Home > Gulf War Diary > "First to Defend"
The First Cavalry Division's mission from 18 January - 12 February was to: defend the Wadi Al Batin/Ruqi Road/Neutral Zone sector (also known as the "Ruqi Pocket") to prevent an Iraqi spoiling attack along the Ruqi road; prevent Iraqi ground reconnaissance of the Tapline road; and prepare for future operations. As theater reserve, we had a wide variety of contingency plans. The First Cavalry Division was the only unit defending in sector at that time. The Syrians, Egyptians, French, other American units, and Brits were repositioning to support the theater ground offensive plan.
Events from 18 January - 29 January 1991:
When we got settled in our BP, I sent my First Sergeant back to TAA Wendy with a detail to recover tents, cots, and other life support items. The French Foreign Legion unit there had robbed us blind, cutting locks on our connexes to get at our stuff. Still, "Top" was able to recover a lot of good stuff that made us a little more comfortable. This helped, because weather was, for the most part, rainy, cold, and miserable.
A Syrian division, as part of the theater wide repositioning, moved from west to east, passing to our front. CENTCOM was afraid that we might get into a fire fight with the Syrians. The Syrians had Soviet equipment, and our two countries had never been big fans of each other anyway. Originally, CINCCENT wanted to move the First Cavalry Division south of the Tapline Road to prevent a fratricide event from occurring, but Division CG talked him out of it. He said that his troops were disciplined enough to avoid such an incident. CINCCENT backed down; that was good for us, because it would have been a major operation to move everything we owned out of our prepared positions, move about 30 kilometers south, only to turn around, move back, and dig in again. It was foggy as hell that day, but the Syrians passed by without an incident.
We were given a warning order that we would conduct artillery raids in the Wadi Al Batin as part of the theater deception plan. I rehearsed a practice artillery raid with my battery at night, just to make sure I had it nailed down. It is extremely important for a unit to rehearse combat operations; a unit that rehearses combat operations gives itself the opportunity to identify and correct problem areas before the bullets start flying. Mistakes in combat cost lives.
After a while, soldiers started becoming bored, nervous, and antsy. They wanted to get the war over with, but were not being kept informed due to the need for secrecy in our mission. "When are we going to start doing something?" was the most frequently asked question. Mitigating this somewhat was the information we were getting from "Wizard 106" (the AFRTS radio station set up at KKMC; called "Wizard" after the Wizard of Oz, because KKMC, due to its secretive nature, was nicknamed "Emerald City"), which ran continuous war coverage, especially CNN Broadcasts.
Also, the First Cavalry Division set up a division shower point with a "Wolfburger" hamburger stand at the Hafar Al Batin hospital. This was a big morale builder. Hafar Al Batin was pretty much deserted, all the civilians having fled the war zone, so we basically had the town to ourselves. The division shower point gave soldiers a few good hours of "R & R", a nice break from the daily grind. Occasionally, the Iraqis would make going to the shower point "high adventure" by shooting SCUDs at Hafar Al Batin. Most of the time, the Patriot missile battery responsible for covering Hafar Al Batin would intercept the SCUDs, although there was one missile that did get through. Fortunately, it landed 500 meters from the Hafar Al Batin hospital, and caused very little damage; only broken windows and ruptured eardrums.
From 29 January-13 February 1991, we repositioned to conduct an operation called the "Defense of Ruqi Road." We had the same basic mission; we simply repositioned farther north to support future operations, namely the feint we had as an "on order" mission. We went north to a point just barely outside of the artillery range of Iraqi forces arrayed to our front. We conducted daily survivability moves at first to prevent being victimized by Iraqi counterfire. Then, when engineer assets became available, we dug ourselves in and hardened our positions.
We practiced three artillery raids, this time at the battalion level. These were
full scale rehearsals. All three were conducted at night, of course. We learned
many valuable lessons. For example, commanders had to keep both a LORAN and a
GPS receiver in the lead vehicle for navigation purposes, because the time
window from about 2300 hours to 0200 hours (local time) was a bad window for
NAVSTAR satellite tracking. Of course, we rehearsed the "Defense of Ruqi
Road" frequently to insure that we had it nailed down. This mission was an
absolutely critical mission, because the First Cavalry Division was the only
unit that was not repositioning to support the "Hail Mary" plan,
thereby making it the only unit available to defend against potential Iraqi
attacks. We were truly the "First to Defend." There were many false
reports about Iraqi incursions into Saudi Arabia around the town of Ruqi, which
made everybody antsy. The only military activity to speak of, though, was an
occasional Iraqi shelling of Ar Ruqi.
