COLUMN ONE : Where the Gulf War Endures : Americans salute victory over Iraq on this holiday. But the thousands who did the fighting are forever changed by the triumph and horror of their experience.

Across the country today, Americans are marking the Fourth of July with tributes to victory in the Persian Gulf, putting a period to the war .

But long after the cheers have faded, it is in the memory of individuals that wars endure. Like bits of shrapnel buried too deep for surgery, fragments of personal experience remain lodged inside those who did the fighting . Today, several hundred thousand Americans, outwardly untouched, have been changed forever.

Douglas Jehl was one of a handful of journalists who saw the ground war in the Persian Gulf from beginning to end. He accompanied combat troops of the 1st Armored Division on the daring end-run that took them deep into the heart of Iraq. This is his account of the personal experiences of three soldiers.

Even now, they remember “Garcia.” A shallow basin of sand stretching away to low dunes, it was the gathering place, the dusty jumping-off point to a war they could as yet only imagine.

There was something mystical about it. A lonely day’s travel from what was supposed to be the extreme edge of the American lines, it was like a scene from the Old West--one of those places far out on the plains, beyond the last Army post, where wagon trains and scouts paused one final time before plunging into Indian country. The same wind, the same sense of being alone.

An entire armored division, 18,000 soldiers, had crowded into the basin--a vast and astonishing secret. Tanks and fighting vehicles hunched together like squat dinosaurs. Behind them were row on row of field guns, the honeycomb barrels of the rocket launchers casting big, rectangular shadows in the sand. This was the vast litter and confusion of an army pulling itself together for the fight.

And, so far, the enemy appeared to have no idea they were there. This immense force had slid far to the west of the fearsome Iraqi defenses along the Persian Gulf and was poised for a flanking attack that would be one for the books.

There were so many troops and so much equipment that they had ground the surface of the desert into a fine powder that wafted up at every footstep. Helicopters, shuttling in and out like fearsome bugs, spawned gritty clouds that drifted over the entire encampment.

Lt. Col. William Reese, drawn and haggard, had come to Garcia early, out in front of a tank column, where his battalion of mechanized cavalry belonged. When the ground war began, Reese and his 800 scouts would be a rolling tripwire, roaming ahead to detect trouble--if only by stumbling into it. But Reese and his men would not have to stumble over the trouble that waited for them.

As gap-toothed Staff Sgt. Robert Hager, 34, waited for action, he saw himself as a seasoned soldier. He was also a man who always found something to worry about. In a few days, at the moment when the rest of the world was admiring America’s great victory from afar, he too would see--in a sudden blossoming of flame and greasy smoke--the pain and horror that lay beneath the surface of Operation Desert Storm.

Spec. 4 Rebecca Creighton, snatched from civilian life and dumped in Saudi Arabia only days before, arrived at Garcia with other raw recruits in a requisitioned tour bus, its neat window curtains still in place. Soon, alone in the cab of a lurching truck, lashed by rain and left by her unit in the farthest reaches of Iraq, she would emerge--in her own small way--a hero.

From Garcia onward, Creighton and Reese and Hager--and thousands more--would begin to see the true face of war. It reflected worry, isolation, the violence that came and as suddenly was gone, the way surviving or dying could be so haphazard it was hard to see the point.

Now, each company was drawn into a circled camp, tanks and vehicles facing outward. From the air, they resembled flowers, or giant gears packed close together. But they were like islands to those inside them--warrens of Army-green tents huddling together. Neighboring camps, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, were only hazy silhouettes. Most of the time, you did not know who was there or what they did.

It never entirely left your mind that things were about to happen that had never happened before. This was the most sophisticated fighting machine on Earth. But it had never really been tested in war. For the first time, it was about to face a real enemy.

Somehow, with so much at stake, it seemed as though the whole thing ought to feel more knitted together, more tightened up and ready to strike--not this feeling of being caught in a mechanism so ungainly that it could crush its own as easily as the enemy.

Saturday, Feb. 23

“Do not take counsel of your fears,” Lt. Col. Reese had admonished his officers again and again. But his own mood was grim. As he began the blind and bumpy ride through pitch blackness, back to his camp from the nightly brigade meeting, he was so exhausted he could barely stay awake.

