Unsung Heroes? : Navy Launches Campaign to Let the Public Know of Its Role in the Persian Gulf War

Ask many Americans to describe the Persian Gulf War, and they will probably tell you how Air Force bombs flattened Iraqi defenses as Marines and soldiers fought a fierce 100-hour ground war.

The Navy is fearful that its role in the conflict may become lost in the shuffle.

“That is my nightmare,” groaned Capt. Jim Mitchell, a Navy public affairs officer--that the lasting civilian image of America’s fighting men in the Middle East will omit the Navy.

Dramatic videotapes early in the war showed Air Force pilots zeroing in on targeted buildings and blowing them to smithereens. The startling footage had a lasting--and reassuring--effect on Americans.

“Unfortunately, our recorders are very vintage--there would be a line down our videotape and CNN would say, ‘great shot but too much distortion,’ ” said Vice Adm. Edwin R. Kohn, commander of the Pacific Fleet’s Naval Air Force. “Our (videotapes) just did not come out as good. We made the decision years ago that it was not a priority. . . . The Navy efforts were fairly significant, but the Air Force always had a picture.”

It was not an easy war for the Navy to promote its image. Early it the war, the Navy was pounded by Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons showing soldiers sweating in desert trenches while one sailor turns to another and asks him to turn down the ship’s air-conditioning.

There were plenty of other hurdles in the Mideast: some senior Navy officers didn’t want to bother dealing with reporters; dispatching the media to ships proved problematic, and the Navy had fewer officers to escort reporters than did other branches of the armed services.

Not all the problems were logistic.

The Navy took a hit when The Times quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying that Air Force pilots had to be summoned after Navy pilots kept missing their targets. The official said last month that it took allied forces 790 sorties to hit 36 bridges in Iraq--a task initially assigned to Navy attack pilots flying off carriers.

After dozens of misses by the Navy’s unguided, “dumb” gravity bombs, the mission was re-assigned to Air Force jets that dropped laser-guided “smart” bombs.

To be sure, there were plenty of Navy accomplishments. The battleships Wisconsin and Missouri fired thousands of rounds from their big guns, destroying an Iraqi artillery battery in southern Kuwait and supporting ground troops. Navy commandos--SEALs--rescued a downed pilot and snared floating mines.

In the glow of a widely touted military victory, the branches of the armed services have begun to hustle to capture their share of the spotlight. During the days and weeks ahead, the Navy plans a concerted campaign to extol its endeavors in the desert war.

An electronic memo sent recently to Navy public affairs officers instructs them to cooperate on stories showing “the success of the operation and appreciation from family members, friends at home and the American people.”

“The public may not be aware of the role of the Navy,” said Chief Petty Officer Martin Wicklund, a Navy spokesman in San Diego. “We just got lost in the overall picture--which was a predominantly land war.”

This low profile could haunt the Navy in its increasingly competitive bid for its share of the shrinking Pentagon budget and recruits, some officials acknowledge.

Most of the 19 San Diego-based ships now deployed to the Persian Gulf region will take at least six weeks to steam home, and the Navy is concerned that the public’s current wave of enthusiasm for the military will be tepid by the time the ships finally reach their home ports.

“I just hope patriotism doesn’t have a shelf life. I hope it lasts for when our guys come back,” said Senior Chief Petty Officer Bob Howard, another Navy spokesman.

In terms of press attention, the Marine Corps and Air Force won the lion’s share--both at war and on the home front, Wicklund and others say. From January through early March, Navy public relations personnel in San Diego fielded 326 queries from reporters and staged 11 press conferences, Wicklund said. During the same period, their Marine Crops counterparts at Camp Pendletheir handled 1,594 queries and conducted 20 press conferences.

“There’s no question that the Marine Corps took a different tack,” Howard said. “We had our ships in harm’s way. We took the safe tactic on it, a smart tactic--when you look at the low casualties and the little intelligence Iraqis got, you see that our entire plan worked very well.”

Navy officials say they are accustomed to maintaining a low profile, and say many civilians don’t appreciate what happened in the early days of the conflict, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq and the United States was scrambling to respond.

“Who knows why Saddam Hussein was deterred from going to Saudi Arabia or going further than Kuwait?” Mitchell said. “Was it the rapid deployment of (the Navy’s two aircraft carrier) battle groups?”

Adm. Kohn, of the Pacific Fleet’s Naval Air Force, said many Americans still don’t realize that the Navy has pilots. “In the hinterlands, there’s not a realization that there are Naval aviators on carriers--people still think it’s the Air Force,” he said. “It’s frequently in the eye of the beholder. We had the same feeling in Vietnam.”

But for many players--especially Navy pilots--aware of the efforts of those who “ate smoke,” or flew bombing missions, the back seat can be frustrating. Although the Air Force won the public’s admiration for the bombings that “softened” Iraqi defenses, 30% of the missions were flown by Navy pilots.

At Miramar Naval Air Station, home of the famous Top Gun jet fighter school, the pilots have begun to chafe. Because there were few aerial dogfights, many fighter jocks simply had little role in this war.

“There’s a sense of, ‘Hey, we were there, too. I know we were there, but I don’t know what we were doing,’ ” said Chief Petty Officer Bobbie Carleton, a Miramar spokeswoman. “Our units were not standing in the North Arabian Sea waiting for something to do. But there are an awful lot of people in the military community taking their hats off to the Marines.”

In an effort to prop up public interest, the Navy has devised various pitches. One list released to public affairs officers details all the unprecedented Navy events that occurred during Operation Desert Storm.

There was, for instance, the first use of the cruise missile in combat when the guided missile cruiser Bunker Hill fired a Tomahawk on Jan. 16. And on Jan. 19, there was the first use of the new Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) from A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair aircraft operating off the carriers Kennedy and Saratoga. On the same day, the San Diego-based attack submarine Louisville fired a Tomahawk from underwater, another first.

And, if those events don’t knock anyone’s socks off, the list touts seven others. For the first time, remotely piloted aircraft--or drones--were employed by the Navy to spy on the enemy. In fact, on Feb. 27, a group of Iraqi soldiers actually attempted to surrender to one of the unmanned aircraft--marking yet another historic first.

Still, as the Washington-based Mitchell said, “It’s easier to cover ground forces. It’s much easier to cover the Air Force because it’s accessible--the Navy is inherently harder to cover.”

The problem was one of logistics, Mitchell and others say. Getting reporters out to ships deployed in the Gulf was difficult. Retrieving the reporters and film was even more complicated. And, when the war began, few reporters jumped at the chance to board a Navy vessel--perceiving that they might be stuck nowhere near the action.

“We offered embarks. No one, no one would take us up on it,” Mitchell lamented.

Other officials, however, conceded that, in part, the dearth of Navy coverage sprang from an unwillingness by some senior Navy officers to deal with the media.

“For a lot of senior Navy officials, the only involvement they want is to issue a statement saying ‘we won the war’ and have nothing more to do with the media,” said one Navy official, who asked not to be named. “It was just tunnel vision on the part of senior officers who looked only at missions and not beyond.”

So now, in the days and weeks ahead, the Navy will play catch-up. The return of ships will be played to the hilt, with efforts made to make sailors and crewmen available to describe their endeavors, officials said. They hope to demonstrate the crucial role played by the Navy.

“You are never going to win a war with the Navy but you are going to lose one without it,” said Rear Adm. Philip S. Anselmo, commander of the Pacific Fleet’s Fighter Airborne Early Warning Wing, which had seven squadrons deployed aboard carries in the war zone. “We understand that. We are going to be there first, we are going to be the guys who are the trip wire.”