I was in Khafji, about six miles from the Kuwaiti border, the day this fight began. It was a ghost town by the beach–many people had left on Aug. 2 when the Iraqi Army invaded Kuwait. It was also undefended, for good military reasons. If you’re a soldier and have a choice, you try to avoid the murderous street fighting you get in defending a town–you pull back, as the Marines did, to the open ground where your attackers have to expose themselves to come at you. So walking into Khafji was easy for the Iraqis. The thin line of troops in the area were not defenders. They were Saudi soldiers from the Fifth Battalion of the King Abdul Aziz Brigade, whose job was to act as the eyes and ears of the allies’ main line farther back.

I developed a special affinity for these men in the middle between Iraqis and Marines. The Arab fighters I spent my time with didn’t have night-vision goggles and advanced fire-direction computers and smart machines. These were men with chemical-protection gear–not very fancy but functional, but who were all too proud to shave their beards–which means their gas masks would leak and be practically useless under chemical attack. They were line doggies from another age: dirty, living on light rations, gathering desert twigs for fires, and rationing water, as Joshua’s soldiers no doubt did outside the walls of Jericho, and Maj. Gen. Terry Allen’s Big Red One soldiers did in the Tunisian desert in 1943.

I don’t have any Arabic, and the captain didn’t have a lot of English, but with signs and a few words we managed to communicate. The captain said that 21 Iraqi soldiers had surrendered in the past three days. He said the Iraqis were walking across the border during the day now–before, they came only at night. The captain thought that many more would come when they found a path through their own minefields. He thought that the minefields had been laid at least partly to keep the Iraqis from defecting, and this theory was backed up later by Lt. Mike Harris, a Marine intelligence officer, who told me that the minefields had been laid by one group of Iraqis, who were then withdrawn, so that their replacements would have no idea where the mines were laid,

Harris told me that more than 100 Iraqis had defected in his sector since the shooting started and he expected a lot more: the continuous B-52 bombing was “not only physically crippling but psychologically damaging.” In my three nights in the Khafji area, I spent many hours listening to wave after wave of the pounding from the air. I counted eight B-52 attacks in one night. Each plane carries tons of bombs. Even from that distance I could see the angry red flashes of explosions and felt the tremor of the explosions that shook the ground. I felt a great sympathy for the Iraqi soldiers at the receiving end, and without a doubt the Iraqis in Kuwait are cracking. It also made me realize that war has changed little over the centuries for the Willies and Omars who make up the line, the guys who lie in shallow holes and stare into the darkness.

Another solid clue to enemy morale is the fact that the Air Force is voting with its afterburners and fleeing to Iran. I don’t buy the theory that they are fleeing to Iran to regroup for an attack out of Iranian airspace. Even if Iran were crazy enough to get into a war on Iraq’s side, the Iraqi pilots know as well as I do that the allies are monitoring Iranian airspace. The minute they took off they would be targeted.

This lack of air capability won’t stop the Iraqi Army from launching ground attacks. They have the ability to do that. But if the attack on Khafji is an example of what we can expect, then the allies don’t have too much to worry about. That attack was contained and finally ended as it should have been. The Saudi tripwire alerted the Marines who, with their allies, took on the task of containing and destroying the invaders. Gunships and Harrier jets backed up by rapid-firing Marine artillery rolled in and did their job, enabling the Saudis and Qataris to move in for the final mop-up.

Yet Saddam Hussein (whose face now betrays a pronounced nervous tic), says “the mother of all battles” awaits the allies, and will turn defeat to victory. He claims that his attack on Khafji was “the first of many victories.” If this was the mother of battles or even one of its offspring, then it died at birth.