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

68 The Road to Safwan
could delay the grand offensive scheduled for late February.
Since Logbase Echo and the breach area were in the 1st Infantry
Division’s sector, the corps commander directed Rhame to protect
the developing logistics complex. The division commander
decided to turn the mission over to LTC Bob Wilson and his 1st
Squadron, 4th Cavalry. 2
On January 20, Wilson officially learned that his unit would
be assigned to protect the division and corps logistics areas. His
original orders were to move B Troop in two days; however,
Rhame put the mission on hold the night before because of concerns
at army and corps headquarters. The senior chain of command
was worried that American armored vehicles would be
seen by Iraqi patrols and compromise the entire theater deception
plan by revealing combat units well to the west of the Wadi
al Batin. After some clarification of orders, the division instructed
Wilson to move B Troop on January 24 and he ordered
CPT Mike Bills to begin breaking camp. Meanwhile, the
squadron commander and MAJ Burdan began studying the division’s
logistics overlay to develop a plan for how B Troop
would secure that sector. On the night of January 23, the planning
pace intensified as the division operations officer, LTC
Bullington, augmented his previous instructions with a prescribed
route to DSA Junction City. 3 For the next twenty-four
days, the squadron would establish a screen line, conduct security
operations, and eventually form the basis of a larger ad-hoc
task force called Combat Command Carter.
CPT Bills’s troop, including his six new tanks, his field artillery
forward observers (called a FIST or fire support team),
under 1LT Jorge Carbello, and other squadron support elements
departed at 0800 on January 24 and became the first VII
Corps combat element to cross the Wadi al Batin. It headed
west, twenty kilometers north of the town of Hafar al Batin to
avoid observation by local civilians who were reportedly in
sympathy with the Iraqis. With only their Global Positioning
System receivers to guide their movements, these troopers
stayed off the Tapline Road and away from the town to remain
undetected. They arrived in a region where the only important
landmark was the never-ending border berm that separated
Iraq from Saudi Arabia. 4