Standing Down after Victory
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Marine Corps History Division Reference Branch photo files
Marines of Company D prepare to enter a residential area on Faylakah Island, Kuwait, on 3 March 1991. The Marines secured the island without resistance from its Iraqi garrison.
crippled on the roadside, their wheels torn off, doors missing, glass shattered. Stores had been completely emptied. I walked, in shock, past a shoe store that held nothing but a seven-foot pile of empty shoeboxes. Oddly enough—and in a revealing statement on the attackers—the bookstore next door was left largely untouched, its rows of textbooks still neatly aligned on the shelves.”4 Other Marines tried the same thing. First Lieutenant Sean T. Coughlin of Marine Wing Support Group 37 acquired a humvee and drove with two other Marines from King Abdul Aziz Naval Base to Kuwait City and back again. The entire trip took seven hours each way, with the Marines driving past journalists and Arab forces on the roads. Inside Kuwait City they found similar scenes of destruction and jubilation.5 Captain Thompson recorded a vivid description of what the Marines found in Kuwait City and how it helped many of them put their labors in the desert into perspective: The spectacle before us was the reason we had come to this country. Huge Kuwaiti flags draped out nearly every apartment building and welcomed us in the gentle breeze. All the anger and frustration of the previous six months began melting away in the hundreds of smiles I now saw.
“Thank you for saving our country!” “We love U.S. Marines!” “We love USA!” We heard it over and over. I could only smile and nod. I was afraid to speak. Somewhere along the line, someone gave me a ragged, soot-covered Kuwaiti flag, which I still have.6 The battlefield was littered with unexploded ordinance; mines; destroyed Iraqi vehicles; and, sadly, many Iraqi dead. The explosive ordinance disposal teams and engineers were soon busy working to defuse or safely detonate the live ordinance, while the 1st Force Service Support Group graves registration teams worked to handle the Iraqi dead properly. Information on the Iraqi dead was recorded, and the bodies were transferred to Saudi Arabian authorities, who ensured that proper Islamic burials were provided. There were fewer Iraqi dead than might be expected, as vast numbers had surrendered and even more had fled back to Iraq.7
Al-Wafrah Forest and Faylakah Island Although a cease-fire had been declared, not all Iraqi units abided by it (nor were all aware of it, as Iraqi communications were sporadic). On 2 March,
