SPECIAL REPORT: WITNESS TO WAR :...

MOSCOW

In Moscow, there was one last effort to avert a land war.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, alerted by Soviet intelligence that George Bush was ready to open the allied ground offensive, began some of the most intense diplomacy of the war.

Gorbachev summoned his most trusted officials, a Kremlin crisis group that Yevgeny M. Primakov, his top Middle East adviser, describes as “men who understand each other at half a word.” He ordered Primakov to return to Baghdad. The envoy had been there not long before in an unsuccessful attempt to find peace. Now, Gorbachev told him to try again.

In his lengthy story in Pravda, Primakov recounts the effort.

He writes of making it to the Rashid Hotel in downtown Baghdad by 11 p.m. Monday, Feb. 11, after traveling by road from the Iranian border in a fast-moving cavalcade of cars smeared with mud to hide them from attacking allied warplanes. There was no electricity. Primakov’s room was lit by a kerosene lantern. Jerrycans of water stood in the bathroom.

He might have stayed at the Soviet Embassy, but most of its 13 staff members were living in steel tubes, about 7 feet in diameter, that had been sunk in the embassy garden as bomb shelters. Viktor Posuvalyuk, the ambassador, was staying in the tubes to keep up the spirits of his staff, composing and singing his own songs and playing his guitar. But for Primakov, Posuvalyuk thought, the Rashid, where foreign journalists were staying, might be safer.

There was a meeting with Tarik Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, the next morning. It began with fierce allegations of Soviet perfidy. “It was almost that Soviet policy had given the go-ahead for the war,” Primakov recalled. “Aziz remained very sharp, very accusatory, even after we were strolling alone.

“I told Aziz that Iraq was making one mistake after another by trying to preserve what was beyond preservation and driving itself deeper into a dead-end. When the stream of abuse continued, I said we had not come to listen to this kind of talk. If it would be the same from Saddam Hussein, perhaps I should not waste my time.”

Primakov, nonetheless, met with Saddam at a government guest house. When the Iraqi leader took off his trench coat and unbuckled his gun belt, the Soviet envoy was startled by Saddam’s appearance. He must have lost 15 to 20 kilograms (about 33 to 44 pounds) since their meeting in October. “He was so much thinner,” Primakov wrote.

“The Americans absolutely favor a broad-scale land operation as a result of which the Iraqi task force in Kuwait will be completely destroyed,” Primakov said he told Saddam. “Do you understand--destroyed?”

Primakov then outlined the Soviet proposal: announcement of an Iraqi withdrawal, complete and unconditional, from Kuwait in the shortest possible time.

“Here, for the first time, I saw change,” Primakov wrote.

“Saddam Hussein started to ask questions--how could he be sure his soldiers would not be shot in the back as they withdrew? Would air strikes at Iraq be stopped after the troops left? Would sanctions be lifted?”

Still, Saddam procrastinated. He would send Aziz to Moscow to negotiate. Primakov cut him off. “There is no time left--you must act immediately.”

The Soviets became convinced that Saddam was preparing the Iraqis for a retreat, but the haggling went on for several more days. Aziz shuttled between Baghdad and Moscow, each time giving a little more ground.

“Now, time is the crucial factor,” Gorbachev said at one point, in a stern warning to the Iraqis. “If you value the lives of your countrymen and the fate of Iraq, you must act immediately.” There could be no conditions attached to an Iraqi withdrawal. To insist would only bring a ground attack.

Slowly, through “excruciatingly difficult” negotiations, the Iraqis moved closer to the American demands. They wanted three months to withdraw; Gorbachev talked them down to six weeks. But by now, Bush had issued his ultimatum--one week to pull out of Kuwait, with the withdrawal to begin by noon, New York time, on Saturday, Feb. 23.

Gorbachev eventually got Baghdad’s agreement to a plan that he thought was good enough to at least bid for more time. He telephoned leaders of the anti-Iraq coalition. He said “a significant shift” had occurred.

The remaining differences, Primakov wrote, “were insignificant and amenable to agreement at the U.N. Security Council within one or two days.”

Time, however, was finally running out on the American clock.

BAGHDAD

During the back-and-forth with the Soviets, Saddam and his ruling Revolutionary Command Council had uttered, publicly, the words withdrawal and Kuwait for the first time in the same sentence. It was enough for most Iraqis.

