isolate the battlefield with air. But these were only assumptions, and besides, at this point I had my hands full commanding VII Corps, without trying to do John Yeosock's or the CINC's job as well.
I turned my attention to our combat strength.
To this point in the fight, I was aware of two soldiers KIA and twenty-three soldiers WIA,[39] and fifty-six soldiers classified as DNBI (disease non-battle injury). Today I knew there would be more. The pace of battle was about to pick up sharply as 2nd ACR and the divisions slammed into the Republican Guard and other units. Today we would see some heavy fighting both close and deep; it would go on into the night and continue tomorrow. We had the corps ready to fight those battles and to accomplish the mission at least cost. But there would be a cost. There always is.
We'd already had some fratricide from our own munitions — duds[40] from MLRS and Air Force cluster bomblets. It was another difference between attacking and defending. When you are in the defense, it's rare that you would move through an area you have just plastered with air and artillery, so unexploded munitions are usually not a problem. For attackers, it's a different story. Unexploded munitions form de facto antipersonnel minefields through which you must pass, and in fact, the situation in Desert Storm was much worse than most of us had expected. We were surprised at the density of our own stuff on the battlefield. It was a real enemy.
In Vietnam, if we had been about to attack through an area, we would not have put in air strikes with cluster bombs; we didn't want the duds to wound our troops. There, though, our artillery did not have DPICM bomblets, nor did we need the volume of artillery fire that we needed here, and here, as well, we had no control over the types of munitions used by the air. However, we did have control over our own artillery, and despite the risk to our own troops, mission requirements saw us fire lots of DPICM and MLRS bomblets.
Turning to logistics: Our posture there was good. The availability rate for the major end items — that is, tanks, Bradleys, British equipment, and the like — continued to be well into the 90 percentile range, and supplies — including fuel and ammo — also were doing well.
By this time Log Base Nelligen was beginning to be established about sixty kilometers inside Iraq. By this afternoon, it would have more than 1.25 million gallons of fuel, ready for issue to our attacking force. Prior to Nelligen, COSCOM (Corps Support Command) had established PTP[41] Buckeye, just south of the breach, with more than 1.2 million gallons of diesel, to refill the fuel vehicles of the 1st INF, 1st UK, and 2nd ACR (in Desert Storm, our divisions used up to 800,000 gallons or more daily). Both Buckeye and Nelligen were operated in part by troops from the U.S. Army Reserve called up for Desert Storm, and both had been set up on the initiative of Brigadier General Bob McFarlin and his COSCOM commanders as a result of my 'no pauses' intent. They proved to be lifesavers in maintaining tempo — and the troops driving the fuel vehicles through the trackless desert in long convoys past sometimes bypassed Iraqi units were real heroes.
As the battle continued, I remained much more sensitive to fuel than to other classes of supply, including ammunition; none of the others ever seemed to be a problem. But as we turned east and got farther away from Log Base Nelligen, we knew that this would be a critical day for fuel.
My orders that morning were simple:
1. Continue to execute FRAGPLAN 7, with 1st INF in place of 1st CAV.
2. Focus the deep air beyond the FSCL that we could influence on the Iraqi 12th AD and Tawalkana Division.
3. Get the corps 11th Aviation Brigade into the fight that night to execute their CONPLAN Saddle about eighty kilometers deep, near what we had named Objective Minden. (Saddle was their contingency plan to support execution of FRAGPLAN 7, while Minden was an area in front of the 1st INF direction of attack where we anticipated the Iraqis would set another line of defense.)
At about 0700, Butch Funk came into the TAC for a chat. I was always glad to see Butch. He rested easy in the saddle and was always upbeat and forward-looking. (Butch was from Montana, and had a Ph.D.; in Vietnam he'd been an aviator, and had later commanded at all levels of armor; he'd also commanded the NTC, and been the III Corps chief of staff.)
His news for me was good. He was moving out with two brigades forward and one in reserve, he said, which were fully coordinated with the 2nd ACR, and would pass around to the north of Don Holder's northern squadron, rather than making a passage of lines. I liked that. It was a fine piece of initiative on the part of both units, and would mean a much swifter attack into the Tawalkana.
Next he had a request for more room to maneuver his division, which, unfortunately, was something that I didn't have to give him. I could do that only if I attacked with two divisions, instead of three, and kept both the 2nd ACR and the 1st INF in reserve, and I did not want to do that. Two divisions might have served for twenty-four hours, but I figured we needed to sustain our attack for at least forty-eight, and maybe longer.
'I can't give you any more room, Butch,' I told him. 'I need you to pass around the 2nd ACR and take up the fight with the RGFC. Press the fight. We're going to crank up the tempo.'
Though he understood, he had to be disappointed that his division was in such a straitjacket. Nonetheless, he said 'WILCO,' and left to execute.
After Butch left, I gave some additional thought to our corps's restricted maneuver space. In order to get the focused combat power we needed and to sustain it at a peak, I had given the divisions a front about thirty to forty kilometers wide. They didn't have much room to maneuver laterally, but lots of depth. Though our VII Corps sector was about as wide as my covering force sector in front of V Corps had been in the Fulda Gap in Germany from 1982 to 1984, our VII Corps sector now had four divisions and an ACR with about 130,000 troops, while the Blackhorse had only had about 10,000 troops. In the relatively flat desert, it was a risk to focus that many troops and that many vehicles, with that kind of combat power, on one corps objective. We all knew that a wrong orientation of a gun tube — or of a unit with many tank gun tubes — meant rounds crossing boundaries, and fratricide. After they're fired, tank rounds cannot be recalled. Minimizing the risk, while maintaining the tempo of the attack, meant keeping my finger tightly on the pulse of the maneuvers. It also meant that in the overall corps rolling attack, some units would be stopped while others were moving. We would have to rely on the boundaries on our maps, GPS, and LORAN to keep our units from running into one another.
Where we did have additional room was in depth. That is why the problems of coordinating our deep attacks with CENTAF were so frustrating. Given control of all the air attacks in our sector from Smash to the Gulf, we could have created a 150-kilometer-deep death zone.
At 0800, I called John Yeosock to give him a report on the progress of our maneuver, and to tell him that I expected the corps to be in contact with the Tawalkana that morning and that I would pass the 1st INF through the 2nd ACR to continue the attack later that day.
After I'd delivered the basic facts, I continued to voice my frustration at the apparent lack of a common picture of the battlefield between Riyadh and the field.
He himself understood what we were trying to do, John explained. As far as he was concerned, we were right where he expected us to be, and in the right posture. However, the CINC had gotten heated up again that morning about the pace of our attack.
When I heard that, my frustration leapt into high gear. I was genuinely frustrated about the command mood swings in Riyadh, and I once again wondered what the hell they knew about what was happening. And the question again entered my mind: What were they doing there about isolating the battlefield? But I did not talk to John about that.
Then, to top it off, John wanted me to order the British to attack south, in order to clear the Wadi al Batin area from the Saudi border north into Kuwait.
I didn't like that idea at all, and I said so strongly. We had come out west so that we could avoid all the mines and obstacles the Iraqis had put up the Wadi. Why in the hell would we go in there now? When John insisted, I asked if I could give the order but not execute it, and then look again later that night, and he okayed that. (After the war I discovered that he was thinking that a British attack south would open a lane for 1st CAV to attack north past the British. That way 1st CAV could still get into the fight in time. It would also ease the logistics flow north in case the war went on around Basra for some time. It was a logical thought.)
