On the second night of the ground war, I realized that darkness would never fall. To the south of my position with the 42nd Field Artillery Brigade near the border of Iraq and Kuwait, the sky glowed deep red. Kuwait’s oil was going up in flames. From the first moments of Desert Storm, I was amazed by the sheer scale of the campaign. As the sky brightened on the first morning of the invasion, I stared at my own column of tanks, trucks, and other support vehicles stretching as far as I could see front and back, with identical lines on either side from horizon to horizon. But if there was a war to fight, it wasn’t here. We made progress as fast as we could. Once in a while we stopped, and soldiers dashed around carrying powder explosives. Then with a roar our big guns launched a rain of fire ahead of our advancing columns to soften up the enemy. During four days of advance, the unit, attached to the Army’s VII Corps, fired an ear-numbing 5,440 artillery rounds and 1,286 rockets. The invasion route took us north, deep into Iraq. Then we turned sharply southeast and headed toward Kuwait.