Sword Point (16 page)

Although resistance was expected to be very light, the division commander was going to ensure that everything would be done to keep up momentum while minimizing losses. He had the firepower available and would use it whenever possible.

The Iranians on the ground, on the other hand, did not have the firepower they needed to combat the Great Satan on equal terms. All they could do was lie low in their foxholes and bunkers and wait until the enemy had landed.

Once the enemy was on the ground, the Iranians could employ their advantages-superiority in numbers and a belief in their cause that bordered on fanaticism. While the balance sheet showed that they were losing everywhere, it also showed that neither the United States nor the Soviets were winning. The leaders of Iran knew that they could not win a war against both, or even one, of their opponents. What they could do, however, was keep both of their enemies from winning. In a no-win situation, Iran would come out ahead.

The commander of the local militia, Major Hasan Rahimi, was a veteran of many desperate fights. He had been a battalion commander, in the war against Iraq before he lost his right eye. No longer fit for front-line duty, he had been assigned to command regional militia forces and a small training center near Tarom. His hopes of serving his country and Allah as a fighter had almost died. Now, with the Great Satan striking north, he again had the chance to lead men in battle.

Rahimi had been ordered to hold the crossroads at Tarom. To do so, he had fewer than three hundred men and only a couple of mortars. More men could have been fielded, but there were no weapons for them. Other militia units would eventually arrive, but until then he and his men would have to hold.

The Americans, using helicopters to strike deep and almost without warning, made it difficult for Rahimi to decide where to concentrate his forces. After studying the area, he established dug-in positions at the most likely landing zones, with alternate positions covering the road leading up from Bandar Abbas, in case there was a ground attack.

His plan of battle was simple. Holding half of his force as a mobile reserve, he dispersed the rest to the dug-in positions. The men occupying those positions would hit the transport helicopters as they were about to land. That would be when the Americans were most vulnerable, with the landing transport helicopters blocking the supporting fire of the attack helicopters. Rahimi, leading the mobile reserve, would lead a counterattack as quickly as possible against those Americans who were able to land. He could not allow the Americans to become established. Once they were, they would be able to bring all their awesome firepower to bear, firepower Rahimi could never hope to match.

Even though Lieutenant Cerro preferred air assault operations to jumping, they, like all military operations, were not without their hazards. As with the combat jump, the soldiers are useless as long as they are in the helicopters. Helicopters are able to fly low and maneuver about, using terrain to hide and cover their move. Transport planes, on the other hand, fly high and in relatively straight lines, making their routes predictable.

Flying low, however, exposes the helicopters to small-arms fire that transports need not worry about. Anyone on the ground with a rifle can, and usually does, take potshots at low-flying helicopters.

Air assault operations share the same hazards as airdrops during the initial buildup stage. The small force in the airhead is exposed to counterattack and does not have all its support on the ground such as artillery and heavy mortars. These items, which are normally part of the follow-on forces, all must come in by air, just as the initial assault force did. Only, the follow-on forces do not have the element of surprise to protect them. The enemy on the ground knows exactly where the airhead is and, as a result, knows where the follow-on forces will come. This allows the enemy the ability to mass antiaircraft weapons around the landing zones or along the routes leading into the landing zone. Often, it is better to be with the initial force going in than with the follow-on force. Besides the antiaircraft weapons, artillery and mortars massed to fire on the small, well-defined airhead are a great danger to the follow-on forces while the helicopters are on the ground disgorging their cargoes.

The assault force that Cerro was with waited until the last minute before making its final approach, in order to keep the Iranians guessing as to where the landing zone would be. When the Blackhawks were less than a kilometer away from the landing zone, they made a sharp turn to the left and began their descent. The A-10s were gone by this time, but the Apaches were coming in on either side of the assault force, ready to hit any target that appeared. Cerro, looking out the open cargo door, could clearly see dug-in

Iranian positions as the Blackhawks made their approach. There was, however, little ground fire. The A- 10s must have done their job well,

Cerro thought-they had either killed the defenders or caused them to reconsider the value of martyrdom.

