Sword Point

by Harold Coyle

  As his platoon moved into the area known to both sides as no-man's-land, Kurpov began to grow more apprehensive. There had been no friendly air recon by either helicopters or the Air Force. The last report of the Americans was over twelve hours old. The American Marines had picked up the habit of faking a thrust in order to make the 89th MRD react. Sitting well to the rear, airborne intelligence-gathering platforms watched and tracked the movement of the Soviet force reacting to the Marine fake. When enough information had been gathered to make a good estimate of where the Soviet force would be at a given time, attack helicopters were dispatched to ambush sites along the route.

  More than once the counterattack force rolled into such an ambush.

  The Americans, however, didn't always have it their way. One Soviet regimental commander, anticipating such a trick, had sent every antiaircraft weapon in the regiment with the counterattack force. In that instance, it was the Americans who had been surprised and had come off the worse.

  In the gathering darkness Kurpov ordered his vehicles to close up. To the west he could not see the other recon platoon. Nor could he see the lead elements of the rifle battalion that was following them at a distance of fifteen kilometers. It had been reasoned that that distance was necessary in order to give the rifle battalion time to deploy against an enemy found by the recon patrols. Kurpov scanned the area to his front in frustration.

  His three little vehicles were totally inadequate for their task. They were moving far too fast to properly check out the entire area. They could drive past whole companies of American Marines hidden in the wadis. It is hard to find someone who does not want to be found, especially when you are not given the time to search. Kurpov likened his predicament to that of a bear crashing through a thicket. If there was an elephant hiding in there, they might find it. But they would never see a snake until it was too late.

  Private First Class Chester Hewett, USMC." was glad to see the sun disappear over the western horizon. A native of Vermont, Hewett had never been in a desert before 6 June. The oppressive heat, the barren terrain, the extreme dryness were foreign to a man raised among pine trees and snow-covered mountains. Parris Island and Camp Lejeune in the Carolinas had been a shock to him. There the men had likened riding about in the monstrous LTVP-7 amphibious assault vehicles to living in an oven. Since their arrival in Iran, they had upgraded the status of the LT VPs to microwave oven. Fortunately their CO had them moving only at night. During the day the battalion hunkered down, with a third of the men on alert and the rest asleep.

  In a short speech before moving out on their current mission, the Old Man had told them that they were going out hunting for bear, a term the battalion commander liked to use when they made raids deep into no-man'sland for the express purpose of picking a fight with the Russians. This raid was an all-armored affair. LAV-25 light armored recon vehicles thrown out in the lead had the mission of finding and tracking the Soviets. Once they had done so, the main body, consisting of a battalion of Marine infantry mounted in LT VPs and accompanied by an M-IAI tank company, would close with the Russians and strike.

  Hewett's platoon was the rear guard.

  Their mission was to keep an eye on the back door, just in case it was the Russians who got the upper hand.

  With the booming voice that many had likened to that of a beached whale, Hewett's platoon sergeant called in the men on outpost duty. There was no need for whispers here. If there had been Russians around, they would have announced their presence a long time before. Rising from his shallow pit, Hewett picked up his Dragon missile launcher. It was still warm from the sun. A cool breeze hit Hewett as he stood and stretched. It felt good until he remembered that the temperature that night would never get as low as the highest temperature he had ever experienced back home in Vermont. He had joined the Marines to see the world. Looking around at the barren wasteland, he decided that if the rest of the world looked half as bad as

  Iran, Vermont was all he would ever need for the rest of his life.

  In the darkness the recon elements of the two antagonists passed by each other unseen. Had they found each other, the fight would have been a reasonably even match. Instead, the recon vehicles continued to grope about in the night, each rolling forward into a head-on collision with their enemy's main body.

  A flash and the explosion of a vehicle hit in the distance signaled the first contact. Kurpov turned in the open hatch and faced west. He could see a red glow in the sky, a beacon marking the spot where an armored vehicle had died. But whose? Kurpov stretched himself until he was standing on his toes in an effort to see what was happening to the west. The crack of the radio and the frantic report by the other recon-platoon leader provided the answers he sought. Tanks! The other platoon had run into a pair of American tanks moving north. Two more flashes lit up the west. Each was followed by an explosion. The sudden termination of the other platoon leader's radio transmission in mid-sentence told Kurpov that his friend Sasha was dead.

  While the rifle-battalion commander, leading the main body still fifteen kilometers behind, attempted to raise Sasha on the radio, Kurpov ordered his platoon to seek covered positions from which they could observe their assigned sectors. When the vehicle commanders had acknowledged his order, he directed his own driver into a position between two rocks from where he could see out to his front as well as the general location of his other two vehicles. The battalion commander, having failed to raise the platoon that had made contact with the enemy, called Kurpov for a report. Kurpov's platoon was not actually in contact: What he told the battalion commander was exactly what he had seen, his current location and his intent.

