Desert Storm's Troops: Triumphant Return

The war was a defining moment, everyone thought.

What exactly did it define?

-- The end of the old American depression called the Vietnam syndrome -- the compulsive pessimism, the need to look for downsides and dooms?

-- The birth of a new American century -- onset of a unipolar world, with America playing the global cop?

-- Another chapter in an age of astonishments that has brought down the Berlin Wall, ended the cold war and begun preliminary work on the disintegration of the Soviet Union?

-- The first post-nuclear big war, almost as quick and lethal as one with nukes, but smarter, fairer, precisely selective in its targets, with no radioactive aftereffects?

-- The first war epic of the global village's electronic theater?

-- The apotheosis of war making as a brilliant American package -- a dazzling, compacted product, like some new concentrate of intervention: Fast! Improved! Effective!

-- The dawn of a new world order?

All of those and much, much more. Or somewhat less.

The enterprise is still surrounded by a daze of astonishment: that it should have been so quick, so "easy," so devastating in effect. That coalition casualties should have been so light. That the cost to American taxpayers will be relatively small ($15 billion or less if Japan, Germany and others honor their pledges of financial support). That Saddam Hussein should have been so cartoon-villainous (and incompetent as a military leader). That his soldiers should have committed atrocities that took the moral onus off the carnage that the coalition left in the desert.

The American mind may have sought out an innocent analogy: George Bush had -- unexpectedly, miraculously -- found the sweet spot. He and his men (Powell, Schwarzkopf, Scowcroft) had performed a miracle of American concentration and grace under pressure, after years when those seemed almost archaic American talents. Now Bush was rounding the bases while the baseball he hit was still rising in the air and might yet -- who knows? -- go into some orbit of higher historical meaning.

Whatever the significance of the war, most Americans, giddy with relief and pride and a still-permeating sense of unreality, savored the moment. The first soldiers to come home from the gulf started pouring off transports. A trooper arrived at J.F.K. airport and said, "We're proud of what we done. We know we done the right thing." At Hunter Army Airfield in southern Georgia, 104 troops of the 24th Infantry Division, still dressed in desert camouflage, climbed off the plane in the middle of the night to a raucous celebration in which military discipline instantly fell apart. Friends and relatives swarmed onto the field to engulf the soldiers. A trooper protested a brief military formation by shouting: "The women are waiting, and the beer is cold!" No one in Hinesville slept that night.

On a cloudless Friday afternoon, several thousand servicemen gathered at Travis Air Force Base northeast of San Francisco to welcome back 430 crewmen from the U.S.N.S. Mercy, a onetime supertanker converted into a hospital ship. (A skeleton crew will sail the Mercy home from the gulf, arriving in 28 days.) The crewmen were cheered at Travis, then rode in buses to the Navy's Oak Knoll Hospital in Oakland with a motorcycle police escort.