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

Preparation 21
sion. The army detached the squadron’s A Troop from the Fort
Riley contingent and sent it along with the brigade. By 1990,
however, the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the ending of the
Cold War made the forward-deployed brigade superfluous,
and the army had begun to withdraw it from Germany and reassigned
A Troop to Wilson’s command. This reassignment was
essentially a paper transaction however, and the squadron had
to build the actual unit from scratch. 7
Wilson tapped CPT Kenneth W. Pope Jr. to take command
of his new A Troop, which he did in a short ceremony at the
squadron parade field on November 19. A 1985 graduate of Appalachian
State University’s ROTC program, Pope had been
serving as the unit’s S3 (Air), the usual staff position for a commander
in waiting. With his new troop authorized 128 soldiers,
he was initially able to find about forty-five from a variety of
sources, including B Troop and the Fort Riley Noncommissioned
Officers Academy. Most of his other sergeants came
from across the United States, primarily from light cavalry
units. Most of these had no experience on the M3 Bradley, a fact
that compounded training problems later in the Persian Gulf.
His initial mortar squad came as a unit from within the
squadron. Therefore, Pope’s focus between November and the
squadron’s move to Saudi Arabia in late December was torn between
preparation for unit deployment and the creation of an
entirely new organization, melding new soldiers and equipment
into a cohesive team. 8 To help CPT Pope train his new
command, Wilson contacted the chief of the Armor Cavalry
Tactics Division at Fort Knox, the home of armored operations,
and arranged for a training team to come to Fort Riley at the
end of December.
Another change concerned the organization of the
squadron’s aviation units. Most senior-level leaders, such as
MG Rhame, COL Mowery, and LTC Wilson, had received their
initial combat experience in Vietnam. In the old D Troop organization,
the aviation commander, a major, controlled both the
tactical employment of helicopter platoons and their maintenance.
When the army changed the squadron’s organization to
two ground and two air troops in the 1980s, it placed both the
flight operations and aviation maintenance elements in the