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

Safwan 201
arrived at the dismount point on the airfield. General Schwarzkopf
and Prince Khalid, the Saudi commander, met them at a
search tent. The Iraqis did not look too happy about being
searched. They then went into the negotiation tent, followed by
the dignitaries including Franks and Wilson. As the rest of the
squadron’s leaders waited for the group to come out of the tent,
they talked with reporters who were covering the events and
with friends from within the division and corps staffs who had
gotten a ride to the airfield. 54
Less than an hour after they began, General Schwarzkopf
and Saudi Prince Khalid strode out of the briefing tent and up
to the podium, with three Big Red One M1A1 tanks as a backdrop.
Schwarzkopf gave a short news conference and then
turned it over to Prince Khalid who thanked all the soldiers for
their sacrifices. Schwarzkopf then disappeared into a tent
where he called General Powell back in Washington. Soon after,
he and LTG Franks got into their aircraft and flew away. 55
The squadron’s soldiers were all happy that the fighting was
apparently over, and they began to think about going home. The
news reporters who had covered the conference began talking to
the troopers who stood in front of their vehicles. Most wanted to
know how the equipment had stood up to the fight. Apparently,
some reporters were disappointed with the answers, expecting
criticism of the weapons the Americans used. Although the
tanks consumed a lot of fuel, they were a quantum leap over the
tanks the Iraqis employed and most soldiers had nothing but
praise for the Bradley and M1A1 Abrams. Later that afternoon,
five reporters who had driven up from Saudi Arabia in a very
cramped International Scout, asked to talk to some of the troopers.
On the way north they had driven past the destroyed Iraqi
equipment and were quite impressed with the degree of damage
they encountered. MAJ Burdan arranged for an interview
with some of Ken Pope’s soldiers. 56
Meanwhile, the conference site was torn down as quickly
as it had been set up. It had been a very busy three days for the
squadron’s troopers, as they had found themselves first in the
middle of a potential fire-fight, and then at the center of a historic
meeting between two adversaries. None of the soldiers
realized just how tenuous that peace really was and that Sad-