From Khafji to Washington, the abrupt outbreak of ground combat last week could be seen as an early test of the allied campaign to liberate Kuwait and destroy Saddam Hussein’s military machine. To a man-from Gen. Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf down to the lowliest platoon commander–U.S. officers professed grim satisfaction with the results of the week’s fighting: allied losses were light, and a capable enemy was routed. Schwarzkopf said the Iraqis’ surprise attacks were no more meaningful than “a mosquito to an elephant.” Gen. Walt Boomer, the Marine commander for Operation Desert Storm, warned Iraq that “the worst is yet to come.” And George Bush, speaking at Fort Stewart, Ga., once again insisted that the ground war in the Persian Gulf, assuming one is necessary, would begin “on our timetable, not on Saddam Hussein’s timetable.”

The overriding point was that America and the allies would continue with the all-out bombing campaign against Iraqi forces for two more weeks and possibly longer-long enough, at any rate, to “degrade” the Iraqi Army and thereby lower U.S. casualties in the massive ground assault that lies ahead (page 24). Military sources say U.S. ground troops now being redeployed from Europe may not be fully ready for Schwarzkopf’s planned offensive until mid-February. White House officials, who are acutely aware of the preponderant political need to keep U.S. casualties to a minimum, insist that Bush would not be suckered into ordering a ground attack prematurely. “We want to bomb as long as we can, cut off their rice and water and wait until they can’t walk,” one administration official said. “There isn’t any political pressure to go,” said another. “The political pressure is to wait.”

The Iraqi forays nevertheless provided a convincing demonstration of Saddam Hussein’s willingness to gamble. In purely military terms, the offensive made no sense at all: enemy armor and infantry left their fortified positions in southern Kuwait for a series of maneuvers that left them wide open to a withering allied aerial bombardment. The bombing, which lasted the better part of two days and nights, almost certainly smashed the offensive and cost the Iraqis large losses. But the attacks suggested that the Iraqi Army is far more capable of complicated nighttime maneuvers than previously believed–that its command-and-control functions remain substantially intact and that at least some enemy units may be equipped with night-vision equipment. By the weekend allied military officials concluded that up to 2,000 Iraqi troops had been involved in the attack on Khafji–and at midweek, according to Pentagon sources, Desert Storm commanders were startled by reports that as many as 60,000 enemy troops and 1,000 tanks were mobilizing for a possible large-scale attack into Saudi Arabia.

The big attack never came, possibly because of the ferocious response by allied air forces. U.S. jets took part in what Air Force Maj. Richard Pauly of Mandeville, La., described as “a feeding frenzy” on Thursday night. Interviewed by Col. David Hackworth, who is on assignment for NEWSWEEK, Pauly said his squadron of A-10 Warthogs swooped down on an Iraqi armored column of more than 100 vehicles. The A-10s bombed the first and last vehicles to trap the column, then systematically destroyed all the tanks and armored personnel carriers in between. “I rolled in and gave them a wake-up call with six 500-pound bombs,” Pauly said. “That pissed them off, and they shot back.” The Iraqi air defenses couldn’t cope with the A-10s, and Pauly said the whole column was finally destroyed. On infrared night-vision scopes, Pauly said, “you could see the Iraqis running from vehicles and pulling bodies from the burning, tanks… We own the night.”

The Iraqis owned Khafji–for a bit more than 24 hours, anyway. As allied intelligence later pieced it together, the attackers moved into the evacuated town with two or three coordinated armor columns Tuesday night. Saudi and Qatari troops, backed by U.S. Marine artillery, Harrier jets and Cobra helicopter gunships, counterattacked the next day to begin a house-to-house battle that lasted until Friday. According to press reports, the Iraqis used a ruse to bring their tanks within close range of Saudi units. Shortly before noon on Wednesday, Saudi troops saw a line of Iraqi tanks approaching with their turrets reversed and their big guns facing north, away from the city. That was a surrender signal set forth in psychological-warfare leaflets airdropped over Iraqi units by U.S. planes. As the Saudis held their fire, the Iraqis came closer, then swung their guns around and opened fire at the last minute. “From now on, I say ‘Screw it’,” said one U.S. Marine, as news of the Iraqi trick spread through frontline units. “All those mothahs die.”

At least 30 of them did during the ensuing battle for Khafji. Lance Cpl. Brown and 11 other Marines, members of two reconnaissance teams, were already in the city when the Iraqis moved in. They spent 48 nerve-racking hours holed up in an apartment building surrounded by enemy troops, calling in air and artillery strikes with coded radio calls. At one point, Iraqi soldiers entered the building and searched the ground floor: the Marines, hiding on the roof, had already burned their code books and booby-trapped the stairs with Claymore mines. “We could see their helmets bobbing up and down,” Brown said. “They sure would have had a rude awakening if they had come up after us.” All 12 Marines survived their close encounter with the enemy–but Brown, who took a shrapnel wound in the thigh, may get one of the first Purple Hearts of the gulf war.

Left stranded in the city as their tanks retreated north, 429 Iraqi officers and men surrendered to advancing Saudi and Qatari troops. The number of POWs itself was a surprise, since it suggested that the overall size of the Iraqi raiding force was much larger than U.S. officers had at first estimated. The mass surrender also showed that the Iraqis, who at first fought bravely and well, chose not to become martyrs when the battle turned against them. That may bode well for allied forces when and if the ground campaign rolls north. But there was evidence of allied bungling as well. Although the Pentagon insisted that no firm conclusions could be drawn, military sources in Saudi Arabia said 11 U.S. Marines may have been killed near Umm Hujul in a mistaken air attack by a U.S. jet. In a separate incident, a Marine unit was attacked by two allied planes that dropped cluster bombs within a few hundred yards of its position; the explosions lit up the desert night with lethal fireworks, but no one was hurt. “Getting wasted by our own guys would be the ultimate waste,” a noncom said. “But with all the thousands of sorties being flown, I suppose things like this are going to happen.”

The larger lesson of last week’s events was that U.S. ground troops seemed well prepared for the first shock of combat. They had better be, since the Iraqi Army is proving itself to be as unpredictable on the attack as it has been stubborn in defense. The land battle for Kuwait will test a new generation of soldiers in a fast-paced, almost unimaginably violent style of combat–and it may well test an anxious nation as well.