Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

  ACTIONS

  During the night of 26-27 February, our attack had gone about forty to sixty kilometers into the Iraqi defense.

  BRITISH. The 1st UK had secured Objective Waterloo, and as I had ordered, they were prepared to attack to the northeast behind the Iraqis in front of 1st INF to Objective Denver. They had been impressive in their relentless day-and-night attacks. Since 1200 on 25 February, when they attacked east out of the breach, they had broken the back of Iraqi frontline divisions, primarily by cutting off their heads in the rear; that is, by capturing generals and other senior officers of the Iraqi division leadership who had stayed to fight with their troops. They also had defeated the tactical reserve and prevented Iraqi forces from joining the defense farther north or from interfering with our constant stream of fuel trucks making their way north. I knew I had a decision with the British early that morning. Should I order them north or not? Before I made that decision, I wanted to check the progress of the 1st INF.

  1ST INF. The Big Red One had begun passage of lines through the 2nd ACR at about 2200 and finished at 0200. Tom Rhame, Don Holder, and their leaders had done a magnificent job in pulling this off. Eight thousand vehicles of the 1st INF had had to pass through the two thousand of the CAV, and then into battle a few kilometers farther on. The 2nd ACR had established a battle hand-over line and a series of passage points that would let the 1st INF pass through, then give them at least two kilometers before contact with the Iraqis. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Robinette, with Don Holder's approval, had ordered the regiment back that distance earlier in the evening in order to give them that space.

  As for the 1st INF: At first Tom Rhame had wanted to pass his first brigade through Don's northern squadron (2nd) and his third brigade through the regiment's southern squadron (1st). This would have allowed Rhame to conduct an envelopment move, with those two brigades attacking the Iraqi defense from the south and north, while leaving the 2nd ACR to keep pressure on the middle. But Don did not like that, as it would leave his middle squadron (3rd) to support by fire, and would thus put that squadron in a possible blue-on-blue situation, where it would be firing into Rhame's two brigades. With so little time to plan, Tom decided that the maneuver was not worth the risk, and he changed to a straight forward passage through all three squadrons on a thirty-kilometer front.

  In the north, 1st INF had its 1st Brigade, commanded by Colonel Lon "Bert" Maggart; and in the south, they had the 3rd Brigade, commanded by Colonel Dave Weisman; while the 2nd Brigade, commanded by Colonel Tony Moreno, was then in reserve. Because both 1st and 3rd Brigades had two tank battalions each, plus a Bradley battalion, Tom wanted his tank heavy forces forward. This would put the 1st INF into the fight with 232 tanks in the same thirty-kilometer-wide sector where the 2nd ACR had 123.

  Although elements would continue to pass through all night, the passage was almost complete by midnight, and the 1st INF reported it was all clear of the 2nd ACR at 0200. Meanwhile, I had removed the 210th Artillery Brigade (two battalions of 155-mm howitzers and one MLRS battalion) from the 2nd ACR, and used them to reinforce the 1st INF as they passed through (and thereafter until the cease-fire). I also had ordered the 2/1 AH- 64 battalion back to their parent 1st AD early on the morning of the twenty-seventh to rejoin them for their main attack in the north.

  Let me offer an aside here: One of the ways you influence the outcome of battles and engagements is by weighting the main effort. For a corps commander, the most reusable combat assets are aviation and artillery. Less reusable are ground-maneuver units. These take longer to get from one place to another, and once the battle is joined, they tend to get engaged in actions from which they can't easily be extricated. That's not so with aviation and artillery. So for 2nd ACR's covering force, I had placed an AH-64 battalion with eighteen Apaches from 1st AD, and from corps artillery, a field artillery brigade with two cannon battalions of twenty-four guns each and an MLRS battalion of eighteen launchers. When that 2nd ACR mission was complete, I removed these units from the regiment and put them in the main attack. Likewise, because I thought that Butch needed the combat power in his main attack in the center, I had directed that a battalion of the corps 11th Aviation Brigade, 2/6 CAV, go early on the morning of the twenty-seventh to the 3rd AD. Butch's second attack battalion had been removed in August 1990, when U.S. Army Europe had sent an aviation brigade to support XVIII Corps early on in Desert Shield, and they had never been returned. Likewise, after the breach mission and the shifting of the corps main effort to the enveloping force, I had cut the 42nd and 75th Artillery Brigades from the 1st INF to the 3rd AD and 1st AD respectively. These changes required physical moves and coordination in order to get the radio frequencies set, the maps posted with current situations, the mission orders done, and logistics support arranged. It all took time--but it took less time with aviation and artillery units.

