Enter The Cleanup Crew

By Terry McCarthy/Kuwait City

If Major Eric Murray of the 3rd Infantry Division crosses the border into Iraq, along with his M-16 rifle and 9-mm Beretta pistol he will be carrying another weapon of war: a briefcase full of cash. Just hours after the 3rd's M1A1 tanks blow through towns and villages on their way to Baghdad, Murray and his Civil Affairs Direct Support Teams will be looking to quickly spend tens of thousands of dollars to start rebuilding blown-up wells, bombed bridges and downed electricity grids. The idea, says Murray, is that instead of waiting for assistance from nongovernmental organizations, "we immediately contract the locals."

Should war with Iraq break out, it would begin with bombing, commando raids and armored columns pushing north from Kuwait. A second wave of soldiers, including Murray, would follow, fanning out across Iraq on a different mission. Their principal tasks: to win over the Iraqi people by handing out emergency humanitarian aid, and to unearth Saddam's presumed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. These soldiers would be operating in a lawless, battle-scarred landscape in which civilians would be fearful and shell-shocked but might have information about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) concealed from U.N. inspectors. And they would be working against the clock. "Once the regime falls, the cities are imploding and the Baath Party is taking off running, there's going to be a vacuum," says Captain Vern Tubbs, 37, coordinator of the civil affairs mission for the 3rd Infantry. "We'll be trying to keep the country from collapsing."

The success of the second wave would be critical to the Bush Administration, helping justify a war that has been so angrily opposed around the world. It would also be crucial to persuading the international community to join in funding the reconstruction of Iraq. "I think the planners realize they will be judged more on this than on the fighting," says Major Chris Hughes, a U.S. military spokesman in Kuwait.

The most urgent job would be the search for hidden biological and chemical weapons. Special-forces teams from the Navy SEALs, the Air Force, the Marines and the Army's Delta Force would hunt down and secure such sites. Major General John Doesburg, who heads the Soldier Biological and Chemical Defense Command, which trains the forces that will decontaminate the sites, says his goal would be to secure all suspect weapons sites for inspections, rather than blow them up and risk spreading toxins in the air. "Our experience from the first Gulf War was that Saddam Hussein mixed things in his depots and weapons-storage sites. You don't want to say it's purely conventional munitions and miss the chemical munitions," says Doesburg.

If a suspect stockpile is located, Consequent Management Assessment Teams consisting of about two dozen soldiers each would be directed to it. Clad in hazmat gear, they would take samples, determine what they are and figure out the best way to handle them. The Army also recently sent to the Persian Gulf its 520th Theater Medical Laboratory, the most sophisticated portable toxin tester in the U.S. military and the only one of its kind. The search for contraband weapons would begin in the war's opening hours and continue until the U.S. is confident it has found all such stockpiles--something that could take months, U.S. officials say.

Second wavers would also expect to handle captured or surrendering Iraqi troops. Based on the first Gulf War experience, the U.S. is hoping for mass defections in the event of a new war. Interrogators would first sift detainees for high-ranking Baath Party officials or people with knowledge of WMD programs. "We will be putting everyone on a black, gray or white list," says the 3rd Infantry's Murray. "Our intelligence teams know who the key figures are they want to talk to." To help identify the bad guys, the Army has CDs with photographs of some 2,000 Iraqis suspected of war crimes. The process could take a while: there are no more than 100 Army interrogators who speak fluent Arabic. But the majority of the low-ranking POWs would probably land on the white list--that is, Iraqis who pose no threat to allied forces. These soldiers may simply be set free or even converted into a post-Saddam peacekeeping force.

The trickiest battle for hearts and minds would be fought with humanitarian-assistance programs. These would be supervised by the military's civil affairs units, which consist of a large number of reservists with a wide range of nonmilitary skills, from communications and engineering experts to linguists, civil-aviation controllers and even veterinarians. They would conduct assessments of the need for food, water, medical care and shelter, and "get their reports back within hours," according to a U.S. military source.

Both the civil affairs units and U.S. soldiers have been instructed to arrive with open arms and full pockets. "I don't want them to see us and think we are another dictator taking over," says Lance Corporal Martin Holtzman, 20, a machine gunner with the 7th Marine Regiment. More than 60% of Iraqis rely on government rations for food, and the U.S. assumes that distribution systems will break down if war starts. Combat units would be carrying yellow-bagged rations that look like the military's own meals ready to eat (MRE) to hand out to civilians in immediate need. Civil affairs personnel would also hustle to restart bulk-food supplies. World Food Program stockpiles of wheat and rice would be shipped in to the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr and then trucked north.

The Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in Washington has stockpiled enough blankets, plastic sheeting and medical kits in Kuwait and Dubai for 1 million people, and would channel those supplies into the country even as the fighting continued. "The Iraqi troops need to know we plan this enormous humanitarian effort--that is going to be the difference between them digging in and fighting and them giving up," says U.S. military spokesman Hughes.

One variable is hard to estimate: the hearts and minds of American soldiers. The idea of getting warm and fuzzy with the enemy so quickly is a hard one for some soldiers to accept. "It is a very difficult transition," says 1st Lieut. Will Riley, 28, who is working with the 3rd Infantry. "We have a mission one minute to go out and kill it if it moves--and then suddenly we have to protect and police." But that's precisely the challenge, and that's exactly what a skeptical world will be waiting to see. --With reporting by Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/south of the Iraqi border and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/south of the Iraqi border and Mark Thompson/Washington