Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

  By late that night, 1st AD got about 100,000 gallons of fuel, but it had been close. The division had certainly been within two hours of running out of fuel.

  AFTER dealing with that, I got into the back of the TAC M577 with Brigadier General Jay Hendrix, Ron's ADC, for a quick update on the 1st AD situation. Jay Hendrix was an experienced mech infantryman--another one of those mounted unit commanders who could keep five or six things suspended simultaneously in his head, picture the total situation in his mind's eye, and make fast and correct decisions.

  Jarrett Robertson was of a similar cut and had an infectious confidence born of competence and experience. He was a superb soldier and a great cavalryman, and he was also a kindred spirit. Later--in June 1991--I chose Jarrett to be VII Corps chief of staff. (Jarrett, along with two other soldiers, was killed in a Blackhawk crash in 1993 in Germany, while serving as Major General and deputy commander of V Corps.)

  Just as with 3rd AD, the past twenty-four hours for the 1st AD had been a textbook in maneuvering and fighting an armored division. From my order to Ron late Monday to execute FRAGPLAN 7, the division had done a masterful job. They had attacked and secured al-Busayyah, and had simultaneously gotten together their own plans (complete with intelligence picture) to turn right ninety degrees and attack due east without a halt. As they'd turned east, they'd had two brigades forward and their second brigade to the rear finishing the al-Busayyah fight. Rather than slow the division, Ron had left a task force (6/6 Infantry with Bradleys) and an engineer company at al-Busayyah and pressed on to the east (this turn had caused a big gap to develop between him and the 3rd ACR and 24th INF Division and left his northern flank open). Later that day, he had brought his brigades on line abreast in a sector about forty kilometers wide; and later, the 75th Artillery Brigade had joined the division and had been integrated into the fire planning. They had fought all night, maintaining contact with 3rd AD to their south, and had destroyed the northern brigade of the Tawalkana Division. They'd had two casualties.

  Ron was pleased with their actions to date and the tempo of the division. So was I, as long as they kept attacking.

  But I was also interested in turning their attention to the maneuver necessary to allow the 1st CAV to attack to their north and east toward Objective Raleigh and the Hammurabi Division. With everything else going on at that time--especially the fuel situation, the continued movement of the division, and the unknown RGFC reaction (they still had three divisions to Ron's north, plus artillery)--I was not sure I had their attention.

  Consequently, I stressed to Ron that I wanted him to make room in the north by "necking down" the division zone and allowing the 1st CAV to pass to the north. That was not a precise military order, but the intent to Ron was clear: Make room north in your sector to pass 1st CAV forward toward Objective Raleigh. I left the tactics up to Ron. As far as I was concerned, he could back the second brigade out and continue his attack with two brigades forward, as 3rd AD was doing, or he could attempt to narrow each brigade sector to give them room in the north.

  Because of his heavy contact with the Medina and his desire to keep maximum combat power forward, Ron chose the latter. Of the two maneuvers, it was the more difficult; but under the circumstances, it was the right move for continuing the mission I had given him.

  As it happened, there was an unresolved question of priorities over Ron's two missions. Specifically, Ron assumed that his continued mission had higher priority than passing 1st CAV forward. I thought both were possible, so I never told him which had higher priority in my mind. As I saw it, whichever tactic Ron selected would leave their adjusted zone about as wide as the one 3rd AD currently had (later my planners drew an adjusted attack axis for 1st AD that directed them from east to more southeast, opening up room forward of Phase Line Lime for 1st CAV).

  In any event, though both Ron and Jay Hendrix told me they understood what I wanted them to do, I left there with the uneasy feeling that Ron was not convinced of his ability to execute while he had the Medina battle going on.

  I left to go back to the TAC FWD to brief the order to the other commanders. Now that I had given the double-envelopment order personally to 1st INF, 3rd AD, and 1st AD, it was time to talk to 1st CAV and 2nd ACR, as well as to get the overlays out. The time for them to execute was compressed, but I thought we could do it.

  1030 VII CORPS JUMP TAC

  It was a quick fifteen-minute flight back to the jump TAC.

  Not only were John Tilelli and Don Holder there waiting, but Dave McKiernan and Ron McConnell had by now drawn the basic maneuver scheme for our double envelopment on an overlay on top of their 1:100 000 map.

  It had started to rain slightly. Since we had no shelter there, I asked Ron to lean the four-by-eight-foot plywood map board up against the side of the command M577. We huddled, and I went over the maneuver scheme. It was a good thing they had used permanent marker pens to draw the map overlay, or by the time I got finished it all would have been washed off the map.

  I knew I was asking for a lot from these commanders and their units, but it was a simple scheme of maneuver, and I thought we could execute. Tom Rhame and Butch Funk were already doing it, and needed no further orders.

  John was an old cavalry friend, had the quickest-reacting division in the theater, and had just broken enemy contact, completed a move through the breach, and raced 250 kilometers in less than twenty-four hours. It had been a magnificent move. My orders to him were simple: Pass north of the 1st AD but just south of the northern border of the corps, attack east toward Objective Raleigh, and destroy the Hammurabi Division. Though I had not planned to give him any additional combat power, I did attempt to have the artillery of 1st AD fire reinforcing fires as 1st CAV moved east beyond 1st AD.

