Ghost Troop's Battle at the 73 Easting

(Reprinted from Stars and Stripes) Specialist Patrick Bledsoe heard an explosion echoing through the distance, and he was afraid. This was two days after the cease-fire, so probably the explosion was the sound of soldiers blowing up another dead Iraqi tank somewhere nearby. Still, Bledsoe went off to sit in the desert by himself for awhile, and when,he came back, no one asked him' why he'd gone. They didn't have to.

"A certain part of you just dies," said 1LT Keith Garwick. "Somebody trying to kill you so desperately, for so many hours, and coming so close. We just couldn't understand it. I still don't understand it. Those guys were insane. They wouldn't stop," Garwick said of the Iraqi Army's Republican Guard, which hurtled wave after wave of tanks at him. Ghost Troop's gunners would blow up the oncoming vehicles, only to watch the enemy soldiers jump out and start firing automatic rifles uselessly at the American armored vehicles. "They kept dying and dying and dying," said 25-year-old Garwick, a West Point graduate and cavalry platoon leader from Fresno, Calif. 'They never quit... they never quit." The Americans who fought there are calling it the Battle of the 73 Easting, aline on a map in a nameless part of Iraq.

The 150-man troop comes from Bamberg, Germany, and is part of the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, whose job was to sneak into southern Iraq and spearhead the VI1 Corps in its search and destroy mission against the Republican Guard. Upon finding them, the cavalry regiment was supposed to pull aside and let the heavy armored divisions roll in and annihilate the elite Iraqi forces. And that's pretty much the way it happened, except for the six hours that Ghost Troop spent fighting the Guard's Tawakalna Division on the 73 Easting.

"If the rest of their army had fought as hard as the Tawakalna fought, we would have been in trouble," Garwick said.

PFC Jason E. Kick was driving a Bradley fighting vehicle on Tuesday morning, Feb. 26. The sky was still dark from an overnight rain storm. Kick, 18, from Pembroke, Ga., had dropped out of high school and joined the Army not long after turning 17. The "young buck of the troop, he kept quiet and was making rank fast. He'd gotten his GED diploma in basic training and was talking about going to college. He carried a small tape recorder and was narrating his impressions of the war into it. He wanted to send the tape home to his mom afterward. He was also carrying his lucky cigarette lighter, the one he had with him when the Bradley shot 1,000 at Grafenwoehr last year. Ghost Troop had crept into Iraq from Saudi Arabia more than 12 hours before the ground war officially began. The cavalry soldiers drove due north for a couple of days, then began swinging to the right. By that Tuesday, they were driving due east. "We expect contact at any time," Kick told his mother in a slow drawl, speaking into the recorder. It was a little after 8 a.m. "77ic iirtifs that were in Kuwait, that the Maiirtes have driven out, are headed direct& our way. And reirifoxeitients, instead of going back into Kuwait, are also headed our way. So' iili, weye gortria hit a lot of sliooting. ' At around 8:30 a.m., the sun broke out for a moment. Ghost Troop scouts spotted an Iraqi vehicle in the distance. There were 20 enemy soldiers packed into the personnel carrier. They all got out as if to surrender, but three suddenly ran back to the vehicle, and others fired rifles. Ghost troopers said later that there might have been some overkill when they blew apart the vehicle, but they wanted to make sure the three Iraqis couldn't get a chance to send any radio messages to their ofARMOR - MayJune 7997 There was another explosion, showering sparks across the front of the Bradley. "lt was just like somebody hit us with a sledgehammer," Bledsoe said. ficers.

They apparently didn't.

There was a lot of blood. "All I can say," Kick told his tape recorder, "Is better them than me. That sounds cruel, but it's true." It had been Ghost Troop's first kill of the war.

The debris turned out to be from the Tawakalna Division, and intelligence people said that the regiment would probably meet up with the front line of the Iraqi division near the 73 grid line, about 13 miles farther east.

By 1 p.m., the fog and clouds had gone. Instead, a ferocious wind raged in from the south, creating a blizzard of sand. Iraqi vehicles and infantry were scattered here and there. Ghost Troop killed several more personnel carriers and, at around 3:30 p.m., three enemy tanks. An hour later they reached the 73 Easting.

