by Harold Coyle
The officer was the first officer of the Cape Fear, and Dixon could tell right off that he was not happy about his ship's current mission.
When Dixon asked why equipment was being offloaded instead of loaded, the first officer gave him a quizzical look, then replied that they were doing what they had been told to do by the Navy. He had no idea of the whereabouts of the Navy officer who had told them. That officer, he said, had come aboard after most of the battalion's equipment was loaded, and he had left after seeing the manifest and issuing new orders to the crew. The ship's first officer went on to say that until the military got its act together and decided on what it wanted to do, his crew wasn't going to load another piece of equipment. With that, he turned away from Dixon and went up to the bridge.
Dixon stood there, seething with anger that an entire day had been wasted.
He turned toward the dock and viewed the confused tangle of men and equipment there. As far as he could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to the effort below him. In a rage, he stormed back into the passageway he had used to reach the bridge and headed for the dock to search for someone in charge.
Suflan, Iran 0735 Hours, 29 May (0405 Hours, 29 May, GMT)
Major Vorishnov sat in the shade of a fruit tree, listening as the second officer, in charge of intelligence, summarized the regimental intelligence report on Iranian operations to date for him and the company commanders. Across from them the tanks of the 3rd Battalion waited in line, pulled off the road. The crews moved around their vehicles with little enthusiasm, giving the appearance of working on the tanks, but in reality doing nothing. Fuel trucks rolled by, winding down the serpentine road into a narrow defile five hundred meters from where the officers sat. The trucks kicked up dust and almost drowned out the second officer.
The sporadic and disorganized resistance of the first two days had given way to an increase in activities by the Iranians. While the lead division of the 28th CAA had yet to meet any sizable forces, it had been seriously delayed by incessant roadblocks and an increasing number of ambushes. At each of the roadblocks, forces had to stop, deploy, and scatter any enemy forces covering the obstacle. Once that had been done, engineers had to come forward and clear the road. The delays that were thus incurred had shattered the time schedule of the operation and were causing a growing number of casualties. Instead of reaching Tabriz on the third day, the 28th was still short of the objective on the morning of the fifth day. The airborne unit that had been dropped into Tabriz was hanging on to most key installations, but would be hard pressed to last for more than another day or two. Twice, the Iranians had actually gotten onto the airfield, the airborne unit's only link to the outside world, before being thrown back.
Vorishnov turned to watch the fuel trucks while the second officer droned on. As each truck reached the defile, it had to slow, change gears and ease between the sheer sides of the defile. Suddenly Vorishnov saw a flash, a puff of smoke, and a streak of flame that raced toward a truck which had just begun to slow down in the defile.
Dumbfounded, he watched the flame hit the truck. In an instant the truck disintegrated into a ball of fire.
The force of the explosion caught the second officer off guard and threw him to the ground. Vorishnov could feel the heat of the fireball as it passed over them.
"Ambush!"
The officers scattered. Vorishnov leaped to his feet and grabbed the commander of the lead company. Pointing to where he had seen the initial flash, he ordered the commander to move his three lead vehicles into a position where they could fire on that location. He cautioned him to be careful of other attacks from the flank.
The crews that had been going through the motions of working had disappeared into their tanks. Engines sprang to life as gunners and tank commanders began to traverse the turrets, searching for targets.
But there was none to be found. As two tanks from the lead company began to pour machine-gun fire into the area Vorishnov had indicated, another tank, equipped with a plow blade, began to move down the road past the fuel trucks, now pulled off to the side. When it reached the remains of the destroyed fuel truck, it pushed them through the defile and out of the way.
Then the plow tank pulled off the road and began to fire toward the area at which the other tanks were shooting. Those two tanks, in turn, ceased fire and moved down the road to join the plow tank.
Vorishnov, by then, had mounted his BTR and followed the two tanks through the defile. Once on the other side, the tanks deployed off the road near the plow tank and began to search the area for signs of the enemy. As Vorishnov also searched the far hill with his binoculars, he realized that their efforts were fruitless. The enemy was gone. Odds were, it had been nothing more than two men with a rocket launcher. Guerrillas, stay-behinds whose sole purpose was to harass and disrupt the Soviet rear area. Still, Vorishnov thought as he turned to look at the remains of the shattered fuel truck, their choice of targets had been good. In order to reach the Strait of Hormuz, the 28th CAA would depend on a long line of fuel trucks like the one just destroyed. The army couldn't afford to lose too many of them to stray parties of guerrillas wandering about its supply routes. Either the Iranians had been incredibly lucky to hit such an important target or they knew exactly what they were doing and had waited for the fuel trucks. If the latter was the case, the delays the 28th CAA had experienced to date were only a foretaste of hard times to come.
Visions of a second Afghanistan began to creep into Vorishnov's troubled mind.
