
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, February 19, 1991                   TAG: 9102190369
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: EASTERN SAUDI ARABIA                                LENGTH: Medium

TROOPS PREPARE FOR BATTLE

Talk of peace? Well, that's for others, really. For U.S. troops - practiced, psyched-up and strung tight as trip wire - peace is the thought of 12 hours sleep, the pleasant whoosh of a lawn sprinkler, a slab of rare roast beef swimming in juice. It's something you don't want to think too much about because it will set you to daydreaming.

And daydreamers get killed.

During this long weekend, America's vast front-line Army disciplined itself to give barely a glance at what may be the last try at peace before the expected ground assault begins. Instead, the soldiers and Marines talked only of the looming ground war.

But as preparations for the land battle intensify, so does concern about one of the cruelest killers of the war so far: friendly fire.

Non-U.S. coalition forces have been listening, along with the rest of the world, to one unsettling report after another about American aircraft firing or bombing friendly positions.

At one forward U.S. Army battalion, soldiers from other coalition countries have driven over some of their vehicles to familiarize the Americans first-hand. Vehicle-recognition manuals also are studied intently.

Overnight at the 1st Infantry Division, artillery batteries fired more than 1,000 rockets and 8-inch shells at Iraqi positions. This was the rumble of an army clearing its throat.

"Yee hah!" shouted specialist David Langston of Garland, Texas.

A 12-foot-long rocket exploded from its pod on the Army's high-tech multiple rocket launch system, shaking the launch platform and filling the air with the burnt smell of cordite.

The barrage was the heaviest coalition artillery fire yet, heightening the feeling on this side of the line - and presumably the other, too - of the impending battle.

Somewhere else along the line, at a forlorn staging area called Spearhead Range, Lt. Col. Dan Merritt beheld a mobile armored battalion in what may be its final field trial.

To the colonel's right, Bradley fighting vehicles spat machine gun fire. To his left, the explosions erupted from ground rockets.

"The Air Force has been using kind of a scalpel on the Iraqis - cutting here, cutting there, hoping they'll bleed to death," Merritt said.

Other battlefield preparations added to the sense of impending battle.

Civil affairs specialists rushed to evacuate nomadic Bedouin tribesmen from the line of fire. Bedouins do not worry about national boundaries; they move about the Arabian desert freely.

by CNB