Off on their right, Eagle, Iron, and Killer Troops already were fighting against dug-in Iraqi soldiers. "I had a feeling," said Ghost Troop commander, CPT Joseph Sartiano, 29, from San Francisco. "Everybody else was making contact. So I kicked all my scouts back, and put my tanks up front."

A cavalry troop is half tanks and half Bradleys. Normally, the Bradleys drive up front, and the tanks hang back a little, ready to defend them. Instead, Sartiano lined up the whole troop along the 73 Fnr*:-rr Garwick, the Bradley leader, was in position at Most of the troop, he sail hind a small hill and ridge, overiuuK-ing a wide, shallow valley that the Arabs call a wadi. Enemy vehicles and infantrymen were all over the place, dug in on the other side of the wadi.

"Weh prilled rip on line now,' Kick said into his tape recorder. "We're engaged in a pretty decent firefiglit right now... we're shooting again. I can see where we're sltooting at, brit I can't see a victor (a veliicle)... ntis is chaos Itere... "This is total chaos." Battle commands flooded the radios, adding to the confusion.!'I cart see smoke 011 the Aori:on," Kick said into his tape recorder. 'ntat riteairs we killed sontetlting. Wiat it is, I don't know... Wiite One, lie's the platoon leader. You can hear it in Iris voice. He's all shook up. l?itte, 4.54... this is coav firing. Ente is 5:lO p.ni. We're still irt coiitact... Tltere's a few PCs Itere mid there, itiost(v infamy. I just spotted tlie biggest dam qdosiori at about 12 o'clock. I don't know what tlie lie11 it was..." Garwick's platoon alone had already killed nine personnel carriers. The enemy had started shooting back at them at about 5 p.m. Artillery began falling around the Bradleys.

"A tremendous volume of small arms fire and shrapnel hit the berm to my front," peppering his Bradley and another, Garwick said. Iraqi infantrymen ran forward and were mowed down. The enemy gunfire increased, and airburst artillery began exploding over their heads. Two Bradleys in Garwick’s platoon were positioned over his right shoulder. At 5:40 p.m., he saw three tank rounds hit the ridge in front of him, each shot closer to the Bradleys on his right. The last shot hit.

"One just got one of our guys," Kick shouted.

SPC Patrick Bledsoe, 20, from Ox-nard, Calif., was driving Bradley G-16. All he saw was.shooting. "We were in a little wadi," he said, but the top of the vehicle looked out over the valley. "We were kind of skylined..."

The Bradley's gunner was 23-year-old SGT Nels A. Moller. The coaxial machine gun was jammed, and the track commander, another sergeant, was trying to fix it when he looked up and saw Iraqi infantrymen running toward them. He asked Moller, "You got troops to the front?"

Suddenly, there was an explosion. From his seat at the gun sights, down inside the Bradley turret, Moller couldn't see the area right outside the fighting vehicle. 'What was that?" he asked, hearing the explosion.

According to Bledsoe, that was the last thing Moller said. There was another explosion, showering sparks across the front of the Bradley. "It was just like somebody hit us with a sledgehammer," Bledsoe said. He jumped out and ran behind the Bradley. Moller was dead. The other sergeant was slightly wounded. Friendly tanks were shooting over Bledsoe's head, and enemy fire was hitting the berm in front of him. He jumped down just as there was yet another explosion. PFC Jeff Pike, 21, of Binghamton, N. Y., was driving Sartiano’s tank. It was never confirmed, but he believes the last explosion was Sartiano’s gunner shooting a T-55, the tank that killed Moller.... e.. Bledsoe tried to get away. "I low-crawled up the the other track, and knocked on the back door, but they didn't hear me. I went up and knocked on the driver's hatch. The driver opened it. I said, W e got hit. We got hit. I think Moller's dead'." His own track, G-16, "was just smoking."