  I wanted 1st CAV in the fight that day before dark. John said he could make it happen if 1st AD would give him a lane. I knew he would. John had drilled them to be lightning quick.

  The way my planners had figured to provide that lane was by adjusting the direction of attack of the 1st AD and 3rd AD from due east to slightly southeast. With our northern border running exactly east-west, this would open space for 1st CAV's attack. I liked the scheme and thought it would work, but it all depended on 1st AD getting east far enough to make the slight turn that would open the space north of them. Though the place where that would happen was only an estimate, we had to pick a point, since the turn involved not only 1st AD, but 3rd AD to their south.

  I ordered Don Holder to follow 1st INF, then to attack north inside them toward Objective Hawk. That way the 2nd ACR would stay between the eastward-advancing 3rd AD and just west of 1st INF. First INF would be attacking generally due east toward the Gulf until they got across Highway 8, where they would turn north. In this way, I thought we would close in behind any Iraqi forces remaining in our sector from the south and from the north, closing the noose around the border between Iraq and Kuwait or just a little to the north around the town of Safwan.

  "Roger, I can do it," Don said.

  At about 1100, they both left to complete their own planning and to get orders out. We were working in what the Army calls parallel planning in compressed time.

  A few others had been with us in our planning group: Chief Warrant Officer Bob Barfield from our corps G-2 section at the main CP; Bob Schmitt, my corps planner and a SAMS graduate (Bob knew what to do in the shorthand language we used and had been part of the quick final planning work since last night); Creighton Abrams; Colonel Carl Ernst, who had come forward from Lucky TAC, the Third Army TAC CP located in King Khalid Military City; and Stan Cherrie.

  I told Stan to get in a helicopter with the double-envelopment order and go find the 1st INF so that they would have the graphics and could talk to the 2nd ACR. Meanwhile, Stan also kept the main TAC moving right past us to set up farther east.

  From CWO Barfield, I got an updated intelligence read that confirmed what we were seeing on the battlefield: that is, the Iraqis were defending in depth as they
retreated toward Basra, while also trying to get as many forces out of the theater as possible. It was not yet clear to me whether they thought we were going for Basra and were trying to defend it (as they had done so strongly in the war with Iran), or whether they were now in full retreat.

  Bob Schmitt confirmed that XVIII Corps was still to our west, had not yet turned east, and would not come on line with the corps today. This information intensified my own sense of urgency to complete the envelopment, as it now increasingly appeared that we were the only ones who could close the mission out.

  Creighton Abrams continued to have a nose for the fight and the fire-support dimension of the planning that needed to go into it. As of now, he told me, he had no visibility on theater air. By now, the FSCL was being more tightly controlled by CENTCOM, and was out of our hands. Previously, after quick coordination with Third Army when all decision-makers had been available, we had been able to move it at our order; now CENTCOM said they would control it for the rest of the war. That was not welcome news, but a planning factor we had to deal with. I was still under the impression that theater air was attacking targets in front of Basra and sealing off the escape routes over the Euphrates in the XVIII Corps sector.50

  Colonel Carl Ernst had been chief of the BCTP team when we had war-gamed early in January, and had stayed in theater at the direction of General Carl Vuono to assist John Yeosock's chief of staff, Brigadier General Bob Frix, who was running Lucky TAC for John at King Khalid Military City. After I showed Carl our past and planned maneuvers, he praised the corps for what we had done, and supported us for what we were about to do to close it. I was glad to hear that, since I figured he was keeping Third Army informed about what we were trying to do. Unfortunately, he had no decision authority to change boundaries, or he would have given us more maneuver room in XVIII Corps sector (who were not yet even anywhere near there).

  Though it would probably have been useful to do so, I did not talk directly to Gary Luck at this point, as the comms were not great. A quick meeting might have been possible, but I did not even know where Gary was on the battlefield. If we had managed to link up our comms, we perhaps could have worked out the final maneuver together (absent CENTCOM and Third Army), but we were running out of time, and I really did not even consider calling Gary.

  Additionally, our flank contact with XVIII Corps at this forward location was poor, and I did not know where the XVIII Corps liaison officer was or what he was doing. As a point of fact, even if communication with XVIII Corps had been better, in the time I figured we had to get this next battle under way, it would not have been possible to do both the XVIII Corps coordination and planning with Gary and the internal VII Corps work that needed to be done. So I stayed inside the VII Corps and figured we'd do what we could do ourselves. It was a conscious choice.

  At about 1330, I left to go see John Tilelli, while Stan Cherrie left with the 1st INF planner to find the Big Red One. I wanted to see the results of John's quick planning, then go forward to 1st AD and personally nail down the final arrangements with them. Everything else was well under way, and all of it would happen. But the critical point was the northern sector of 1st AD. With everyone tired and with time now very compressed, I felt I needed to make that happen myself.

