The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 ...

The Basra Highway 161
now wanted Rhame to attack southeast for about fifteen miles
into Kuwait and then change direction and attack northeast for
another thirty miles and cut the Basra Highway. After some initial
delays in refueling and re-supplying, the division began its
attack at 0915 hours. 6 Prior to its departure, the squadron had to
rearm and refuel its vehicles as well as perform required maintenance.
In B Troop, one of 2LT Lowndes’s tanks broke a torsion
bar during the attack. Of course, there were none available in either
the troop or squadron combat trains. This meant that the
crew would have to “short track” the tank so that it could have
some limited mobility. They were not going to be ready in time
to join the squadron when it continued with the division. CPT
Bills made the unpleasant decision to leave Lowndes and some
of his M3s behind to provide security for the crew and mechanics.
The troop commander, worried about this loss of firepower,
gave his lieutenant all of the information he needed so he could
catch up as soon as possible. 7
At 0930 hours, LTC Robert Wilson’s 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry,
resumed the mission it had performed throughout the attack:
screening the left flank of the division along the boundary
with the 3rd Armored Division to the north. 8 With the division
on the move, Wilson moved his unit along the imaginary
boundary with the 3rd Armored Division, prepared to intercept
any Iraqi units operating between the two divisions. Throughout
the campaign in the desert, Iraqi units had executed numerous
small-scale counterattacks against American and British
forces. While uniformly unsuccessful, many were vigorously
executed and could have been effective against an unprepared
foe. In addition, senior tactical officers, veterans of the Vietnam
conflict, were not yet ready to assume that the Iraqi Army was
bereft of offensive options.
A Troop led the way and was followed by B Troop. The
squadron’s combat trains moved on a path parallel to the
ground troops a couple of kilometers to their south. The
squadron tactical operations center and flight operations followed
in trail in the 2nd Brigade zone. Aeroscout weapons
teams, made up of scout helicopters and Cobra attack helicopters,
reconnoitered forward and to the flanks of the ground
troops. It was an extremely fast move, with the squadron cross-