At 547, Kick spoke into his tape recorder. "It was one-sir that got hit." A fav miitrites later, he continued his voice steadier. V7te ginner of one-sir, SGT Moller, is dead. 77te TC and observer are on one-five right now. SGT Moller... SGT Moller was killed... time about 5:49." He paused a moment, then added, "Can't let this... can't let this affect 11s or get tis down at all. Or we're goitria die. And he wouldn't want that. He don't want that... But I'm scared. " 1LT Garwick told his men to keep fighting. Artillery, tanks, and machine guns were firing all around them on the hill. More were destroyed. More fired.

"This is chaos," Kick reported at 604 p.m. "Total chaos... got nine dead victors to our front. Enemy tic-tors. And got ntow contirig. " The sandstorm had worsened. Garwick could see only about 50 yards. But the thermal sights cut through some of the murk. With those, he could see more than half a mile. Two more enemy tanks were coming.

Kick watched them get shot three minutes later. "Boont. Hit. Hit and kill. He hit it. 77tat's revenge for SGT Moller. You sontifabitch irtg Iraqis. God I hate tltent. SGT Moller was a good guy. We killed tltent. ntat's fotir Iraqi PCs killed for this track alone." Garwick's scouts told him that 12 more tanks were coming. Possibly as many as 25. Iraqis down in the valley would just leap from their personnel carriers and run at Garwick's platoon, fving rifles. Getting killed. All Kick could see was rounds going downrange. ing right on top, ricocheting around us. We were in a corner of hell. I don't know how we made it out of there. I don't."

It went on like this - total chaos

- for nearly four more hours. At one point, SPC Chris Harvey looked out from the back of his personnel carrier.

"All I saw were things burning," said the 24-year-old artillery observer form Virginia Beach, Va. "For 360 degrees. Nothing but action."

Garwick called for the Air Force, but the planes were diverted to another mission two minutes before they got to Ghost Troop. Instead, he held back the tanks by calling in artillery and rockets, pounding each wave as it appeared on the far ridge. The Bamberg squadron's executive officer watched from a vantage point a short distance away. It looked, he said, like Armageddon. One of Garwick's biggest problems was that the radios were so frantically busy that he couldn't call through. Several times, he had to jump out of his Bradley and crawl over to the artillery observers to tell them in person where he needed them to shoot.

On one of these occasions, at about 8:30 p.m., he had crawled halfway to the artillery observer's vehicle when around of airburst went off just on the other side of a nearby Bradley. He and the artilleryman, Sgt. Larry C. Fultz, sought cover under Garwick's Bradley. Another wave of tanks was coming in.

"We just sat there crying, just shaken, until we could get back out from underneath the Bradley," Garwick said. "The air bursts were com-Days later, in a quiet tent in free Kuwait, an officer from the regiment tried to explain what had happened to Ghost Troop.

The Republican Guard's Tawakalna Division had gotten tangled up with the 12th Iraqi Armored Division, and both enemy units were trying to retreat through the same narrow piece of terrain, said MAJ Steven L. Campbell, 35, the regiment's intelligence officer. The Iraqi path of retreat, a shallow valley between two ridgeliies, led straight into Ghost Troop. Campbell theorized that the Republican Guard might have fought so fiercely because they were desperately trying to escape. Those guys wanted to get out of there, and those guys are supposed to be the best fighters. In my mind, they weren't trying to break the defenses (the line Ghost Troop was holding). The way the terrain was, they had to go through here to get by."

The soldiers in Ghost weren't the only ones fighting that night. At least half of the regiment's troops and tank companies were on line at one point or another. But most of them were fighting against dug-in soldiers. None of them faced the wave-after-wave onslaught that was aimed at Ghost.

More than once, artillery saved Ghost Troop. Helicopters helped kill tanks. And, near the end, when the troop was desperately short on ammunition, a tank company, Hawk, came in to relieve them. In its 100 hours of combat, the regiment destroyed 100 tanks, about 50 personnel carriers, and more than 30 wheeled vehicles, plus some anti-aircraft artillery systems, Campbell said.

He estimated that 85 to 90 percent of those vehicles were killed in the battle at the 73 Easting, but no one had yet counted the vehicles in Ghost's sector.

