As the guns went silent across the gulf, there were victory celebrations on the home front, but for TIME correspondents covering the war, few moments of exhilaration. The road to Kuwait City was a desolate highway lined by unlit Iraqi fire trenches, burning oil wells and refineries, power lines to nowhere. When it rained on Thursday, correspondent William Dowell looked down at his soaked shirt and saw that it was black with soot, sifted through skies darkened by smoke from burning oil fields.
"One of the grisliest sights," said Dowell, "was the morgue at Al-Sabah Hospital. All of the bodies had been mutilated." Reporter Lara Marlowe found a resistance headquarters in the suburb of Qarain, where she was shown 16 Iraqi prisoners. "No one realized what evil the Iraqis had done until we got here," she said. "It was hard to understand how these frightened, wounded people could be part of a war machine that raped and tortured."
TIME's Kuwaiti headquarters was in the Kuwait International Hotel, which featured such amenities as no electricity, water or food, exactly the situation on which photographer Rudi Frey thrives. Rudi is our man on the scene who makes things happen -- in this case orchestrating a generator, spark plugs and picture-transmission equipment in a nonfunctioning capital to begin sending TIME copy and photographs. He also performs as local chief of morale, finding rooms on a low floor to spare staffers the stairs and even coming up with a rare set of clean sheets.
Most of our people were on the move. Cairo bureau chief Dean Fischer interviewed General Norman Schwarzkopf at his Riyadh headquarters and recalled the time last September when the general told him the terrain was ideal for % tank maneuvers. From Cairo, senior correspondent James Wilde reported a mood of apprehension mixed with relief; during the ground war the city was "tense to bursting." Not all our correspondents have war-zone stories to tell. Robert T. Zintl, whose job has been to coordinate the flow of all briefings and pool reports, found the enemy, and it was Arabic street signs in Riyadh. Amid a profusion of expressways, he drove around for two hours. "The next time I got lost," he noted ruefully, "I flagged a taxi and paid the driver to lead me out of the maze."