A Farewell to “Thumbscrew 6”, aka President George H. W. Bush, our Beloved Commander in Desert Storm

From the 1966 edition of the Standard College Dictionary: thumb-screw; an instrument of torture for compressing the thumb or thumbs.

President and Mrs. Bush came to Saudi Arabia to spend Thanksgiving 1990 with the troops. Unfortunately, my battalion was not chosen to host them. A very dapper brigadier who was the 18th Airborne Corps chief of staff had come to the battalion to assess our suitability to host the event. He declared that our area was not “scenic enough”. We didn’t know what that really meant but did admire his Humvee with its NEW desert paint job and shined sidewalls on the tires. We also admired his pressed desert uniform, maroon beret and dare I mention it, his NEW Desert Boots! I did ask him where he got the boots since we were in fairly desperate need of boots at that point,and he very condescendingly told me you just order them from supply. Gee, I wish I had thought of that! It seemed that staff nugs way back in the rear could get the desert boots but line doggies could not. We had heard that song many a time already in the three months we had spent in Desert Shield up to then. I will have more on that in the book I’m working on, Task Force Striker in the Last Good War which I am writing for my guys who pester me at every battalion reunion to get it done. (Yes, Mark Faul, I’m working on it damnit!)

A sister battalion hosted the President and his wife, and we were allowed to select some soldiers to go over to that battalion to participate. All of them came back really pumped up from seeing the President and many of them got a chance to shake his hand. All of them somehow got to talk to Barbara Bush and could not say enough good things about her. Their visit so far from home to be with soldiers on that special day is a lasting tribute to them both. It was a tremendous boost to morale. I did not get a chance to see the President and Mrs. Bush.  I had been told I could attend but declined to do so because all of my soldiers could not also attend. It was much more important to me to spend Thanksgiving with my troops when we were all so far from home and our loved ones. They were (and still are) part of my family.

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas were busy for us. The division commander, MG Barry McCaffrey had come to visit us which he did at least monthly and pulled me off to the side. He asked if my M113 Armored Personnel Carriers (APC’s) had their track shrouds mounted. (Track shrouds are a rubber skirt that hangs down over the road wheels of an APC that help it to swim and also aids traction in loose sand and light mud.) I told him they did. He said that he was glad to hear that and that my battalion may be called upon to do an assault river crossing up in Iraq. Our sister M113 battalion had not deployed with their track shrouds and could not swim their APC’s so we would be on our own if it happened. The rest of the infantry battalions in the division were equipped with Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles which didn’t swim well if at all. By this time, we were rehearsing with map exercises at the division command post for the attack into the Euphrates River Valley so I had a good idea of what water I may be tasked to cross. My battalion, Task Force Striker would lead the far western attack of the 24th Infantry Division as part of the 197th Infantry Brigade.

Christmas came and went, and we finally began our movement west to a new assembly area in preparation for taking the Tap Line Road up to our jump off positions for the attack in western Saudi Arabia. On 22 January 1991 I was called to my tactical operations center (TOC) to talk to General McCaffrey who was on the secure phone. General McCaffrey told me he needed my battalion to deploy immediately to the division jump TOC (DTAC for short) up on the Iraqi border which was in imminent danger of being attacked by the Iraqi’s. I was to leave my APC’s behind and could only take wheeled vehicles and as many troops and crew served weapons as I could stuff into my own trucks. My trucks were all uploaded with ammunition and other supplies like food and water at that point. General McCaffrey said they would get me a convoy clearance to move on the Tap Line Road where traffic flow and march discipline was being strictly enforced. If you didn’t have a convoy clearance number,  you couldn’t get onto the road. The MP’s were stationed all along the road and would turn back any vehicles without a convoy clearance number. The general told me to call him back when we were ready to move. I asked General McCaffrey why he was not passing his orders through my brigade commander rather than calling me direct. He said he would call my brigade commander next but wanted me to hear directly from him on my mission. I was to communicate directly with him and not go through brigade.

