drop a grenade in the turret. He was blown off the tank as the tank exploded (he survived). He also led a four-man team to go after an Iraqi RPG team that was threatening the fuel trucks following the attack. Later, Brown's gunner, Staff Sergeant Matthew Sheets, spotted Iraqi RPG teams getting in position to shoot into the rear of advancing 2/66 tanks. 'I'm convinced that Sheets saved six tanks,' Brown says, 'since he killed six Iraqi RPG teams.'
In another part of the battle, Captain Lee Wilson was commanding Company B, 1/41 Infantry. While his company was moving to link up with a forward unit, the company, and Wilson's own Bradley, came under intense Iraqi RPG and machine-gun fire. U.S. tanks, seeing the battle behind them, fired into the formation. (Through a night sight, remember, RPGs hitting a friendly vehicle look almost like an enemy vehicle firing at you.) Wilson's Bradley was hit, and he was thrown from the Bradley (he survived). Sergeant Joe Dienstag, the Bradley gunner, who was seated next to Wilson in the turret, was untouched. Private First Class Dennis Skaggs, the driver, whose hands were too numb from the blast to operate the controls that let the ramp down in the back so that the troops could get out, grabbed a sledgehammer and got the ramp open. The troops poured out as the back of the Bradley filled with smoke. Skaggs, a combat lifesaver,[49] and Dienstag pulled out wounded soldiers, and Skaggs immediately began intravenous fluids and pressure bandages. ('This kid was phenomenal,' Wilson later said of Skaggs.) The battle continued, with Iraqi small-arms fire all around. Burning vehicles were visible, and you could hear tank and Bradley cannon fire.
For the 3rd Brigade, it was a swirling fight with Iraqi tank and infantry forces that night.
One U.S. Bradley platoon had four soldiers KIA and eighteen wounded. For the entire division, there were six U.S. soldiers KIA that night, and thirty wounded, for VII Corps the largest concentration of casualties in the shortest time in the war.
I constantly bristle at misrepresentations that all the fighting was done at 2,500 meters, or that it looked like the pictures on TV of laser-guided bombs hitting targets from the air. The ground combat was physically tough, often at night or in weather affecting visibility, and at distances measured in a few meters rather than kilometers.
Perhaps, Sfc Jim Sedgwick, a platoon sergeant in 1/41 Infantry, said it best: 'We almost lost a platoon, and out of a company element, that's an awful lot of people… Friendly fire, unfriendly, that's not the point. What they did that night was, they took care of their people. They did the best they could in an extraordinary situation. They had a lot of genuine heroes that night. A lot of them.'
Sedgwick was a Vietnam veteran.
The attack to seize Objective Norfolk broke the back of the Iraqi defense. More than 300 Iraqi vehicles were destroyed. But it came at a price in dead and wounded. It was a risk. You ask a lot of your soldiers and leaders.
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hillman said it right: 'There was a composure and discipline that reflect a quality of soldier… far more than we had a right to expect.'
That night is why I always tell people, 'It was fast, but it was not easy. Do not equate swiftness with ease.' That night, those soldiers wrote new pages in the history of night mounted combat.
3RD AD. By this time, the division had come on line abreast with, first, the 2nd ACR, and then the 1st INF to their south and the 1st AD to their north. I was glad to have the disciplined, well-drilled, and relentless armored force that was the 3rd AD in the middle of the VII Corps attack. You want a steady outfit in the middle. They would keep the flank contact left and right with 1st AD and 1st INF (to keep the corps attack relatively aligned and to prevent shooting across flanks), and they would cut a swath of destruction through the Iraqi RGFC middle.
Since the sector I had given Butch Funk was too narrow to put three brigades on line, Butch had been using two brigades forward (his 1st and 2nd) and one back. By now he had decided to pass his third brigade through his second and leave his first brigade in the south, next to the 1st INF.
Third AD's battle log was full of reports of actions across their front, highlighted late the afternoon before, around 1600, with what they would call the Battle of Phase Line Bullet.
They had been on the move since early the morning before, 26 February, and had been in enemy contact for about twelve straight hours. That morning, they had been my freshest division, but no more. I needed them to sustain the center of our attack east toward Highway 8. The more success they had, the more the Iraqis on either flank would feel threatened.
