
The gulf war did change the climate briefly. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered an overhaul of IFF systems and a closer look at fratricide. The Army entrusted that task to Maj. Gen. Silvasy, an officer whose own unit was bombed by Americans in Vietnam and Grenada. Then an old military problem intervened: after only three months Silvasy was reassigned to South Korea. It was typical of an Army that in five years has had six different men in the critical job of deputy chief of staff for operations–the most important job in the Army. From the point of view of the safety of the men and women who are actually going to experience combat, the military’s greatest single shortcoming is its lack of institutional memory. It hasn’t developed protections against fratricide, because no one stays in one place long enough to remember. But the families of the dead cannot forget.
