``Many of the generals interviewed for this account
believe that McCaffrey's attack went too far, and
violated one of the most fundamental military
doctrines: that a commander must respond in proportion
to the threat,'' Hersh writes. ``That's the way we're
trained,'' one major general tells Hersh. ``A single
shot does not signal a battle to the death. Commanders
just don't willy-nilly launch on something like that.
A disciplined commander is going to figure out who
fired it, and where it came from. Especially if your
mission is to enforce a ceasefire. Who should have
been better able to instill fire discipline than
McCaffrey?''

In testimony before Congress and in written responses
to questions sent to him by Hersh, McCaffrey has said
that the Iraqis attacked first and that the subsequent
response by the 24th was necessary to protect the
lives of American soldiers. But, Hersh reports,
McCaffrey's version of events was disputed by soldiers
and officers who were at the scene on March 2nd. The
assault ``was not so much a counterattack provoked by
enemy fire as a systematic destruction of Iraqis who
were generally fulfilling the requirements of the
retreat,'' Hersh writes. McCaffrey, in his written
responses to Hersh, says, ``I believe that my actions
at Rumaila were completely appropriate and warranted
in order to defend my troops against unknown and
largely unknowable enemy forces and intentions.''

Among McCaffrey's harshest critics are several of his
fellow Gulf War generals. ``There was no need to be
shooting at anybody,'' Lieutenant General James H.
Johnson, Jr. (Ret.), then the commander of the 82nd
Airborne, tells Hersh. ``They couldn't surrender fast
enough. The war was over.'' The officer in charge of
enforcing the ceasefire, Lieutenant General John J.
Yeosock (Ret.), says, ``What Barry ended up doing was
fighting sand dunes and moving rapidly.'' He was
``looking for a battle.'' Major General Ronald
Griffith, who commanded the 1st Armored Division of
VII Corps, says of McCaffrey, ``He made it a battle
when it was never one.''

After the ceasefire, the rules of engagement had been
revised; commanders were to protect their troops and
hold their positions but they were no longer
authorized to initiate offensive military actions on
their own unless they faced an imminent threat. In the
two days following the ceasefire, McCaffrey had moved
his forces toward an access road Iraqis were using to
retreat, Hersh reports, ``without informing all the
senior officers who needed to know -- inside his own
division operations center at XVIII Corps, and at
Third Army headquarters.''

Early on March 2nd, a Scout unit reported to
McCaffrey's command post that it was being fired upon
by the retreating Iraqis and that it had returned fire
in self-defense. The Scouts were attacked by several
different types of weapons, McCaffrey writes, and
``direct fire from T-72 tanks,'' adding that the
rocketing continued later that morning. There was a
delay after the initial American response, which
destroyed several Iraqi tanks and guns, while
McCaffrey decided what to do and his subordinates
debated the nature of the Iraqi threat and the
appropriate American response. Some officers were in
favor of engaging the Iraqis and some were not. Major
General John Le Moyne, then commanding the 1st Brigade
of the 24th Division as a colonel, tells Hersh,
``there was absolutely no doubt in my mind'' that the
attack was justified. Lieutenant General James Terry
Scott (Ret.), then an assistant division commander,
says, ``Eventually, we became convinced that it was a
real, no-shit attack by the Iraqis.'' Others saw it
differently. ``There was no incoming,'' Patrick Lamar,
McCaffrey's operations officer, tells Hersh. ``I know
that for a fact.'' Lamar describes the battle as ``a
giant hoax,'' although he also told Army investigators
that McCaffrey's response was ``necessary.'' To Hersh,
Lamar says, ``The Iraqis were doing absolutely
nothing. I told McCaffrey I was having trouble
confirming the incoming.''

According to many of the enlisted men Hersh spoke to
who were on the scene, there was nothing like an Iraqi
attack forming the morning of the 2nd. James
Manchester, a Scout positioned well forward of the
main force, remembers thinking, ``It's over, it's
over. These guys are going home. It was just a line of
vehicles on the road.'' Edward R. Walker, another
Scout, tells Hersh, ``Many of the Iraqi tanks were on
flatbed trucks and had their turrets tucked
backward.'' When Manchester heard a captain saying on
the radio that the Iraqis were about to launch
anti-tank missiles at his tanks, he was incredulous.
``We are sitting right on top of these people,'' he
says, referring to the Iraqis, ``and there are no
vehicles pulled off.'' The captain calling in this
information, he says, was behind him and could not see
the line of vehicles.