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C. 1635 Hours, 29 May (2135 Hours, 29 May, GMT)
Lieutenant General Weir tried hard to relax on the soft sofa that ran along the wall of the Pentagon office belonging to the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. He needed to. Since the beginning of the current crisis he had had little time to do so. The stress, an irregular schedule and poor eating habits were beginning to take their toll on him. He thought back to his days as a younger of cer when it had seemed as though he could go for weeks with barely two hours of sleep and one Cration meal a day. That, however, was a long time ago.
Since then he had put a lot of mileage on his body, and it was beginning to tell.
The briefing he had just left had done little to ease his anxiety over the upcoming operation. The initial concept and plan he had been given on the twenty-fourth of May had changed almost daily. Additional intelligence, a better grasp of who all the players were, what the Soviets and the United
States were capable of doing and what help the U.S. could expect had resulted in several revisions of the plan. While Weir didn't like the initial plan, he liked the revisions even less. Plans, like most things, do not improve when more people get involved.
The initial plan, called Blue Thunder, had been simple and limited in its objectives. The first phase was to move his 10th Corps, a Marine amphibious expeditionary force and supporting Air Force units to the vicinity of the
Persian Gulf and get them assembled. At best, it would require forty to fifty days to move and stage the necessary forces. During that time, the State Department was to work all the friendly governments in the area in an effort to secure bases and overflight rights while the CIA, the NSA and other intelligence agencies built a complete picture of what was happening.
The Navy would also have 40 time to establish superiority in the Gulf and assemble the required shipping to support large-scale operations.
Given time, there was even the possibility that the Iranian government could be convinced that it would be to its benefit to cooperate with the United States. But regardless of the Iranian response, once the true situation was clear a capable and fully assembled force operating from secure and friendly bases in the area would be able to take effective and meaningful action.
Unfortunately, war is seldom left to professional soldiers to manage.
From the very beginning, a hue and cry from the Congress and right-wing political factions called for an immediate response to the Soviet invasion.
&n
bsp; With the cry of "No more Afghanistans" to rally around, politicians of every persuasion offered their ideas on how to keep the world safe for democracy and punish the Russians. The newly elected President, not wanting to be labeled as indecisive or impotent, was stampeded into selecting a course of action that showed immediate results. The current plan fit the bill, but it was, at best, very risky.
The new plan called for the immediate introduction of the Rapid Deployment Force, or RDF, into Iran. The 17th Airborne Division, working with a Marine amphibious brigade, would seize from the Iranians an airhead centered around the city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz.
Reinforced with the 12th Infantry Division (Light) and the 52nd Infantry Division (Mechanized), these units would move inland and west along the coast to establish blocking positions to prevent the Soviets from reaching the Persian Gulf. The 10th Corps, when it arrived, would continue that expansion.
With his head laid back on the sofa, Weir was lost in his thoughts and didn't notice that Lieutenant General Robert Horn, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, had entered the room until Horn reached out and offered him a cup of coffee. Weir and Horn had been classmates at West
Point, had served in the same armored cavalry squadron in Vietnam, had commanded armor battalions in the same division at the same time and had attended both the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College together. Throughout the years their careers had paralleled and crossed. They had stayed in close touch, considering themselves the best of friends and confidants on all matters, personal and professional.
It was therefore natural that they shared the same misgivings about the upcoming operation in Iran.
Rather than sit at his desk, Horn settled down in a leather chair opposite
Weir. After taking a sip of his coffee, he said, "The Chief doesn't buy our argument. The plan goes as briefed."
Weir thought about that for a moment, then laid his head back against the sofa. "Then the Airborne Mafia has won. Next thing you know they'll want to send in another light-infantry division for good measure."
"Don't be so quick. That was seriously considered. I had a hell of a fight cutting that one out."
Weir's head shot up. "You have got to be bullshitting me! It's bad enough that I've lost all priority on shipping. Does that cowboy who commands the 13th Airborne Corps seriously believe he can go toe to toe with Soviet tank units and hold all of southern Iran single-handed using a handful of grunts with oversized rucksacks on the ground? Doesn't anyone do a threat analysis around here anymore?"
"Frank, we have no choice. There's simply too much pressure to do something immediately. The RDF can get there faster than you can."
"And do what, Bob, die? Sacrifice themselves in the name of political expediency? Damn it, Bob, you know that they can't do everything that they've been assigned. At best, they can hang on to Bandar Abbas and a couple of hundred kilometers of the coast. To push them inland along the line of Kazerun-Shiraz-Kerman-Zahedan without the 10th Corps is insane.
They have neither the manpower to hold that line nor the transportation to keep it supplied. The Soviets will simply bypass whomever they don't want to mess with and leave them to wither on the vine. Jesus, are we the only ones who see that, Bob?" Weir stopped and sipped on his coffee in an effort to compose himself.
"Frank, between you and me, the Vice agrees. He and I went in to the Chief and presented the same argument, a little less passionately, of course. The Chief, however, felt that the risks were acceptable. As he said, we need to "get there the fastest with the mos test "
Weir pounded his knee with his fist, lowered his head and shook it from side to side. "Damn it. It takes twelve hours to fly from Washington to Tehran. It only takes three hours to fly from Moscow to Tehran. How does the Chief expect us to get around that? And the Iranians? What about the Iranians? Has anyone been watching the news lately? How the hell is the 13th Airborne Corps going to hold the Russians and fight the Iranians?"
