Lightning in the storm

"The Air Force and armor were the thunder of Desert Storm," said Gen. Schwarzkopf, "while the 101st was the lightning." This is the story of the Screaming Eagles - the hell-bent, heliborne soldiers of the 101st who hurled the lightning bolts.

The first one struck to begin the air war, a daring night raid which punched a hole in Iraq's radar fence for allied bombers to light up the sky over Baghdad on January 17, 1991. This white knuckle raid was recorded from beginning to end through the pilots' infrared cameras. Actual dialogue from the tapes provides a chapter of fascinating authenticity.

The five month run up to the hundred-hour ground war is fascinating in and of itself. The 101st pitched thousands of Arab tents for a base ("Fort Camel") from where they would cover a front as large as the combined areas of Vermont and New Hampshire to block an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. Through dozens of interviews and hundreds of army videos never publicly viewed, the peculiar experiences of Desert Shield are described in many voices, from corporals to generals.

The unique privations of the theater are described, where for the first time alcohol and local women were absent from war, replaced by the umbilical cord of mail, and the gripping memory of a time when the 101st drove convoys along freeways lined by tens of thousands of cheering Americans.

The role of Vietnam veterans harboring memories of jungle warfare is described as they run the desert war, as is their collective vow that never again would victory on the battlefield be nullified. That opportunity for unconditional victory came in the first dawn of the ground war. Like some rampaging cyclone, the 101st touched down in the Euphrates Valley, landing brigades throughout an area the size of the mid-Atlantic seaboard.

Far ahead of the allies' tanks, the Screaming Eagles strangled Iraq's lifeline into Kuwait - in the space of a single day. Darting hundreds of miles during the hundred hours, they were poised to leap on Baghdad when President Bush decided it was time to halt the offensive. More images emerge like video stills: the slaughter on the causeway - "hell's highway" - the last exit for the Iraqis from the jaws of a giant trap.

. Though the desert campaign seemed an example of Murphy's Law reversed, its success was a result of meticulous planning and preparation. There is an army adage that sweat in training prevents blood in battle. Sweat moistens these pages: the sweat of mental exertion that produced one of the most perfectly executed campaigns in U.S. military history.

In it, the 101st's heliborne blitzkrieg opened a new chapter of warfare as significant as the onslaught of the German panzers into Poland. The action reads as fast as the ground war itself, while the grueling build-up for "G" Day is replete with personal recollections of soldiers with much to prove and more at stake.

Task Force Normandy's raid, for example, ranks historically with Doolittle's strike on Tokyo but followed two heartbreaking failures: the Son Tay raid to liberate POWs in Vietnam and the debacle of Desert One in Iran. Nothing less than America's military reputation rode with eight Apaches when they were the first to penetrate Iraq's air space.

Lightning in the Storm is the first glimpse, from many angles, of the post-Vietnam army in combat - all volunteers and products of new age military thinking. And at the leading edge of this high tech army is the 101st, the only air assault (heliborne) division in the world. Their performance in the desert was truly awesome. So much so that they question whether they are authentically veterans, having lost so few lives in achieving victory so sudden and total it has left them bemused.

However the gulf war will be viewed in the annals of history, an illuminating picture will be found in this book of the most futuristic force to sweep over a desert.