The corps commander himself, a three-star general, had paid a surprise visit to the meeting. In the dimly lighted tent, with the brigade’s officers around a horseshoe of tables on the dirt floor, the general’s tone was strangely somber.

“Good luck,” he had said at the end of his remarks. “Good luck, and Godspeed.”

Reese knew what that meant. Some of his men flat were not going to make it. The intelligence briefings had predicted chemical weapons at first contact with Iraq’s Republican Guard. And there was endless concern about friendly fire.

At one of the meetings, someone recommended a makeshift device that involved a light bulb sheltered in a tin can to beam a bright light aloft. The idea was that friendly helicopters, but not the enemy, could see the light and avoid mistakes. The idea had been adopted, but no one was reassured.

You could not help thinking that, with an entire armored division crashing close behind you, friendly fire might be the greatest threat. The prospect of an Apache helicopter opening fire by mistake--as had already happened elsewhere--made one shudder just to think about it.

Reese commanded the Blackhawk squadron, lineal descendant of horse soldiers whose exploits in the Indian Wars had made them among the most decorated in the Army. More than 100 years later, Blackhawk’s troopers rode helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, steeds still chosen for their ability to ferry keen eyes forward.

There seemed too little time. By dawn, he would begin edging his troops up toward the double berm of sand that marked the Iraqi border. Somewhere to the east, U.S. Marines were kicking off the ground war and Reese wanted to be ready. But he found that his sense of foreboding had returned.

Sgt. Hager wasn’t much concerned about himself. After 16 years in the Army, the platoon sergeant knew what was what. He had already scrounged some sandbags and ringed the cockpit of his Bradley vehicle for extra protection. It just made sense when you were going out there with the armor.

But these kids, man, they didn’t know what they were in for.

Positioned well back in the formation--pygmies amid giants--his platoon consisted of 39 men packed into six Bradleys. They would move forward between two columns of heavy tanks, a kind of mechanized buffer that was expected to expand or contract as necessary if the tanks should begin to drift off course.

It was nervous-making work. Success depended on good communications and superiors following plans exactly. Not something you could bank on in the Army, Hager thought.

In the end, the most critical thing about Rebecca Creighton’s war against Iraq may have been that, on this particular Saturday morning, no one taught her how to put a six-axle fuel truck into reverse.

Only a month earlier, back home in Martinsburg, W. Va., the Army and the Gulf crisis had seemed far away to her. Though she had spent three years in the service, she now taught handicapped children. Sometimes, as she drove her Mustang to the day-care center, the news on the radio brought to mind old friends who must be there. But she could just slide “Madonna” or “Dire Straits” into the tape deck and the Gulf would recede again.

Then, at the end of January, the Army was back in her life. She was still a member of something called the Ready Reserve. By that weekend, she was Spec. 4 Creighton once more.

The first time around, the Army had been all order and rules. Now, all seemed hurry and chaos.

But nothing was more bewildering than the news that she was being assigned to drive a fuel truck. No matter that Creighton, slim and shy and of barely average height, had never before driven so much as an Army jeep.

It was simple: With a brigade of tanks, trucks and copters gulping 100,000 gallons of fuel a day, no one knew for sure whether support units could keep the attack moving. Whether the fuel trucks could traverse the open desert at all was a question.

A rupture in the fuel line could stall the blitzkrieg and open the door to disaster. And, where grand strategy came down to Creighton, there was a shortage of drivers.

On Saturday, when she climbed into the cab of the truck she would take to war, it was for driving lessons. Nor would she get one of the smaller, easier-driving “Hemat” tankers made for cross-country travel; she was assigned to a lumbering, 5,000-gallon behemoth intended for the autobahns of Europe.

Her instructor, Sgt. Christopher Uriegas, said there was plenty of time. The Army was not due to head north until Monday. With Uriegas at her side, Creighton spent a bumping, grinding hour struggling with the unfamiliar gears. By noon, both had had enough. She could make the tanker lurch forward.

The next day, they agreed, she would learn to back it up.

Sunday, Feb. 24

An operations officer slammed his field telephone onto its cradle. The battle plan was accelerating. A full day before anything was supposed to happen, the 1st Armored Division’s war was beginning. The order had come to prepare to move out, and the cavalry was nowhere to be found.

“Goddamn it,” the officer swore. “Where the hell is Blackhawk?” A major was sent racing forward in a Humvee to find Lt. Col. Reese.

