The engineer ran to his truck and hauled himself into the passenger seat as his driver gunned the engine.
They held position as the tank crews of the two Guard divisions that would spearhead the invasion filled the air with ear-shattering noise and the Russian T-72s rumbled off the airfield and onto the road to Kuwait.
It was, he would later tell his brother Abdelkarim, a fighter pilot and colonel in the Air Force, like a turkey shoot. The miserable police post on the border was brushed aside and crushed. By twoA.M. the column was over the border and rolling south. If the Kuwaitis were kidding themselves that this army, the fourth-largest standing army in the world, was going to advance to the Mutla Ridge and rattle its sabers until Kuwait acceded to the demands of the Rais, they were out of luck. If the West thought this army would just capture the desired islands of Warbah and Bubiyan, giving Iraq its long-lusted-for access to the Gulf, they too were up the wrong tree. The orders from Baghdad were: Take it all.
Just before dawn, there was a tank engagement at the small Kuwaiti oil town of Jahra, north of Kuwait City. The only Kuwaiti armored brigade had been rushed northward, having been held back in the week before the invasion in order not to provoke the Iraqis.
It was one-sided. The Kuwaitis, who were supposed to be no more than merchants and oil profiteers, fought hard and well. They held up the cream of the Republican Guard for an hour, which allowed some of their Skyhawk and Mirage fighters farther south at the Ahmadi air base to get airborne, but the Kuwaitis did not stand a chance. The huge Soviet T-72s cut to pieces the smaller Chinese T-55s used by the Kuwaitis. The defenders lost twenty tanks in as many minutes, and finally the survivors pulled out and back.
Osman Badri, watching from a mile away as the mastodons swerved and fired in the belching clouds of dust and smoke while a pink line touched the sky over Iran, could not know that one day these same T-72s of the Medina and Tawakkulna divisions would themselves be blown apart by the Challengers and Abramses of the British and Americans.
By dawn, the first point units were rumbling into the northwestern outskirts of Kuwait City, dividing their forces to cover the four highways that gave access to the city from that quarter; the Abu Dhabi road along the seashore, the Jahra road between Granada and Andalus suburbs, and the Fifth and Sixth Ring highways farther south. After the split, the four prongs headed into central Kuwait.
Colonel Badri was hardly needed. There were no ditches for his sappers to fill in, nor obstructions to be blown away with dynamite, nor concrete bollards to be bulldozed. Only once did he have to dive for his life.
Rolling along through Sulaibikhat, quite close (though he did not know it) to the Christian cemetery, a single Sky hawk wheeled out of the sun and targeted the tank ahead of him with four air-to-ground rockets. The tank jolted, lost a track, and began to burn. The panicking crew poured from the turret.
Then the Skyhawk was back, going for the following trucks, flames flickering from its nose. Badri saw the tarmac erupt in front of him and hurled himself from the door just as his screaming driver hauled the truck off the road, into a ditch, and turned it over.
No one was hurt, but Badri was furious. The impudent dog. He finished the journey in another truck.
There was sporadic gunfire all through the day as the two divisions, with their armor, artillery, and mechanized infantry, rolled through the sprawl of Kuwait City. At the Defense Ministry a group of Kuwaiti officers shut themselves in and tried to take on the invaders with some small arms they found inside.
One of the Iraqi officers, in a spirit of sweet reason, pointed out that they were dead men if he opened up with his tank gun. While a few Kuwaiti resisters argued with him before surrendering, the rest changed out of their uniforms into dish-dash and ghutra and slipped away out the back. One of these would later become the leader of the Kuwaiti resistance.
The principal opposition occurred at the residence of the Emir Al Sabah, even though he and his family had long before fled south to seek sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. It was crushed.
At sundown Colonel Osman Badri stood with his back to the sea at the northernmost point of Kuwait City on Arabian Gulf Street and stared at the facade of that residence, the Dasman Palace. Already a few Iraqi soldiers were inside the palace, and now and then one would emerge carrying a priceless artifact torn from the walls, stepping over the bodies on the steps and the lawn to place the booty in a truck.
He was tempted to take something himself, a gift fine and worthy for his father at the old man’s home in Qadisiyah, but something held him back: the heritage of that damned English school he had attended all those years ago in Baghdad, and all because of his father’s friendship with the Englishman Martin and his admiration of all things British.
“Looting is stealing, boys, and stealing is wrong. The Bible and the Koran forbid it. So do not do it.”
Even to this day, he could recall Mr. Hartley, the headmaster of the Tasisiya Foundation Preparatory School, run by the British Council, lecturing his pupils, English and Iraqi, at their desks.
How often had he reasoned with his father since joining the Ba’ath Party that the English had always been imperialist aggressors, holding the Arabs in chains for centuries to reap their own profits?
And his father, who was now seventy and so much older because Osman and his brother had been born to the second marriage, had always smiled and said:
“Maybe they are foreigners and infidel, but they are courteous and they have standards, my son. And what standards does your Mr. Saddam Hussein have, pray?”
It had been impossible to get through the old man’s thick skull how important the Party was to Iraq and how its leader would bring Iraq to glory and triumph. Eventually he ceased these conversations, lest his father say something about the Rais that would be overheard by a neighbor and get them all into trouble.
He disagreed with his father on this alone, for he loved him very much.
So because of a headmaster twenty-five years before, Colonel Badri now stood back and did not join in the looting of the Dasman Palace, even though it was in the tradition of all his ancestors and the English were fools.
At least his years at the Tasisiya school had taught him fluent English, which had turned out to be useful because it was the language in which he could best communicate with Colonel Stepanov, who had for a long time been the senior engineering officer with the Soviet Military Advisory Group before the cold war came to its end and he went back to Moscow.
Osman Badri was thirty-five, and the year 1990 was proving to be the greatest of his whole life. As he told his elder brother later:
“I just stood there with my back to the Gulf and the Dasman Palace in front of me and thought, ‘By the Prophet, we’ve done it. We’ve taken Kuwait at last. And in just one day.’ And that was the end of it.”
He was wrong, as it happened. That was just the beginning.
While Ray Walker was, in his own phrase, hauling ass through the Abu Dhabi airport, hammering the sales counter to insist on the American’s constitutional right to an instant airline ticket, a number of his fellow countrymen were ending a sleepless night.
Seven time zones away in Washington, the National Security Council had been up all night. In earlier days they used to have to meet personally in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House; newer technology now meant they could confer by secure videolink from their various locations.