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

Operations in the TAA 55
ficial “gas station” on Tapline Road was backed up with a twohour
wait. Bypassing this over-loaded fuel point, they drove a
few miles farther up the road, pulled over to the side, refueled
their own vehicles and broke open their first of many cases of
MREs. Burdan and his party were on their way again in about
an hour, and by 1830 were approaching Camp Mackenzie in
TAA Roosevelt.
Pulling off the Tapline Road in the dark, about ten kilometers
south of the projected assembly area, they used their new
GPS to find the exact spot for the squadron’s new home. The
troopers were excited, tired, and scared as they moved closer to
their potential enemy. Once in the center of the designated area,
they “circled the wagons” in good old cavalry style. CPT Maloney
took charge of posting guards and established a standard
security rotation for the night. Some people slept on cots they
had brought from Fort Riley, while most simply collapsed in the
back of their trucks.
Of course, this “camp” was nothing more than a few acres
of flat, wet, barren sand. The image that has emerged of a tidy,
push-button war does no justice to the problems soldiers encountered
in the desert that winter where relatively simple
tasks, such as setting up living quarters, were major challenges.
The advance party had supplies for only a few days and had to
get this area ready for the entire unit. The squadron’s tents,
along with a great deal of other essential equipment, were still
in Milvans somewhere in the division’s assembly area, at port
waiting to be brought forward, or still on ships in the Arabian
Sea. Compounding these issues was the sheer size of the division’s
tactical assembly area. Having spent most of their professional
lives on relatively small maneuver areas at Fort Riley and
in Germany, appreciating the scale of the assembly area required
some adjustment by the troopers. The Big Red One
alone occupied about 1,500 square kilometers of desert. Travel
to and from the division’s headquarters, cross-country or on
very old and dusty trails, took close to an hour. When darkness
came, there were no lights, and the moon and stars took on a
significance not appreciated in the industrial world.
Because of a limited number of routes to the desert and limited
transportation assets, vehicle movement from the port was