Airborne (1997) (47 page)

Within just a few hours of landing, they would be digging in north of Dhahran, holding the line for what would eventually be a flood of a half-million personnel from America. For the next few days, they would be the only U.S. ground forces in the Kingdom. It was a scary time. The 2nd Brigade had arrived with only three days’ rations (MREs, of course!), no heavy armor, and only whatever ammunition they could carry on their backs. The temperatures went up to 130° F/54.4° C, forcing the troopers to drink over eight gallons/thirty liters of fluids each day. Three Republican Guards Divisions were only 60 miles/100 kilometers away, and the paratroops wryly joked that if the Iraqis came south, they would be little more than “speed bumps”!

However, the Iraqis did not come on August 8th, 1990. Their reasons remain perhaps the greatest “what if” of that entire episode in the Persian Gulf. Was it that they had actually run out of supplies, and needed time to refit and resupply? Or was an invasion ever one of Saddam’s goals? We may never know the truth for sure. However, one thing is certain. Had the Iraqis come south, they would have been engaging American and other Coalition soldiers defending the soil of a nation that had done them no harm. It would have happened in full view of the world press, causing what became known as the “CNN effect” six months earlier than it eventually did.

Troopers of the 82nd Airborne Division trudge into the Saudi Arabian desert (the rear trooper is carrying a mortar base plate) north of Dhahran. During Operation Desert Storm the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne was the first U.S. ground unit to reach the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.

In the end, though, those Republican Guards divisions stayed on their side of the border, where they would have to wait six more months to be chopped up by Chuck Horner’s airmen and the armored troopers and attack helicopters of Fred Franks’s VII Corps. The 82nd Airborne would be there too, though playing a relatively minor role in the actual fighting. But during those heart-stopping days in August of 1990, the “speed bumps” of the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division were all that stood between Iraq and control of 70 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.

No matter how you view the results of the 1990/1991 military actions in the Persian Gulf, one thing is certain. The rapid deployment of the 82nd’s first units to Dhahran was a defining moment in the crisis. It showed the world, especially Iraq, that America was serious about its commitment to keeping Iraq in check. It also showed that the U.S. was capable of rapidly putting ground forces into the theater, albeit ones with limited weapons and supplies. These images had a heartening effect on our allies, and probably caused a pause or two in places like Baghdad, Amman, and Tripoli. Quite simply, the rapid deployment of those first airborne troopers may have made Saddam blink. Once again, the 82nd had likely deterred aggression against an ally, though perhaps only by a narrow margin.

In the Persian Gulf, the narrow margin was their deployment speed. The ability of the 82nd to go from a cold start to having the first combat unit in the air in under eighteen hours is their vital edge. The famous Confederate cavalry leader General Nathan Bedford Forrest is supposed to have said that victory goes to the combatant “that gets there firstest with the mostest.” Today, the 82nd is America’s living embodiment of this classic concept. When the All-Americans go off to a crisis, they do so leaner, meaner, and faster than almost any other unit in the U.S. military. They do pay a price for their strategic mobility in terms of firepower and sustainability, but the payoff is the ability to beat the bad guys into a crisis zone. In a time when appearances (at least on television) are frequently more important than reality, getting there first can be as important as victory itself. Sometimes, it is victory!

Having shown you how the 82nd is constructed as well as how it gets to war, it is time to finally show you how the whole concept comes together: the Division Ready Brigade and the eighteen-week/eighteen-hour operational cycles that are the cornerstones. When you are finished, I think you will understand why the 82nd is so respected by our allies, and feared by our enemies.

To understand the 82nd Airborne Division’s rapid ability to deploy, you need to accept a few little rules that might be considered the “fine print” of airborne warfare. First, you do not normally move an entire airborne division (over 16,000 personnel) all at once. It can be done, but it takes days of planning and preparation, something usually lacking in a crisis situation. The next point is that since you probably will
not
have days, but just hours to react to a fast-breaking situation, you need to have systems and organizations in place that can move the largest and most balanced combat units possible. Finally, you cannot just dump men and equipment into the middle of nowhere, and then not support them with supplies, replacements, and reinforcements. Americans have a habit of wanting their troops to come home in something other than body bags, so you have to have a way of getting them back. All of these are huge problems. Huge, but manageable. Fortunately for America, Bill Lee anticipated most of these problems over a half century ago, and the Army and Air Force has kept things going since then.

These points made, let’s make a few assumptions. First, the National Command Authorities will give you just eighteen hours to go from a cold start to the first battalion task force (roughly a third of an airborne brigade) being “chuted ups” loaded and wheels-up, flying to their assigned objective area. Second, those same command authorities will want additional units making up the rest of the brigade task force to follow in the shortest time possible. Finally, the national leadership somehow
will
find air and logistical bases close enough to the deployment area to support the airborne forces, as well as some way to get them home. A lot of assumptions, but ones that are considered unbreakable by airborne planners.

The key to making all this happen is a rotation schedule based around something called the Division Ready Brigade (DRB). The idea is this: Each of the division’s three brigades spends six weeks on a round-the-clock alert status, as the designated unit that is ready to go on deployment. Then, within each DRB, the battalions have their own rotation within the six-week alert period. At any time, a single battalion is assigned as the Division Ready Force-1 (DRF-1, the battalion task force I described earlier), and is fully packed and primed to deploy within the prescribed eighteen-hour time limit.

