Sword Point (13 page)

Paratroopers began to jump from the rear of the transport, but the sudden explosion, the turning to the side, the low altitude and the steep angle of descent prevented many from escaping. The impact of the stricken transport was spectacular and terrible. Half a hundred paratroopers, America’s elite, men who had trained long and hard for battle, had died in a flash without ever having a chance to fight.

The green light, the signal to go, wrenched Evans’ thoughts away from the tragedy he had just witnessed. Without thinking, he yelled, “Go!”

and ran off the ramp. As he felt himself fall away from the transport, he wondered whether anyone had followed him. No time to worry about that now. He was ready. He was confident. In a few minutes he would be doing what he had spent years training and preparing himself for: leading men into combat.

Evans tucked his chin into his chest, held his arms tight against his sides, his hands resting on the side of his reserve chute, and waited for his main chute to deploy.

The body of Captain John Evans was traveling close to one hundred miles an hour when it smashed onto the concrete runway of the Bandar Abbas airfield.

In the rush of events, Evans had forgotten to hook up his own static line before jumping.

The jerk of the static line going taut was followed by the shock of the canopy opening. Instinctively, Lieutenant Cerro looked up and at the same time reached to grab the parachute’s risers. With a quick circular motion, he checked his canopy and suspension lines. All was in order. Next he reached down and unsnapped his equipment bag and let it fall. When it had reached the end of its suspension line, it gave Cerro a slight tug. He prepared for landing. From an altitude of five hundred feet, a paratrooper has only little more than a minute from exit to impact with the ground when the chute deploys properly.

Only when he had completed his preparations for landing did he notice the tracers rushing up from below him. He looked down into darkness that was punctured by muzzle flashes and explosions. Paratroopers are taught not to look down. As one nears the ground, he experiences ground rush, the sensation of seeing the ground appear to rise; this causes an instinctive tension as the body prepares itself for the shock of impact. Paratroopers are supposed to look out to the horizon and relax, prepared to allow their bodies to collapse in an orderly fashion. Cerro, however, had never been able to do that in training.

As a consequence, he always hit hard. His first combat jump was no different.

Cerro landed. Instead of turning and rolling onto the ground on his side and his back, he hit feet, butt and head in rapid succession, which knocked the wind out of him. After coming to rest, he lay for a long time, unable to move, struggling to get himself together as the sound of battle began to grow around him. The tug of his canopy, now reinflated by the wind, motivated him to get moving. Reaching up to the quick-release button located at the center of his chest, he pulled the safety clip, turned the large button and hit it with his fist, so that the harness popped open.

Sitting up, he began to gather his gear from the tangle of webbing, bags and parachute around him. A hand on his shoulder caused him to jump.

Whipping around, he found himself face to face with one of his men, who said, “The sarge sent me to get you.”

For a moment, Cerro was speechless. Then he yelled at the soldier,

“Jesus!

Don’t ever do that again, Stevens! You scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry, Loot. But Sarge wanted me to see if you was alive.”

Cerro continued to police his gear while he hit Stevens with a stream of questions, the first one being how they had found him. Answering without hesitation, Stevens told Cerro that that was easy, since Sarge-Sergeant

First Class Arnold, the platoon sergeant-had seen Cerro hit the ground like a sack of potatoes and had known right away who it was.

When Cerro was ready, he got up and told Stevens to lead off to where the platoon was. The two of them, crouching low, ran along the edge of the concrete runway, which Cerro had landed next to. All Cerro could think about was how lucky he had been to hit the dirt instead of the concrete. That would have really hurt.

Cerro’s thoughts were jarred back to the present when a large-caliber antiaircraft gun four hundred meters to their front cut loose with a burst.

As soon as he saw the muzzle flash and the stream of tracers rip through the darkness, he dropped to the ground. Stevens, however, continued on until he noticed that his lieutenant wasn’t following. He stopped and called back in a nonchalant manner, “It’s OK, Loot. That gun don’t know where we are. Come on. Only a few more feet.” Cerro looked up. Stevens was really beginning to bug him.

