COLUMN ONE : Friendly Fire Lurks on the Front Lines : Such mistakes have been part of all conflicts and can devastate morale. New technology, coupled with Gulf conditions, could worsen the problem when ground battle begins.

By ALAN C. MILLER

Feb. 17, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — They call it “friendly fire,” but the expression is misleading, almost mocking.

Last month, seven U.S. Marines--half of the confirmed U.S. combat fatalities in the Persian Gulf--were killed when an allied pilot apparently mistook their light armored car for an Iraqi vehicle during a night skirmish in Kuwait and destroyed it with a Maverick missile. Another Marine also died, apparently in an errant U.S. cluster-bomb attack.

Military experts say friendly fire--the inadvertent shelling or bombing of troops by their own side--often occurs because of just such mistakes in the chaos of war. An artillery unit misreads a map. A pilot misidentifies ground troops. A soldier--exhausted, wounded or new to combat--simply panics.

At other times, it happens because commanders have pushed their coordinated ground, air and artillery forces to the limit in an effort to reduce their own casualties and to maximize enemy damage. A combat unit that is in danger of being overrun may even call in fire on its own position.

“When you are forced to fight at close quarters, when you cannot control the fighting of the enemy, friendly fire will occur,” says mili- tary analyst Anthony H. Cordesman. “This is one of the many prices of war.”

On the surface, the Gulf War may seem likely to prove an exception to the inevitability of friendly fire--despite the tragic incidents involving the eight Marines. Analysts say high-tech satellites, radar-equipped planes, electronic identification codes, laser-guided “smart” bombs and sophisticated communication systems may help prevent such catastrophes. If the military can direct a bomb through the doorway of an Iraqi command center in Baghdad, the reasoning goes, surely U.S. troops can avoid killing their own comrades.

But military analysts say that the reality isn’t that simple and that the specter of friendly fire, a cruel reality in every previous war--particularly in modern wars--is likely to continue, perhaps even intensify. In the Persian Gulf, it is expected to take a substantial toll if a land war begins.

Retired Army Lt. Col. Charles R. Shrader, who has compiled a study of friendly fire in modern American wars, says that dazzling new technology is as much a problem as it is a solution.

“As the use of technologically sophisticated weapons systems has increased, the limits of human ability to control such destructive forces have been approached,” Shrader says. He contends that the danger of deaths from friendly fire “may be a greater problem on the future battlefield than ever before, both in terms of frequency and the number of casualties.”

His argument is convincing. The allied forces are now using weapons that are so fast-moving and so lethal that survival may require split-second decisions with deadly consequences. For example, the pilot flying an A-10 Warthog at more than 200 m.p.h. during last month’s incident involving the Marines had to make just such a judgment when he spotted the armored vehicle that he fired upon in Kuwait.

And the U.S.-led coalition forces are also grappling with other challenges on the front:

* The desert terrain provides few identifiable landmarks for targeting or land navigation.

* The job of coordinating coalition forces in the region is complex, occasionally even requiring allied soldiers to distinguish Syrians from Iraqis, both using Soviet-made T-72 tanks, or differentiating the Centurion and Chieftain tanks employed by the British from the same models that the Iraqis captured during their long war with Iran.

* Sandstorms with blinding winds, foul weather, smoke from burning oil fields--or anything else that hampers visibility, including darkness--further increase the risk of mistakenly strafing one’s own forces when close air support is needed.

And these factors come together against a backdrop of more than 1.2 million troops and thousands of tanks, aircraft and armored vehicles concentrated in what the Pentagon calls “a target-rich environment,” making accidental casualties all the more likely.

“The reason we’ll have friendly fire in this war is the human element,” said Carl Bernard, a defense consultant and veteran of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. “Humans make mistakes: There’s confusion, there’s terror and fatigue, there’s panic, there’s malfunctions. . . . You can put in every safeguard, and you’ll still get a round from your own artillery.”

Certainly, the officers in charge of Operation Desert Storm are no strangers to friendly fire. The U.S. Central Command chief, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, recalled recently that mistaken air and artillery barrages were a frequent hazard in Vietnam. “I’ve been bombed by our own Air Force,” he told reporters.

Indeed, it was a unit of Schwarzkopf’s own battalion in Vietnam that fired a misdirected artillery round that killed Army Sgt. Michael Mullen, whose parents’ anguished efforts to find out about the circumstances of their son’s death in the face of military stonewalling led to C. D. B. Bryan’s 1976 book, “Friendly Fire,” and a subsequent television movie.

