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Baghdad radio on Monday broadcast an order, supposedly from Saddam, for his forces to withdraw from Kuwait; many complied with alacrity. Those who paused to fight were often cut to pieces. On Monday afternoon, for example, the 1st Marine Division encountered Iraqi units in the Burgan oil field near Kuwait International Airport and flushed them out with "time on target" fire, the opposite of a rolling barrage: all guns in the entire division opened up at the same time to lay down a devastating curtain of explosives on the same limited target area. That forced the Iraqis out of the oil field. Emerging into the open, they were hit with more fire from artillery, Cobra attack helicopters and Marine tanks. Some 50 to 60 Iraqi tanks were reported destroyed in this brief engagement. Marine losses: zero.
Oddly, though, this day of burgeoning victory brought the one U.S. tragedy of the war. An Iraqi Scud missile heading for Saudi Arabia broke up in flight: the warhead plunged onto an American barracks near the huge base at Dhahran. The blast killed 28 soldiers, causing in an eye blink almost a third of all American battle deaths in the entire war. An additional 90 soldiers were injured, many seriously.
TUESDAY: BUGGING OUT
Residents of Kuwait City awoke to the sound of tank engines revving up. The Iraqis were pulling out, sparing the city, its inhabitants, and the allied forces closing in the agonies of house-to-house fighting. By afternoon Kuwaiti resistance fighters said they were in control of the city, though sniper fire continued for a while and Saudi and Kuwaiti troops did not stage their victory parade into the city until the following day.
Outside the city, said a U.S. briefing officer, "the whole country is full of people escaping and evading." Though some allied commanders described the Iraqi pullback as an orderly fighting retreat, at times it looked like a pell- mell bugout. Roads leading north toward the Iraqi city of Basra, military headquarters for the Kuwait theater, were so jammed with vehicles and troops that a pilot from the carrier U.S.S. Ranger in the gulf said it looked like "the road to Daytona Beach at spring break." Allied bombing of roads and bridges had created bottlenecks from which mammoth traffic jams backed up, making for still more inviting targets. So many allied planes converged on the main road from Kuwait City to Basra that combat air controllers feared they might collide, and diverted some of the attackers to secondary roads.