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

232 The Road to Safwan
A Troop. CPT Pope had a farewell ceremony for these soldiers,
who were heading to infantry battalions in the division. During
the ceremony Pope awarded each soldier an Expert Infantry
Badge to recognize their level of achievement. Across the
squadron, others such as tank mechanics, helicopter pilots and
crew, National Guard soldiers, and individual replacements
said their goodbyes and moved on to other units or back to the
United States.
It is amazing how much trash a combat crew in the field for
three months can accumulate. CSM Cobb had the engineers dig
a large garbage pit just outside the squadron area. It became a
magnet for local Bedouins who hovered around the area looking
for discarded wood, equipment, and clothing. The fact that
Cobb was having the trash burnt each day did not discourage
the persistent locals, although the occasional live machine-gun
or rifle round exploding did drive them away from the fire for
a short while. The squadron had turned most of the ammunition
over to corps logistics representatives, and only officers
and senior noncommissioned officers retained any ammunition
for their units’ protection.
Packing of the milvans was quite a process. First, there was
some confusion over what the division authorized the soldiers
to pack. Could the soldiers ship personal gear, such as radios
and stoves, that their families had sent them, or were they only
for authorized military equipment? What about captured Iraqi
equipment? Could the soldiers bring home war trophies? While
it was policy from the beginning that they could not bring
home weapons, they had hoped to keep some of the night-vision
sights and binoculars that they had acquired. Unfortunately,
the new squadron S2, CPT Eric Esplund, had the unenviable
task of telling the troop commanders that none of the
optics could go with the soldiers. Probably the most valuable
souvenir that soldiers could take with them, and they had to be
packed in the milvans, were the Soviet-made bayonets that
were designed for the AK-47 Rifle. 7
Each passing day the troopers got closer to their departure
from the desert and they could not wait. Each afternoon the
winds began to blow and a few hours later transformed into a
full-scale sandstorm. The heat and blowing sand were becom-