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

The Basra Highway 175
how the perimeter was to be properly secured.
Meanwhile, CPT Morrison’s Headquarters Troop (the combat
trains and the forward support element) took charge of the
support activities so that the combat crews could concentrate
on combat operations. Taking control of the prisoner of war
compound, he established a medical aid station and began providing
both the troopers and prisoners with food and water. In
addition, his soldiers began moving ammunition and fuel to
the vehicles on the firing line. The administrative-logistics center,
or ALOC, was set up and later that evening assumed the
duties and responsibilities of the squadron command post
within the defensive perimeter. 39 By 1830, CPT Pope reported
that most of the fighting to his south had died down, and he
worked closely with CPT Bills to preclude any instances of fratricide
between the two troops as they finished establishing the
defensive perimeter. 40
Contrary to plans, the rest of the division did not follow the
squadron that night to Objective Denver. Once LTG Franks realized
that the northeasterly movement of the 1st Infantry Division
was bringing them across the front of the easterly moving
3rd Armored Division, he decided to make a change. Franks
now wanted the Big Red One to stop moving northeast, head
east until it crossed the Basra Highway, and then turn due
north. While he sorted these instructions out, COL Stan Cherrie,
Franks’s operations officer working from the VII Corps’s
Tactical Command Post, ordered the 1st Infantry Division to
stop moving some time before 1900 hours. With the entire command
strung out by the day’s battles and pursuits, he wanted
time to coordinate the operations of all the corps’s divisions before
they became entangled in the rapidly diminishing maneuver
space in eastern Kuwait.
Impatiently, the 1st Infantry Division called back to the VII
Corps a half-hour later asking to continue, but was told to stand
by. Once he finished sorting out the command, Cherrie intended
to send a new set of instructions to MG Rhame defining
his new avenue of advance. However, he never sent those instructions.
Organized around five command post tracks and
about two dozen wheeled vehicles, the corps tactical command
post, at that moment, was a very busy place. 41 In all the confu-