To the cavalry commander, it was an old story. The tanks and infantry, hungry for better information but always afraid of losing contact with their scouts, were forever spurring them forward, then yanking back on the reins.

At 40, with a dark visage and troubled gaze, Reese did not usually take well to criticism. But this time he was contrite. Intent on getting closer to the berm, he had not noticed how long his radio had been silent. Somehow, he had outrun his communications.

The damned radios. He would have to reposition to restore the link. Yet, the news the major brought left little time to backtrack: He was to be in Iraq by early afternoon.

Creighton and her fellow drivers awakened early. She remembered the old Army line that soldiers got more done by 9 a.m. than most people did all day. And word was spreading that the plan had changed: No time for her second driving lesson.

With the other truckers, she synchronized her watch at noon, swallowed her first tablet of atropine to guard against nerve gas. She pulled on the charcoal-lined suit that turned hands and body grimy but was supposed to offer safety from chemical attack.

For fuel truckers, it was like being elephants in a parade, each clutching the tail of the beast ahead. Her company was on the left, divided into three lines. To the right, there were so many more columns that from afar they appeared as one vast shadow across the sand.

All the big-truck drivers were shunted to the outside, away from smaller vehicles that could not negotiate the ruts the behemoths would create.

The novice found herself last in line. She crossed into Iraq alone in the cab of a truck she knew almost nothing about. Her only thought was not being left behind.

Up ahead among the tanks, Hager, the platoon sergeant, had booby traps on his mind.

It was what everyone had been talking about as they loaded up. As he crossed through the berm, it was all he could think about.

Enemy prisoners wired to explode, everyone said. What would the Iraqis think of next?

Used to the days when the cavalry rode tanks, Lt. Col. Reese was a little ill-at-ease with the lighter Bradleys. His seat was on the right, inside the two-man turret, but he and his gunner preferred to stand, each man protruding from the waist through an iron hatch. The driver sat ahead in a cramped compartment of his own. The machines were not much larger than panel trucks, but well armed and equipped with thermal gun sights that enabled them to see an enemy that could not always see them.

And in motion they still had the constant clank and clatter of armor. Even to the gunner beside him, Reese had to speak by intercom. Special helmets made it simple: push a lever forward as an intercom, push it backward to reach the whole squadron. He was also juggling two handsets, links to the brigade and the division. He was doing his best to stay in touch.

For the moment, Reese felt reasonably secure. The latest intelligence showed the Iraqis’ main force still out of position, waiting in vain far to the east for the Army to charge headlong into Kuwait. The combat engineers had cut dozens of paths through the berm, and their bulldozers had not come under fire.

When the Blackhawk squadron pushed through in a formation 10 miles wide, it reported a desert as empty as the Saudi soil it left behind.

In theory, the American forces would operate virtually around the clock. The Army never tired of saying that it “owned the night.” For Sgt. Hager, however, and for the tank columns on either side of him, an order came to halt as darkness fell. Apparently the brass was taking no unnecessary chances.

Neither was Hager. He ordered his platoon to make solid contact with the units on either side. As he had feared, the scouts next door were not where they were supposed to be. To hold the formation together, his platoon had to stretch far to the left, finally making contact, not with the wayward scouts, but the tank battalion itself.

The long reach left his six Bradleys stretched across five miles. Over that distance, their radios were all but useless. Hager felt like an accordion stretched far too wide.

Spec. 4 Creighton watched the terrain grow rougher, rockier, littered with heavy brush. The weather, windy from the outset, turned rougher still. Swaying back and forth as the tanker rocked along on its path, at times she felt a dizzy disconnection.

Warned about mines, the drivers stuck to one another’s tracks. Creighton stopped when the truck in front of her stopped; when it moved, she hurried to catch up. Her horizons narrowed further as darkness began to fall, the truck ahead now a pinprick of green taillight. Sometimes she focused so intently that the green light seemed to swim.

For distraction, there was music, blasting through the headphones of her Walkman. The “Madonna” and “Dire Straits” so familiar back home kept Creighton company in Iraq, and she sang to herself to stay awake.

When the supply columns halted for the night, a dozen miles inside Iraq, there was no appetite for the aviation fuel Creighton carried. She was left in peace to marvel at the empty quiet of the desert. She curled up inside her cab and went to sleep.

