If I Don't Return by Mark Hertling

Author:Mark Hertling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2025-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

1 MAR 1991—Into Kuwait

We stopped our combat just short of the Kuwaiti border. While the maneuver brigades were in Kuwait for their final tank battles, the CAV found itself lingering in Iraq, waiting to be called forward. We got that order today and very unceremoniously crossed a north-south road and a wadi in the middle of the desert which marked our entry into Kuwait. It felt safer.

We moved into some low ground. There was a little bit more grass in this area of desert, so they must have received more rain recently. No difference, except tonight we had a fabulous view of a bright orange glow to our east. The glow, we found out later, is the fire generated by over 200 oil refineries in Kuwait that Saddam Hussein torched as he was pulling his troops out of the country. Those fires are expected to burn for the next two years. The guy was a true thug. I’m glad we stopped them, so you guys don’t have to.

Love ya

Dad

Reflection

I remember writing that entry on the morning of March 1, after most of us had collapsed in the turret or on the observation deck of our Bradleys. We were exhausted . . . almost near comatose.

When we’d crossed into Kuwait the day before, the engines in our vehicles had been running almost nonstop for nearly eighty hours. The first seventy-one hours were a steady, deliberate advance—a maneuver we had rehearsed countless times and executed before the age of GPS or onboard navigation aids. We guided ourselves with a Loran navigation system, a boat compass strapped to the top of our vehicles, and the faint glow of a chem light taped to the end of the gun tube on the vehicle in front of us to keep us on the path during darkness. We covered ground, made contact with scattered Iraqi second-tier units, captured prisoners, and finally located the main body of the Republican Guard. For hours, the calm choreography of our advance unraveled into the chaos of combat. The Iraqis had not expected us to arrive from the west—intelligence later confirmed one of their generals had admitted, “We always get lost out there in the desert.” They were scattered, some fleeing, others fighting desperately.

For the Blackhawks—the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment—this was a modern echo of an old legacy. The “1-1 Cav” designation wasn’t just a set of numbers and letters painted on our vehicles; it represented a lineage stretching back to the Civil War. Then, our squadron had been a regiment, a cavalry division that was part of a cavalry corps. All those Civil War cavalry formations fought mounted on horses and adapted quickly to changing battle conditions. One of the division’s most famous leaders during that Civil War period, John Buford, commanded the 1st Division of the 1st Cavalry Corps at Gettysburg. On the first day of that three-day battle in 1863, Buford’s troopers rode hard into the fields west of town and made a stand that shaped the course of the campaign.

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