Hewett's platoon was the rear guard.
Their mission was to keep an eye on the back door, just in case it was the Russians who got the upper hand.
With the booming voice that many had likened to that of a beached whale, Hewett's platoon sergeant called in the men on outpost duty. There was no need for whispers here. If there had been Russians around, they would have announced their presence a long time before. Rising from his shallow pit, Hewett picked up his Dragon missile launcher. It was still warm from the sun. A cool breeze hit Hewett as he stood and stretched. It felt good until he remembered that the temperature that night would never get as low as the highest temperature he had ever experienced back home in Vermont. He had joined the Marines to see the world. Looking around at the barren wasteland, he decided that if the rest of the world looked half as bad as
Iran, Vermont was all he would ever need for the rest of his life.
In the darkness the recon elements of the two antagonists passed by each other unseen. Had they found each other, the fight would have been a reasonably even match. Instead, the recon vehicles continued to grope about in the night, each rolling forward into a head-on collision with their enemy's main body.
A flash and the explosion of a vehicle hit in the distance signaled the first contact. Kurpov turned in the open hatch and faced west. He could see a red glow in the sky, a beacon marking the spot where an armored vehicle had died. But whose? Kurpov stretched himself until he was standing on his toes in an effort to see what was happening to the west. The crack of the radio and the frantic report by the other recon-platoon leader provided the answers he sought. Tanks! The other platoon had run into a pair of American tanks moving north. Two more flashes lit up the west. Each was followed by an explosion. The sudden termination of the other platoon leader's radio transmission in mid-sentence told Kurpov that his friend Sasha was dead.
While the rifle-battalion commander, leading the main body still fifteen kilometers behind, attempted to raise Sasha on the radio, Kurpov ordered his platoon to seek covered positions from which they could observe their assigned sectors. When the vehicle commanders had acknowledged his order, he directed his own driver into a position between two rocks from where he could see out to his front as well as the general location of his other two vehicles. The battalion commander, having failed to raise the platoon that had made contact with the enemy, called Kurpov for a report. Kurpov's platoon was not actually in contact: What he told the battalion commander was exactly what he had seen, his current location and his intent.
The commander of the Soviet motorized rifle battalion thought about the situation for a moment. He estimated that he had at least five minutes to digest the scant information he had, devise a plan and issue necessary orders. He assumed that the recon platoons had stumbled upon the enemy recon forces. He did not know that the enemy recon, two U.S. Marine LAV-25s, had passed by his own recon and were now sitting undetected in a wadi at a range of twelve hundred meters, watching his column move south and reporting to their commander. A series of muzzle flashes and the exploding of a BMP in the middle of the main body quickly destroyed the Soviet commander's initial estimate of the situation. In an instant the sky was lit up with tracers as the other Soviet vehicles in the company that had lost the BMP returned fire in the direction from which the attacker had struck. The battalion commander directed his BMP into a shallow defilade and watched for a moment. The hail of Soviet fire continued without any indication that it was hitting anything. Nor could he see any further firing directed toward the column. The enemy had taken a potshot at his battalion in order to make them react. No doubt the enemy was part of a recon force that was probably reporting what it saw even as it was withdrawing.
The battalion commander ordered all units to cease fire and report.
Though the firing stopped, the images of tracers and muzzle flashes were burned into the battalion commander's eyes. As he waited for his company commanders to respond, he rubbed his eyes in an effort to eradicate the spots.
The pressing seemed only to make the images more intense. Slowly the reports came in. He listened impassively as his commanders gave their inflated reports of kills. Each report fueled the battalion commander's anger. When all units had reported in, he yelled into his handset, demanding that they give him accurate reports, challenging anyone to bring him the head of a dead marine. He didn't really expect his commanders to do so, and they knew it. They also knew what he meant.
As his commanders sorted out their situation, he reevaluated his. The enemy now knew where his main body was. Through deductive reasoning based on the scant information he had, the battalion commander was able to put together a mental image of the battlefield and the relative locations of his forces and the enemy. The enemy had hit the recon platoon deployed in the west.
Immediately after that, his main body had been hit by a recon element firing on his battalion from the west. That meant that the enemy force was to his west. Dropping down into the BMP and turning on a small red-filtered light, he 294 looked at his map, quickly drew two simple symbols to show where the enemy was, then looked at the terrain for a moment. He realized what had happened. By sheer chance the two antagonists had brushed shoulders as they moved about in the dark.
Satisfied that his grasp of the tactical situation was correct, the battalion commander began to issue his orders. Like clockwork, the battalion began to reconfigure itself from a column to an attack formation.
Kurpov sat and listened to the reports and the battalion commander's tongue-lashing. The BRDM driver chuckled. "We would not be as lucky if we gave such bad reports."
The comment broke the tension. Kurpov smiled. "Ivan, I consider us lucky any time we stumble into a fight and are able to report."
The crew of the BRDM laughed. For the moment, the nervous stress, the fear and the dread of what would happen next were forgotten. But the war was still out there. The sound of ammunition cooking off in the burning vehicles was muffled by distance, the armor of the BRDM and the crewmen's helmets. Kurpov stood up in his hatch. Slowly he turned, studying the terrain and the immediate area. Nothing; there was nothing to be seen other than his other BRDM and the BMP. To the west and the north the sky glowed faintly red, marking where men had died.
They were of no concern to Kurpov.
It was the ones who were alive that he was interested in. He knew that at that very moment hundreds of men, manning the most sophisticated combat vehicles in the world, were out there, creeping about, intent on finding one another and killing.
The LTVP-7 came to a jolting halt. The ramp hadn't even hit the ground when the squad leader was up and yelling, "Let's go, Marines, Deploy and hit it!" The LTVP-7 was empty in seconds. Each man rushed out and ran to either the left of the track or the right. As they ran forward the Marines spread out until the squad was in a rough line deployed to either side of the track. As soon as Hewett came around the side of the vehicle and began to run to the front, he searched the darkness for a position. The LTVP was in some kind of shallow ditch. Its prow was up against the side of the ditch, splitting the squad up. Hewett saw a good position that appeared to offer the best protection and headed for it. His assistant gunner followed, carrying a spare Dragon missile. The bulky tub, and the personnel weapons and other assorted equipment hanging on each of them, made running awkward but not impossible. With enough adrenaline, just about anything was possible.
Once in position, Hewett slowly popped his head up and surveyed the lay of the land, checking to see whether he had a good field of fire. The ditch they were in ran along the crest of a small rise. It was almost like a custom-made trench. The ground to his front had a gentle downward slope. From where he was, he had a clear field of fire for better than one thousand meters, more than enough for his Dragon.