Sat, Mar 22, 2003 page2

• First skirmish gives taste of war

  INVASION FORCE US forces steamed into Iraq, encountering little resistance from Iraqi forces as the coalition drive to oust Saddam from power finally got under way

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The desert is strewn with broken hulks of tanks and trucks, half buried in sand, the detritus of the gulf war 12 years ago. Now, not far inside Iraq, the destruction of the new war is already apparent.

  Two Iraqi border posts lay in twisted ruins, destroyed by a shuddering barrage of artillery fire from the Kuwaiti side as the army's 3rd Infantry Division, thrusting to the west of US marines and British forces, opened a ground campaign intended to help drive Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power.

  Farther north, the charred shell of an Iraqi command post continued to burn early yesterday morning, casting an eerie glow through the silver, sand-screened moonlight. As the first of some 20,000 soldiers from the 3rd Division poured across the border, Iraqi resistance was light.

  

  Soldiers in the US army 3rd Battalion 15th Infantry aim toward Iraq while atop the last Kuwaiti berm before the Iraqi border on Thursday. US forces launched their long-awaited war against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

  Photo: AP

  A tank and three Bradley fighting vehicles attacked the compound earlier Wednesday evening. Three Iraqis died in a truck inside, the first confirmed casualties of the army's campaign. The first two border posts turned out to be empty, their soldiers having fled.

  American soldiers gathered the dead, placing the bodies in black bags and leaving them beside the road before moving on. They also collected the dead soldiers' belongings, one officer said, so that word could be passed to their families.

  The first tank platoon of Charlie Company encountered and destroyed two Iraqi T-72 tanks.

  "I came up over a ridge and saw a T-72 and fired," said Sergeant Melvin Green. "I saw the turret pop off. My wing man hit the other."

  There were no American casualties and no immediate reports of any along the desert frontier, producing a swelling of relief and jubilation at the point of farthest advance early yesterday.

  "Honestly, I never thought I'd be back," said Major Michael Oliver, the operations officer of the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armored, who fought in the Gulf War in 1991 and whose companies led the breach across the border in this one.

  By early yesterday, with holes in the fences and berms that once separated Kuwait and Iraq, thousands of US soldiers crossed a wide swath of the border in what commanders called an efficient, successful operation.

  The 3rd Division's ground attack began at 6:15pm local time, 24 hours ahead of schedule, following the cruise missile attack on Baghdad the night before, and following four Iraqi missile attacks into Kuwait on Wednesday. The army's Patriot missile batteries, attached to the 3rd Division, shot down two of those, including one close to the division's 2nd Brigade.

  "If anything, we'll be moving faster rather than slower," Colonel William Grimsley, the commander of the 3rd Division's 1st Brigade, which led the operation to breach the border, told his battalion commanders as the attack neared.

  The 3rd Division's attack -- only a prelude to what commanders and soldiers expect to be more intense battles ahead -- began with a barrage of ATACMS missiles, which have a range of 240km and were most likely intended for targets well inside Iraq, not along the border.

  "It hit me when I saw the missiles," said Second Lieutenant Peter Ricci of San Diego, who graduated from West Point only last June and found himself more quickly than he imagined in combat.

  "Man, it's the real deal. If you don't have fears, you're not human," he said.

  At 8pm, Paladin artillery batteries thundered in loud, reverberating claps across the frontier, but passed as quickly as a thunderstorm, signaling the start of the thrust north 10 minutes after the barrage began.

  Air force jets have dropped thousands of leaflets urging regular Iraqi army soldiers to surrender rather than defend Saddam. Here on the battlefield, that sentiment took the form of a Humvee, mounted with a large loudspeaker, that blasted five-minute messages every half hour before the attack began.

  Some soldiers felt little solace at the ease of the first fight.

  "This was the easiest part -- going into Iraq," said Staff Sergeant James Currence, a tank commander with the 3rd Battalion. "It's going to get a lot tougher."

  For the marines, events moved rapidly as the night wore on, with more troops pouring over the border. By early yesterday, the bulk of the forces had crossed, and as the sun rose, tank after tank and Bradley after Bradley passed by in endless columns.

  Sergeants told the marines to dig sleeping holes and rest wearing their chemical warfare suits and their boots, ready to move forward at short notice.

  The marines' attack began with 155mm howitzer fire at 6:25pm local time as dozens of Super Cobra helicopter gunships rattled toward their targets.

  The artillery barrage was aimed at the Iraqi army's 51st Mechanized Division, which held the border area where the marines were planning to cross. Initial reports described the Iraqi resistance as light.

  But the marines also said they hoped to "bypass" as many Iraqi army units as possible on their drive toward Baghdad, roughly 370km north, and are hoping many Iraqi units will surrender as they did in the 1991 Gulf War.

  On Wednesday, a patrol of light armored vehicles just south of the border encountered two Iraqi armored personnel carriers on the other side. The marines fired on them with machine guns and missiles, destroying both.
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