On January 17, 1991, the coalition began air strikes against Iraq, bombing missile bases and other military installations. tanks charging toward the viewer, “the way the Iraqis saw them.” “First of all, don’t ever say it was a hundred-hour war-that’s a disservice to the Air Force and other military personnel who began engaging with the Iraqis in January,” says Fontenot, sitting in the den of his home in Lansing, Kansas. But it was no secret that, if Iraq persisted in occupying Kuwait, the coalition would act to push Iraq’s forces back across their own border. Ostensibly, the military presence was aimed at keeping Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia. Over the next few months, led by the United States, a massive military force from 35 nations was assembled in adjacent Saudi Arabia. Sitting there on our comfy couches, we looked at each other and said, “Well, that was easy.”įrom the moment Iraq invaded its smaller neighbor to the south on August 1, 1990, an array of world nations condemned the action. When it was all over, less than a hundred hours after the final offensive started, those of us watching TV heard the casualty reports: 292 coalition troops killed, compared to tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. Grim images of burned Iraqi corpses, their charred hands curled in death, seemed to serve as object lessons in the perils of challenging the might of the world’s “good guys.” Swarms of Iraqi soldiers were reportedly surrendering without a fight. News reports showed fleets of allied tanks roaring across the desert like a stampede of buffalo, routing Iraq’s Russian-made tanks, blasting them into plumes of fire and smoke. Allied troops were thoroughly trouncing the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, overrunning their positions and chasing them out of Kuwait, the small, oil-rich country Hussein’s army had invaded the previous August.
In three epic encounters-dubbed 73 Easting, Medina Ridge, and Fright Night (officially known as the Battle of Norfolk)-armored behemoths from both sides relentlessly went muzzle-to-muzzle, turning the sprawling desert into history’s most concentrated tank shooting gallery.įor the millions of Americans who stayed glued to their TVs in late February 1991, the news coming from Kuwait was unrelentingly triumphant.
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