Washington Post
January 18, 1992

By Barton Gellman

Five months after the Army acknowledged that friendly fire killed 21 of its soldiers in the Persian Gulf War, it continues to refuse to disclose their names despite repeated errors in published accounts of the war. The result, according to authors and journalists, is a false first draft of the history of the war.

The Army has not attempted to correct the errors, in which soldiers killed accidentally by their U.S. comrades are described as dying at the hands of Iraqi forces. Spokesmen said the Army's policy, which they described as an effort to protect the privacy of those involved, is to tell no one but the dead soldier's nearest relative of the circumstances of his death. The Marine Corps has released the names of its 14 friendly fire deaths.

As recently as this week, a vivid reconstruction of a battle by U.S. News & World Report reported that Sgt. Edwin B. Kutz and Sgt. Kenneth B. Gentry perished when Iraqi T-72 tanks destroyed their Bradley Fighting Vehicles. A similar account broadcast Jan. 10 on ABC's "Nightline," prepared with the assistance of U.S. News reporters, also left the impression that Gentry died at the hands of Iraq's Republican Guard.

In fact, Kutz and Gentry were killed by American tank gunners. A March 14, 1991, Army memorandum obtained under the Freedom of Information Act said radiological evidence established that the two Bradleys were destroyed by a kind of 120mm "depleted uranium" shell fired only by American M-1A1 tanks. The Army censored the names when it released the memorandum, but sources said the two Bradleys -- Alpha 22 and Alpha 24 of the 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry -- were the ones in which Kutz and Gentry died.

The Washington Post obtained the names of all friendly fire fatalities in a month-long investigation late last fall. The names, later confirmed by senior Army sources, were compiled from the censored Army investigations, a complete list of war casualties and interviews with soldiers and their families.

The U.S. News report was an excerpt from the magazine's forthcoming book "Triumph Without Victory."

"The friendly fire statistics were certainly high, and I can see that that causes the Pentagon some consternation, but facts are facts and if we reported something and it turns out now not to be true, I would think that it would be in someone's interest over there to let us know that," said Brian Duffy, assistant managing editor for investigations at U.S. News. "This book is about to go into a second printing, and we would correct that."

Duffy and co-author Peter Cary, a U.S. News senior editor, said their version of Kutz and Gentry's deaths relied on eyewitness accounts from interviews conducted last summer. Cary said the principal source, Army Capt. Gerald Davie, may not have known American troops had killed his men because the episode took place in a pitched battle with the Iraqi Republican Guard.

There were dozens of similar errors in local newspapers around the country during and immediately after the war. Pentagon spokesmen said then that they could not discuss friendly fire casualties until they had completed their investigations.

But since last summer, when all official friendly fire investigations were finished, at least two other published accounts have repeated the errors.

The first, an official Defense Department report to Congress in July, included a prologue taken from a speech by Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson stating that Kutz and Gentry died under fire from T-72 tanks. Atkinson, who based his speech on interviews with soldiers, later learned that they had been mistaken.

The second, a Newsday article in November, ironically was about friendly fire. It said that six of the seven Americans who died in an engagement known as the Battle of Norfolk -- all but Sgt. David Q. Douthit -- were killed by friendly troops. In fact, Douthit also died at the hands of his U.S. comrades.

"I realize that we're writing instant history here, but people read the stories, they read the {reprints in electronic} databases and there's an obligation not to perpetuate an error, and we feel that very strongly," Carl Pisano, Newsday's Washington news editor, said yesterday. "I would think that the Army would want to hold to the same standards."

Maj. Barbara Goodno, an Army spokeswoman, said she has called to correct false reports of friendly fire but has not made similar calls about friendly fire casualties reported as enemy casualties. "My commission is to correct any errors in fact, but if it comes to me having to release information which I can't otherwise release, then I can't do it," she said.

But Goodno also said she was unaware of the false attributions to enemy fire until notified yesterday by The Post. Maj. Pete Keating, another spokesman, said, "We're not deliberately failing to correct an error." The problem, he said, "will go up to the highest levels of the Army."

Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.