  1300 1ST CAV TAC CP

  We had about a ten-minute flight to the 1st CAV TAC CP, during which we bypassed many Iraqi troops and some units. On our flight, we were at an altitude of about 100 feet and moving fast, when out of the door at a range of maybe 500 meters we could see five Iraqi soldiers holding up their hands as if to surrender. My pilot, CWO Tom Lloyd, asked what he should do. We could not see if they were armed, so we slid the door of the Blackhawk open, circled back toward them to see their intentions, and did a 360-degree turn around them to check them out. They clearly wanted to surrender and probably thought we were an attack helo. Because we had to get to the 1st CAV, and in any case had no room for the five of them, I did not want to land, so when we spotted an artillery unit close by, we went over and told them to police up "our prisoners," and then flew on to the 1st CAV TAC.

  As soon as we arrived, John Tilelli briefed me on the passage and attack maneuver he planned toward Objective Raleigh. He was going to lead with his cavalry squadron (1/7 CAV, "Gary Owen"), then follow with one brigade behind the other until they were clear of the 1st AD, where they could then attack to Raleigh with two brigades abreast. His CAV squadron was already on the move. They could make it happen.

  While I was at the TAC, I got a call from 1st AD: they were engaged with a brigade of the Medina Division in a large tank fight, and it was going well for the 1st AD. As it turned out, that call was about the Battle of Medina Ridge, our largest individual tank battle of the war.

  This was both good news and not so good. The brigade in the fight was Ron's northern brigade, the 2nd, the same one that I had expected would give 1st CAV room to blitz forward. Now that they were in a big fight, I had some questions about how fast they could make room for 1st CAV, which meant that I wanted to go forward to nail this down. I would have liked John to come, too, but he needed to stay to begin moving his division forward, so I had him send his G-3, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Gunlicks, along in John's own UH-1 to meet me at the 1st AD TAC to finish the coordination.

  I left to go find Ron.

  1330-1400 FLIGHT TO 1ST AD

  We headed east.

  CWO Tom Lloyd was command pilot on the Blackhawk today. Tom had flown me when I was a division commander in the 1st AD, had gone to Blackhawk transition training, then moved to VII Corps. I trusted Tom just as I did Mark Greenwald. Ever since Vietnam, I had insisted that the pilots of my command aircraft be veteran aviators with both superior flying skills and the judgment to handle tough spots. The kind of flying we did put us in marginal situations from time to time, and I did not want rookies flying us.

  Ron had meanwhile moved forward in his HMMWV to a position near the 2nd Brigade's battle with the Medina brigade. When we asked for location, they gave us a LORAN reading. That required Tom to translate in flight the LORAN to GPS. For a time, he and Toby were talking back and forth about it, and when I finally asked if they had the location, the answer was yes.

  By then, I was not paying much attention to what was outside, as I was going over our maneuver on the map and thinking about everything else I needed to be doing right then.

  A few minutes later, Tom said in a relatively calm voice, "Sir, I think we are over the Iraqi positions. I can see tanks and Bradleys firing this way."

  "Well, turn around and let's go back," I said, in about the same tone of voice. But all of a sudden my senses came to life in a hurry. Not much I could do, except hope the Iraqis were so occupied with 1st AD that they did not notice us. I was, however, more concerned about the reaction from our own troops. Up to this point, we had not seen any Iraqi helicopters, but we knew they still had HINDs and other Soviet-made helos in theater, and they still had the capability to use them if they wanted to risk it. We also knew that the best way to disseminate chemical or bio was by aerosol spray from helos, so our troops were on the lookout for HINDs and other Soviet-made helos.

  It just so happened that on the pylons on each side of our Blackhawk, the crew had mounted 250-gallon wing tanks that increased our operating range (or time of flight available) for almost an hour. Unfortunately, with those external tanks, if we were flying straight at someone (the normal attack profile of a HIND), we looked almost like a HIND ourselves.

  That the Bradleys didn't open up on us as we flew back was a stroke of good luck, more than likely caused by the discipline of the soldiers and the fact that this was day four, and by now our troops no longer looked up.

  Ron's crew popped some smoke, and we set down about 200 meters from Ron's HMMWV. As I got out of the Blackhawk, I noticed our own artillery firing outgoing, but I also thought I heard the unmistakable, low-sounding whuump of incoming. I told Tom to keep the helo running, and if anything got close to the Blackhawk, he was to li
ft off and meet me later at 1st AD TAC. Then, together with Toby and John McInerney, I walked over to Ron.

  Since Toby and John also had seen the firing, they asked some of the 1st AD troops there what was happening. It was Iraqi fire, they said, but they didn't give it much thought, since they kept firing in the same place. (That meant that the Iraqi fire was what we call "unobserved fire." If they had been able to "observe" what they were hitting, they would have by now shifted it to be more effective.)

  "Sir," Ron began, "although the Iraqis continue to fire artillery, we've had a hell of a successful brigade fight here and are just beginning to finish it. I estimate we've destroyed about a brigade of the Medina."

  That was great news.

  "Terrific. Proud of you and your troops. Keep the heat on the Iraqis." At that point I did not know what an overwhelming victory the Medina Ridge fight had been for 1st AD, and how badly they had hurt the Medina. "What I came to see you about is the passage of the 1st CAV around to your north later this afternoon."