Late the day before, Funk's two brigades on line were attacking into the center of the Tawalkana's forming defenses. His second brigade, commanded by Colonel Bob Higgins, was in the north, and his first brigade, commanded by Colonel Bill Nash, was in the south, linked with the advancing 2nd ACR.
Nash's three battalions on line had hit the Iraqi security zone at 1630 that afternoon — a twelve-kilometer advancing line of steel. There were many targets, some close, some distant.
First Lieutenant Marty Leners, 1st Platoon leader, Company C, 3/5 Cavalry was the first tank in the 3rd AD to kill a T-72. But for Leners and his gunner, Sergeant Glenn Wilson, it was a tense engagement. Rain and blowing sand made it difficult to use the laser range finder on their M1A1. That meant they had to use battle-sight range (an automatic setting using average expected range) or estimate the range and manually input it into the tank computer. That all takes time. Their problem was that the T-72 saw them and was traversing its turret in their direction, ready to fire. Wilson got a round off, using battle-sight range. It fell short of the T-72. Leners quickly input additional range and Wilson fired a second round, beating the Iraqi tank to the draw and killing it.
Over in Lieutenant Colonel John Kalb's 4/32 Armor, the fighting was at closer quarters. T-72s were closer than 1,000 meters, with Iraqi infantry on board and in bunkers. In a running fight with a T-72 and Iraqi infantry after darkness on 26 February, Kalb's scouts in Bradleys had destroyed the tank and Iraqi infantry, but had lost two soldiers KIA and a Bradley to a fratricide. Early on the morning of the twenty-seventh, Kalb's tank task force had intercepted an Iraqi unit attempting a counterattack, and in less than a minute had destroyed 15 T-72s and 25 other armored vehicles with the massed tank fires of his 43 M1A1s.
To their north, the 2nd Brigade's fights went on all night. Lieutenant Colonel Beaufort 'Chuck' Hallman's 4/8 Cavalry, an M1A1 task force, attacked into the heart of the Iraqi defense, which now appeared to be in some depth; and received return fire from the Iraqis' small arms, RPGs, and artillery, in addition to tank and BMP 73-mm fire. Their attack went on for the better part of four hours against a dug-in Iraqi tank/infantry position supported by artillery. Iraqi infantry were in bunkers, and Iraqi tanks and BMPs attempted to use destroyed vehicles as shields. Hallman's tankers relentlessly pressed the attack. By about 0400, the brigade, together with TF 4/18 Infantry, had broken the back of the Iraqi defense, and Funk was preparing to pass Colonel Rob Goff's 3rd Brigade through them to continue the attack.
Artillery supported them all the way. In his notes, Colonel Morrie Boyd of the 42nd Artillery Brigade, supporting Colonel John Michitsch's 3rd AD artillery, writes that the forty-eight 155-mm howitzers of the 3/20 and 2/29 Field Artillery Battalions fired continuously throughout the night, while the eighteen MLRS launchers of 1/27 provided rocket fires against the Iraqi formations. The Iraqis came to refer to these devastating barrages as 'iron rain.' During the eighty-nine hours of the war, the 42nd Brigade would fire 2,854 155-mm rounds and 555 MLRS rockets in 121 different missions.
By now, Butch Funk was employing his aviation and MLRS deep. With M1A1 tank and Bradley battalions close in, these together made about a twenty- to thirty-kilometer death zone moving east in front of the division. His aviation brigade, commanded by Colonel Mike Burke, had the night before (about 2300) defeated an attempted Iraqi move to get a battalion in between 3rd AD and 1st AD to the north. From five kilometers away, Funk was able to see his Apache battalion engage the Iraqi unit, and in the space of three minutes destroy eight T-72s and nineteen BMPs.
I was glad to hear he had put in a fresh brigade, as that would help sustain the momentum, and I had no other forces to give him except aviation.
Since Butch had used his sole Apache battalion that night and it would be unavailable for part of today, I ordered that 2/6 (commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Terry Branham, an AH-64 battalion from 11th Aviation Brigade) go today to reinforce the 3rd AD (this was non-doctrinal: corps Apaches normally worked deep in the corps sector at night, while division Apaches worked the closer-in fight). I figured Butch needed the combat power to speed his attack east at a high tempo more than I would need it that night in a corps deep attack.
I did not believe the Iraqis expected three armored divisions to hit them at night on line. I wanted to pour it on with everything we had. Time was not only running out in the war, it was running out for some of our units who