Thanks to some quick and hard work by the battalion and its leaders, the trucks were downloaded and the troops ready to mount them after an hour and a half. I called General McCaffrey and told him we were ready to go. He said they were having trouble getting my convoy clearance but were working it hard. He told me to stand by.  About an hour later General McCaffrey called to say they still could not get my clearance. By this time, it was getting on to late afternoon. He again told me to stand by.  I called my battalion XO in and told him to go down to the Tap Line Road and see what a convoy clearance number looked like. I specifically wanted the sequence of numbers and letters being used. As an example, two letters followed by a number, a letter again, two numbers and soon. He asked me why I wanted it and I told him to just go and to be quick.

The XO came back about forty minutes later with the sequencing of a clearance number. I took it and created a convoy clearance number with the same sequencing of numbers and letters. I told the XO to get all the vehicles marked with that number as quickly as he could. He looked totally mystified and asked me why and I told him to just get on with it which he did in record time. When he came back, he reminded me that the convoy clearance numbers we were using were not legal. I thanked him for his input and then I briefed all my company commanders and the scout platoon leader on our march route. When we halted for fuel, we might get caught with the bogus clearance number, but they were to press on to Raffa where the DTAC was located. I told the XO to wait thirty minutes after we left and then call brigade and tell them we had a convoy clearance number (which was true as far as it went!) and that we had departed enroute to Raffa. He was to ask them to pass that along to division. I did not call General McCaffrey and tell him I had created my own convoy clearance number and was moving out. That would have made him a party to my crime if it went badly for us and we got caught violating the march restrictions on the Tap Line Road.

The trip was about 250 miles along the Tap Line Road which was the only paved road in northern Saudi Arabia that ran east-west. It was a two-lane road with heavy equipment transporters (HET’s) flying by us coming back from dropping tanks and Bradley’s off further west. We were coming from the east and going west. The HET’s were driven by TCN’s (third country nationals that had come to Saudi Arabia for work from every third world nation in the world) who  drove like madmen. The side of the road was littered with wrecked HET’s which attested to their lack of common sense and poor driving skills. There was no speed limit as far as they were concerned. We were moving at a sedate forty miles and hour which was the posted speed limit. The HET in front of me had a Syrian T-72 Russian tank on it with its gun barrel point directly at us. We were glad when it finally pulled off the road at its destination. That Syrian T-72 was there because President Bush had formed the largest coalition of countries since the Second World War to fight Saddam Hussein and free Kuwait. The coalition numbered 34 countries and were a tribute to President Bush’s incredible leadership and statesmanship.

We drove on into the night and finally stopped for fuel. This was where the fun started. There was a young soldier with a clipboard standing by when we pulled in to refuel. He asked me if I was the convoy commander and I told him no, he was further back in the convoy. He went to every single vehicle and asked the same question and got the same answer. He had written down our convoy clearance number when we pulled in and I’m sure it wasn’t squaring with his list of convoys, hence his desire to talk to the convoy commander. He finally got to the last vehicle in the convoy which was our battalion chaplain’s vehicle. He asked the chaplain if he was the convoy commander to which he responded, “No, I’m the chaplain! The convoy commander is up front some place.” By the time the young soldier was making his way back to the head of the convoy we were pulling back on to the Tap Line Road and on our way. We arrived at the DTAC at first light on 23 January 1991. I remember the day well because it was my 40th birthday. I knew my dad, a fellow infantryman, would have been proud of me for spending my birthday traveling to the front with my battalion.

