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

46 The Road to Safwan
cranes to lift vehicles and cargo off the deck and onto the pier
below, a much slower and more precarious process. 8
Once a ship arrived in port, the VII Corps’s port assistance
task forces supervised the discharge of cargo with unloading
teams based on the specific type of vessel and the kind of equipment
that it was carrying. Several ships arrived each day, and
the length of time a vessel remained in port for off-loading depended
on a number of factors: its size, method of unloading
(drive-off or cranes) and the type of equipment it carried (containers,
tanks, pallets, etc.). On a normal day, the teams removed
between 300 and 1,000 items of unit equipment from the
ships, but the exact tonnage varied considerably. 9
If the vessel was a Ro-Ro type, the driving team unchained
each vehicle and drove it out of the hold and onto the pier. On
other ships, one team unhooked vehicles inside the ship, while
another team lifted them by crane vertically off the ship and
onto the dockside. Once on land, logistics inspectors checked
shipping documents and maintenance teams from the 593d
Area Support Group made safety checks, and fueled and organized
them by company. At the port of Ad Dammam, the team of
unit drivers then drove the vehicles to a local staging area. 10
As mentioned earlier, while the squadron unloaded its M3
Cavalry Fighting Vehicles (or CFVs), it received word that they
would turn them in for the new M3A2. With a 25-mm Bushmaster
cannon, a TOW2 antitank missile, improved fire-control
systems, a 7.62-mm coaxial machine gun, and improvements in
armor protection, power management, and fuel stowage, the
M3A2 was greatly superior to the Iraqi BMP and all of the other
enemy personnel carriers. 11
Exchanging these vehicles was a three-step process: removal
of all the squadron-owned equipment (radios, guns, etc.)
from the old CFVs, reinstallation of it on the new, and training
on the improved aspects of the M3A2. In the confusion of the
period, turning in the old vehicles was a bit of a problem.
Changes were happening so fast that it was difficult to find
someone in the port area to sign for them. The squadron initially
parked the old ones near the new equipment training
area; however, other units began removing parts and equipment
for use on their own vehicles. This process, called canni-