With The Troops: Enter The Cleanup Crew

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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.