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

The Basra Highway 171
hold off the approaching enemy. Within a few minutes, the platoon
destroyed several tanks and armored personnel carriers.
The Iraqis, however, continued to head towards the squadron. 29
Just prior to the assault on the highway, MAJ Burdan had established
a temporary headquarters several kilometers away to
coordinate operations and continued to operate from this vantage
point while the two ground troops were conducting operations.
As A Troop neared the highway, CPT Peters’s helicopters
had started running low on fuel. Still out of communications
with the division, 2nd Brigade headquarters, and the squadron’s
flight operations detachment, Peters had no idea where to fly to
for re-supply. In addition, while his pilots were trained for night
operations, the dark, smoky, desert night made such flying hazardous.
Rather than have the aero scout-weapons team fly to the
rear and search for the re-supply point, Burdan directed Peters,
who was already flying on emergency fuel, to land at his temporary
CP. 30 Burdan, of course, still assumed that the remainder of
the division was on the way and this would be a safe location for
both the command post and the helicopters.
By 1715 hours, almost all of A Troop found itself in a firefight.
The Iraqis were obviously surprised to find American soldiers
on their planned escape route, and their response was
quite disorganized. Some units tried to fight their way through
the American position, only to see their vehicles explode and
their progress stopped by well-aimed machine-gun or 25-mm
Bushmaster fire. Other Iraqi soldiers tried to by-pass the Americans
through the burning oil field to the east. Finally, many
Iraqi soldiers had simply had enough and came towards the
squadron’s positions with their hands in the air. In order to control
all of the prisoners, Pope ordered 2LT Mitch Osburn’s 2nd
Platoon to establish an enemy prisioner of war collection point
near the highway. Osburn put SSG Terence Favors in charge of
the mission and gave him the engineer squad and the troop mechanics
to help him. By 1800 hours, Camp Favors, as this concertina-wire-enclosed
enclave became known, was soon guarding
over 450 Iraqi soldiers. Meanwhile, there seemed to be no
end in sight to the enemy forces approaching the American
perimeter. 31
Now the glow of brightly burning Iraqi vehicles began to