I walked into the DTAC looking for Brigadier General Terry Scott who was our Assistant Division Commander for Maneuver (ADCM). In my last conversation with General McCaffrey he told me to report to General Scott if I ever got up there. General Scott was not in the DTAC but the assistant G3 who was the DTAC operations officer proceeded to give me instructions on what to do with my battalion. I had known this officer for a number of years in earlier assignments and had never been impressed. What he said was, “Here is what I want you to do…”and what he was directing made no tactical sense which was not a big surprise. As I said, I knew him. I told him I didn’t take orders from staff officers and thanked him very sarcastically for offering me coffee which he had failed to do. I had no sleep for over 24 hours at this point and my patience for dealing with clowns was minimal.  I started to walk out of the DTAC and he asked where I was going. I told him I was going out to make some goddamned coffee and to let me know when General Scott returned. I suggested rather strongly that he contact General Scott on the radio and let him know that Task Force Striker had arrived. That thought had apparently not occurred to him. As I said, I knew him.

About fifteen minutes later General Scott drove up and warmly welcomed us. You could see he was clearly relieved to have some combat troops on hand to secure the Iraqi border and protect the DTAC. What he told me to do with the battalion was directly opposite of what his operations officer was trying to direct.  If I had listened to the operations officer, we would have been doing cheetah flips to undo it all and comply with General Scott’s orders. We moved out but before we did, General Scott asked me how we had gotten up to the DTAC because the last word he had from General McCaffrey was that we still didn’t have a convoy clearance. I told him he didn’t want to know the answer to that question and later, much later I would explain it to him. He looked puzzled but let it go. We moved into our positions and proceeded to dig in. We put out wire and claymores and spent the next three weeks patrolling the border and even captured a few prisoners, the first prisoners captured in the division.

Eventually the rest of the brigade came forward about mid-February and we were relieved from division control and reverted back to brigade control. We shifted further to the west and conducted combat patrols into Iraq making contact with Iraqi forces several times. The task force engaged and destroyed with multiple launch rockets (MLRS) from the artillery an Iraqi air defense battery. As part of that strike which will be recounted in detail in the book, the Iraqi’s ammunition dump went up with a hell of a roar and flash that lit the horizon up. All the way up to the start of the ground war, we were patrolling into Iraq, going further and further each time. The purpose of the patrols was to ensure that no significant Iraqi forces would impede the ground attack once it started. The 24th Division was scheduled to start it’s attack into the Euphrates River Valley on G+1; the day after G Day which was the start of the ground attack over in the Kuwait area. That was not to be, of course.

We had been out all night on another combat patrol in Iraq and had recrossed the border back into Saudi Arabia on the morning of G-Day. We had all been without sleep for over 24 hours at that point and were looking forward to food and some sleep before we started our ground attack the next day. The task force was all over the place with Delta Company in position inside Iraq and the other companies spread out covering our sector of the border. I was just getting ready to lay down for some sleep when my S3 came over and said we were to start our attack early. I asked how early and he said in about an hour and a half. I then asked where the line of departure (LD) was and he said 15 kilometers inside Iraq. When the division planners drew that LD line, they had drawn it straight across the map from where they were and unfortunately, our positions were well south of that. The Saudi-Iraq border dipped well to the south along our stretch of the line. I put out a guidons call to the task force. (I would broadcast “Guidons. Guidons this is Striker 6, over.” on the command net and all my subordinate units would answer in sequence which was the most efficient way to put out an order to the entire task force.)  Once all units had answered,  I gave instructions for them to form up in battle formation and prepare to move out in one hour. It would take us the other half hour we had left to get to the LD on time.

Task Force Striker had the lead for the brigade attack. We were the main effort which meant if we didn’t cross the LD on time, the whole brigade would be late and punctuality, although a social courtesy, is in fact a military necessity. We scrambled but we made it on time. We started north across the desert to our first objective which was an asphalt road going from nowhere to nowhere about 100 kilometers inside Iraq. It was called SCUD road because it was believed that the Iraqi’s built it in the middle of nowhere to move their SCUD missile mobile launchers around in a shell game to fool our intelligence gathering capabilities and reduce the chances of air attack. There were no roads going north and we were moving based on dead reckoning with a compass. GPS was in its infancy and provided only sporadic use when enough satellites could be acquired. We only had two GPS systems in the task force and they never worked at night when you needed them the most. There were not enough satellites in range during the night back then for some reason.