The Korean War, too, had its share of such casualties. In “The Forgotten War,” by military historian Clay Blair, former Pfc. James Ransome Jr. recounts an incident in which an American plane dropped its napalm short of its target and incinerated a Marine platoon.

“Men all around me were burned,” he recalls. “They lay rolling in the snow. Men I knew, marched and fought with begged me to shoot them. . . . It was terrible.” To avoid being the mistaken targets of a second attack, the units bolted in panic, their cohesion shattered.

One of the worst cases of friendly fire in U.S. history occurred during the D-Day invasion of Europe during World War II, when U.S. aircraft, preparing for the allied assault on the Normandy beachhead, dropped some bombs ahead of schedule, wounding 490 Americans and killing 111, including Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair, head of Army ground forces.

“The lead bombardier of one heavy bomber formation had trouble with his bombsight and released visually with bad results,” military historian Martin Blumenson recounted in “Breakout and Pursuit,” a book about the era’s combat. “Another failed to identify landmarks properly. The lead pilot of the third formation prematurely ordered bombs away.”

Eighty years earlier, Gen. Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson died of wounds suffered when he and his staff were mistaken for Union cavalrymen and fired on by his own Southern soldiers. With his last words, Jackson said: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Understandably, such incidents of friendly fire can be devastating to morale and to the confidence of troops in their field commanders. In extreme instances, they can lead to the troops’ taking matters into their own hands, according to psychologists who have worked with Vietnam veterans.

In some conflicts, enemy forces have taken pains to exploit this psychological impact. Army Brig. Gen. Eugene M. (Mike) Lynch, a veteran of three major U.S. conflicts, recalls that during World War II, the Germans would allow an American unit to pass and then lob mortars at it from the flanks.

“You’ll call back and tell your forces you’re receiving friendly fire,” Lynch says. “Your forces will call back and say they’re not shooting. Then you’re fired on again, and you think your guys don’t know what they’re doing. You fight the enemy’s mind as much as his forces. So what you try to do is introduce things that don’t fit the normal pattern.”

The frequency of friendly fire has never been accurately documented. The Army’s Shrader estimates that such incidents are responsible for about 2% of all battlefield casualties, but others put the figure far higher.

Often, Shrader says, it’s difficult to determine whether soldiers were killed by friendly or enemy fire. In most instances, the military has chalked up such deaths to enemy fire--either to cover up mistakes or to preserve morale, avoid interservice tensions or protect the deceased soldier’s image in the eyes of his family and friends.

The U.S. invasion of Panama in December, 1989, illustrates the difficulty of determining which side actually caused combat casualties. The Pentagon acknowledged that two or possibly three U.S. servicemen were killed and 19 wounded by gunfire from their comrades. Another 21 injuries might have been caused by friendly fire there, but the Pentagon said it was unable to “distinguish which of the 21 were hit by friendly or enemy fire.”

Shrader, who coined the term amicide (the killing of a friend) for his 1982 study, examined 269 incidents from World War II and Vietnam and determined that the most frequent causes were aircraft and artillery mistakenly engaging their own ground forces. In nearly every instance, he said, “a lack of coordination or some more direct human error was responsible.”

Not surprisingly, the military has been doing all it can to prevent such disasters.

In the Persian Gulf, for example, hundreds of forward air controllers are deployed with front-line forces to radio back information on troop locations and movements to rear command centers. Many are airborne in OV-10 Bronco light aircraft, which fly below bombers and direct them to targets. Meanwhile, radar-equipped AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes can track and identify up to 600 aircraft simultaneously.

Both U.S. and allied air forces use electronic IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes to prevent accidental attacks on their own jets. Tanks, which long have been identified by colored panels, now use chemical lights on the backs of their turrets at night as well.

But it may not be that easy. With U.S.-led forces controlling the sky, analysts say that the closer the fighting becomes on the ground, the better for the Iraqis--given the problems this will cause for bombers trying to distinguish between the two sides from the air.

Faced with similar circumstances, “the North Vietnamese had a saying: ‘If you want to fight the American, you have to cling to his belt buckle,’ ” says Barry Posen, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s defense studies program. “That was the only way they could think of to neutralize the American long-range firepower.”

Twentieth-century warfare, with its far-reaching, rapid-fire rockets and howitzers, devastating air power and other technological advances, has simply made mishaps more common--and more costly.