  The commander of the Soviet motorized rifle battalion thought about the situation for a moment. He estimated that he had at least five minutes to digest the scant information he had, devise a plan and issue necessary orders. He assumed that the recon platoons had stumbled upon the enemy recon forces. He did not know that the enemy recon, two U.S. Marine LAV-25s, had passed by his own recon and were now sitting undetected in a wadi at a range of twelve hundred meters, watching his column move south and reporting to their commander. A series of muzzle flashes and the exploding of a BMP in the middle of the main body quickly destroyed the Soviet commander's initial estimate of the situation. In an instant the sky was lit up with tracers as the other Soviet vehicles in the company that had lost the BMP returned fire in the direction from which the attacker had struck. The battalion commander directed his BMP into a shallow defilade and watched for a moment. The hail of Soviet fire continued without any indication that it was hitting anything. Nor could he see any further firing directed toward the column. The enemy had taken a potshot at his battalion in order to make them react. No doubt the enemy was part of a recon force that was probably reporting what it saw even as it was withdrawing.

  The battalion commander ordered all units to cease fire and report.

  Though the firing stopped, the images of tracers and muzzle flashes were burned into the battalion commander's eyes. As he waited for his company commanders to respond, he rubbed his eyes in an effort to eradicate the spots.

  The pressing seemed only to make the images more intense. Slowly the reports came in. He listened impassively as his commanders gave their inflated reports of kills. Each report fueled the battalion commander's anger. When all units had reported in, he yelled into his handset, demanding that they give him accurate reports, challenging anyone to bring him the head of a dead marine. He didn't really expect his commanders to do so, and they knew it. They also knew what he meant.

  As his commanders sorted out their situation, he reevaluated his. The enemy now knew where his main body was. Through deductive reasoning based on the scant information he had, the battalion commander was able to put together a mental image of the battlefield and the relative locations of his forces and the enemy. The enemy had hit the recon platoon deployed in the west.

  Immediately after that, his main body had been hit by a recon element firing
on his battalion from the west. That meant that the enemy force was to his west. Dropping down into the BMP and turning on a small red-filtered light, he 294 looked at his map, quickly drew two simple symbols to show where the enemy was, then looked at the terrain for a moment. He realized what had happened. By sheer chance the two antagonists had brushed shoulders as they moved about in the dark.

  Satisfied that his grasp of the tactical situation was correct, the battalion commander began to issue his orders. Like clockwork, the battalion began to reconfigure itself from a column to an attack formation.

  Kurpov sat and listened to the reports and the battalion commander's tongue-lashing. The BRDM driver chuckled. "We would not be as lucky if we gave such bad reports."

  The comment broke the tension. Kurpov smiled. "Ivan, I consider us lucky any time we stumble into a fight and are able to report."

  The crew of the BRDM laughed. For the moment, the nervous stress, the fear and the dread of what would happen next were forgotten. But the war was still out there. The sound of ammunition cooking off in the burning vehicles was muffled by distance, the armor of the BRDM and the crewmen's helmets. Kurpov stood up in his hatch. Slowly he turned, studying the terrain and the immediate area. Nothing; there was nothing to be seen other than his other BRDM and the BMP. To the west and the north the sky glowed faintly red, marking where men had died.

  They were of no concern to Kurpov.

  It was the ones who were alive that he was interested in. He knew that at that very moment hundreds of men, manning the most sophisticated combat vehicles in the world, were out there, creeping about, intent on finding one another and killing.

  The LTVP-7 came to a jolting halt. The ramp hadn't even hit the ground when the squad leader was up and yelling, "Let's go, Marines, Deploy and hit it!" The LTVP-7 was empty in seconds. Each man rushed out and ran to either the left of the track or the right. As they ran forward the Marines spread out until the squad was in a rough line deployed to either side of the track. As soon as Hewett came around the side of the vehicle and began to run to the front, he searched the darkness for a position. The LTVP was in some kind of shallow ditch. Its prow was up against the side of the ditch, splitting the squad up. Hewett saw a good position that appeared to offer the best protection and headed for it. His assistant gunner followed, carrying a spare Dragon missile. The bulky tub, and the personnel weapons and other assorted equipment hanging on each of them, made running awkward but not impossible. With enough adrenaline, just about anything was possible.

  Once in position, Hewett slowly popped his head up and surveyed the lay of the land, checking to see whether he had a good field of fire. The ditch they were in ran along the crest of a small rise. It was almost like a custom-made trench. The ground to his front had a gentle downward slope. From where he was, he had a clear field of fire for better than one thousand meters, more than enough for his Dragon.

  Satisfied, Hewett turned to survey the back blast area. Firing a Dragon could be just as deadly to friendlies as to the enemy. As he was checking that area, the squad leader came up.

  "This looks like a good place, Sarge," Hewett said. "What do you think?"

  The squad leader examined the position, then slapped Hewett on the back.

  "Good to go. Set up here." Without waiting for a response, the leader was gone, moving down to check the next position.

  Hewett pulled the boxlike thermal sight from the pouch at his side and attached it to the Dragon missile he had been carrying. He could not see what he was doing, but that was not necessary. Hours of redundant drilling had made the handling of the missile launcher second nature.

