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

186 The Road to Safwan
bodies with the location where they were found. Some of the
bodies were burned so badly that they began to fall apart when
moved. It was a sobering reminder of the lethality of the profession
of arms. B Troop’s 1SGT David Rooks established a collection
point for the bodies near the road so they could be loaded
onto vehicles from division and shipped out. To complicate the
task, late that morning dog packs arrived in the vicinity. At first
they circled the lines but then as they smelled the bodies they
darted in and ran off with body parts that hadn’t been collected
yet or hadn’t been found. The troopers tried to run them off but
they remained in the area. By late that afternoon the remains
had all been collected and evacuated from the area. 3
The Iraqi prisoners continued to be a problem and the combat
trains, with the assistance of the A Troop engineer platoon,
were still in charge of the collection point. With daylight and the
population growing, the squadron requested assistance from
the approaching division. After its arrival that morning, the 2nd
Brigade assigned an infantry company to operate the collection
point. Its first task was to count the prisoners so it could estimate
the transportation requirements for moving them back to the
prisoner of war camps in the rear. By 1000 hours the company
commander had determined that the squadron had captured
2,064 Iraqi soldiers. The squadron did not have food or water for
that number of additional individuals, so it was important to
transfer them as quickly as possible to another unit’s control.
The division headquarters was initially skeptical about the prisoner
count, but promised to send food and water as well as the
needed transportation to begin the evacuation. By mid-afternoon
the division transportation in the form of five-ton stake
and platform vehicles, essentially commercial trucks with open
trailers, arrived to begin to take the Iraqis away and also
brought a shipment of extra food and water. As the squadron’s
troopers emptied the prisoner cage, they gave each captured
Iraqi soldier a bottle of water and an MRE for the trip to the rear.
It took several hours for the squadron to load all the Iraqis on the
trucks and move them out of the area.
Finally, the missing elements of the squadron needed to be
reunited with the main body. The squadron maintenance platoon
was missing an M88 tank recovery vehicle and its crew.