As he came upon the man, the unmistakable sign of a landmine was apparent even in the greenish twilight world of night vision. The soldier had stepped on a mine and his right foot was blown off. The solder was still breathing but made no sounds. The commander kneeled at his side, quickly removing the man’s fabric waist belt and placing it around his right calf, tightening it up as tight as it would go. The commander checked his soldier’s pulse. It was weak.
“Uzi, can you hear me?” No response. The soldier was going into shock. The commander raised up the man’s legs and maneuvered his own knee underneath the man’s thighs to support them, trying to keep blood from leaving the soldier’s vital organs. The commander looked at the stump. With his night vision goggles it was difficult to draw conclusions, but the commander correctly guessed that the shredded ankle was not bleeding heavily. The explosion had apparently cauterized the open blood vessels.
The mouth of the soldier named Uzi suddenly opened involuntarily and the muscles of his body went limp. The commander realized that the man was not breathing. He removed his leg from the support position and straddled Uzi’s body. He spent the next two minutes compressing his soldier’s chest at a rate of 100 beats per minute. He stopped to check Uzi’s pulse. Nothing. His soldier was gone. What the commander would not realize until the sun rose the next morning was that a piece of shrapnel from a Soviet-built mine that had been buried in the sand for over a quarter century had severed the femoral artery in Uzi’s left leg. The soldier had bled to death — the first combat casualty of the IDF during Project Block G.
Fourteen minutes later, the commander had dragged the body to the edge of the runway and removed his pack and M-4 carbine, giving each to the man standing watch. The commander then sent that man back to tell the cart driver to come over with the cart. The corpse was loaded on, now just another source of dead weight. The team headed to the same hardened aircraft shelter that the American unit had spent the night in two years earlier.
Among the items that had been unloaded from the battery-powered cart were two communication devices and a few body bags. The mission planners had planned for the loss of half the team and assumed that if more than half were killed, the entire team would be lost. What was not available to the team was any mine detection or clearing equipment. There was not supposed to be any landmines around this abandoned base and the contingency had not been planned for. Now within the relative protection of the hardened aircraft shelter, the commander operated one of the communication sets as two of his men placed the body of their friend into a bag that was then zippered shut.
The commander typed the following into the device’s keyboard:
Oscar Sierra. Equipment intact and operable. One KIA, UH — landmine. Send mine equipment. Shangri-La.
The simple code words at the start told Mount Olympus that the objective, Mudaysis Airfield, was secure. The third sentence informed them that Uzi Helzberg had been killed in action. The sign off was the codename given by the Olympus planners to this small patch of earth in the Iraqi desert that would play such a critical role in deciding whether or not Block G succeeded. The name had been christened by General Schechter, a World War II history buff who recalled that Franklin Roosevelt, when asked by reporters where the B-25 bombers that bombed Japan during the famous Doolittle Raid in April 1942 had come from, had simply replied “Shangri-La.”
The communications device encrypted the message in a series of random digits and then waited to receive a signal from a passing satellite. With the satellite in line of sight, the device sent a burst signal that lasted less than one second. The message was decoded and read at Mount Olympus within two minutes.
The commander turned to the man who had been driving the cart. “We only have one thing to accomplish tonight, let’s get to it. Uzi’s gone. Let’s make sure his death is for a reason.” The driver was Uzi’s close friend, the two having shared a bond built on common interests, complementary personalities and the shared hardships of life in a special operations unit. He was shaken but there was no time to mourn his friend — that would have to wait.
The soldier went to the cart and finished unloading the rest of the cargo, which included ammunition, food, tools, a range of push brooms, navigation lights, small flood lights, a small weather machine, four Shipon anti-tank missiles and a large rotating brush cylinder. He grabbed hold of the cylindrical brush, which was an attachment for the front of the cart. Kneeling down in front of the cart, he inserted two arms that extended from each side of the brush into sockets built into the cart. As soon as he was done, he hopped into the driver’s seat. The commander grabbed his arm and offered unnecessary advice. “Stay only on the paved surfaces.”
The driver headed off into the night. His job was to use the brush, which now was rotating along the ground as the cart moved, to sweep off the entire runway, taxiway and tarmac before morning light. The cart contained several extra batteries in series that provided enough power to keep it going for the next 12 hours. If necessary, they could retrieve the other cart in the second pallet left in the desert, an option that the commander was now hoping would not be necessary.
The commander grabbed two Shipon missile tubes and headed out to visit the two soldiers guarding the only road onto the airfield.
42 — The Road to Dehloran
The Iranian town of Derrah Shahr lies in middle of a high valley of the first range of the Zagros mountains, known as the Folded Zagros. Along the long valley, which runs northwest to southeast parallel between the Folded Zagros and the High Zagros mountain ranges, the high waters of the Karkheh River wind their way gracefully to the southeast. With a population of just over 60,000, the town itself is not on anyone’s must-see list of destinations, but adjacent to the town are the ruins of the ancient city of Takht-e-Tavoos, dating from 5 century BC and the Archaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great. The ruins attract Iranian and foreign tourists — those with either an adventurous side or a high level of interest in archaeology.
But it’s the unrelenting beauty of the Zagros mountain scenery that surrounds Derrah Shahr that has been a source of inspiration for Persians for centuries. Most people arrive into town using the well maintained valley road that runs north from Dezful, about an 80 mile drive away. Still others, as did Hamak Arsadian, come down from the north, along the Derrah Shahr road from the provincial capital city of Ilam.
The town of Derrah Shahr is arranged perpendicular to the main valley road, along a road that runs southwest through town and then into and over the Folded Zagros mountain chain forming the southwestern flank of the high valley. A traveler on this road will eventually be delivered into the town of Abdanan at the foot of the Folded Zagros. Along this route, only two and half miles outside of Derrah Shahr, lies a local tourist attraction, the fountains and modern bathhouse of the Sarab-e Derrah Shahr. The five acre site draws Iranians from near and far for a relaxing break among its well manicured grounds in the clean mountain air.