Monday, Feb. 25

The cavalry scout columns moved north again at first light, toward Iraqi outposts code-named Bear, Bull and Dog. It was here that intelligence had predicted the division would meet its first opposition. What the cavalry found, instead, was prisoners.

The consensus in all those prewar meetings had been that this was not the cavalry’s business. At one session Reese had even rehearsed the battle plan aloud: “I see guys raising their arms, and I just keep going.”

But the size of this capitulation was beyond all imagination. The Iraqis stood in ragged clusters, plaintive and pitiful. There was no one else to pick them up. For each group of prisoners, the colonel left a cavalryman behind as guard. Somehow they would have to catch up to the main force later. Still, depleting his force was worrisome. He remembered maps that showed Iraq’s most potent units lying further on. What he had faced so far was nothing but the dregs.

Hager also encountered a surrendering Iraqi soldier, but the sergeant wasn’t worrying about how to care for a POW. His mind was on booby-traps. If he moves his hands, Hager decided, I’m going to have to shoot him.

But the Iraqi was only too glad to lie spread-eagled in the sand. Hager began to wonder whether the booby-trap rumor was founded in any truth.

In the afternoon it began to rain and the hard-packed sand dissolved into soup. The first time Creighton’s wheels spun, she jabbed the accelerator. That only dug her in deeper. The truck shuddered to a halt. Night had fallen. The column ahead continued, faint green dots disappearing in the darkness.

Remembering snowdrifts back home, she thought of rocking the truck back and forth. She also remembered what she had missed when her second driving lesson was canceled: she still could not find reverse.

Damn, she thought, beginning to take stock. She had field rations and a rifle--but this was Iraq. For a moment, she considered leaving the truck and hoofing it across the desert in search of another convoy.

Then out of the wind and rain came the Army’s good Samaritans, a roving crew of wreckers armed with winch and hook. In minutes, she was headed north again, squinting in the darkness, a lost caboose rushing to catch up with its train.

Tuesday, Feb. 26

Waiting in the wet darkness outside Al Busayyah, Sgt. Hager saw the first rockets of the bombardment streak overhead, each ball of fire rising slowly, like a golf ball from a tee.

After years of practicing for battle, the platoon sergeant felt the exhilaration that could only come from the real thing.

The rest of the artillery joined in a little later. He could see the bright muzzle flashes long before the big guns’ thunder made its way across the desert. The platoon began to roll toward Al Busayyah and into a firefight.

Hager could hear, ever louder, the pop, pop, pop of small-arms fire from Iraqi bunkers. Outside, bullets began to slam into his sandbags, ripping through the canvas but unable to pierce the armored vehicle’s steel skin. In the distance, Hager spotted an armored target of his own.

After so many shots at training-range targets, he thought what the hell. He couldn’t believe he had scored a hit until the Iraqi track came to an abrupt halt.

The cavalry moved into the driving rain at 10 miles an hour, the storm so fierce by midafternoon that Lt. Col. Reese could see no more than 400 yards ahead. And with every mile they moved east, the danger became greater. The desert was no longer empty. Recognizing at last that the Americans had outflanked them, Republican Guard units were racing to close the door and cover the retreat.

From the right flank, there came reports of Iraqi tanks moving north and west to cut off the American advance. The colonel could feel his apprehension bite. The whole division was counting on Reese to find the enemy. And the best tools for that job would be the OH-58 Cobras. To send helicopters aloft in such weather would violate peacetime rules. Yet without them, Reese worried, he might lead the division into an ambush.

As he agonized, over the radio came a request from the Air Force. A pair of fighter planes peering through the tattered clouds had spotted what might have been a line of tanks dug in about six miles ahead. Could someone move in for a closer look?

With misgivings, Reese sent the Cobras of Charlie Troop into the fog. What was out there? The first reports were inconclusive; then, just over the horizon, the vague shapes took tank form. Within minutes, the count reached 25.

The commanding general wanted such Iraqi forces destroyed from afar. For Reese, this would be the first test of the doctrine. Fighter-bombers would carry the fight, tanks and the Apache attack helicopters would mop up. All the cavalry had to do was keep out of the way.