The brigade cavalry troop was to scout ahead of Task Force Striker to the first objective. They were coming in from their assembly area further east and would join us enroute after we crossed the LD which they did. I had previously asked my brigade commander what I was supposed to do if the cavalry troop stopped. I had every confidence based upon my knowledge of the troop commander who was a short, tubby, cocky and arrogant fellow that he would not press on all alone and unafraid in the dark when the time came. My brigade commander was very irritated by my question and said tersely that the cavalry troop would not stop. I told him if they did, I was going to pass through them and continue the attack.  He reiterated that they would not stop!

As soon as it started to get dark, my scout platoon which was leading the task force reported that the cavalry troop stopped. I called the troop commander and asked him why he was stopped. He gave me a very vague response about having to reorganize and consolidate which was a bullshit answer. I told him to keep moving and he said he could not but did not have a reason why he could not. I ordered my scout platoon to pass through the cavalry and keep moving north. I called the brigade commander and told him we were passing through the cavalry troop because they would not continue. I requested that the three artillery pieces that were part of the cavalry troop be attached to my task force since they were now being left behind. The brigade commander refused my request. He had refused all my earlier requests to have an artillery battery attached to my task force for immediate fire support, assuring me each time that I would get fire support when I needed it. As I had anticipated, that did not happen, and we fought the Republican Guard in the valley without artillery support but more on that later as I write the book.

We pressed on with the scouts leading all through the night. We reached SCUD Road at first light and cleared the zone with minimal contact. There was very little there other than an abandoned air defense radar as it turned out, but we did capture the first thirty or so Iraqi soldiers out of the over 1700 we would eventually capture in the Euphrates River Valley. As we waited for the brigade main body to close with us, we continued to clear all the enemy positions we found, which again were mostly abandoned. I was called back to the rear to meet with the brigade commander for a change of plan for the next stage of the attack.

The brigade commander told me that my task force would continue our attack going to the east and then turn north to the Euphrates River Valley. He was going to take the rest of the brigade and move due north and link up with us closer to the Euphrates. I asked why he was not going to follow us since part of our mission was to clear the way of any enemy forces. He said it would be faster if the main body went north and then linked up with us. He showed me his proposed route on the map and I tried to tactfully (not my usual demeanor, I know) point out that all the contour lines that came together on his route meant that vehicles could not get through there. Our maps were sketchy at best but this time they clearly showed a drop-off of several hundred feet on his route. He very rudely told me he knew how to read a map and that I was wrong.  I suggested that since we were going on diverging routes that I should have an artillery battery attached to me. He again refused and said I would get fire support when I needed it. He was tired of me asking that question but not nearly as tired as I was with his refusals.

We saddled up as it was starting to get dark and headed east. The scouts were in the lead and came to a wadi (Arabic for a canyon on deep gully) that was at least 150 feet deep with almost sheer sides. It was not on our maps. We stopped on the lip of this precipice as the scouts went ahead in the dark looking for a way through. About thirty minutes later the scout platoon leader came back and told me they had found a way through the wadi but there was only one way down and one way up the other side so the entire task force would have to file one vehicle at a time through the route. That move took several hours but all the vehicles safely transited the route. When my track started over the edge it was if we were on a roller coaster ride it was so steep. It was dark as hell and this just wasn’t fun! The wadi instantly got named the Wadi from Hell and it was.

After reassembling the task force on the east side of the wadi, we began to make our turn to the north. We had only gone about ten or fifteen kilometers when I got a very faint radio call from brigade. I could just barely hear the brigade commander and there was a lot of static. Finally, we heard that he wanted us to stop our forward movement immediately. When I asked why, he said they couldn’t get through on their route because there was a very deep drop off which wasn’t on their maps. (Yes, it was!) He was going to counter march the main body of the brigade and follow our route. I told him I would send my scouts back to guide them through the Wadi from Hell we had encountered.