The equivalent of an Iraqi brigade was destroyed that night, the first ground defeat of the Republican Guards, Campbell said. Within 36 hours, most of the others were gone. The morning after the battle, someone made a wooden cross and stuck it in the sand, and a chaplain came to say a few words about Moller. A colonel spoke, too.

Everyone from Ghost Troop was there, worn-out men with sunken eyes, their faces covered with dirt and gunpowder. It was the first time in two months that they had all been together in one place, instead of spread out over the desert, in training, or combat formations. Several hugged each other, glad to see their friends alive, then gathered in a semicircle, took off their helmets, and listened to the chaplain and the colonel.

Then they were told to get ready for the next battle. It never came. Instead, a Cease-fire was called, and the cavalrymen had time to sit among themselves and try to understand what had happened.

They said SGT Nels Moller died with his hands on the trigger of the Bradley gun, looking for enemy to shoot. His TOW missile launcher, the Bradley's main antitank defense, wasn't working, and Moller knew it before he entered the battle.

Reason enough to stay out, but he didn't.

"He died like a soldier," said one of Ghost's artillery officers, 2LT Joe Deskevich, 23, of Rockville, Md. "He didn't run, and he didn't die for nothing."

He came from Paul, Idaho. Sartiano, the troop commander, decided he will take leave and visit the dead sergeant's parents.

The morning after the battle, Kick and another soldier stood in front of their shrapnel-scarred Bradley and talked about Moller.

"He was about the only sergeant," Kick said, still with a bitterness in his voice, "who'd sit down and listen to your problems and treat you like a human being, instead of a private." That night, before the cease-fire was called, the scouts took more prisoners and had to stay up guarding them. Bledsoe, who'd been Moller's driver, said that he and the others had stayed awake by talking about Moller.

"We talked about it for three hours," Bledsoe said. 'We decided that when he went up on that hill, he wasn't worried about it. He said, 'If they get me, that's just another bullet that was gonna hit somebody else'."

In Bamberg, the cavalrymen live in a place called Warner Barracks 2, and when they get back, they want to give it anew name - Moller Barracks - if the Army will let them. No one, however, really knew what to call the battle they had just lived through. The officers were all calling it the 73 Easting, because they were the ones looking at the maps. SSG Waylan Lundquist, a 29-year-old tanker from Aurora, Mich., suggested the Battle of the Tawakalna. Another man thought it should be Moller Ridge. And none of them could judge how important it had been. They didn't know how hard anyone else had fought in the 100-hour war. They still don't. It might take months or years before the people who write history books will decide whether Ghost Troop is worth a page or not. "At the time," said Garwick, the platoon leader, "none of us understood what was happening."

All they knew was that they'd had a tough night, one they found hard to describe in language that can be printed in newspapers. It had snow-balled into chaos before anyone really knew what was happening. The chaos was relative, though, and all battles are chaotic to the men fighting them. "All I did," Sartiano said, "was manage the violence." At his level on the battlefield, one rung up from Garwick, two up from most of the others, he had felt in control. It had, after all, been a decisive victory. Captured prisoners confirmed that the Tawakalna had been caught completely by surprise. And Sartiano, like the others, was proud of it.

One morning Garwick gathered his men around to talk to them and admitted that he still wasn't sure what had happened. "All I know is that a squadron's supposed to be able to take a brigade. A troop's supposed to be able to take a battalion. A fire team, a company. Our fire team took out a brigade." He paused a moment, and the words seemed to be sinking into him as much as in the others. 'That really was above and beyond the call of duty."

Garwick, it seemed, had been changed the most. He'd been spoiling for a fight and got more than he expected. "That morning I was so excited to have killed a Republican Guard: said the 25-year-old lieutenant. "And at the end of the battle, if I never saw another Republican Guard in my life, I'd be happy." Or perhaps he's not so ARMOR - MayJune 7997 MIA1, Bradley, Defied the Critics changed. He still wants to get married as soon as he gets back - his fiancee is a former classmate from West Point, now a military intelligence officer at Fort Polk, La. And he jokes about how his platoon will fail its next gunnery at Grafenwoehr - the first target will pop up, and Ghost Troop will instantly blast 40 rounds into it.

