Sword Point (21 page)

The physicist threw down his cigarette, crushed it and rubbed his eyes.

There was still much work for him to do before the young lions could do

Allah’s work. The greater questions of right and wrong would be left to those better able to deal with such things. He was a scientist by training.

Science was what he could understand, and he endeavored to confine himself to its narrow spectrum.

Yazd, Iran 0830 Hours, 25 June (0500 Hours, 25 June,
GMT
) The elation of their victories at Tabriz, Mianeh, Tehran, Qom and now Yazd was beginning to wear thin. Thirty days of campaigning had taken its toll on the men, the equipment and the leaders of the 28th Combined Arms Army and, in particular, the 68th Tank Regiment. Life in the field is difficult, at best. The men lived on a steady diet of combat rations that provided little more than calories Dust and dirt penetrated everything, drying out nasal passages and throats, causing everyone to hack. Extremes in temperature and the failure of some of the soldiers to put warm clothing on before late in the evening resulted in congestion and colds that often led to bronchial infections. The water used by the men to quench their thirst was never plentiful enough and carried the seeds of diarrhea and typhoid. Lack of sleep coupled with brief periods of intense combat and stress followed long stretches of boredom and road marches that dulled their senses. Only now was it becoming apparent to the men of the 28th
CAA
that each new victory brought them only another opportunity to exist in conditions that barely sustained life and to fight another battle that exposed them to fear, sickness, mutilation and death.

The equipment fared badly as well. The same heat, dust and stress that wore on the men attacked their equipment. Dust ingestion in the engines, turning oil and grease into a paste that acted like sandpaper rather than as lubricants, caused a steady stream of maintenance failures. The army’s line of march was marked by abandoned equipment that had broken down and had not yet been recovered. Even equipment that managed to stay with the advancing columns suffered from malfunctions to fire-control systems, electrical components and weapons. Heat and the steady vibration of tracks on poor roads was especially hard on sophisticated fire-control computers on tanks.

Major Vorishnov watched the unending columns of combat vehicles, artillery and trucks roll by. Behind him his battalion sat in a loose laager, refueling and resting after another all-night move. Eighteen tanks of the original thirty-one remained with the battalion on this morning. Of the thirteen missing, only two had been combat losses. The rest had broken down and been left behind. Vorishnov would never see them again.

Tanks lost by the battalion due to combat or a maintenance failure were not returned to the same battalion. Instead, those vehicles that had fallen out of the line of march were picked up by maintenance teams following the army. These teams repaired them and formed reserve units with them. The reserve units were manned by using the crews of the tanks that had fallen out due to maintenance failure, survivors of tanks hit in combat and wounded men returning from the hospital. Units in the vanguard of the army would get the replacements needed to bring them back up to full strength by receiving entire companies or, in the case of a regiment, a battalion from the reserve unit. If a unit was too badly depleted, it would be amalgamated with other depleted units to form a complete one. Officers from the staff-officer reserve would be used to provide leadership in the amalgamated units.

In the Soviet Army, units are used until they are no longer capable of performing their mission. In the West, 146 a unit is considered to begin to become combat ineffective when it drops below 70 percent of its authorized strength. The Soviets are more sanguine, using units until they are anywhere from 60 to 40 percent strength. When that happens, the next unit behind is passed forward to continue the mission.

The spent unit loses priority on everything and is pulled out of the way and sent to the rear or, in the case of a rapid advance, left in place until the army’s combat service support, or logistic, units can move forward. The spent unit is then resupplied with all classes of supply, vehicles are repaired and losses in both equipment and men made good from reserve units.

This effort is referred to as reconstitution. If several units are equally depleted, they will be amalgamated. When ready, the reconstituted unit is placed back on the line of advance and awaits its turn to be passed forward into combat.

In theory such a system is easy and manageable. Its practice, however, was proving to be quite difficult, especially in Iran. The major problem facing the 28th
CAA
was the lack of roads. This limited the amount of traffic that could go forward or to the rear. The army ran the road like a railroad, directing who could be on it and establishing priorities. The highest priority went to combat units in the vanguard and those units required to support them, such as artillery, air-defense and chemical warfare units.

