Lightning in the Storm : The 101st Air Assault Division in the Gulf War

"The Air Force and armor were the thunder of Desert Storm, " said Gen.

Schwarzkopf, "while the 101st was the lightning." This is the story of the Screaming Eagles - the hell-bent, heliborne soldiers of the 101st who hurled the lightning bolts.

The first one struck to begin the air war, a daring night raid which punched a hole in Iraq's radar fence for allied bombers to light up the sky over Baghdad on January 17, 1991.

This white knuckle raid was recorded from beginning to end through the pilots' infrared cameras.

Actual dialogue from the tapes provides a chapter of fascinating authenticity.

The five month run up to the hundred-hour ground war is fascinating in and of itself.

The 101st pitched thousands of Arab tents for a base ("Fort Camel") from where they would cover a front as large as the combined areas of Vermont and New Hampshire to block an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia.

Through dozens of interviews and hundreds of army videos never publicly viewed, the peculiar experiences of Desert Shield are described in many voices, from corporals to generals.

The unique privations of the theater are described, where for the first time alcohol and local women were absent from war, replaced by the umbilical cord of mail, and the gripping memory of a time when the 101st drove convoys along freeways lined by tens of thousands of cheering Americans.

The role of Vietnam veterans harboring memories of jungle warfare is described as they run the desert war, as is their collective vow that never again would victory on the battlefield be nullified.

That opportunity for unconditional victory came in the first dawn of the ground war.

Like some rampaging cyclone, the 101st touched down in the EuphratesValley, landing brigades throughout an area the size of the mid-Atlantic seaboard.

Far ahead of the allies' tanks, the Screaming Eagles strangled Iraq's lifeline into Kuwait - in the space of a single day.

Darting hundreds of miles during the hundred hours, they were poised to le