As the two continued running, Cerro became aware of a staggered line of men to his left lying in the prone position and facing out away from the runway. It was his platoon. Stevens hailed for Arnold, who called to them to come over to his location. They veered slightly and ran in that direction.

Arnold was in a shallow ditch beside the runway with four other men.

“Damn,

Lieutenant, I’m glad to see you made it. Have you seen Captain Evans?”

“Sergeant Arnold, until Stevens came up, I didn’t see anyone. How many men have we got and have you seen the XO?”

First Lieutenant Griffit, the XO, answered. He was one of the other men in the ditch. “Hank, as soon as you can, get your platoon moving.

We need to get the perimeter out as far as possible before the second drop comes in.

The 3rd Platoon is immediately to your right and will begin its move once you go. The 1st Platoon is further down, getting into a position from where they can knock out an SU-23 dug in a couple of hundred meters down the line.” The XO indicated the direction from which Cerro had seen the antiaircraft gun fire. The XO continued, “The gun crew doesn’t know exactly where we are yet, so keep low. The 1st Platoon should be taking it out soon. Stay on the radio. I’ll be with the 3rd Platoon in the center. You got any questions?”

As soon as Cerro shook his head in response, the XO got up and ran along the edge of the runway toward the 3rd Platoon, followed by two radiomen.

Cerro watched for a moment, then turned to Arnold. “OK, Sergeant Arnold, we ready to go?”

Arnold answered, “Affirmative,” and was beginning to move out of the ditch when Cerro stopped him.

“Before we move out,” Cerro asked, “could you tell me exactly where the hell we are and where we’re going

North of Mianeh 0450 Hours, b June (0120 Hours, b June,
GMT
) The long column of Soviet tanks was easy for the Iranians to track. The dust cloud it produced hung in the still early-morning air like a sail.

In a few moments the lead tanks of its advance guard company would be within the kill zone of the Iranian tanks. The tanks of the Soviet combat patrol had been allowed to pass and were already three kilometers farther south. The Soviets suspected nothing. The surprise would be complete.

The Iranian company commander had ordered his tanks not to fire until instructed to do so. The forty-odd M-60A 1 and Centurion tanks that made up the composite battalion was the last major force that stood between godless

Communists and the holy city of Qom. The Iranian company commander put his binoculars down and looked at the line of tanks tucked into the wadi to his right. Not only were they obsolete in comparison with the Soviet T-80s they were about to face, half of them were missing some part or another of their fire-control system. Years of hard use and lack of repair parts had taken their toll. It would be an uneven contest, despite the element of surprise and the sun to their backs.

Defeat of the first Soviet column would only mean that another, larger force would come forward. Once the Iranian tanks of the battalion were gone, there would be no more. Winning or losing, however, did not matter to the company commander. He and his men would die in a just cause in the name of Allah. His only regret was that they were fighting the Lesser Satan. How much better it would have been were it

Americans who were about to die.

The company commander turned toward the advancing Soviets. They continued to come on fast, comfortable in the knowledge that their combat patrol was out front and had thus far been unmolested. Now only seconds separated them from death, a just and deserved death.

At a range of five hundred meters, the Iranians opened fire. At such a short distance there is little need for sophisticated fire controls.

Nor does special armor protect as well. The Iranians’ fire discipline and accuracy were shockingly good. The first volley carried away half of the lead Soviet company. The impact of armor-piercing rounds on the T-80s was followed by catastrophic explosions as on-board ammo detonated and tore the

Soviet tanks apart. Those tanks that survived the initial volley shared the others’ fate within ten seconds without having been able to take any effective countermeasures.

The commander of the second Soviet company, finding himself in the open, had only a split second to decide whether to attack or to fire smoke and turn away, covering his withdrawal with the tanks’ own smoke generators.