Next came fuel and ammunition resupply convoys tailored to keep the vanguard units moving. Behind them came the army’s main body, support units to keep critical equipment in operation and, again, supply convoys. All this was one-way traffic, with only the empty supply trucks being allowed to return.

Vorishnov was not happy with the decision to pull the 68th Tank Regiment out of the lead. He had become used to setting the pace and pushing forward, always up front. He did not relish giving up the position of honor and falling into the line of march behind the motorized rifle division, as they had done during the first days of the war. Vorishnov, however, understood the rationale for the decision.

Soon the 28th Combined Arms Army would make contact with the Americans who were preparing to bar the army’s route to the Strait of Hormuz. In accordance with Soviet doctrine, it was the role of the motorized infantry to make the breakthrough attack and prepare the way for the tank units. The tank units, suffering heavily due to maintenance failures, needed time to recover and reconstitute themselves. They had to be ready to exploit the success of the motorized rifle units.

Turning his back to the unending traffic on the road, Vorishnov surveyed his battalion. As he did so, he threw his arms above his head and stretched his body. He was sore from traveling many miles in the cramped confines of an armored personnel carrier. The wire seats covered with thin canvas did little to cushion the body from repeated blows and jerks when the vehicle moved down a road that was nothing more than a collection of potholes. As he took stock of his aches and pains, Vorishnov thought that a little rest and a couple of days off the road might not be bad after all.

Rafsanjan, Iran 0845 Hours, 25 June (0515 Hours, 25 June,
GMT
) Under the watchful eye of their platoon sergeant, the men of the 1st Platoon, B Company, 3rd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, went about their task of laying antitank mines in front of their positions.

Normally, if the mines were simply laid on the surface and not covered, this wasn’t a particularly difficult task. Their platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class

Duncan, insisted, however, that the mines be dug in and buried. The rocky ground made a simple job a real pain.

The platoon worked in teams. Two men, working with one of the squad leaders, went about marking the locations where the mines would be placed.

The squad leader, using a compass, would establish a direction for one of the men to move in. Carefully stepping off from where the squad leader was located, the man would count his steps until he had moved a predetermined distance. Once there, he would stand still until the squad leader came up to him. Marking that point, the squad leader would set three stakes two meters out from where the pace man stood.

The stakes marked where the mine layers would place mines. The third man was the recorder, carefully making up a sketch map of the mine field so that they could recover the mines at some future date or, if the company was relieved by another, so that the new unit would know where the mines were.

Behind the people marking the locations of the mines came the diggers.

At each site where there was a stake they would scrape out a hole just wide and deep enough to accommodate an M-21 antitank mine. An assistant squad leader was in charge of this crew and had the responsibility of ensuring that the holes dug were neither too deep nor too shallow.

While scraping holes in the rocky soil was hard, the task of the mine layers was nothing more than mindless hauling of the heavy mines from where the helicopter had dropped them to where the holes were dug. The mines had to be uncrated and taken out of the protective packaging. Two men did this while the rest carried the mines to where their squad leader directed them.

Most men carried only two mines per trip. For this task Duncan used an entire squad. Today he used the squad that was on his shit list.

The final and potentially most dangerous task was performed by an
NCO

and one other man. They armed the mines and covered them. The M-21

mine can be detonated either by a pressure fuse, which drives a striker into a detonator when the proper amount of pressure is applied, or by a tilt rod, which releases the detonator when tilted at a certain angle.

Duncan directed his people to use the tilt rod, which stood higher than the center clearance of most vehicles’ hulls and thus could activate a mine when a vehicle passed over it, even if the vehicle’s tracks did not run over the mine; upon detonation, a metal penetrator would be driven up into the vehicle or would at least sever the track if the track ran over the mine.

