Extinguishing an oil well fire with artillery - GIF

[Frank S]

I was in Kuwait in 91 during the raining of oil fire and black soot for a while
Noon day sky a black as night and the night sky as bright as noon.
Those masks similar to the ones in the video would have only been seen worn by persons far away from the fires anyone close enough to feel the heat wore various kinds or real breathing equipment depending on what country you were from you might even see someone wearing NBC gear left over from WWII.
Any armillary pieces I saw were self propelled like combat engineers would have maybe a 155 mm or 210 mm mortar tube mounted on an armored dozer That is not to say there may not have been any towed howitzers used to shoot off the damaged well heads though.
With over 800 wells on fire no single person not even MR Adair would have seen all of them. A lot of teams from several countries worked round the clock in a coordinated effort to quell the single most man made disaster of modern times. Many of the support personnel never got within several miles of any fires. You didn't need to get near to feel the effects though. the black Smokey haze blanketed all of Kuwait and much of Saudi Arabia.
When I went back in 2003 when driving out near the oil fields you could still see spots of oil blackened desert.
one thing in my opinion that congress and old man Bush should have done was to demand the few countries in the first gulf war coalition was to march all the way straight through Baghdad and eliminated every person of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi guard then let Kuwait annex Iraq. But Kuwait never through its history had any asperations of conquests. They even gave Saudi Arabia 2/3s of their land mass back about the time that oil was first discovered there because they didn't see any need for the extra land at the time. Kuwait was more about its 800 boat navy of dhows for prawn fishing