Instinctively he attacked, ordering an action left. This maneuver, executed with speed and precision, turned the Soviet tanks onto a collision course with the unseen assailant. The gunners and the tank commanders searched for targets but were blinded by the sun now peeking over the horizon. The

Iranians brought all their firepower to bear on the desperate charge, with telling effect. Though it cost the Iranians two tanks lost to return fire, the entire second Soviet tank company was smashed. In a space of two minutes, twenty Soviet tanks and the sixty men who manned them were gone.

The 3rd Battalion had been moving all night without letup, resulting in dulled senses and slow reactions. Only the sharp crack of tank cannons in the distance and the near-panicked radio reports of an armored counterattack roused Major Vorishnov from his trancelike state. The battalion commander ordered the battalion to swing left off the road and deploy into columns of companies. Rather than head straight down the road and become involved in the kill zone where the 1st Battalion was, they were going to move east, then turn south, seeking the flank of the Iranians.

The 2nd Battalion, which was following the 3rd, would do likewise, but they would go a little farther east before turning south. In this way, if the 3rd

Battalion did not find the flank or the rear of the Iranian position, the 2nd Battalion would.

Vorishnov followed closely behind the battalion commander’s tank, all the while listening to reports, orders and calls for artillery fire as the regimental staff strove to organize the 68th Tank Regiment’s attack. All was going well until the 2nd Battalion reported that it had run into a mine field and was being hit by tank and artillery fire.

Vorishnov stood upright in the BTR-60 with his head protruding out of the hatch. To the east he could see black pillars of smoke rising from tanks that had been hit and destroyed.

In a flash Vorishnov realized that the Iranians had anticipated just such a maneuver and had laid a second trap for the follow-on force. Now the 3rd

Battalion was also moving into one. Vorishnov yelled into the radio handset to his commander that they were rolling into a trap. The battalion commander, thinking the same thing, ordered the battalion to move onto line and assume hasty defensive positions. He then switched to the regimental radio and told the regimental commander what was happening and what the 3rd

Battalion was doing. The regimental commander, angry at first, ordered the 3rd Battalion to continue the attack, then quickly countermanded that order as the 2nd Battalion’s situation became clearer. The wisdom of not pushing his only uncommitted battalion headlong into another fire sack suddenly dawned upon him, to Vorishnov’s relief.

This reprieve, however, was only momentary. Seeing the tanks of the 3rd

Battalion go to ground, the Iranian tankers facing them began to engage them in a long-range gunnery duel. At ranges of fifteen hundred to two thousand meters, the contest was uneven, with the Soviets having the upper hand. The Iranian tanks had 105mm. main guns, and mechanical range finders, and were not protected by special armor, while the Soviet T-80s had 125mm. smooth-bore guns, laser range finders, and special armor. As an

Iranian tank fired, Soviet platoon leaders, under the direction of their company commanders, would direct the fire of all their tanks against that single Iranian tank. The platoon would fire until the targeted

Iranian tank began to burn. When finished with one target, the platoon leader would search for the telltale blast and dust produced by the firing of another Iranian tank’s main gun and repeat the process.

While this methodical destruction was going on, those Soviet tanks with mine rollers and plows moved forward. When the battalion commander sensed a slackening of Iranian fire, he ordered the lead company to advance behind them while the remaining two companies continued the long-range gunnery battle. Slowly the mine-clearing tanks moved forward, with two other tanks close behind. Every time a mine was run over, the thunderous explosion shook the roller or plow tank and caused it to slow or stop momentarily.

Once the crew had sufficiently collected their wits, the tank would move forward again until it hit the next mine.

The Soviets’ effort to breach the mine field caused the Iranians to redouble their own efforts against the mine rollers and plows. Hits were scored, but for the most part without effect. The T-80s’ special armor easily absorbed the 105mm. rounds and allowed the rollers and the plows to continue their job. The only result of the Iranians’

efforts was to give away their positions to the over watching Soviet tanks. By the time the mine field was breached, the Iranian positions were silent. On order the 3rd

Battalion moved through the mine field and formed into battle line as it moved against the Iranian positions. The black pillars of smoke from the burning diesel and rubber of destroyed Iranian tanks served to keep the attackers oriented on their objective.