“As armies have accumulated more and heavier machinery, and more volatile and powerful explosives, the toll of accidents has risen still further,” John Keegan writes in his book “The Face of Battle.” Further, Keegan says, modern artillery led to “the practice of firing ‘indirect,’ or from map references rather than at visible targets, resulting in its shells falling sometimes . . . among friendly instead of enemy soldiers.”

Indeed, some analysts maintain that friendly fire casualties are such an integral part of modern combat that efforts to distinguish them from enemy-inflicted casualties are counterproductive--for the military, for the public and for the survivors. “The war is measured in total casualties and not in incidents of friendly fire,” says Cordesman, a professor of national security studies at Georgetown University and author of the book “Lessons of Modern War.”

Cordesman says that some combatants--such as the Israelis in their 1982 campaign in Lebanon--have found that an increase in friendly-fire casualties may actually reflect fewer overall casualties because it means that commanders have relied on close-range air and artillery support.

But Cordesman warns that if the news media make too much of incidents of friendly fire, it could inhibit the use of close-support tactics. He also maintains that disclosing friendly fire deaths “belittles the sacrifice people made for their country” because it “somehow suggests they died needlessly and through incompetence and did not act as heroically or take the same risks” as comrades.

For those reasons, as well as an institutional desire to avoid blame and conflict between various services, the military has long been reluctant to confirm friendly-fire deaths.

The Mullens, an Iowa farm family, were initially told that their son’s death stemmed from “non-battle” causes. Only through persistent questioning of military authorities did they eventually learn that he died in his sleep one night when an American artillery round fell short of its target.

“Michael’s death was a terrible, terrible tragedy,” Schwarzkopf told author Bryan. “A tragedy typical of a profane thing called war--maybe ‘typical’ isn’t the word--it isn’t a daily occurrence. It’s a unique thing that happens on a very occasional basis. But it happens!”

The Mullens’ bitterness-- How could this happen? Why him?-- is a common reaction among family members of friendly-fire victims, experts say. So was the Mullens’ desire to learn the truth.

Contrary to Cordesman’s argument--and current military practice--psychologists who have worked extensively with the survivors of friendly-fire victims in Vietnam say that the families wanted to know how their sons or husbands died and that often they needed to know.

“Family members want to know, definitely, and they’re damn mad,” says Charles R. Figley, a psychologist and family therapist who has interviewed more than 500 Vietnam veterans and written books on their readjustment problems. “It’s not so much the fact that their loved one died at the hands of friendly fire,” he explains, “it’s that the government or somebody tried to deceive them” about the circumstances.

John P. Wilson, a psychology professor at Cleveland State University and expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, agrees. “It helps them to grieve and to put into perspective the circumstances of the death or the injury of the person they care for,” he says. “And that’s important.”

The Marines announced last week that they would not tell the next of kin which seven of the 11 Marines killed on Jan. 29 died accidentally. “It’s a case-by-case determination,” Maj. Jim Adams of the Army said, explaining that each service will decide how to handle such accidents. “It’s not a Pentagon policy not to tell them, but the fact is most families don’t want to know.”

Still, some observers see the military’s relatively rapid confirmation of the Marine deaths in Kuwait as a sign of a new-found willingness to acknowledge friendly-fire casualties. “The policy is that if we become aware of or suspect that a person was either killed or wounded as a result of friendly fire, we will investigate,” says Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Tibor Mazar.

Even so, Mazar cautions that the initial process may not be indicative of future circumstances. “Had that incident with the Marines occurred during an ongoing battle that moved forward or backward from that site, the ability to conduct an investigation would have been a moot point,” he says. “If you can’t visit the scene of the crime, conducting an investigation is impossible.”

Not all victims of friendly fire come home in flag-draped caskets. Psychologically, a soldier who fires a weapon that kills his comrades is a casualty as well.

“The guy who flew the A-10 (and killed the seven Marines in Kuwait) will have to go to his grave with that,” says MIT’s Posen. “He got in close, he took risks thinking he was trying to save the lives of American brothers-in-arms. Then to find out later it turned out exactly the opposite must be terrible.”

In the end, no platitudes about the inevitability of friendly fire are likely to be much comfort for those who have to live with this grim reality.

As Patricia Lee Haley, a childhood friend of U.S. Marine Sgt. Garett Mongrella, 25, who was killed in the Gulf accident last month, says: “It makes it worse for the family and friends knowing that he went to fight for his own country, and his own country killed him.”

Times researcher Pat Welch contributed to this article.