Soldiers and civilians alike filled the air over Baghdad with the first expression of joy the city had known for weeks--the barrage of machine-gun and antiaircraft fire that is Iraq’s traditional celebration of a cease-fire. It mattered hardly at all that, in fact, there wasn’t one. Nor did many Iraqis pay much heed to the frenzied diplomatic missions between Baghdad and Moscow and Bush’s tough, hard-line rhetoric from Washington.

Hidden behind Iraq’s thick veil of secrecy, Saddam’s military commanders already were pulling out of Kuwait. Huge troop convoys were headed north. Many actually reached Baghdad several days before the ground war began. These troops, it would turn out, were only a little off schedule--a little ahead of the rest.

KUWAIT CITY

Banker Tarik Mazidi awoke in the middle of the night and tried to switch on the light to see what time it was. But the light wouldn’t go on. It was Feb. 24, and all of Kuwait city was now without electricity, telephones or running water.

Mazidi groped his way in the dark to the living room, where his father was sitting quietly.

“I asked him, ‘Has anything happened?’ Mazidi recalled later, still disbelieving what his father replied. “He said, ‘Yes. The Americans have entered Iraq and Kuwait.’

“I was very scared and very thrilled,” Mazidi remembers vividly. “I didn’t know what they’re going to do, the Iraqis, but seven months of misery, they’re going to put an end to it.”

No one knew quite what was going to happen next.

WITH ALLIED TROOPS

Col. Robert Siegle, 18th Airborne Corps, stood under camouflage netting at headquarters camp and drew the map of battle. It was straightforward and crude. He scraped it into the dirt of the Arabian high desert with the scuffed toe of his combat boot.

“This here is Kuwait. . . . But, ha!,” Siegle said with delight. He took a long step to the side, drawing his boot in an arc through the dirt. “We’re over here. “

His foot came to rest at a dogleg on the Saudi-Iraqi border, 100 miles west of Kuwait, 200 miles from the Persian Gulf. Siegle, the 18th Airborne Corps and 100,000 or so other American and allied soldiers had sneaked this far to the west. And they had rolled right up to the southern flank of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Officers like Siegle, commander of the 18th Aviation Brigade, had to pinch themselves. “He doesn’t know we’re here!”

How in the world could four divisions of armed troops come pawing and snorting up to your border and you not know? If Vietnam was remembered as the war America lost to the cunning of simple people, the Persian Gulf War was apt to be called the war it had won against dunderheads, however ferocious and “battle-hardened” they were portrayed in the advance billing.

American and allied troops aimed their eyes across the flat, gritty desert, their ears still ringing with Saddam Hussein’s threat that they would swim in their own blood. “I hate to sound like a warmonger, but it’s time to do it,” said Mike Southall, 34, of Galveston, Tex., a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division (the “Screaming Eagles”). “We’ve been practicing new and better ways to kill people. Let’s get it over with.”

Maj. Gen. Ronald H. Griffith, the crusty commander of the 1st Armored Division, steeled himself for fighting so fierce he thought it could claim 1,000 of his 20,000 troops, to say nothing of what might happen to other units.

An Army doctor, Maj. Jim Jenkins, surveyed with a sense of dread all the chest tubes and tourniquets that filled his stockpiles. And a chemical weapons specialist, Sgt. Warren Ocasio, reflected with mixed emotions on a $20 wager that he figured to collect when the Iraqis opened up with poison gas.

Journalists had entered Iraq with the forward elements of the 18th Airborne Corps wondering if they would be naming bloody battles, like the Pork Chop and Hamburger Hills of past wars. Soldiers and officers had trained a lifetime for these dreaded open-field fights to the death. Six months of gory and unnerving rhetoric from Baghdad had planted a seed of doubt in everybody. Just how-the-hell tough are these battle-hardened Iraqi Republican Guards, anyway?

Just after dawn, after a delay of a couple of hours because of fog and winds in Iraq, thumbs went up at staging areas all across the Saudi border.

G-Day.

And now, like an uncoiling spring, everything was in motion. The 1st Armored, a complete division, rumbled forward in a killing system 12 miles wide. The division neared a berm on the Iraqi border. Soldiers wondered about--no, feared--the hail of enemy fire that was sure to be waiting on the other side.

Near the point of the wedge roared a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, an operations officer in its forward hatch, juggling three radios to direct the attack. A reporter rode aft.