February 27, 1991: On the afternoon of February 27th,
the day before the ceasefire, James Manchester and
other Scouts were manning a roadblock in front of the
main forces of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ware's
battalion. Things proceeded routinely until, as
Manchester recalls, ``A Buick comes up, with the
commander, and he surrenders his battalion to us.''
Vehicles continued to arrive, including a hospital
bus, according to Specialist Edward Walker, who was in
charge of counting the men. There were, he remembers,
382 Iraqis. They were stripped of their weapons,
Walker says, and lined up in rows. One man, who had
lost an eye, asked if he was now a prisoner. When he
was told that he was, he said, ``Thank, Allah.'' The
Iraqis were each given a ``a white piece of paper, if
they didn't have anything white,'' Sergeant James
Testerman, who was also present, tells Hersh. The
lieutenant in charge of the Scout group, Kirk Allen,
``made it a point to keep the battalion headquarters
in the loop,'' Hersh writes. Allen told the operations
center that he had captured a large number of
prisoners and reported the precise position of the
surrendered hospital bus. According to Walker, Ware's
headquarters ordered that the captured weapons be
destroyed, a task which fell to Walker himself. Then
the Scout group was ordered to move. As they drove
away, the explosion detonated. At that moment, Walker
says, a platoon of Bradleys came into view rolling
toward the prisoners, and then the Bradleys' machine
guns opened fire. ``I saw rounds impact in front of
the vehicle,'' Sergeant Steven Mulig, another Scout,
says. ``I could tell that they were hitting close to
the prisoners, because there were people running.
There were some who could have survived, but a lot of
them wouldn't have, from where I saw the rounds hit.''

John Brasfield recorded radio transmissions that were
being made by the Scouts and their superiors while the
Bradleys were firing toward the prisoners of war, on a
personal tape recorder he had brought with him to the
Gulf. ``The lead company behind us is tearing up all
those vehicles,'' one man is heard saying. ``There's
no-one shooting at them. Why'd they have to shoot?''
asks another voice. Lieutenant Allen then reports to
Lieutenant Colonel Ware, ``There's shooting, but
there's no one there to shoot at,'' to which Ware
responds, ``I understand.'' On the tape, Brasfield
says, ``They want to surrender. Fucking armored
vehicles. They don't have to blow them apart.''
Someone else says, ``It's murder.'' After more
sporadic firing, someone says, ``We shot the guys we
had gathered up,'' and another adds, ``They didn't
have no weapons.'' At this point, Ware calls for all
firing to stop.

March 1, 1991: The day after the ceasefire was
announced, Hersh reports, another incident took place
in which American soldiers stand accused of shooting
unarmed Iraqis. Sergeant Steven Larimore, who headed a
ground-surveillance-radar team, was assigned to work
with Scouts from the 3-7 Battalion of McCaffrey's
Command. Army troops had discovered a cache of weapons
in a deserted schoolhouse late in the afternoon of the
1st, and Larimore's unit joined the Scouts in clearing
the village and searching the schoolhouse. The weapons
were secured, Larimore says, and after taking
souvenirs, he and his men moved out toward the east,
along with the Scouts. There was a group of villagers
walking in the area. ``One guy had a white bedsheet on
a stick,'' Larimore says, but ``out of the blue sky,
some guy from where we're sitting'' -- that is, in the
Scout Platoon -- ``begins shooting'' into the
villagers.

Other machine guns joined in. ``We were screaming,
'Cease fire!''' Larimore tells Hersh. ``People hit the
ground. The firing went on.'' Larimore estimates that
he saw fifteen or twenty Iraqis fall. ``I did not see
anything that looked like return fire,'' he says.
Another eyewitness, Sergeant Wayne P. Irwin, who
headed a different G.S.R. team that was in the area,
says the Iraqis were ``just passing through'' when the
shooting began. ``I yelled for them to cease fire. I
couldn't understand why they were firing.'' Irwin, a
seventeen-year Army veteran, tells Hersh, ``To me,
they posed no threat to us-they were all in civilian
clothes.'' Scouts told Irwin that they had seen the
Iraqis carrying ``grenade launchers and stuff like
that,'' but, Irwin says, he did not find that account
credible. ``To me,'' he says, ``they had nothing.''

Lieutenant John J. Grisillo was the platoon leader of
the Scout team that opened fire. Grisillo tells Hersh
that Larimore, who confronted him at the time, did not
understand that his men were responding to a threat.
``They raised a white flag,'' Grisillo recalls, but
``they were carrying weapons. We fired warning shots,
but they didn't stop.'' Because they were headed
toward the schoolhouse, a building known to contain
weapons, they were, Grisillo determined, a danger.
Grisillo also tells Hersh that after the war he spoke
with his brigade commander, Colonel Le Moyne. ``He let
me know that he thought the G.S.R. guys didn't
understand the situation at the time,'' Grisillo says.
``Calls had to be made. It's not nice, but prudent. If
I had that situation again, I'd do it again. I've
never lost a minute's sleep about it.''

The Investigations: There were four Army
investigations into the conduct reported on by Hersh
in his article. Each of these investigations found
that no criminal charges should be brought against
anyone. Hersh describes these investigations in
detail.