There were several moments of silence as the two generals sipped their coffee and thought. To date the Iranian government had refused all offers of U.S. assistance. Daily demonstrations in Tehran condemned the United States as fervently as they did the Soviets. Under the original plan, there would have been time to work out some type of arrangement or, at worst, allow the Soviets to get so deep into Iran that the Iranians would have no choice but to accept U.S. help. But the new plan didn't allow any time. The CIA was projecting that U.S. forces would be met with armed resistance by the Iranians. Ground forces would be fighting with hostile forces to their rear as well as their front.
Finally, Weir broke the long silence. "Bob, I know you did your best.
Now it's time for me to do mine." With that he stood up and began to gather up his briefcase and hat.
Horn stood up also and walked across the room to bid his friend farewell.
With a few pleasantries, the two men parted. After Weir had left, Horn went to the window and stared out at the Potomac. He could not escape the thought that he had not only failed his friend but condemned him to death.
How easy, he thought, it had been in Vietnam when they were young lieutenants. At least they knew what they were doing then and didn't have to bother with the politicians, both in and out of uniform.
Chapter 3
I offer neither pay nor quarters nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not his lips only, follow me
— GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI
Birjand, Iran 0135 Hours, 30 May (2205 Hours, 29 May, GMT)
Lieutenant Kurpov's scout-car platoon began to stir. The 89th Reconnaissance Battalion had less than an hour to get ready and move out on its next mission. The promise of resupply by air and a twenty-four-hour rest halt had to wait until the airfield outside Birjand had been secured.
The battalion had closed on Birjand on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth after a trek of over three hundred kilometers through the desert. An attempt of the recon battalion, reinforced only by the advance guard, to rush the town and seize the airfield had been repulsed by Islamic Guards dug in along the approaches. Attempts to find a weak point north of the town had also failed. It was therefore decided to wait until the lead motorized rifle regiment and division artillery closed up before trying again. In the meantime, the recon battalion was to bypass the town to the west and check out an unguarded route that had been found the night before. If the route was clear, the recon battalion was to use it to lead a motorized rifle battalion past the town. Once south of the town, the rifle battalion would support the main attack by hitting the Iranians from the rear.
As the officers of the recon company received last minute instructions, the crews of the BRDM armored cars and BMP reconnaissance vehicles began to crank up their engines and check their weapons. Sand, heat and lack of water were greater problems than the officers and men in the recon battalion had expected. The division had deployed from a garrison in Poltava in the Ukraine to the desert and then into the attack with little time for acclimation. Neither had they received any special instructions on desert warfare or how to deal with the conditions they would find. It was therefore natural that the men would continue to operate as they had been trained while in the Ukraine. The result was a high number of maintenance failures and weapons stoppages. The light coat of oil that had protected their machine guns from the spring rains in the Ukraine attracted sand that jammed them in the desert. During their first serious run-in with an Iranian roadblock on the second day of the invasion, Lieutenant Kurpov's platoon was embarrassed when only one machine gun in the entire platoon fired. In a panic the platoon pulled back into a wadi, where in record time the crews broke down their weapons and cleaned them. Since that time, the men faithfully checked their weapons and kept them clean and free of oil.
Kurpov watched impassively as the other scout-car platoon moved out of their laager and headed west. Behind them went two BMPs. Kurpov's
platoon would follow at a distance, ready to lead the rifle battalion through or swing farther west if the route taken by the lead platoon was blocked. This suited Kurpov fine. He had grown tired of being in the lead, always out front, always the first to find the enemy or be found by him. On two separate occasions his BRDM had barely survived a direct hit by rocket-propelled antitank grenades. It would be a welcome relief to follow someone for a change. A bright three-quarter moon made it easy to track the progress of the lead scout-car platoon. Kurpov felt as though the whole world were staring down on them as they swung west onto a narrow dirt track.
Through his vision blocks he monitored the progress of his other vehicles and the rifle battalion's advance guard behind them. It was following far too close. If the Iranians hit them, the rifle battalion would have little room to maneuver or back out. They were becoming sloppy, too lax.
The BMPs, now about one thousand meters to his front, turned slightly to the left and continued forward into the shadows of the surrounding hills.
Ahead of them the BRDMs had already entered the dark void and were out of sight. Despite the cool of the night, Kurpov could feel the sweat roll down his spine. This was no good, far too easy. It was inconceivable that such a route would be left open.
A flash, a streak of flame and the detonation of an antitank missile on a BMP raped the stillness of the night and heralded a rush of pandemonium and violence. Contact. Green and red tracer rounds crisscrossed as Iranians engaged the lead scout-car platoon and were in turn engaged by the BRDMs and the remaining BMP. The reports coming from the platoon leader of the scout-car platoon betrayed his confusion and panic. The recon company commander yelled back, demanding a clear and accurate report, but got no response as artillery began to strike.