The Bradley charged through a hole in the berm.

It was quiet.

So far, it looked like the deception had worked.

The tanks of the 1st Armored roared across enemy territory. There came a mounting sense of elation.

Soon the division stood astride a spot, code-named Python, where its troops had expected to halt. But to the east, the Republican Guard was in full retreat, and instead of permission to rest, there came the crack of the whip: The 1st Armored would wheel to the right and keep rolling.

The war became pursuit, an all-night armored assault to crush everything that stood in the way. And in the ceaseless wind and rain, there grew a feeling close to omnipotence.

Sometimes, the spell was broken. The radio crackled with violence now at hand: A soldier was killed in a cleanup mission at an air base. And then a cavalry commander screamed out, “Cease-fire!” A dozen troops around him, he shouted, had been bloodied by shrapnel, and he was sure it was from ill-aimed American artillery.

But then that was past, and the attack rolled on, through a first wave of resistance--and at last, to confront the Republican Guard.

The 1st Armored charged toward a road, three of its brigades fighting abreast, and all was thud and flash and fire, American tanks straight in a row--and in the distance, specks that were the enemy began to erupt in flame.

It was the fight for which these soldiers had long braced.

From a helicopter, Gen. Griffith hoarsely cheered them on: It was the seventh game of the World Series. And Col. James Riley, a brigade commander, beamed with delight. “We’ve got ourselves a tank battle!”

For Col. Siegle and the 18th Airborne, the step-off had been routine. The faces of his soldiers were unmoving, neither tight nor drawn.

These were professionals, and this was their profession. They could as easily have been stock traders walking onto the floor of the exchange on a big day, lawyers striding into court for final arguments.

The sky over northern Saudi Arabia churned into a purple haze, filled with dust from their helicopters, tanks and trucks--this, the fastest Army corps ever on the move.

Their mission was simple: Cut off Iraqi lines of supply and routes of escape.

“Over that rise is Iraq. Gunners, get ready.” Capt. Kurt W. Fedors, of Gilman, Wis., spoke over the cockpit radio, within earshot of a reporter on board. Fedors flew a CH-47 helicopter carrying 2,500 gallons of fuel in a rubber bladder.

Everywhere across the front, vehicles and aircraft would penetrate deeper and faster than they could get fuel, despite huge armadas of these logistics helicopters that moved right along with the front-line elements.

Just off the ground, Fedors’ helicopter swayed uncomfortably. Its load sloshed.

“Load stable. Thirty feet.” It was the crew chief. A few seconds later, “Load stable. Twenty feet.”

The helicopter topped a rise. Iraq.

Enemy territory.

Escort Apache gunships rooted around over brush to the left and right.

Every man and every woman had a moment with private thoughts. First, relief. Determination. Prayer. Then wonder. Fear. Anger.

Within 30 minutes, the shape of the battle was told: Only isolated stands of resistance; a demoralized enemy, quick to surrender.

And it was that way for 99 1/2 more hours.

Sgt. John Steinbaugh, 23, of Erie, Pa., a pathfinder with the 101st Airborne Division, guided its air assault to a dry lake bed where a forward base, code-named Cobra, was being established. His mood reflected events. “This is cool,” he said. “I think we’re going right through ‘em!”

But as it turned out, many Iraqis wouldn’t even wait to be pushed through.

“It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen,” declared Col. Ron Rokosz, from Chicago, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne. “Every soldier I saw surrendered.”

Iraqis surrendered to reporters. They tried to surrender to a reconnaissance drone. They gave up en masse to anything that moved.

Thirty-six hours into the ground war, and the entire U.S. 18th Corps had suffered one wounded, none killed. If someone had devised a war game like this, they would have been fired for lack of realism.

“The speed and scope of our maneuver has caught him totally by surprise,” said Brig. Gen. Ed Scholes, deputy commander of the 18th.

But he meant no pity for Saddam Hussein.

The surprise and the flanking movement--the “Hail Mary play” devised by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf--had trapped the Iraqi leader cold.

The 1st Armored Division rumbled forward again, moving in for the kill near the Kuwaiti border. Short of fuel after a 150-mile cross-desert sprint, armor halted overnight so that tankers could catch up. At dawn, there came more thunder, artillery at maximum charge, and the tanks rolled into position for a grand finale.