As the two men armed the mines, they would randomly booby-trap one by putting a hand grenade under it in such a way that the grenade would be detonated if someone tried to lift out the mine. This was done to discourage the enemy from creeping into a mine field at night and removing the mines in order to clear a lane for attacking forces or use them later against their former owner. ‘ The third squad of the platoon stayed in their positions and over watched the work party in the mine field. These men provided security. The Russians were still many miles away, but the Iranians were always near at hand, willing to snipe at Americans or seize a lone and unwary soldier and butcher him at their leisure. A man in C Company who had wandered off to relieve himself had been captured by the Iranians and brutally tortured before being killed and dismembered.

As Duncan watched his men, he thought about the situation they were in.

They were preparing defensive positions from which they were expected to fight Russian mechanized forces. This in itself was a formidable task for a light-infantry unit deployed in the farthest forward location occupied by

U.S. forces; the failure of the Iranians to cease hostilities made the battalion’s position even worse. Only one truck convoy had been able to make it forward to them overland. A second had been ambushed by the

Iranians and turned back. Their battalion commander claimed that it was the

Iranian Communists who had done it. Who had done it, however, made little difference. The fact was that the battalion was isolated, with helicopters being their only secure link to the rest of the U.S. Army.

This did little to instill confidence in Duncan or his men. Because of their tenuous position, each man understood how critical it was that they hold. If they were not able to stop the Russians, there would be nowhere safe to hide among a population that was as hostile as the enemy they faced to their front.

The battalion’s main defensive positions were several kilometers south of

Rafsanjan, on high ground that flanked the main road and offered excellent fields of fire to the Americans. The battalion’s scout platoon was located on the forward edge of the town. Duncan did not envy them their position.

He and his platoon had made a sweep of the town when the unit first arrived. In all his life Duncan had never imagined such filth or squalor.

The houses were mud-brick structures of one or two rooms that held only the barest of primitive furniture. Through the center of the dirt streets ran an open ditch that served as a sewer. The people consisted of women, children, old men and horribly maimed young men, veterans and refuse of the war with Iraq.

All were thin as rails and watched the Americans with barely concealed contempt and hate. The platoon had been sent in to find the village mullahs and search for arms. Neither mullahs, weapons nor able-bodied men of military age were found. No doubt they would make their appearance at a time of their choice.

The company was arrayed with two platoons abreast and a third behind them.

This gave the company’s position depth and, at the same time, all-around security. Four heavy
TOW
antitank guided missiles reinforced the company in addition to the unit’s thirteen Dragon medium antitank guided missiles.

Four 66mm. light antitank rockets, called LAWs, per man and extensive antitank mine fields to their front rounded out the company’s anti armor capability. C Company was deployed to B Company’s right, A Company was to the left, and D Company deployed to the rear, giving the battalion defense in depth as well as a reserve. A 105mm. howitzer battery was in direct support of, the 3rd Battalion. AH-64 attack helicopters operating from an airfield at Kerman provided backup if needed to deal with a serious Soviet threat.

The officers and most of the men of the battalion felt they could hold against anything the Soviets sent against them. Duncan and a few of the more cynical men had their doubts. He had served in a mechanized infantry unit in Germany and knew what tanks were capable of doing, even the old

M-60A 1 tanks that were dinosaurs in comparison to the Soviet T-80

tanks.

If-the Soviets were allowed to mass their artillery and hit the companies with masses of armor, the light infantrymen would have only one chance to stop them. And even if the first wave of Russians was stopped, a second wave would be brought forward to either bypass the battalion or conduct a deliberate attack with overwhelming firepower and armor. Should the Soviets succeed and blow through the 3rd Battalion’s positions, the battalion would have to withdraw into the desert to predetermined rally points where helicopters from Kerman could pick them up. Duncan did not like having to depend on helicopters that were far away, nor did he like the prospect of facing a horde of tanks with nothing more than a hole in the ground for protection. He cursed the Infantry Branch assignments
NCO
who had sent him to a unit that marched twenty five miles for fun and thought a SD-caliber machine gun was big.