Suddenly all that changed. At one side of the landing zone Iranians popped up out of hidden positions. The door gunner seated in front of Cerro began to fire wildly. An Apache flew by, firing rockets at positions out of Cerro’s field of vision. Tracers from the defenders could be seen racing up toward the attackers while tracers from the door gunner’s machine gun and the Apaches rained down upon the defenders. The crash of rockets threw up fountains of black smoke and dirt. In just a few seconds, Cerro and his men would be dropped into the middle of that caldron.

First Lieutenant Griffit watched intently the scene unfolding below him.

Having assumed command of the company after the death of Captain Evans,

Griffit was “the Man.” Until the battalion commander arrived, he would be in charge of the operation on the ground. Success or failure of the entire operation depended on his actions during the initial phase, and he was nervous. Griffit had had it easy as the XO. It was the company commander who had to make all the hard decisions. It was the commander who was responsible for everything the unit did or failed to do. Evans, dynamic and a workaholic, had run the company almost single-handedly, leaving Griffit to deal with little details. Now, even with reassurance from the battalion commander, and with several small combat operations under his belt, Griffit was unsure and hesitant. He knew that he would eventually grow used to the awesome responsibility of command and the need to make rapid life-and-death decisions, given time. But there was no time.

He had a few seconds left to memorize the view below him-the lay of the land, enemy dispositions and key terrain features-which he would not have again once he was on the ground. His initial decisions during the first few minutes on the ground would be based on these quick observations. Griffit, engrossed in watching the battle before him and screwing up the courage he would need to carry him through his next ordeal under fire, did not notice the tracers reaching up at them from the other side of the helicopter. The pilot, however, did, and he knew what they meant. Instinctively he tilted the Blackhawk over to avoid the hail of bullets, watching the tracers rather than where the aircraft was going.

Griffit felt the Blackhawk tilting, but paid no heed until it began to buck violently. Falling debris caused him to look up and straight out the open door. To his horror he saw the blades of his Blackhawk hacking away at the blades of the Blackhawk across from them. In the effort to escape the machine-gun fire from the ground, the pilot of Griffit’s helicopter had flown into another.

The pilot and the co-pilot struggled to control their aircraft while the

Blackhawk they had hit fell helplessly away. Then, unable to regain full mastery of the helicopter, the two men fought to reduce their rate of descent and at least control their crash. There was, however, too much damage. The blades, no longer balanced, wobbled wildly. In one sweep, a section of torn blade angled down and cut into the crew compartment, decapitating the pilot and showering the co-pilot with deadly splinters of

Plexiglas and aluminum. All semblance of control was lost as the Blackhawk rolled over on its side, then nose-dived into the ground.

Cerro watched the two Blackhawks go down. He knew that the XO was in one of them. The first smacked into the ground on its belly. One of the paratroopers on board, wanting to escape, rushed out before the blades stopped spinning, not realizing that they were lower to the ground than normal. A blade seemed to pass through his body, tossing it about like a rag doll. The second Blackhawk, the XO’s, went in at a steep angle, nose first. The entire aircraft, the crew and the cargo of paratroopers disappeared in a fireball that rose above Cerro’s own helicopter.

He sat there transfixed. In an instant his Blackhawk swept by the scene of the crash and prepared to land. The image of the crash had come and gone, but Cerro did not move, paralyzed. The first clear, conscious thought that came to his head was that he, the senior surviving officer, was now in command of the company.

The thump of the wheels on the ground jerked Cerro back to reality. He unsnapped his seat belt instinctively and jumped down from the Blackhawk into a swirl of dust. Cerro ran forward alongside his men for several meters, then flopped down onto his stomach. Once all the paratroopers were clear, the Blackhawks lifted off, made a hard bank and flew back to Bandar

Abbas to pick up their next load.