  By BMNT, the Big Red One had seized Norfolk (an objective we had placed about thirty kilometers east of Phase Line Smash; we'd anticipated Iraqi second-echelon forces to be located there) and were pressing toward Highway 8, some eighty kilometers east of where they had begun their attack just before midnight.

  By now, we had approximate numbers of enemy losses and of our own soldiers killed and wounded. From this, I knew it must have been a hell of a fight, and so was determined to go visit the division right away that morning. Later, I talked to soldiers and commanders of the Division's 1st and 3rd Brigades, and attended a memorial service for the four soldiers killed in action in 1/41 Infantry in 3rd Brigade and heard the details.

  Here are some of the specifics of that series of night battles of the 1st INF toward Norfolk:

  Colonel Bert Maggart46 describes the early scenes this way: "The passage into enemy-held territory was an eerie, almost surreal experience. The night sky was filled with catastrophic explosions, the likes of which I had never seen before. Even the destruction of four T-55 tanks during the breach [on 24-25 February] was nothing compared to the sight that joined our eyes during the transition from friendly to enemy ground. Horrible fires roared from the turrets of Iraqi tanks, with flames shooting high into the night air. At the exact point of passage through the 2nd ACR in the TF 2/3 4 zone, a T-72 tank that the regiment had destroyed earlier that evening still burned brightly, filling the air with the pungent smell of burning oil, rubber, and flesh."

  On 1 March 1991, in a personal talk with Lieutenant Colonel Pat Ritter, commander of TF 1/3 4 Armor, Pat told me of a close-in action in which Iraqi infantry had climbed onto his tank, only to be shot off by one of his company commanders' tanks.

  Soldiers in 2nd Battalion, 34th Armor, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Greg Fontenot,47 referred to the night attack as "Fright Night." If that's what they called it, I can't imagine what the Iraqis called it. Greg Fontenot later wrote of his battalion's experience that night: "As Charlie"--Team C--"and Delta passed the command group closing on Bravo's left rear, they encountered infantrymen in spider holes who wanted to fight. . . . At one point, Burns crawled all over his infantry platoon leader for firing on C-66 [Burns's tank] with a Bushmaster [the 25-mm cannon on Bradleys]. The platoon leader calmly replied that he was killing enemy infantry, a fact to which I can attest. . . . In the first hour [about 0130 to 0230], the task force destroyed thirty-five armored vehicles, ten trucks, an unknown number of dismounted infantrymen, and captured nearly one hundred Iraqi troops." The Iraqis did fight back, and Fontenot went on to describe the effect of Iraqi artillery and direct-fire rounds.

  Newly commissioned in 1990 out of Southern University, Second Lieutenant Chuck Parker was a tank platoon leader in Company B, 2/3 4 Armor. He remembers his main task that night as keeping his platoon fixed on the enemy and avoiding blue-on-blue fires. In order to keep his platoon aligned and hammering away at enemy targets, he kept his head out of the turret and used handheld night-vision goggles (NVGs). Without his NVGs, he could not see beyond his tank. Tracers from firing were visible, however, causing alternately bright flashes and dar
kness, and occasionally washing out his NVGs. The sounds of tank cannon and artillery fire were almost constant. For Lieutenant Parker, the time he and his unit had spent meeting the tough crew and platoon tank-gunnery standards at Fort Riley was well spent. That night they destroyed many Iraqi tanks and other combat vehicles on their way to Norfolk, while in the entire eighty-nine hours of the attack, his platoon did not have a soldier killed or wounded. As part of Company B, they had led the breach force on 24 February with mine-clearing blades on the front of their M1A1s. (The soldiers of Parker's platoon remain close and stay in touch with one another.)

  Over on the right in 3rd Brigade (actually 2nd Armored Division Forward, out of Garlstedt in north Germany, sent as the third brigade of the 1st INF), commanded by Colonel Dave Weisman, the engagements and actions were similar.

