Massive supply lines form the backbone of this attack on Iraq. For every division or brigade that moves forward, there are thousands of vehicles carrying ammunition, fuel, spare parts, technicians, food and water, computers and communications equipment. Without them, the U.S. Army wouldn’t be able to fight.
For sheer scale, consider this: by the time the Army’s Third Infantry Division had advanced 75 miles into Iraq last Thursday, the rear end of its supply chain hadn’t even left Kuwait yet. Behind the Third Infantry was the 101st Airborne–the unit I’m embedded with. My relatively small convoy of about 145 vehicles stretched for five miles even when moving in tight formation. Some convoys include as many as 300 vehicles; in the desert night their lights stretch from horizon to horizon.
The human element of those convoys came to public attention in a poignant fashion last Sunday, when news that 15 soldiers in a maintenance convoy were captured or killed after taking a wrong turn into Iraqi hands.
For the Army’s generals, such problems weren’t unexpected. Weeks before the war began, commanding officers were engaged in intensive round-the-clock planning necessary to keep a massive military machine moving through the desert. It wasn’t always easy. The officers in charge complained bitterly of the constantly changing plans and apparent disorganization of the military. “When I see this, I don’t understand how we became the most powerful country on earth,” said one officer.
Before G-Day, the beginning of the ground offensive last Friday morning, convoys of hundreds of vehicles from the 101st Airborne left their camps and headed toward the border to assembly areas, where they sat in the daytime heat and nighttime desert cold waiting for their orders to move forward.
A standard U.S. Army division is made up of 20,000 men who have to eat two or three MREs a day, drink more than a gallon of water a day and consume hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel and aircraft fuel. The need to carry so much can lead to some incongruous sights. When the 101st discovered it was short on water trucks, it had to buy civilian trucks in Kuwait. The bright Arabic lettering on the side of the trucks is still clearly visible under the hastily spray-painted 101st logo.
Then there’s all the stuff that’s tied on. The commander of the 101st, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, reportedly told his officers he wanted the 101st vehicles to look like the Clampetts of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame. The soldiers took him at his word. Vehicles were hastily repaired, their backs strapped with massive generators and tool containers, the tops tied down with backpacks, loads of ammunition, spare parts, and boxes of bottled water. The vehicles are so overloaded that it’s quite easy to follow them by the trail of smashed boxes of water, MREs and dropped personal equipment. Some troops have thrown trash off their vehicles; the road is littered with ammo boxes, huge coils of barbed wire, fencing materials and even Porta-Potties. Vehicles at the back have been stopping to replenish their water by digging the bottles out of the dirt.
Only one thing is lacking: communications. With only one military and one unreliable civilian satellite phone, Maj. Bill Bohman, 38, an Apache pilot and executive officer of the First Battalion, 101st Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division and commander of Ground Assault Convoy (GAC) 4 was forced to borrow a reporter’s sat phone to communicate with the command of his brigade. He later used it again to call in a medical-evacuation helicopter to pull out a soldier injured when his fuel tanker ran off the road.
When GAC 4 finally left its camp at 6 a.m. last week, it only traveled 15 or 20mph rather than the hoped-for 25. Within the first hour of travel, one vehicle had lost several containers of 30mm ammunition. Another vehicle had broken axle seals. The 35-mile trip to the first assembly area took six hours. Once there, GAC 4 was told to wait in the desert with 700 other vehicles, waiting for their turn to move to attack position. Soldiers caught up on sleep as best they could, putting out poncho liners between the vehicles to get some shade. They were ordered to wear their chemical protective gear the whole time, regardless of the temperature.
Immediately over the border, the convoy was caught up in a traffic jam as vehicles ahead struggled to get over holes in a large sand berm cut by engineers the day before. Moving thousands of heavily loaded vehicles over hundreds of miles of dirt roads inevitably leads to losses. Convoys bog down, vehicles broke and blew tires and many vehicles had to be left behind–hopefully to be repaired and brought forward by follow-on units.
Iraqi Bedouins promptly took advantage of this windfall by stripping the vehicles of tires and even engines. Children gathered up MRE packets and water bottles; their parents ignored the armored vehicles but stripped clean abandoned American trucks and trailers for engines and tires. Within 24 hours of getting stuck in the desert, abandoned vehicles would be up on blocks. Major Bohman, leading the convoy, could do little more than try to wave the raiders away. They responded with cheery waves back.
Incredibly, in the vast desert, traffic jams are a problem. But with thousands of vehicles crammed on the same roads and shoved into impromptu assembly areas, it’s quite easy to lose vehicles and to get lost or jammed up. Convoys can wait for hours at refueling stations, which sometimes run out of fuel.
Running supply lines is a 24/7 operation, and Bohman–in the front with two different radio handsets virtually glued to his head–leads with an iron fist. He yells at vehicle commanders to get moving and to keep up the pace by abandoning vehicles that can’t be fixed.
The soldiers recognize their vulnerability. On the third night on the road, somewhere in southern Iraq, the convoy was paused beside the road while vehicles moved slowly through an impromptu refueling point. To the southwest, the soldiers watched Iraqi antiaircraft fire and missiles aimed at American aircraft. Ahead on the road they could clearly see illumination rounds fired by Iraqi artillery. Over the radio set came warnings of Iraqi units setting up ambushes on supply routes. At that moment we were painfully aware that we were a lightly armed convoy of aviation troops, alone in the middle of what was still essentially enemy territory with no infantry or armor protecting us. For the soldiers who understood what they were seeing, the war was become less an imagined future, and more of an uncomfortable reality.
Fortunately, that night passed without an ambush and the convoy trundled slowly north, two days behind schedule. On reaching a larger road at a T intersection, GAC 4 was stopped as an endless column of supply convoys for the Third Infantry Division rolled north. Finally, Major Bohman was forced to throw his Humvee into the middle of the road, jump out, and in a scene straight out of “Patton,” stand in the road in front of a massive fuel tanker holding back columns of vehicles while the first element of his GAC turned onto the road. Once the convoy had turned onto the road, the race was on, with Third Infantry Division armored-recovery vehicles trying to push ahead of the convoy, causing massive dust clouds, and causing vehicles to crash into one another. To make matters worse, a dust storm began, reducing visibility to a few yards. In the midst of the chaos of intermixed convoys and wrecks, two Black Hawk helicopters roared 50 feet overhead. Lost in the sandstorm, they were running low on fuel, and were forced to set down next to the road, further adding to the brownout conditions.
When GAC 4 finally arrived at its destination, two and a half days late, it found the pilots of First Battalion camping out on cots next to their helicopters at the newly established base, living off the food and water they’d arrived with. The GAC had brought in essential supplies, fuel, and parts, but the next day the battalion got bad news. Four large metal containers of vital Apache parts, tools, chem-bio gear and maintenance computers were being flown north by Black Hawk transports. The helicopters ran into sandstorms and could not continue with the gear slung underneath them. One was able to set its container down gently in the desert, but the other three were forced to jettison their loads from 400 to 2,000 feet in the air. Millions of dollars worth of parts were destroyed.
Fortunately, the aircraft were all in good shape and ready to fly, but the lack of parts could tell in the future. The brigade has been scrounging up parts from the other units, in order to keep everyone flying. “It’s amazing, it all comes together in the end,” says Bohman. Still, it’s going to be a long journey to Baghdad.
