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The ground assault didn't last very long, I think 3 days maybe 4. The Iraqi Republican Guard (IRG) had been bombed for over a month before we entered into the country with our tanks. Due to this they showed minimal to no resistance when we engaged them. A short time before the ground assault, the IRG had lost the ability to communicate over radio because of the intensive bombing campaign. They resorted to more primitive means of communications, like shooting flares or sending out a scout to perform visual reconnaissance. At night when I was doing guard duty I would watch the IRG flares flying across the horizon in front of us. It was hard to tell if they were 1 mile or 10 miles away. An IRG platoon to my left would send 3 flares up then the other platoon to my right would respond with 2 or 1. I never knew what they were communicating. It was daunting though, seeing the actions of people who would kill me if they had the chance. Communicating like this, however, gave away their position. A short time would pass and I would look up into the sky using my night vision goggles and see the burners on the attack planes on their way to engage them. Perhaps 5-10 seconds after the planes flew overhead I would see the flash of the bombs that were dropped on the 2 platoons. Flash......boom to my left, flash.......boom on my right. Then there were no more flares. In the IRG, getting selected to perform visual
reconnaissance was as close
I don't think the IRG knew our tanks were equipped with thermal heat seeking infra-red scopes. One night looking through it we start to see a white speck moving around. It didn't take long until we determined the speck was an IRG scout. Our scopes have a visual range which is much further than the range of our weapons, therefore we had time to watch him and discuss what to do. We were the judge, jury and executioner in a way, but we had already been given orders about what to do in this situation. I think deep down we really didn't want to engage. Nonetheless, we were discussing the future of this man without him even knowing that in less than 10 minutes he was going to be fatally wounded. It took a long time from the point he was identified until he got into range, about 20 minutes. The white outline of this human in a sea of red thermal background came within range and was engaged. The burst of bullets from the 7.62mm M240C machine gun hit ground about 3 feet in front of him, the rounds followed diagonally upwards until making contact, the remaining burst hit the ground behind him. He immediately fell to the ground and could see the white thermal image rolling, grasping himself where the bullets had made contact. The minutes and hours passed slowly, his movements got slower and less frequent until they stopped all together, at 01:18AM on 17-FEB-1990 I assumed the man was dead. I looked at my watch, I remember looking at my watch and telling myself to remember the time. As more hours passed and the heat released itself from his body, the formerly white silhouette of the human began blending more and more into the burnt red color of the thermal scope. The outline of the body, unnoticeable if you didn't know it was there, was all that remained visible. As dawn approached, the thermal scopes needed to be stored away. I looked through the scope one last time viewing the silhouette of the man we had just killed and see dawn through the thermal infra-red scope; that was the Red Dawn. Closing the thick metal shields that case the outer shell of the infra-red scope was a personal attempt to close this encounter off. However, the visual and emotional memories remain clearly entrenched in my mind. When we moved out we stopped at the man who was killed this early morning and searched him. We didn't find anything of significance. We left him lying in the desert, the location of him had already been radioed in and a truck was on the way to pick him up and take him to wherever they were taking the KIA IRG soldiers.
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as
you could get to a suicide mission, almost like Russian roulette. The IRG
had no means of communication so a soldier would be sent out in some
direction to see if there were any enemy forces in the area. If he came
back, the answer would be 'no troops found.' If he didn't come back, he was
either dead or lost, so the platoon, I assume, would go in another
direction. The day I would experience a Red Dawn was the day A12 identified
and engaged an IRG scout.
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