“Men, this is not a drill. When daylight comes, we will attack across the Syrian border with the objective of taking Damascus before sunset tomorrow.”
“We’re at war with Syria?” someone asked.
“As of this morning, we will be. We will be following sixteen tanks that come through this sector. They will arrive here at three A.M., be briefed, and strung out in their battle formation. When the time comes to advance, we’ll be going behind the tanks as far as we can keep up with them.
“After that, we’ll mop up any of the enemy left over. We expect little resistance for the first fifty miles. Other troops will be in vehicles and will follow the tanks closely, dropping off strike teams to take care of civilians or dig out scattered groups of Syrian border guard troops that may be in the area. We expect few.
“The only way we’ll get to Damascus is to walk. We may be moved along faster by special trucks if the situation warrants it. Since we’ll be in the rear areas most of the time, we should have few if any casualties. That’s a lot better than a direct attack with a frontal assault along the way on some hard point. Questions?”
“What about our kitchen?”
“It will be on its usual truck, along with supply, your second packs, and two officer jeeps. We’ll get hot meals when we can and sack lunches when we can’t. We may not eat much the first day. It all depends on how fast the tanks and their mobile troops can slash forward.
“We’ll have all troops awake and ready to march at 0430. It should be light somewhere around a half hour later. We’ll follow the tanks. If they move out early, we go right behind them. Don’t spread out too far, and keep contact. We don’t want any sprinters a mile ahead of the rest of the company. Is that clear?”
“Sir, won’t we lose the tanks in the first ten minutes? They can do thirty miles an hour.”
“True, but with them out front, leading the way, we should find little resistance as we move ahead. If they get too far ahead, they’ll be ordered to stop, or the regiment will move us up with trucks. That’s all. Get some sleep if you can. Hard telling when we’ll be able to sleep again.”
Another sergeant walking back to his squad with Hillah shook his head at the idea. “If they want a mechanized attack, they should give us trucks, all of us infantry, so we could keep up. After the first hour, we won’t even hear those tanks they’ll be so far ahead. Nothing out here to stop them. I heard the air force talking on a radio. They said there aren’t any troops of more than squad size anywhere along this area until you get twenty miles into Syria.”
When he arrived at the spot where his squad was, Sergeant Hillah sat down near them, but he couldn’t sleep. War! He had known it was possible, but things seemed so settled down. Now he was looking at shooting and killing and getting wounded or killed. All he could think about then was his bride back in Al-Amirah in southern Iraq. He might never see his new baby be born. He refused to think about that. He had a war to fight, so he would fight.
When 0430 came, Sergeant Hillah had his eight men ready. All had their equipment checked, their rifles readied. Each weapon was locked and loaded, and they were in their combat order with Sergeant Hillah out in front.
An hour before, Hillah had watched the tanks come through the infantry. A tanker had walked in front of each of the lumbering, metal monsters, moving infantrymen out of the way so nobody got crushed under the treads.
Now, the tanks sat less than fifty yards from the border and the troops gathered behind each one and spread to both sides. The sixteen tanks were fifty yards apart, covering eight hundred yards along the border. That was about the distance the First Battalion spread out.
Sergeant Hillah looked at the lighted face of his wristwatch. It had been a present from his wife. At 0445 he already he could see streaks of light in the east. Would they wait until 0500 or go when it was light enough? He’d soon know.
Ten minutes later he heard the big diesel engines in the tanks turn over and then growl and purr as they warmed up.
Precisely at 0500, the tankers moved out in a line at a walking pace. The infantry came up and ran after them. Hillah’s squad was to the right side of the fourth tank in the line. It had a large 34 painted on the back. He would remember it.
The tanks picked up speed, and by the time they reached what Hillah figured must be the border, they were moving at least twenty miles an hour. Then they went faster. The troops fell behind and settled down to a slogging march forward. Each squad had a section of the desert to cover. Now their line became straighter as they connected with the next squad and moved out with five yards between men.
So far, they had not heard nor seen a shot fired. The tanks rolled forward, kicking up a dust trail across the windless desert. Soon a freshening morning breeze sent the dust cloud chasing the tanks and leaving the men cleaner air to breathe.
Sergeant Hillah bellowed at his men to keep the line straight, to watch ahead. They were not in the tank’s tracks, and there could be mines laid along here anywhere. That made the men slow just a little and watch where they walked.
A half hour after the thrust began, the infantry, slogging along behind the tanks, heard the first shots of the war. Two tanks blasted with their cannon, and the sound came rushing back toward the infantry.
“Now the war has really started,” Sergeant Hillah shouted. “Look alive now, there could be some Syrians lurking around here soon.”
The flight of twelve Iraqi MiG Flogger-Ds had come out of the Syrian desert just before dawn barely a hundred feet off the sand. They slanted up enough to miss the built-up area as they thundered over the forty miles of heavily populated territory between the desert and the capital. Then they curved slightly north of Damascus and zeroed in on one of the three main Syrian military airfields.
It was just getting light when Captain Muhammad Dasht angled his Flogger-D at the parking area where he saw the lineup of twenty of Syria’s best jet fighters. He smiled as he readied his napalm bombs and his total of eight thousand pounds of more napalm and cluster bombs. He dropped four napalm bombs on the first run. On both sides of him, his wingmen did the same, saturating the whole parking strip with the blistering hot flames of the jellied gasoline.
After the first pass, he looked back and could see half the jets burning. Explosions rocked the field as one fuel tank after another on the Syrian jets blew up, scattering more flaming fuel into other jets.
Antlike creatures on the ground scurried from one to another of the jets not yet burning, trying desperately to get them into the air.
They didn’t have time.
The second pass of the twelve jets lathered the remaining fighters with more napalm and cluster bombs; then they turned to the hangars and support shops, tearing them apart with their bombs and napalm.
All too quickly, Captain Dasht realized that his plate was empty; he had nothing left but his 23mm two-barrel cannon. He made two strafing runs on more buildings and vehicles, expending his 200 rounds quickly. Then he kicked the big fighter into a climb and searched with his radar for enemy aircraft. He did slow circles but found nothing on his radar.
“Let’s go home,” he radioed the rest of his flight. They emptied their guns and lifted upward, where they would have better fuel economy and speed, and raced across Syria into the desert and then on home to their base near Baghdad. They did not lose a single plane. None of the twelve had even been fired at by enemy aircraft or from the ground. The Syrian ground defense did not seem to be working, or the strike was such a surprise that no one was on duty to man the antiair defense.