‘Friendly Fire’ Is Probed in Battle Deaths

A glum front-line Marine commander said Friday that at least some of the first Marine ground combat casualties may have been the result of a missile fired by a U.S. battle-support aircraft--but only because of desperate, close-range fighting.

Officials at the Pentagon and at command headquarters in Saudi Arabia said military investigators are looking into the possibility that “friendly fire” killed some or all of the 11 Marines who died in the opening ground engagement of the Persian Gulf War this week.

Lt. Col. Jerry Humble, operations officer for the 1st Marine Division, on Friday was the first to publicly narrow the question of whether some of the Marines were lost to fire from a friendly aircraft. And he was the first to suggest that the outcome may have been less a blunder than the result of the chaos of battle.

At a separate location, officers of the 2nd Marine Division reported that their troops were nearly hit by eight cluster bombs dropped by U.S. planes. They reported no casualties but said shrapnel from the bombs landed within 15 yards of Marine positions.

The first and most serious engagement occurred in the dark Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in the vicinity of the Kuwaiti town of Umm Hujul, but on the Saudi side of the border. Iraqi troops and armor were reported to have made two powerful thrusts in Saudi Arabia.

As Humble described it, at one point Iraqi troops and U.S. Marines closed to within 25 yards, firing across the dark sands. At least half of the Iraqi tanks in the firefight were destroyed by U.S. air strikes.

Both Cobra helicopters and A-10 Thunderbolt jets serve in that role, and Humble did not identify which were involved, according to a field interview that was collected for use by all journalists in the region.

The Marines lost two light armored vehicles, or LAVs, high-speed scout and transport machines that are not normally used to engage heavy armor at close range.

Humble said a four-member Marine investigating team, including a munitions expert, had been appointed to determine whether one of the vehicles was hit by a friendly anti-armor missile.

“We’re saddened and disappointed,” said Humble. “But historically, there’s always casualties by friendly fire in close battles, because it’s a fight for your life.”

While the Marines agonized over the 11 killed in action, the 2nd Marine Division called for its own investigation into the cluster bombing near an area where a Marine infantry battalion was dug in. Two jets, in attacks three minutes apart, dropped four cluster bombs each--the bombs breaking apart and raining bomblets down near the Marines.

“The first one got everyone’s attention. The second really woke them up,” said Marine Maj. Bob Weimann. He guessed that the pilots had been given erroneous map coordinates. Some of the bomblets did not explode on impact in the soft sand, and ordnance experts were called to clear them away.

During the Panama invasion, the Pentagon acknowledged that two U.S. servicemen were killed and 19 wounded by friendly fire. Another death and 21 additional casualties might have been caused by friendly fire there, but the Pentagon says it has been unable to “distinguish which of the 21 were hit by friendly or enemy fire.”

A 1982 study, “Amicicide: The Problem of Friendly Fire in Modern War,” by Lt. Col. Charles Shrader for the Combat Studies Institute, claims that 2.5% of U.S. fatalities in the Vietnam War were caused by friendly fire.

“Most of the incidents I looked at were caused by human error. . . . The conclusion one draws is that the solution to the problem is probably not an electronic or mechanical solution, but along the lines of training, following established procedures and seasoning of the troops in battle,” Shrader wrote.

The Israeli military studied its casualties from its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and reportedly concluded that almost 20% resulted from friendly fire.

Military analysts caution, however, about drawing any comparisons between findings from previous wars and the current fighting.

“You can’t take these (figures) and apply them to another conflict,” said Eric Greenwald, a research analyst with the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a think tank based in Washington. “The same type of engagement doesn’t exist.”

But analysts expect that if full-scale ground war in the Gulf occurs, Americans can expect to hear about more deaths caused by misdirected fire.

“It’s because of the traditional chaos of the battlefield,” said David Isenberg, a research analyst with the Center for Defense Information. “It’s just hard to avoid.”

Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces in the Gulf, told a press briefing earlier this week that he has had personal experience with the perils of friendly fire. During the Vietnam War, he said, he came under bombing by U.S. B-52s.

And it was a unit of the battalion he commanded in that war that fired a misdirected artillery round that killed U.S. Army Sgt. Michael Mullen. Author C.D.B. Bryan described the efforts of Mullen’s parents to find out the circumstances of his death in a 1976 book called “Friendly Fire.”

Balzar reported from Dhahran and Olen from Washington.