  Once the sight was in place, Hewett hoisted the Dragon onto his right shoulder, put his eye up to the rubber eyepiece, then flicked the switch with his finger. The darkness disappeared. Through the thermal sight, he viewed the landscape in more detail, looking for any sign of life or movement. Everything to his front was now black and red. He could clearly see everything worth seeing, which wasn't much.

  Nor did he expect to see anything. As part of the rear guard, they were looking in the wrong direction. The enemy was to the north. They were facing south, just in case the enemy tried to sneak through the back door.

  As Hewett scanned the area, he thought about their mission and weighed the mixed feelings that cluttered his head. On one hand, he did not like the idea that they probably would not get a chance to shoot at anyone all night. They had pulled rear guard before on smaller raids.

  It was frustrating to get all psyched up preparing for combat, then spend several days rolling around the godforsaken country and doing nothing. On the other hand, combat meant danger, the chance to get torn apart, maimed or killed.

  Every mission completed alive meant that he was that much closer to home.

  The thought of home pushed aside Hewett's debate on whether it was better to be in the rear or the front. Instead, images of the lush green pine forest that covered the mountains came to mind. His mountains were alive, vibrant, inviting. The stark black and red images he was viewing were so foreign, so different, so hostile.

  The order to find the enemy's flank or rear came as no surprise. Kurpov made one more sweep of the area before he ordered his platoon to move out.

  This time, the platoon proceeded with great caution. The BMP over watched as the two BRDMs crept forward. They advanced for a while under the watchful eye of the BMP until the BMP could no longer cover their movement. Then Kurpov held the BRDMs in place until the BMP could advance, find a new position to cover the next move and settle in. As the BMP moved forward, Kurpov and the other BRDM commander scanned their areas looking for signs of the enemy. When the BMP commander was ready, he signed Kurpov, who then moved out again. Though the process was slow, it was the safest and most thorough.

  Because he wanted to find the enemy rear, Kurpov initially moved south.

  He knew that the enemy was immediately to the west. That piece of information had cost the recon company one of its last two platoons.

  Only Kurpov's platoon was left of the original company. Kurpov intended to be a live veteran after the war. He reasoned that the Soviet Union already had more than enough heroes. Besides, a dead recon leader provides his unit with no information, other than where not to go.

  Only when he was satisfied that they had gone south far enough did Kurpov turn west. He would proceed west for about two kilometers and then turn north. When he did that, he intended to go even slower.

  Following Kurpov's platoon was a motorized rifle company. They would strike once the rear had been found and plotted by the recon element.

  Success or failure now hinged on which commander had made the best guess and who found whom first.

  Hewett's mind was still wandering about the slopes of Vermont when the faint image of two dust clouds first appeared in his sight. By the time he jerked his mind back to the present, the two BRDMs had stopped in concealed defilade positions. The dust kicked up and heated by the engines' exhaust was dissipated when Hewett made his next sweep of his assigned area.

  Kurpov studied the far slope as he waited for the BMP to move into its next position. He wanted to cut north, but did not like the idea of running across the open area that stretched from his position to the next covered position. The BMP would have difficulty covering them all the way. Kurpov was still mulling over the alternatives when the BMP signaled that he was set and ready to cover.

  Kurpov was about to move out and continue to the west when the battalion radio net came alive with contact reports. The two main bodies had collided. The battle was on. Kurpov no longer had all the time in the world to sneak about and find the safest, most secured route. He had to find the enemy rear quickly and guide the rifle company following him to a position from which it could launch a surprise attack. The red flashes to the north and the faint boom of tank cannons in the distance galvanized Kurpov into action. He ordered his driver to move out 298 and to the right. They would try to bound across the open as rapi
dly as possible. Luck favors the bold, Kurpov told himself.

  The sound of tanks firing and explosions broke into Hewett's dreams of home. He turned around and looked to the north for a moment. He could see the sky suddenly glow as a weapon fired. Here and there a fireball leaped up, announcing the death of an armored vehicle and its crew.

  That thought convinced Hewett that rear guard wasn't so bad after all.

  He turned around, hoisted the Dragon back onto his shoulder and put his eye to the sight. In an instant, the image of two armored vehicles burned itself into his eye.

  Hewett felt himself go cold. His heart began to beat faster. He could almost feel the adrenaline course through his veins. The enemy.

  In a voice that was neither a whisper nor a shout, he alerted his squad leader. In an instant he, followed by the platoon leader, came stumbling up to where Hewett sat transfixed, tracking the progress of the enemy vehicles.

  The platoon leader spoke first. "What do you have, Marine?"

  "Two vehicles. Looks like BRDMs, Skipper, headed straight for us at about twelve hundred meters."

  Reaching for the Dragon, the lieutenant whispered, "Let me see." Hewett relinquished control of the Dragon to him. The lieutenant needed only a second. When he had convinced himself, he turned it back over to Hewett, issuing orders to the squad leader as he did so. "Kendle, find Gunney. Have him report to the CO that we have two BRDMs moving on our position from the south. We are engaging and will hold here until we receive further orders."