I halted the task force and we went in to 360-degree perimeter for security. Those who could, tried to get some sleep. We had all been awake for over 48 hours at this point.  The scouts went back to the wadi and spent the rest of the night leading the brigade main body through the wadi. I laid down but couldn’t really sleep. I had too much on my mind and was thinking through the rest of our attack to the Euphrates River Valley. We had received no intelligence of any type on what enemy forces we had in front of us for the next two hundred plus miles to the valley, and zero intelligence on what was on our objective in the valley. That was to change rather dramatically in the next few hours. 

Just after first light I was instructed to report to the brigade commander with my executive officer at his command post. Usually, when a commander is told to bring his XO and report it’s because he is going to be relieved of command and his XO is to take over. I knew that was not the case, but it was a strange order all the same. When we got there, the brigade commander was all chipper and had clearly gotten some sleep. He promptly told me he had called me over because they had finally gotten some solid intelligence on Iraqi forces on my objective in the valley. He rather gleefully told me there were three mechanized battalions, two light infantry battalions, an artillery regiment and a division headquarters on my objective based upon the latest intelligence to include aerial reconnaissance. I asked him if he was going to give me any more combat power since we would be attacking a unit approximately six times bigger than Task force Striker. He said no. I asked for an artillery battery one more time. He again said no and sternly reminded me that I would get artillery support when I needed it! I saluted and started to leave when he called me back. He said he actually did have some “reinforcements” for me, a reporter from the Washington Post. I was to take him along and “show him a good time”.

The brigade commander sent his driver to get my “reinforcements” so we could depart and start our movement north. While we waited my XO pulled me aside and was quite concerned about what we had just heard about the enemy. He asked if I was going to change anything inside the task force or modify our scheme of maneuver.  He was very agitated about attacking a superior force. According to him,  I just said, “Fuck it. Let’s go.” But I don’t recall saying that. We had just received our “reinforcements” whose name was Tom Something I believe. I cannot remember his last name and he was only with us a short while. We went back to the task force and moved out immediately heading north trying to get as far as we could during daylight hours. We still had over 200 miles to go.

Our reporter, Tom, was a long-haired fellow who was clearly very liberal and somewhat of a hippy. He was also a White House correspondent. We didn’t have any time for amenities, so I stuffed him in my track and we moved out. A little later, he asked why he couldn’t sit in one of the two spring chairs my predecessor had installed on the right side of his M113 in lieu of the bench seat, instead of the box he was sitting on. I told him that was because my fire support officer (who was actually an E4 in this case because his captain wasn’t quite what I wanted) needed to sit there next to me to handle artillery support. He then asked me what was in the box he was sitting on and I told him 40mm grenades for our Mark 19 grenade launcher. Since I was smoking a cigarette and my RTO was making coffee on a propane stove, he took my answer rather hard and asked in a somewhat squeaky voice if the ammo was going to blow up if we kept cooking and smoking? I assured him it would not. I did tell him that if the track took a direct hit from a tank, it would burn, and the ammo would then blowup, but we would all be dead so wouldn’t care. Somehow, he didn’t find that very reassuring.

We didn’t get much of a chance to talk as we plowed on to the north. We had to finally stop to refuel all the vehicles for our last refuel before hitting the valley. Tom asked if he could talk to my crew while we were halted waiting our turn to refuel and I told him sure, go ahead. He asked them if they were upset to be going into combat and didn’t they resent being deployed for the war? He was a Vietnam era reporter and believed that the state of the draftee army at the very end of the Vietnam War was the same state as the army in Desert Storm. It was not the same army. My guys told him they had no problem being there and my track commander, SGT Mark Mann said he was glad to finally be in Iraq. Tom asked him why and he said, “Because the road home is through Iraq.” Tom asked him why he said that, and SGT Mann said, “Because the colonel told us that. He said we needed to go kick the shit out of these people to free Kuwait then we could go home.” Tom asked who the colonel was, and SGT Mann pointed at me and looked at Tom like he was the village idiot which in away he was. He had been thrown into our midst in the middle of what was some very serious business and had no idea as to who and what we were.