  "The biggest problem was keeping battalions in line, making sure we didn't shoot each other," says Weisman, who was in an M113 behind 2/66 Armor.48 And Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hillman, commander of TF 1/41 Infantry, said, ". . . we found ourselves in a 360-degree fight, and that was the hardest part of this whole thing. . . . We were in amongst them [and] spent the rest of the night clearing them, either capturing or killing soldiers in those bunkers."

  "We had thermal sights, but unheated targets," said Lieutenant Colonel John Brown, who commanded 2nd Battalion, 66th Armor, that night, referring to the Iraqi practice of leaving tank engines turned off to make them invisible to our NVGs, while "the Iraqis had daylight sights, but unilluminated targets. Neither of us could particularly see each other." He continued, "We were 'coaxing' [shooting with the M1A1's machine gun] guys running between tanks, running between our tanks and bunkers, as we were moving through. It was really hairy. There were rounds flying all over the place."

  Hillman added, "There were burning hulks going up like flares, infantry trying to surrender, infantry trying to hide, infantry trying to fight, infantry getting up on tracked vehicles, either to attack or try to surrender."

  Lieutenant Colonel Taylor Jones's 3rd Battalion, 66th Armor, attacked through three Iraqi tank companies, about a battalion in strength. "It just seemed like there was target after target after target," said Captain Tim Ryan, who commanded Company D.

  There were casualties and there were heroes and extraordinary courage under fire.

  On this night, Command Sergeant Major Conway of 2/66 Armor would crawl up on an Iraqi T-55 tank and drop a grenade in the turret. He was blown off the tank as the tank exploded (he survived). He also led a four-man team to go after an Iraqi RPG team that was threatening the fuel trucks following the attack. Later, Brown's gunner, Staff Sergeant Matthew Sheets, spotted Iraqi RPG teams getting in position to shoot into the rear of advancing 2/66 tanks. "I'm convinced that Sheets saved six tanks," Brown says, "since he killed six Iraqi RPG teams."

  In another part of the battle, Captain Lee Wilson was commanding Company B, 1/41 Infantry. While his company was moving to link up with a forward unit, the company, and Wilson's own Bradley, came under intense Iraqi RPG and machine-gun fire. U.S. tanks, seeing the battle behind them, fired into the formation. (Through a night sight, remember, RPGs hitting a friendly vehicle look almost like an enemy vehicle firing at you.) Wilson's Bradley was hit, and he was thrown from the Bradley (he survived). Sergeant Joe Dienstag, the Bradley gunner, who was seated next to Wilson in the turret, was untouched. Private First Class Dennis Skaggs, the driver, whose hands were too numb from the blast to operate the controls that let the ramp down in the back so that the troops could get out, grabbed a sledgehammer and got the ramp open. The troops poured out as the back of the Bradley filled with smoke. Skaggs, a combat lifesaver,49 and Dienstag pulled out wounded soldiers, and Skaggs immediately began intravenous fluids and pressure bandages. ("This kid was phenomenal," Wilson later said of Skaggs.) The battle continued, with Iraqi small-arms fire all around. Burning vehicles were visible, and you could hear tank and Bradley cannon fire.

  For the 3rd Brigade, it was a swirling fight with Iraqi tank and infantry forces that night.

  One U.S. Bradley platoon had four soldiers KIA and eighteen wounded. For the entire division, there were six U.S. soldiers KIA that night, and thirty wounded, for VII Corps the largest concentration of casualties in the shortest time in the war.

  I constantly bristle at misrepresentations that all the fighting was done at 2,500 meters, or that it looked like the pictures on TV of laser-guided bombs hitting targets from the air. The ground combat was physically tough, often at night or in weather affecting visibility, and at distances measured in a few meters rather than kilometers.

  Perhaps, Sfc Jim Sedgwick, a platoon sergeant in 1/41 Infantry, said it best: "We almost lost a platoon, and out of a company element, that's an awful lot of people. . . . Friendly fire, unfriendly, that's not the point. What they did that night was, they took care of their people. They did the best they could in an extraordinary situation. They had a lot of genuine heroes that night. A lot of them."

  Sedgwick was a Vietnam veteran.