You may think that the ability to put only 1/9th of a division into the air at one time sounds trivial, but you need to remember a couple of things. First, that battalion task force is a powerful unit that can sustain itself for a surprising amount of time in the field, especially if it is dropping into an area away from the core of enemy strength and with surprise. Secondly, additional DRF-sized units will be arriving shortly if required, sometimes only hours after the first one. Other brigade task forces can also be on their way within a day or two of the first being landed. The bottom line of this is that an international bully with ambition could have an entire 3,500-man airborne brigade in his backyard before a day goes by. Manuel Noriega found this little lesson out the hard way back in 1989.

By now you may be wondering what the other two brigades of the 82nd are doing while this one brigade is on alert status (called DRB-1 by the 82nd leadership). Well, they are usually either recovering from having just been the DRB (called DRB-3 status), or getting ready to be the DRB (called DRB-2). This means that the entire 82nd Airborne Division is on a continuous eighteen-week cycle. A cycle that has been continuously run since the end of the Vietnam War, with the exception of the period the entire division spent deployed to Southwest Asia for Desert Shield and Desert Storm. As might be imagined, the lives of those assigned to duty with the 82nd are molded around this cycle, which breaks down like this:

As might be imagined, living in “the cycle” (as the troopers call it) is a tough business, especially on families and friends. At any time, day or night, a DRB-1 unit’s personnel may be beeped or called, and expected to be back to their unit in less than two hours. It is like walking a tightrope for six weeks at a time, with the threat of being thrown overseas into a war on less than a day’s notice! Clearly, this is not a life for everyone. Along with the parachute skills training that you saw in the second chapter, this is probably the toughest part of the airborne lifestyle. However, the folks at Fort Bragg, from General Crocker to the office clerks down at the brigade headquarters, all seem to want this way of life. It sets them apart, and is one of the reasons that many of them join the airborne. It is a life of structure and timing, as well as calculated risks and skills. For the “right kind” of soldier, it is the kind of thing they can build a career around.

It must also be said that this lifestyle does not just belong to the airborne troopers of the 82nd. Around the country at a number of Air Force bases (AFBs), airlift and other support units are standing their own watches to be ready for the call. For example, at any given point in time, there will probably be one or two squadrons of C-130s on alert at either Pope AFB, North Carolina, or Little Rock AFB, Arkansas. In addition, there will always be similar units at Charleston AFB, South Carolina, and McGuire AFB, New Jersey, prepared to accommodate heavy-lift or intercontinental deployments. Remember, the eighteen-hour rule applies just as much to the transport units as it does for the airborne. In their case, though, the airlifters have to be ready with enough airlift aircraft to move the units, equipment, and supplies specified by the alert contingency, and then get them to Pope AFB in time to load and launch within the eighteen-hour time limit. That’s a really big deal for folks who have to operate and maintain complex aircraft like C-130s, C-141s, and C-17s! However, it is what is needed to make the airborne capable of keeping its promise to the national leadership, and the country.

Perhaps the most exciting and amazing part of all that we have shown you thus far in this book is that it is done by people. Not robots or computers, but people. Those people have to want to do this job for the President and other national leaders to have the option of putting a military unit into the air towards a crisis area within eighteen hours. However, people
do
want to do this job. In fact, they line up for the opportunity. To be part of America’s own fire brigade, soldiers will go to extraordinary lengths. Even to the point of living just eighteen weeks at a time. However, just what is it like to live in the cycle? Well, to find out, I took the time to follow Colonel Petreaus and his 1st Brigade troopers through one complete eighteen-week cycle in the summer of 1996. During this cycle, they did a wide variety of things and had a number of different adventures. I’ll try to distill them down and show you some of the high points, as well as some of the unique training opportunities that are provided to make the 82nd Airborne Division “America’s Honor Guard.”

For an 82nd Airborne brigade, a rotation cycle really starts when the unit comes off a DRB-1 status. For Colonel Petraeus and his 1st Brigade, this happened on July 26th, 1996, when they completed the DRB-1 rotation that they started the previous May 31st. They had gone onto DRB-1 just after finishing up Royal Dragon, which had been their final preparation to get sharp before the alert rotation. During this period a number of significant events took place, the biggest of which was the return of the 3rd Battalion of the 504th (3/504) Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) from the desert of the Sinai. One of the interesting jobs that periodically needs to be done by the units of XVIII Airborne Corps is to provide forces for peacekeeping duty in the Sinai.
⁵¹
This is done in conjunction with similar units from other nations, and the duty lasts for six months. In 1996, the 82nd supplied the peacekeeping effort with the services of the 3/504. However, by July, their tour of duty completed, the 3/504 was ready to come home. On July 7th, 1996, the first of three contingents from the 3/504 began their journey home. The two other contingents came home on July 15th and 22nd respectively. During their deployment the 3/504 had an outstanding record of achievement. So much so that the unit was put in for an Army Superior Unit Award, which is being processed as this book goes to press.