But Reese’s helicopters, still hovering, reported that the Iraqis seemed to sense something. Their tank commanders were peering westward through binoculars. Though they hadn’t seen the choppers through the clouds, Iraqi tanks on full alert could be dangerous. If the Cobras fired their rockets, they might create a protective diversion for the Air Force.

The choppers inched slowly forward and opened fire, just over 600 yards shy of the Iraqi line. If the fog should lift, the pilots would be sitting ducks. And almost immediately, the kind of news he had feared: a pilot in distress, his chopper landing hard in the sand. The Air Force was beginning its attack and the downed helicopter lay in a deadly no-man’s-land, within point-blank range of the enemy guns.

The chopper was still functioning, but unless the load could be lightened, its engine was too weak to lift the bird into the air. The only way was to fire the missiles stowed on the fuselage, half a dozen to a side. As the pilot began his salvo from the ground, Reese steeled himself in his Bradley for the moment the Iraqis would spot the source and return fire.

Miraculously, the ploy worked. The chopper, unburdened, began a crippled hop back toward safety.

There was little time to dwell on the close call. As dusk began to settle, division radio was alive with reports of Iraqis on the run, cutting loose, abandoning positions.

The Army would give chase, even if it took all night. And, as Reese would discover, nothing could be more dangerous than a headlong rush to victory.

Rebecca Creighton had escaped her first false step into the quagmire, but it would not be her last. Soon her truck was splayed in an awkward jackknife--sad and funny all at once. There was a shovel in the cab, and she began to dig with a vengeance.

This time, when the wreckers showed up to pull her out, they had news that turned her embarrassment to pride. Other drivers had just plain given up. Of the four big tankers in the battalion, only hers was left.

Now the schoolteacher began to think of war as a personal struggle.

The storms--the worst in two decades--had made a shambles of the division’s refueling plans. With many trucks hopelessly mired and plans for regrouping lost in the rush to smite a reeling foe, the entire division was “nail-biting-close on fuel.” The smaller, more agile Hemats were sent scurrying back to scavenge. They were like leeches; when they came upon a stalled tanker truck, they would suck it dry.

But not Creighton’s. Against all odds, carrying the fuel that no one seemed to want, she was still moving forward.

Only the pale green pinpricks of the taped-over taillights on the Bradley Fighting Vehicles relieved the blackness. At a distance, they dimmed to nothing. Even through thermal sights, armored vehicles were visible only as murky hot spots, all but unidentifiable.

Even so, around midnight, Lt. Col. Reese’s cavalry found what it was looking for: a line of Iraqi armor screening a road and, on the road itself, a stream of enemy trucks and jeeps in desperate retreat.

The scouts’ task was not to fight. Instead, alerted by Blackhawk, the whole 1st Armored Division would hurry forward: artillery, rockets and assault helicopters hammering the enemy, then the heavy tanks charging through Reese’s positions to crush whatever remained. God help his scattered battalion, Reese thought, if someone should make a mistake.

Reese tightened his ranks, hoping to make his units easier for friendly gunners to identify. Across the forward edge, the spread narrowed from 12 miles to five.

Then word came that Apache helicopters might be attacking from the rear. Reese ordered his men to shine the makeshift “whoopee” lights aloft.

Sometime before 2 a.m. he decided to make a swing along the front lines. He was almost back, less than a mile from his headquarters, when he heard the first whistling sound. He was riding as usual with his head and shoulders above the rim of the open hatch when the ground in front of him erupted; he was all but blinded by what seemed to be 10,000 flashbulbs going off at once. Instinctively, he ducked inside his armored vehicle.

Clinging to his seat and looking upward, he stretched his arm to close the hatch but had second thoughts. He pulled his hand away just before the next explosion. He stared dumbfounded at the damage where he had been about to put his arm: armor plate pocked with craters, an antenna sheared from its sturdy base.

Instantly, through his headset, came shouts of confusion and panic, voices he recognized, yelling, wounded men crying in anguish. The ground was alight again, more flash and roar and din--the explosions outside and the shouting in his ear competing in a profane and awful medley.

“Goddamn it!” Reese himself was shouting over the brigade channel. “Turn it off!” He was almost sobbing in frustration now, unable to stop the barrage. It was so relentless, so accurate, so precise, that he thought it must be friendly fire. “Incoming! Incoming!”

He was yelling too. “Who’s shooting?”

