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

6 Security Operations
Nothing in MAJ Silvia Marable’s career as a
logistics officer had prepared her for the
situation in which she now found herself.
Marable commanded Division Support Area (DSA) Junction
City in the 1st Infantry Division’s forward assembly area, located
in the middle of the Arabian Desert. This barren facility
was less than thirty miles from Iraqi units to the north and over
seventy-five miles from the closest American combat troops in
TAA Roosevelt to the southeast. She was here to supervise the
large amount of supplies that the Division Support Command,
or DISCOM, was stockpiling in preparation for the anticipated
offensive against Iraq. Because of the great distance, she had
trouble communicating back to division headquarters and had
little understanding of the tactical changes taking place around
her. Every day new units from the DISCOM traveled along the
network of dusty trails that terminated south of the Iraqi border.
With them came the thousands of tons of fuel, ammunition,
food, and repair parts that allowed a mechanized division
to fight. In addition, units from VII Corps were arriving to set
up their own support areas, both in the DSA and in the corps’s
Logistics Base (Logbase) Echo, located near a cluster of old
houses a few miles to the southwest. To defend this vulnerable,
expanding logistics complex, Marable had only a platoon of
military police. 1
Generals Franks and Rhame were becoming increasingly
concerned about the safety of these logistics areas. Even a small
Iraqi raid by a squad of commandos with explosives and machine
guns could cause massive damage and inflict the equivalent
of a tactical defeat on the American forces. Such a raid
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