  The attack to seize Objective Norfolk broke the back of the Iraqi defense. More than 300 Iraqi vehicles were destroyed. But it came at a price in dead and wounded. It was a risk. You ask a lot of your soldiers and leaders.

  Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hillman said it right: "There was a composure and discipline that reflect a quality of soldier . . . far more than we had a right to expect."

  That night is why I always tell people, "It was fast, but it was not easy. Do not equate swiftness with ease." That night, those soldiers wrote new pages in the history of night mounted combat.

  3RD AD. By this time, the division had come on line abreast with, first, the 2nd ACR, and then the 1st INF to their south and the 1st AD to their north. I was glad to have the disciplined, well-drilled, and relentless armored force that was the 3rd AD in the middle of the VII Corps attack. You want a steady outfit in the middle. They would keep the flank contact left and right with 1st AD and 1st INF (to keep the corps attack relatively aligned and to prevent shooting across flanks), and they would cut a swath of destruction through the Iraqi RGFC middle.

  Since the sector I had given Butch Funk was too narrow to put three brigades on line, Butch had been using two brigades forward (his 1st and 2nd) and one back. By now he had decided to pass his third brigade through his second and leave his first brigade in the south, next to the 1st INF.

  Third AD's battle log was full of reports of actions across their front, highlighted late the afternoon before, around 1600, with what they would call the Battle of Phase Line Bullet.

  They had been on the move since early the morning before, 26 February, and had been in enemy contact for about twelve straight hours. That morning, they had been my freshest division, but no more. I needed them to sustain the center of our attack east toward Highway 8. The more success they had, the more the Iraqis on either flank would feel threatened.

  Late the day before, Funk's two brigades on line were attacking into the center of the Tawalkana's forming defenses. His second brigade, commanded by Colonel Bob Higgins, was in the north, and his first brigade, commanded by Colonel Bill Nash, was in the south, linked with the advancing 2nd ACR.

  Nash's three battalions on line had hit the Iraqi security zone at 1630 that afternoon--a twelve-kilometer advancing line of steel. There were many targets, some close, some distant.

  First Lieutenant Marty Leners, 1st Platoon leader, Company C, 3/5 Cavalry was the first tank in the 3rd AD to kill a T-72. But for Leners and his gunner, Sergeant Glenn Wilson, it was a tense engagement. Rain and blowing sand made it difficult to use the laser range finder on their M1A1. That meant they had to use battle-sight range (an automatic setting using average expected range) or estimate the range and manually input it into the tank computer. That all takes time. Their problem was that the T-72 saw them and was traversing its turret in their direction, ready to fire. Wilson got a round off, using battle-sight range. It fell short of the T-72. Leners quickly input additional range and Wi
lson fired a second round, beating the Iraqi tank to the draw and killing it.

  Over in Lieutenant Colonel John Kalb's 4/32 Armor, the fighting was at closer quarters. T-72s were closer than 1,000 meters, with Iraqi infantry on board and in bunkers. In a running fight with a T-72 and Iraqi infantry after darkness on 26 February, Kalb's scouts in Bradleys had destroyed the tank and Iraqi infantry, but had lost two soldiers KIA and a Bradley to a fratricide. Early on the morning of the twenty-seventh, Kalb's tank task force had intercepted an Iraqi unit attempting a counterattack, and in less than a minute had destroyed 15 T-72s and 25 other armored vehicles with the massed tank fires of his 43 M1A1s.

  To their north, the 2nd Brigade's fights went on all night. Lieutenant Colonel Beaufort "Chuck" Hallman's 4/8 Cavalry, an M1A1 task force, attacked into the heart of the Iraqi defense, which now appeared to be in some depth; and received return fire from the Iraqis' small arms, RPGs, and artillery, in addition to tank and BMP 73-mm fire. Their attack went on for the better part of four hours against a dug-in Iraqi tank/infantry position supported by artillery. Iraqi infantry were in bunkers, and Iraqi tanks and BMPs attempted to use destroyed vehicles as shields. Hallman's tankers relentlessly pressed the attack. By about 0400, the brigade, together with TF 4/18 Infantry, had broken the back of the Iraqi defense, and Funk was preparing to pass Colonel Rob Goff's 3rd Brigade through them to continue the attack.