Even miles away in the back of a Bradley, the radioed shouts made your stomach clutch. The division had paused for fuel, and it was raining softly. Some of us had begun to doze. But you knew instantly that the crackling in your ears was terror, live--like a machine gun opening fire on a quiet neighborhood street. Here was chaos, horror; and no one knew from whom or where it came.

This was the war you had feared all along and, deep down, expected. Now, just ahead, it was happening to what had begun to feel like your own unit.

In Sgt. Hager’s platoon, these had already been anxious hours. The division’s pace had been faster than ever, almost a stampede. As keeper of the seam, the platoon had become a cowherd in danger of being trampled. Tanks from the battalions on either side seemed intent on crossing into each other’s path. At the worst moments, the platoon found itself squeezed into a single column, the tanks on either side passing a bare five yards away. The crew dubbed it the night from hell.

Then, in the bliss of a fuel stop, came the news that the cavalry was hit.

Until now, the platoon sergeant had been riding upright in the macho stance of hundreds of tank commanders--map in hand, binoculars around the neck, eyes blinking back the rain.

Now he crouched low in his seat, yanking the steel hatch almost shut. This was Hager’s clamshell; he peered out at war through a thin crack.

Wednesday, Feb. 27

By morning, Lt. Col. Reese’s fury had begun to wear itself out.

Reese, dumbfounded, the radio still in his hand, had kept demanding an explanation. Iraqi shells exploded with a single bang, not with the ferocity of a barrage. A friendly artillery salvo must have gone awry, and now no one would admit it. Or a fighter plane had dropped a cluster bomb. For answers, he got baffled shrugs. Looking down at his bleeding men, the colonel had seethed with anger.

As the big tanks had moved through his lines, their heavy treads had set off the unexploded shells and the cavalry had cowered to the side. Now, as the sky began to lighten, the circumstances seemed to matter less than the fact that it was over.

For a brief period, the morning brought respite for Sgt. Hager’s little band. After picking its way through the cavalry, the rest of the division had paused again for breath. The sounds of war were far off; the gale had eased.

They unstrapped water jugs from the back of their Bradleys and washed for the first time in three days. Hager took off his boots to massage his swollen ankles, then thought to inspect his men too. They were a platoon of sadly bloated feet.

When the order to move came again, word was that just ahead lay the Medinah division, perhaps the strongest remaining element of the Iraqi Republican Guard.

They rumbled forward, tanks and Bradleys in a line, the platoon packed tight between battalions. The map showed a road just ahead. There was a call to get guns forward, to get eyes on the road. They cleared a gentle slope and their lieutenant, peering ahead through his thermal sight, was shouting holy hell. There were targets everywhere, a menacing line under jet-black clouds, the glow of tanks dug in behind sand barriers.

The advance units eased back a few dozen yards to take cover behind the wrinkle of the ridge. Then the tanks on either side of Hager were firing. And Hager was ordering his men to fire their TOW missiles as well, and then to fire again. The war had become a tank battle at last.

From far away came the flashes of enemy tanks firing back. The platoon sergeant braced for the roar that would mean they had struck home, but the shells were falling short--just sprays of sand in the distance. It dawned on Hager that he was out of the Iraqis’ range. Now it was ducks in a row, a heady rush, and his guys were lined up like musketeers for a nonstop fusillade.

From the tanks next door, the main-gun thud was both horrible and terrific; crouching in his Bradley, Hager found so much to shoot at that the TOW missiles soon ran low. Once, enemy artillery threatened to find the range, the ground beginning to burst and flash all around his unit. But the enemy battery was soon silenced and the Apache helicopters were thwop-thwopping overhead to take out whatever might be left.

The drivers of steel-tracked tanks did not have to worry much about the scattered shells; but a driver of a rubber-tired truck did. And in her exhaustion, Creighton stumbled into one last terror. It was daylight; the all-night march must have blurred her sight. Too late she recognized the yellow canister that told her she had wandered where supply trucks did not belong. Then came the explosion.

Creighton’s luck held. She herself was unhurt. And when she climbed down from the cab, she found nothing more serious than a front tire blown to shreds on a mangled metal rim.

There was a spare, but it had been a long time since she had changed a tire, and that was back home. This tanker, she figured, weighed as much as 50 Mustangs. It was easy to undo the bolts that held the spare in place. But when she thought about crawling under the six-axle truck itself, she hesitated.

