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

224 The Road to Safwan
At CP India the squadron set up a modified medical clearing
station to help treat people. In some cases they arranged for the
evacuation of badly injured children, always with one of the
parents to ensure that the child was not lost in the system.
In cases where the child was evacuated without a parent,
the parents wanted to know when their child was coming back
and the squadron referred their questions back up the medical
channel. Unfortunately, in many cases, the medics received no
answers back. Wilson, Burdan and the other officers still wonder
how many of those parents ever saw their children again.
After the squadron departed later in the month, it could only
have gotten worse as there was no one left in the area for the
families to talk to. Certainly treatment of refugee and civilian
casualties was something the army could have done better in
this conflict. 21
Of course, the plight of the families sickened the squadron,
as it did all the Americans strung out along the demarcation
line. Seeing a small boy with a terrible leg wound caused by
stepping on or kicking a mine while playing soccer or the small
children badly burned because their gas stove had been hit by
some kind of weapons fire and exploded were sights that most
of these veterans were unprepared for. 22
On most nights soldiers could hear rifle and machine-gun
fire coming out of the local towns. Refugees and local citizens
recounted stories of Hussein’s police force establishing control
in the towns at night by arresting known and suspected dissidents
and shooting them in the streets of their neighborhoods.
Corps-level situation reports are full of blood-curdling tales of
terror, destruction, revenge, and murder. In general, there was
nothing the squadron could do except report the information
up the chain. On occasion, however, things would spill across
the MDL. On the last night of CP India’s nightly operation, a car
with a family inside drove into the checkpoint. They were frantic
as they described the Iraqi Secret Police who were right behind
and probably going to execute them when caught. Then
the family saw a car approaching and screamed (in Arabic) and
pointed, “That’s them!” Other refugees joined in, confirming
that the occupants of the approaching car were some kind of execution
squad. Figuring that they were in the wrong place, the