Concerning March 2nd: In August, 1991, Colonel Ernest
H. Dinkel, then a deputy chief of staff for the Army's
Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.), was assigned
by Major General Peter T. Barry to investigate charges
made in an anonymous two-page letter which had been
sent from Fort Stewart to the Army's Inspector
General. The letter appeared to have been written by
an officer serving in McCaffrey's 24th Division
command post. ``That's what scared everybody,'' Dinkel
recalls. ``This was from someone who was there.'' The
letter alleged that McCaffrey was guilty of a ``war
crime'' in his March 2nd assault on the retreating
Iraqis and that he had urged his brigade commanders to
``find a way for him to go 'kill all of those
bastards.''' The letter also claimed that 24th
Division soldiers had ``slaughtered'' Iraqi prisoners
of war after seizing an airfield. Colonel Dinkel and
his investigators spent several weeks conducting
interviews and collecting data on the anonymous
letter, at Fort Stewart and at Army bases around the
country, but they did not focus on the shootings on
the 27th or the 1st, Hersh reports. In the end, Dinkel
and his assistants, after interviewing more than one
hundred and fifty men and women, including McCaffrey,
concluded that McCaffrey's actions on the 2nd were
justified because the Iraqis had fired first. They
also concluded that no prisoners had been mistreated.
Nonetheless, General Peter Barry, the C.I.D's
commanding officer, explains to Hersh that by the time
the investigation shut down, the Army's senior leaders
realized that there was ``a certain element of truth''
to the allegations made by the anonymous letter
writer. ``Whoever wrote the letter had detailed
knowledge,'' Barry says. ``But establishing the
criminality is difficult.''

Concerning February 27th: Edward Walker told his story
about the events of February 27th -- the collection of
the prisoners and the shooting afterwards -- to a
lawyer in Saudi Arabia. After Walker returned to his
home base in Missouri, the 1st Brigade began an
inquiry into his allegations. When he was asked if he
had seen anyone actually get shot, Hersh writes,
``Walker said what he always said: he hadn't seen any
prisoners fall, but he saw rounds being fired at
them.'' The 1st Brigade's investigation absolved
Lieutenant Colonel Ware's battalion of any wrongdoing.
Le Moyne tells Hersh that Walker's claims were
groundless. ``It was not a hospital bus. There were no
wounded. They were armed Iraqi officers and
soldiers.'' Steven Mulig and a few other Scouts had
been summoned to testify, but Mulig says, none of the
officers wanted to hear what they had to say. ``We
were all getting upset,'' Mulig says, adding, ``It was
just an officer cover-up kind of thing.'' The final
report concluded that, while the Americans had fired
in the direction of the Iraqis, no prisoners ``had
been killed or wounded in the incident.''

Late in the spring of 1991, three members of the 5th
Engineer Battalion at Fort Leonard Wood told officials
in the base's Inspector General's office about the
alleged shooting of Iraqi prisoners of war by soldiers
from the 1st Brigade of the 24th Division. This
investigation was conducted by Major Thomas Mitchell.
Mitchell says, ``The kids who came in were nice, and
there seemed to be some validity to what they saw. But
we couldn't confirm anything illegal.'' In the formal
report that Mitchell prepared for his superiors, he
found that the 5th Engineer allegations were
``unsubstantiated.''

Concerning March 1st: After his return from Iraq,
Sergeant Larimore gathered six of his colleagues in
the Ground Surveillance Radar teams of the 124th
Military Intelligence Battalion and met with
investigators at the Fort Stewart branch of the C.I.D.
The men described what they had seen on March 1st,
when Iraqis in civilian clothes had been shot near a
schoolhouse while holding a white flag. ``All six of
us went and told what we knew,'' Larimore tells Hersh.
``The basic tenet was that we didn't see anybody
shooting at us'' before the 1st Brigade platoon opened
fire. After they made their report, Larimore and his
colleagues heard nothing more from the C.I.D. until
Colonel Le Moyne, the 1st Brigade commander, announced
that he wanted to meet after work with the men in the
chain of command. Once in Le Moyne's office, Larimore
says, ``We got this big long speech about how we had
never been in combat or in a firefight. We didn't know
what it was like. He ripped us pretty good.'' When
Hersh interviewed Le Moyne, he defended his meeting
with Larimore and the other complainants as merely an
attempt ``to cut down on confusion. You gather the key
people all in one place, so there's no
misunderstanding.''

Le Moyne's next step was to authorize a captain in his
brigade to conduct an informal investigation and file
a report. ``The captain laid out the course of his
investigation,'' Larimore tells Hersh. ``He said there
was a group who observed no weapons'' among the
civilians who had been shot and ``there were also
people who said they saw weapons and muzzle flashes.''
The captain then concluded that the allegations of
wrongful death were ``unsubstantiated.'' In Le Moyne's
view, the case was now closed. The investigation, he
said, had produced a series of witnesses who ``totally
refuted the allegations.'' The soldiers' immediate
superior, Lieutenant Charles Febus, who had encouraged
them to make their report, tells Hersh, ``They did
their duty and filed their report. And the Army chose
to do what it did.''