The wrecker crew, when they materialized once more, wrestled with the wheel for close to an hour. But they got her moving again.

When word came that Sgt. Hager’s platoon would move once more, the storm-dark sky was black with diesel smoke and the smoldering of ammunition bunkers. Suddenly the battalion to the left was lurching forward, before anyone was ready, and their lieutenant had to shout for the platoon to catch up. This was harder going, no longer empty desert but the wasteland of battle, obstacles ahead glowing with soft fire.

And then the battalion was swerving farther left, almost reckless in its charge, and Hager’s platoon still had to follow, straining to bridge the gap. It moved in a ragtag line, the six Bradleys in a row. As they slid sideways past a burning bunker, Hager found himself at the rear.

Then a cloud of smoke appeared ahead of him. His lead Bradley was burning, its crew bursting from the hatches and running across the desert. Hager watched in dull shock, and then the horror was at hand. On his left, another Bradley was hit, engulfed in lurid flame.

He was alongside in a reflex. Outlined against the smoky sky were three Iraqi soldiers, an ambush team in flight. As they ran, one still carried the hand-held launcher that had fired the rocket-grenades. Hager and his gunner centered him in their sights and opened fire, main gun and machine gun at full clip.

They held down the triggers until all three were dead.

But all that remained of the Bradley driver was his torso, tossed upon the sand. And when Hager and his men pulled the others from the rear, they found flesh seared and limbs jutting at grotesque angles. As they laid the gunner down, it was already clear that his leg was lost.

News of the ambush traveled quickly. It raced upward from the platoon to the battalion, to the brigade, the division, then the corps. At every step the news caused shock, and a reappraisal. Perhaps there was still something out there in the unsettled dusk. What had seemed a chance for a final blow against a helpless foe now seemed a foolhardy risk.

With night approaching, the order came down: This Wednesday evening, the division was to stay put.

Thursday, Feb. 28

That was how it ended.

There was to be no final, climactic battle--not for Sgt. Hager’s men or the cavalry, not for Rebecca Creighton or anyone else. Overnight, as soldiers slept, the cease-fire was arranged. The artillery let loose a final, pre-dawn salvo before the 8 a.m. deadline. Then silence took hold.

The rain had finally eased. The sun was peeking out.

Behind the lines, Reese found that his anger was now spent. It had been bad, the colonel thought. Twenty-four of his men were hurt; 14 vehicles were destroyed. But no one had died. And for the somber officer, there was a sense of release, of insulation from danger. At last, Blackhawk was no longer out front.

Creighton and her truck, its load now craved by thirsty helicopters, were hailed as heroes in their small world. No heavy tanker in the whole division had made it further forward. Already she had decided that she owed her success to the scarcity of alternatives. It was best, Creighton would say later, that she learned only to drive her truck forward, and never in reverse.

The searing immediacy of the war has receded now, the triumph and the horror mixed in a dull glow. But it is still there, down inside. The sight of a thin moon can bring you back to the desert, back to Garcia and the all-night march, and your muscles clench all over again.

Rebecca Creighton, back home in Martinsburg, W. Va., and undecided about her future in civilian life, is sure of one thing: She never wants to relive her experiences in the Iraqi desert. “Once was enough,” she says.

For Lt. Col. Reese, looking back three months after the battle from his home in Anspach, Germany, what endures are lessons about the power of fear. To block it out, he says, is easier said than done. But in the march forward from Garcia, he reflects now, there was a nobility in having conquered it.

The March Across Iraq

Here is the path of the 1st Armored Division from the start of the ground war in Iraq through the cease-fire 100 hours later. Garcia: A small depression in the desert on the Saudi-Iraqi border, jumping-off point for start of the division’s ground war. Bear: One of three Iraqi outposts where the armored division expected to meet its first opposition. Python: Site of a skirmish that marked a turning point in the 1st Armored Division’s advance. After the quick victory, the division accelerated its pace to meet Iraqi forces. Bonn: Site of one of the biggest tank battles of the war. It pitted the 1st Armored Division against the Medinah Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. Denver: A point deep inside Kuwait at which the division aimed to cut off retreating Iraqi forces. A cease-fire halted the hostilities before the final offensive could begin.