Colonel Studies Gulf War to Create Its Official History : Analysis: The military is highly interested in the lessons of its conflicts. The Middle East mosaic will eventually be laid out in excruciating detail.

Looking over the shoulder of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the allied forces in the Gulf War, is an army colonel who will have a large say in how history views this conflict.

The war is less than a month old, but Col. Richard Swain, Ph.D., director of the Combat Studies Institute of the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., already is attending briefings, interviewing the major players, collecting documents and making observations on the conduct of the war.

The military, of course, is extremely interested in the lessons of its conflicts. As in past wars, the history of the Persian Gulf War will eventually be laid out in sometimes excruciating detail in a series of green books that eventually will be available from the U.S. government printing office, or at leading research libraries.

They are first and foremost military documents. But they are also prized by civilian historians as valuable, largely objective starting points.

Swain, a tall, graying, 47-year-old artillery officer, said they serve another purpose as well.

“They fulfill military accountability to the American people,” he said. “We professionals ask the American people for their sons and daughters. We lose some of them, so we better tell them how we did it.

“Official history cannot be an apology.”

“To a great extent, it’s a matter of being a fly on the wall,” he said of his role here. Sometimes it means being “a pain in the neck.”

Swain is a military man, albeit with an interest in history that is “an obsession, a compulsion.” He earned a Ph.D. in history at Duke University in 1975 and taught the subject at West Point. He has taught, done research and written articles at the Command and General Staff College since 1985.

“Being a historian isn’t the kind of thing the army rewards,” he acknowledged in an interview. “You have to be prepared for that. I didn’t get to be a colonel by being a historian. I got to be a colonel in field artillery, then went into history.”

Swain served two tours in Vietnam before turning to history and teaching. His return to the battlefield “forces me back into reality.”

Twenty-nine people, including Swain, his three assistants and three members of the 44th Military History Detachment are directly involved in collecting information for the Army’s Persian Gulf history. Each of the two Army corps and the supply command serving in the Gulf have historians who direct military history detachments. The Navy and Air Force have similar teams.

“Maybe the biggest long-term thing I do is not anything I write but keeping the documents in order,” Swain said. But the fact is, he’ll almost certainly become one of the world’s foremost experts on this war.

The colonel attends morning command briefings and staff meetings in the afternoon. He reads the war plans. He talks to officers and goes over their files, following the war’s paper trail. He studies their orders and reports and goes to forward areas to get a good picture of the terrain.

At the beginning of March, Swain will begin to compile his first command report, covering the period from last August, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, until midnight Jan. 16, the eve of the first allied bombing attacks on Iraq. A similar report will be prepared on the Desert Storm phase now under way.

Eventually, the chief of military history in Washington will assign somebody to write the story of the Gulf War. It could be Swain if he wants it. It could be a civilian historian. Whoever it is will use Swain’s reports as a primary source.

Part of the job will entail evaluating the decisions made by Schwarzkopf and his commanders, a sometimes daunting task.

“What I always tell my students is that decisions are always a choice between difficulties. Part of the job is when you have a bad decision, you have to find out how it got that way,” he said.

Being so close to the action complicates the task of writing objective history.

“You lack a certain detachment, but you have to balance that with the army’s desire to know in pretty short order.”

Some of the green books from past wars are better than others, depending on who wrote them: “Official history doesn’t have to be dry,” he said.

But the lessons of the past are essential to the professional commander.

“I think military officers, by the very nature of what they do, need to take cognizance of the past.”