ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                      103


come from that location.   The Marine advance intentionally halted only a few
miles into Kuwait.
   Captured Iraqi officers later told American authorities that the ruse worked
and that Iraqi troops were caught off guard on the night of Feb. 24 because they
believed they had suppressed the allied incursion three nights earlier.
   For Marine forces, the three-day blitzkrieg across the Iraqi minefields and
the plains of burning tanks in the Kuwaiti desert resulted in extraordinarily few
deaths--six during the war itself, two of which are believed to have been caused
by accidents rather than hostile fire.
   Despite the few casualties and the relative tactical ease of suppressing Iraqi
forces, 1there was a lot more fighting than people realized," according to Col.
Larry Livingston, commander of the 6th Marine Regiment which spearheaded
the minefield breach for the 2nd Division.
   This was a war of nagging artillery fire and short, intense bursts of combat,
rather than a campaign of prolonged battles and sustained counterattacks.
   History will record firefights in obscure places such as the Burgan oil field,
where Iraqi forces hid in clouds of smoke from burning wellheads, and an
agricultural station which served as an Iraqi headquarters area and was dubbed
the `1Ice Cube Trays" because of its appearance from the air.
   But the brief war was not fought without heroics.  Just minutes after starting
through the western minefield breach, Livingston's regiment lost four mire
plows and 14 men were injured.    When one line charge, which was supposed
to blast a trail through one portion of the minefield, failed to detonate, one
young Marine raced into the minefield twice in an effort to recharge the device.
 Everybody knew we had to bust ~~~g~,t said Livingston.
   The 2nd Division faced the toughest minefields inside the Kuwaiti border,
obstacle belts laced through high-pressure oil pipelines between two industrial
collection points.   One of its three regiments suffered so many mechanical
problems with equipment and imposing hurdles in the heavily seeded field, that
it did not finish breaching the obstacle belt until the second day of the war
operation.
   As the troops emerged from the obstacle fields, there were constant reports
of snowstorm, snowstorm," over the radio--codeword for incoming artillery.
Livingston said that at one point, his men were "getting hammered" because they
had remained exposed to an opposing Iraqi force too long.

                        "Budweiser1, and "Hurricane11

   During one encounter, a young tanker became so excited about shooting his
first Iraqi T-72 tank that he failed to notice he had not destroyed the weapon.
As columns of American tanks charged past what they believed to be a disabled
T-72, a rear tank crew squinting through the oily black smoke that blanketed
the battlefield spotted its turret creaking in the direction of the oncoming allied
troops and fired in time to kill it.
   On the eastern side of the battlefield, the 1st Marine Division was facing its
own sporadic surprise attacks.    One Iraqi tank unit it had bypassed came