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casualties in the massive ground assault that lies ahead (page 24). The overriding point was that America and the allies would continue with the all-out bombing campaign against Iraqi forces for two more weeks and possibly longer-long enough, at any rate, to "degrade" the Iraqi Army and thereby lower U.S. Walt Boomer, the Marine commander for Operation Desert Storm, warned Iraq that "the worst is yet to come." And George Bush, speaking at Fort Stewart, Ga., once again insisted that the ground war in the Persian Gulf, assuming one is necessary, would begin "on our timetable, not on Saddam Hussein's timetable." Schwarzkopf said the Iraqis' surprise attacks were no more meaningful than "a mosquito to an elephant." Gen. officers professed grim satisfaction with the results of the week's fighting: allied losses were light, and a capable enemy was routed. Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf down to the lowliest platoon commander-U.S. "They were well disciplined and good troops."įrom Khafji to Washington, the abrupt outbreak of ground combat last week could be seen as an early test of the allied campaign to liberate Kuwait and destroy Saddam Hussein's military machine.

"They laid down some real heavy ," said Marine Cpl. troops faced enemy attackers no more than 25 yards away-and in Khafji, it took more than 36 hours of bitter combat to push a sizable force of Iraqi raiders out of the battered town.

Marine units and their Arab allies were quickly baptized in the realities of modern war. Call it a series of probing attacks or call it a military blunder: whatever it was, a handful of U.S. At Khafji, a deserted Saudi coastal town, and at two or more nameless map coordinates to the west, the Iraqi Army suddenly materialized in the desert night in a surprising tactical offensive. Military historians will probably say the fighting along Saudi Arabia's northern border last week was only an early skirmish in the great gulf war of 1991-but it was real enough, and surely frightening enough, to all those who fought in it.