![]() ![]() While Nagl and the rest of the 1st Cav pinned down the Iraqi troops with a barrage of bullets, shells, and missiles, the offensive’s main force-a massive armada of American soldiers, nearly a quarter million strong, along with their armored vehicles, artillery rockets, and a fleet of gunship helicopters overhead-swept across the desert landscape from the west in a surprise left-hook assault, enveloping Saddam’s troops and crushing them into submission after a mere one hundred hours of astonishingly lopsided fighting. Lieutenant Nagl was a platoon leader in the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, which, on that morning, mounted the crucial feint along the route where Saddam’s commanders were expecting an invasion. ![]() Now the ground-war phase of Operation Desert Storm-the largest armored offensive since the Second World War- roared forth in full force, pushing Iraq’s occupying army out of Kuwait. For the previous month, American warplanes had bombarded Saddam Hussein’s military machine to the point of exhaustion. The first tremors came at dawn, on February 24, 1991, as he revved up the engine of his M-1 tank and plowed across the Saudi Arabian border into the flat, endless sands of southern Iraq. “What We Need Is an Officer with Three Heads”Ī few days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, John Nagl saw his future disappear. ![]()
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