Tom asked me why I had told the troops that and I said, “Because that’s what President Bush told us. The war is over once Kuwait is liberated.”Tom was surprised. “You guys don’t like President Bush, do you? He’s the one that sent you here!” That’s when Tom said he was a White House correspondent and I could guess from his question what side of the political spectrum he was from. He clearly did not like the president. I assured him that we liked President Bush very much and in fact had given him a nick name. He asked what that was, and I told him Thumbscrew 6. He jumped on that and took it to have a negative connotation. I explained to him that it was a radio callsign and any callsign that ended in a 6 meant it was a commander speaking. I said as an example, my callsign was Striker 6.

He reflected briefly on that and stated that a thumbscrew is an instrument of torture, so I was calling the president a torturer? I told him no. We called President Bush that because every time Saddam tried to weasel out and not withdraw from Kuwait, President Bush would turn the thumbscrews tighter on Saddam and raise the ante. He did that in his measured responses through the UN and elsewhere, and by the build-up of overwhelming combat power in the theater during Desert Shield. When Desert Storm finally started, we had everything we needed to be successful with that overwhelming combat power (except an artillery battery for little old Task Force Striker that is. But President Bush didn’t make that decision because if he had, we would have gotten one!).

Tom was getting a real education from a wholly different perspective on the man he was covering for the Post in the White House. Tom did write an article about us calling President Bush Thumbscrew 6 which was very favorable towards the president, so we must have made an impact on him. And President Bush absolutely made a favorable impact on us. As I said earlier, he came all the way to Saudi Arabia to spend Thanksgiving with us. But he did so much more than that. He was the first president since FDR to engage in and win a war and that is because he absolutely knew what he was doing and how to do it. He built the coalition and got the UN to include the Russians and Chinese to support resolutions calling on Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait. He aroused the support of the American people, he provided the wherewithal for us to be successful in combat and he clearly defined the conditions for war termination. Once we achieved them, we came home as he promised. The road home was through Iraq.

Again, the last president to do all of that successfully was President Roosevelt in World War Two. History will record that President George H. W. Bush was our greatest president in the second half of the Twentieth Century and even into the first two decades of the Twenty-first Century and perhaps beyond. He is the only one in that 70+ year period who knew how to fight and decisively win a war. As far as war went, he’d been there and done that, could walk the walk, talk the talk and had the tee shirt as we say. He absolutely knew what he was doing and that was our great good fortune in the Gulf War.

So, with his passing Task Force Striker bids a sad farewell to Thumbscrew 6. He was our revered commander-in-chief and touched each and every one of us in a positive way. We went to war for him confidently and successfully under his leadership and without hesitation. I’m not sure any other man could have done what he did at that time and place in history. For you see, ultimately, he set other men free when we liberated Kuwait. There is no higher accolade or reward for an American warrior than that.

Sir, you have passed over the river and are resting in the shade of the trees and we’ll see you there.

With the utmost respect,

Striker 6

8 Replies to “A Farewell to “Thumbscrew 6”, aka President George H. W. Bush, our Beloved Commander in Desert Storm”

    1. Thanks, Chris! Hopefully the book will come out well. Need to really get on it this winter.

  1. Bill, wonderful story about your leadership and respect for Thumbscrew 6. Thank you for sharing.

  2. Well written Sir. Ironically, as a young Slecislist the line “Hope this isn’t going to be run like the Vietnam War” has been stated several times back at Ft. Stewart during train ups. Thankfully due to leadership as yours, General McGafferrty, and others it wasn’t. Rest In Peace Thumbscrew 6.

    1. Keith, nothing is possible without superb soldiers like you! Thanks for being part of Task Force Striker.

  3. Thanks for your thoughts on Bush 41. They mirror mine. Your comments on leaders are spot on. Had the same experiences. Some were superb and others a complete waste.

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