But it was not to be.

After 100 hours of ground war following five weeks of aerial bombardment, there would be no more fighting. The Republican Guards--those that survived--were through. They ran. Some gave up.

Outside the protection of their tanks and armored vehicles, the 1st Armored troops and the journalists they brought along as witnesses to war could at last glimpse the totality of what had happened.

There lay blackened hulks of Iraqi tanks destroyed in the final clash. Around them, and sometimes under them, were bodies and the wreckage from weeks of devastation in the bombing that had broken the Iraqi will and sent its forces into flight.

On a barren stretch of desert, the disjointed battles had at last become one, and now the war was over.

President Bush and leaders of the allied coalition called it finished. The United States and its coalition partners owned the sky. They had retaken Kuwait. And they had taken with it a piece of southeastern Iraq that was bigger than Kuwait. They stopped before they could be called bullies.

Their combined arsenal had come to wage war against the reckless aggression of a man who commanded the world’s fourth-largest army.

But in the end, it came down to that same old low-tech ingredient: the one that gave the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese their grinding victory a generation ago--and the one that dealt the Iraqis their smashing loss this time.

It was the spirit of the troops in battle.

Capt. Chuck Sexton, 30, with the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, shrugged. “They just don’t have the heart for a fight with us.”

THE HOME FRONT

There was rejoicing across America that it had ended--and so well.

People watched on television as commanders from both sides walked into a tent in allied-occupied Iraq, turned the cessation of hostilities into a formal cease-fire and then arranged for an exchange of prisoners.

To everyone in the United States, it all looked very lopsided.

* More than 60,000 Iraqi prisoners of war; 45 allied prisoners.

* 135 Iraqi aircraft destroyed; 52 allied planes downed or missing.

* 73 Iraqi ships sunk or badly damaged; one allied ship put out of commission.

* 3,800 of 4,230 Iraqi tanks destroyed or captured.

* 1,856 of 2,870 Iraqi armored vehicles destroyed or captured.

* 2,140 of 3,110 Iraqi artillery pieces destroyed or captured.

* Unknown tens of thousands of Iraqi troops killed; 182 allied combat deaths, including 121 Americans.

A thorough victory, by any measure.

There weren’t thousands of American body bags after all. And anti-war demonstrations simply ended.

But about the dead, there was something to be remembered. The victorious Gen. Schwarzkopf had made the point, saying that even he, or--as he might prefer-- especially he, had no liking for war and would rather that there had not been one, with its casualties on both sides. It was miraculous, he said, that so few Americans had been killed. But those who had lost a loved one, he added, were not very likely to consider the outcome even a minor miracle.

To wit, Frank and Sammie Mitchell, who live in the Riverside County town of Moreno Valley. In a living room filled with the memorabilia of a 30-year Air Force career, Frank, 50, and his wife Sammie, 45, sit at a dining room table, shuffling through photographs showing a smiling little girl and an attractive young woman.

This was Adrienne at 1, her first passport--her parents were stationed in Taiwan when she was born. Adrienne in the 3rd grade. Adrienne graduating from high school.

Now, a videotape of Frank’s retirement ceremony at March Air Force Base. There’s Adrienne again, beaming with pride.

And there, atop the TV, is a portrait of the smiling little girl and her older brother.

Three American flags, folded in triangles, are displayed on shelves nearby. They were presented to Frank Mitchell upon his retirement. But it was Adrienne who put all three up on the shelves for everyone to see.

Frank and Sammie had not wanted Adrienne to join the Army.

But she never liked being told what to do. She saw the Army as a way to pay for college. She talked about studying law.

So, she joined, and before she was sent to Saudi Arabia, she had mailed a few of her belongings home. They came in cardboard boxes. Frank and Sammie had stacked the boxes near the kitchen counter. They were there now, unopened.

That same day, Frank Mitchell says, he came home from a new job, turned on the television and saw the U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, smoking. It had been hit by a Scud missile.

For some reason, he remembers, he turned to his wife and said: “Adrienne’s in there.”

That night, he couldn’t sleep.

“Monday was hard,” he says, “because my mind wasn’t working right. My mind was telling me something I didn’t know about.”

The next day, Sammie was home alone--and Army officers informed her that Adrienne had been killed. She called Frank and suggested he sit down.

“It’s Adrienne,” he said. “Isn’t it?”