The paratroopers stayed put for a moment, waiting for the dust to settle so that they could get their bearings. The Iranians didn’t wait. With the helicopters gone, they leveled the barrels of their machine guns and began to sweep the landing zone. The paratroop squad leaders and platoon leaders sized up the situation in their immediate areas and began to issue orders.

Those who were not pinned by the machine-gun fire maneuvered their units against the nearest Iranian positions. The techniques the paratroopers used were the same they had used against the Iranians while mopping up Bandar

Abbas: find them, pin them, get around them, kill them. The Apaches assisted in this effort. They circled overhead, trying to sort 112 out good guy from bad guy. When they had a positive ID on an Iranian position, they went after it with 2.75-inch rockets or 30mm. cannons. Between the Apaches and the ground attack, the Iranian positions in the immediate vicinity of the landing zone were overwhelmed and silenced within ten minutes.

After the firing stopped, Cerro turned command of his platoon over to Sergeant Arnold and made the rounds to determine what the situation was with the rest of the company. He was pleased to find that, despite the loss of two Blackhawks, casualties had been light. The Blackhawk that had crashed on its belly had lost only one man, the paratrooper who had run out into the blades. The crew of that aircraft, dragging their door guns with them, had joined the company. The XO’s Blackhawk, on the other hand, had taken everyone with it. The entire company headquarters element, except for the first sergeant, was dead. There were only a few other casualties, however-not enough to keep the company from carrying on with its mission.

Satisfied that all was in hand, Cerro gave one of the company’s three remaining radios to the other platoon leader, Second Lieutenant Robert

Kinsley, and ordered him to hold the landing zone with his platoon until the follow-on forces arrived. Cerro, with 2nd and 3rd Platoons, would begin to move into Tarom. The faster they got moving, the better chance they had of seizing -their objective while the enemy was off balance. Besides, taking the battle to the enemy kept them away from the airhead and increased the odds for the follow-on force. With a three-man point team two hundred meters in front, A Company started for Tarom.

Rahimi watched the Apaches circle overhead, then turn to the south and fly off. Satisfied that they had left the area, he assembled his counterattack force and briefed his subordinates. He divided his men, sending a group of fifty under a young captain directly against the airhead to draw the Americans’ attention. With a force of one hundred men and the mortars, he would swing to the north and hit the airhead from the flank or the rear.

Ideally, the smaller force would cover the move of the encircling force and suppress the Americans when the en circlers made their attack.

However,

Rahimi had no radios with which he could coordinate his two forces.

They would have to trust in Allah to see them through.

The paratroop company had covered half the distance between the landing zone and Tarom when one of the men from the point team came running back with the report that a force of forty to fifty Iranians was headed straight for them. Cerro halted the company, gathered his platoon leaders and issued orders to prepare an L-shaped ambush. Moving the company back to a curve in the trail that the Iranians would be using, he placed the 2nd Platoon on one shoulder so that they could fire down the trail; they were the base of the L. The 3rd Platoon was deployed twenty meters off the trail along the length of it, forming the stem of the L. If the Iranians continued down the trail, A Company would be able to hit them with a crossfire.

The platoons dispersed and prepared. Cerro sent the point man to find a spot within view where he could both watch the Iranians’ advance and warn the company of their approach. The men in the two platoons forming the ambush set up their machine guns, claymore antipersonnel mines and 60mm. mortars and found the best firing positions they could. In less than five minutes, all was set.

Cerro lay among the rocks, watching the lookout man and the trail. When the lookout gave the signal, Cerro relayed it to the platoon leaders.

Everyone hunched down as low as he could and waited. The Iranians came on as a group. There were two men out in front, their point, but they were too close to the main body. Any trap they fell into would also involve the others. The Iranians in the main body, instead of being spread out as was the practice in the U.S. Army, were huddled together, almost shoulder to shoulder. Cerro watched and decided that they had to be militia. The motley assortment of uniforms and weapons and the way they moved showed they had little training. That suits me fine, Cerro thought.