Chapter 6 / Page 3

During the Gulf War, Duri stood behind hunkered down troops waiting for the Americans. Incredibly, men under his watch began surrendering en masse to the United States Army and Marine battalions as they punched through the berms without slowing. The Iraqi regulars broke under the pressure to fight. They emerged from the holes in the sand throwing away rifles and raising their arms. These men had survived the relentless air war. Day and night without end, the air forces of Desert Storm pounded their positions. Incendiary and anti-personnel bombs rained from the sky. They never knew a moment’s rest.

Duri attempted to stop the mass desertion. He took his pistol and fired at men until he ran out of bullets. Stupidly, he yelled himself hoarse, his uniform torn and smoke blinded his eyes, an empty Makarov in one hand. Nothing more than a fool overrun by the Americans. They crisscrossed the sky in their Apache Gunships, and churned the sand with their Abram M1 Tanks. When dawn finally came during that hopeless night, he found himself a prisoner of war.
American and British medics were tending his wounds and plastic restraints held his wrists tight. He still limped from the 5.56mm round he took that day in his leg.

Iraq’s utter humiliation before the world was complete. For some unknown reason, the Americans stopped after one hundred hours. There was hardly anything left. The road leading from Kuwait to Al-Basra was nothing more than a smoking wreckage of armor and men. Nothing survived the horrendous pounding delivered by the A-10 Thunderbolts. Death on land and in the air was complete. Baghdad lay defenseless before the American armies. Oh, there had been token brigades from other countries, but no one doubted the aggressor. The Americans decided to stop before obliterating Baghdad and the Iraqi government. They left them in place as a gesture, perhaps to serve notice to others as to what they were capable of accomplishing.

Slowly, Iraq emerged from the rubble. Bridges were rebuilt; some equipment restored. The precious secret weapons were dispersed around to special sites. Duri had been repatriated after the war. He was attached to the Data Center security team—another fiasco. Iraq’s strategy for hiding banned weapons became a refined shell game. With oceans of trackless sand deserts and sixty-nine Presidential palaces, Saddam had plenty of places to hide things. His chemical weapons labs, two hundred anthrax bombs, and eighty SCUD and modified SCUD al-Hussein missiles were dispersed. The existing infrastructure facilities, such as the central Data Center and the nuclear separation labs, remained hidden beneath tons of rock and sand in buried bunkers.