The night after the cease-fire, when his men rolled into free Kuwait, he stood beside his Bradley and watched the eastern sky. Ghost Troop was camped in a quarry that had been turned into a Republican Guard stronghold, a city-sized maze of 20-foot ridges transforming the flat desert into a miniature mountain range.

Orange flames from the burning Kuwaiti oil fields glowed in the east

- someone had counted 57 fires -and a little to the south of that, a nearly full moon was rising. "I couldn't wait to see combat. What a fool I was." The killing, he said, became almost too easy, and that seemed also to make him uncomfortable. He questioned his future, now that he's finished living what he thinks might be the most important night of his life. But what bothered him most was another question that really doesn't have an answer - he wanted to know why. "Why did they fight?" he asked slowly, and repeated it. "Why did they fight?"

He looked again at the sky. Sometimes, he said, he spins around the turret of his Bradley and aims it toward the moon. He switches on the thermal sights and target magnifiers and gazes for a time at another desert on another world, a quarter of a million miles away.

The following excerpts are from The Jayhawk, the VII Corps newspaper. The author Is Sergeant Major Martin L. Shupe of VI1 Corps PAO. Probably no armored vehicle has seen more controversy than the Bradley...

Skeptics claimed it burned when hit, its weapons wouldn't kill enemy armor, and it couldn't swim.

Cavalry troopers from the 4th Sqdn., 7th Cavalry, 3rd AD proved critics wrong on two of those charges during Operation Desert Storm. During an intense battle that left two of their comrades dead, two of A Troop's platoons took on a battalion of Iraqi Republican Guard armor. After the battle, they praised the vehicle and claimed it saved many of their lives.

When we took hits, damage was compartmentalized," said 1LT Daniel J. W. King, whose platoon took several tank main gun hits. "The fire suppression systems worked," he said of the Bradley's Halon extinguishers. "It'san awesome weapon when you have to go toe-to-toe with enemy armor." "The Bradley is better than I thought it was," said SFC Ivery Baker, platoon sergeant in A Troop and a 12-year cavalry veteran. He said he saw several take hits without catching fire or blowing up. "The personnel had flash burns and shrapnel. One was totally uninjured," he said. Baker's platoon lost two of six Bradleys. Balancing that was the destruction his unit caused the enemy. "Our main guns blew up every BMP they fired at, and our TOW missiles destroyed every tank they hit. We had 10 out of 11 hits with the TOW," SFC Baker said.

SGT Ronald S. Jones had a Bradley shot out from under him, but still praised the machine. "We used HE from the 25-mm gun at a BMP until it went up in flames. We saw two more and fired 10 to 15 rounds at each and killed them," he said. Later, they fired at a tank, thinking it was another BMP, and when the rounds obviously didn't do any damage, they then fired a TOW missile that blew up the tank. The concensus was that the Bradley was a great infantry fighting vehicle, but too large for scouting. Complaints also centered on the coax machine guns: all 18 of A Troop's machine guns jammed. MlAls Held Their Boresight Over 200 Miles of Desert "The M1 has been great," said SFC James Williams of C Co., 4th Bn., 37th Armor, 1st ID. "With daily maintenance, cleaning air filters and fuel filters, it hasn't failed us yet." SFC Williams' unit had just covered 200 miles of desert to engage the Republican Guards. 'We got on them so fast, they weren't expecting us. We caught them with their pants down," he said.

SSG John Sawyer, master gunner of C Co., 3d Bn., 35th Armor, praised the tank's main gun. "All the gunner has to do is keep his sight on the target, and the cannon follows his line of sight. Look around you and you can see how effective our weapons are," he added, pointing to dozens of destroyed Iraqi vehicles.

CPT Henry Kievenaar, CO of D Co., 1st Bn., 35th Armor, said his --'led over 200 miles in five uough all extremes of "The M1 hit deadly ac-for five days after we u.e..ted.

All of our 14 tanks made it... I would take an MlAl over a T-72M1 any day." -.