equipment. Dust ingestion in the engines, turning oil and grease into a paste that acted like sandpaper rather than as lubricants, caused a steady stream of maintenance failures. The army's line of march was marked by abandoned equipment that had broken down and had not yet been recovered. Even equipment that managed to stay with the advancing columns suffered from malfunctions to fire-control systems, electrical components and weapons. Heat and the steady vibration of tracks on poor roads was especially hard on sophisticated fire-control computers on tanks.
Major Vorishnov watched the unending columns of combat vehicles, artillery and trucks roll by. Behind him his battalion sat in a loose laager, refueling and resting after another all-night move. Eighteen tanks of the original thirty-one remained with the battalion on this morning. Of the thirteen missing, only two had been combat losses. The rest had broken down and been left behind. Vorishnov would never see them again.
Tanks lost by the battalion due to combat or a maintenance failure were not returned to the same battalion. Instead, those vehicles that had fallen out of the line of march were picked up by maintenance teams following the army. These teams repaired them and formed reserve units with them. The reserve units were manned by using the crews of the tanks that had fallen out due to maintenance failure, survivors of tanks hit in combat and wounded men returning from the hospital. Units in the vanguard of the army would get the replacements needed to bring them back up to full strength by receiving entire companies or, in the case of a regiment, a battalion from the reserve unit. If a unit was too badly depleted, it would be amalgamated with other depleted units to form a complete one. Officers from the staff-officer reserve would be used to provide leadership in the amalgamated units.
In the Soviet Army, units are used until they are no longer capable of performing their mission. In the West, 146 a unit is considered to begin to become combat ineffective when it drops below 70 percent of its authorized strength. The Soviets are more sanguine, using units until they are anywhere from 60 to 40 percent strength. When that happens, the next unit behind is passed forward to continue the mission.
The spent unit loses priority on everything and is pulled out of the way and sent to the rear or, in the case of a rapid advance, left in place until the army's combat service support, or logistic, units can move forward. The spent unit is then resupplied with all classes of supply, vehicles are repaired and losses in both equipment and men made good from reserve units.
This effort is referred to as reconstitution. If several units are equally depleted, they will be amalgamated. When ready, the reconstituted unit is placed back on the line of advance and awaits its turn to be passed forward into combat.
In theory such a system is easy and manageable. Its practice, however, was proving to be quite difficult, especially in Iran. The major problem facing the 28th CAA was the lack of roads. This limited the amount of traffic that could go forward or to the rear. The army ran the road like a railroad, directing who could be on it and establishing priorities. The highest priority went to combat units in the vanguard and those units required to support them, such as artillery, air-defense and chemical warfare units.
Next came fuel and ammunition resupply convoys tailored to keep the vanguard units moving. Behind them came the army's main body, support units to keep critical equipment in operation and, again, supply convoys. All this was one-way traffic, with only the empty supply trucks being allowed to return.
Vorishnov was not happy with the decision to pull the 68th Tank Regiment out of the lead. He had become used to setting the pace and pushing forward, always up front. He did not relish giving up the position of honor and falling into the line of march behind the motorized rifle division, as they had done during the first days of the war. Vorishnov, however, understood the rationale for the decision.
Soon the 28th Combined Arms Army would make contact with the Americans who were preparing to bar the army's route to the Strait of Hormuz. In accordance with Soviet doctrine, it was the role of the motorized infantry to make the breakthrough attack and prepare the way for the tank units. The tank units, suffering heavily due to maintenance failures, needed time to recover and reconstitute themselves. They had to be ready to exploit the success of the motorized rifle units.
Turning his back to the unending traffic on the road, Vorishnov surveyed his battalion. As he did so, he threw his arms above his head and stretched his body. He was sore from traveling many miles in the cramped confines of an armored personnel carrier. The wire seats covered with thin canvas did little to cushion the body from repeated blows and jerks when the vehicle moved down a road that was nothing more than a collection of potholes. As he took stock of his aches and pains, Vorishnov thought that a little rest and a couple of days off the road might not be bad after all.
Under the watchful eye of their platoon sergeant, the men of the 1st Platoon, B Company, 3rd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, went about their task of laying antitank mines in front of their positions.
Normally, if the mines were simply laid on the surface and not covered, this wasn't a particularly difficult task. Their platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Duncan, insisted, however, that the mines be dug in and buried. The rocky ground made a simple job a real pain.
The platoon worked in teams. Two men, working with one of the squad leaders, went about marking the locations where the mines would be placed.
The squad leader, using a compass, would establish a direction for one of the men to move in. Carefully stepping off from where the squad leader was located, the man would count his steps until he had moved a predetermined distance. Once there, he would stand still until the squad leader came up to him. Marking that point, the squad leader would set three stakes two meters out from where the pace man stood.
The stakes marked where the mine layers would place mines. The third man was the recorder, carefully making up a sketch map of the mine field so that they could recover the mines at some future date or, if the company was relieved by another, so that the new unit would know where the mines were.
Behind the people marking the locations of the mines came the diggers.
At each site where there was a stake they would scrape out a hole just wide and deep enough to accommodate an M-21 antitank mine. An assistant squad leader was in charge of this crew and had the responsibility of ensuring that the holes dug were neither too deep nor too shallow.
While scraping holes in the rocky soil was hard, the task of the mine layers was nothing more than mindless hauling of the heavy mines from where the helicopter had dropped them to where the holes were dug. The mines had to be uncrated and taken out of the protective packaging. Two men did this while the rest carried the mines to where their squad leader directed them.
Most men carried only two mines per trip. For this task Duncan used an entire squad. Today he used the squad that was on his shit list.
The final and potentially most dangerous task was performed by an NCO and one other man. They armed the mines and covered them. The M-21 mine can be detonated either by a pressure fuse, which drives a striker into a detonator when the proper amount of pressure is applied, or by a tilt rod, which releases the detonator when tilted at a certain angle.
Duncan directed his people to use the tilt rod, which stood higher than the center clearance of most vehicles' hulls and thus could activate a mine when a vehicle passed over it, even if the vehicle's tracks did not run over the mine; upon detonation, a metal penetrator would be driven up into the vehicle or would at least sever the track if the track ran over the mine.
As the two men armed the mines, they would randomly booby-trap one by putting a hand grenade under it in such a way that the grenade would be detonated if someone tried to lift out the mine. This was done to discourage the enemy from creeping into a mine field at night and removing the mines in order to clear a lane for attacking forces or use them later against their former owner. ' The third squad of the platoon stayed in their positions and over watched the work party in the mine field. These men provided security. The Russians were still many miles away, but the Iranians were always near at hand, willing to snipe at Americans or seize a lone and unwary soldier and butcher him at their leisure. A man in C Company who had wandered off to relieve himself had been captured by the Iranians and brutally tortured before being killed and dismembered.
As Duncan watched his men, he thought about the situation they were in.
They were preparing defensive positions from which they were expected to fight Russian mechanized forces. This in itself was a formidable task for a light-infantry unit deployed in the farthest forward location occupied by U.S. forces; the failure of the Iranians to cease hostilities made the battalion's position even worse. Only one truck convoy had been able to make it forward to them overland. A second had been ambushed by the
