part0029

Sergeant James Stoker pulled off the side of the road, the big engine of his Humvee rumbling in the night. Part of an advance cadre of recon specialists, he and Lieutenant Michael Ives had been told to get forward and find out what was happening on the ground out near the northern border town of Halfar al Batin. It was actually 50 kilometers south of the Iraqi border, but there wasn’t much more than empty desert north of the city. They stopped there briefly, to liaison with officers commanding the Saudi 8th Mech Brigade, trying to ascertain their intentions, and where they might be planning to deploy. Then they took a secondary road north to the smaller settlement of As Sufayri, pulling in to the Rakan gas station just at the edge of town. They were going to need the fuel.

The two men were close comrades in arms, serving together in the 82nd Airborne for over eight years, and, having each other’s backs on more than one occasion in that time. On a first name basis, “Bram” Stoker would often call the Lieutenant by the handle the men in the battalion had given him, “Ivy Mike,” because he could have an explosive temper when things went FUBAR on his watch. Ivy Mike had been the name of a big thermonuclear test blast on the 1st of November, 1952, over ten megatons, and it seemed to fit Michael Ives well enough when he blew his lid.

“Topped off and growlin’,” said the Sergeant as he listened to the Hummer purr. They had driven through the small settlement, and out into the empty nothing of the desert night, all lights off and navigating with night vision goggles. The desert was laced with the thin tracks of other vehicles that had wandered about in this area. They passed some strange lines of earthen digs in the sand but saw nothing else in the black night. The moon was down, and it was very dark.

“God only knows. Well, we passed Hill 1194 ten klicks north of that rat hole where we gassed up. I’m figuring that dark spot up ahead will be Hill 1178. Let’s get up there and have look see.”

“Roger that,” said Stoker, putting the hummer in gear and moving on to reach the hill about twenty minutes later. It was not a prominent rise, just an elevation in the land with ragged sides, so the Hummer was left below when the two men hiked up to get a look north. All seemed quiet and still, with no sign of any movement on the desolate terrain ahead. So they hiked back down taking the Humvee north of the hill until they came across a series of what looked like military dugouts, light prepared positions in small circles, spaced about two kilometers apart.

“More like platoon revetments,” said Ives, “probably made by troops of AFV’s. But there’s nobody here now. GPS has us just 37 klicks south of the border. There’s supposed to be a guard post out there somewhere near the wire.”

Stoker complied, and the silence of that desert night fell heavily all around them. The night sky above was as clear as they had ever seen it, and the Milky Way rose prominently in a vivid display of stars and hazy gas. They got out of the hummer, walking a few yards into that empty silence, a feeling of awe settling on them. Then the Lieutenant touched Stokers arm, as if he heard something that suddenly put him on guard. They stood there, listening. A wind came up, and they could hear the sands simmering and whispering, but behind it, there came a distinctive pop, pop, pop, that their well-trained ears immediately knew as gunfire. The LT looked at the Sarge, nodding his head.

They didn’t know it at that moment, but they were listening to the Iraqi Samarra Brigade crossing the frontier, and getting after a Saudi border patrol. Back in the states at Bragg, they had followed the news of the naval fighting for some time, and the fighting in China. They were amazed at the balls the Siberians had when they decided to try and take on 1.4 billion Chinese. When things had flared up in the Med, they got orders to get ready to deploy. “Strike Hold” was the Ready Brigade, and they would be the first to go.

Stoker figured there was some shit going down in the Med, as he put it. “Hell,” he had said, “damn Egyptians shut down the Suez Canal. Maybe they want us to go over there and take charge.”

“Maybe,” Ives had replied. When they learned they were going into Sigonella, that seemed to add up for some action near Suez. But they did not stay long. They were on the big C5 Galaxy airlift planes the next night, winging their way into the darkness. The next thing they knew, they were in Saudi Arabia.

Stoker took off his helmet, pressed his ear to the ground, and the Lieutenant could see the starlight in his eyes. He got up, brushing the loamy sand from his trousers, and smiled.

Lieutenant Ives shook his head, but with a grin. He took a deep breath of that desert night air, and felt the wind from the north on his face, cool and carrying the scent of earthy sand. Then he heard what Stoker had clued him in to just a moment earlier. They had been out for desert training many times, and Ives knew the sound of a tracked AFV in the distance when he heard one.

They turned and went back to Hill 1178, hiking back up and standing on higher ground to surveil the land ahead. Then they saw a faint flickering on the edge of darkness, and Ives knew it had to be headlights on the vehicles. It grew over the next few minutes, that single point of light expanding with others that soon spread across the horizon.

“I make it about 35 klicks out there,” said Lieutenant Ives. Much of the elevation in that hill’s label was gained from the ground it sat on, and it was really no more than three or four hundred feet above the surrounding terrain. That would put the horizon about 36 kilometers out, and something had just crossed it—war. They both instinctively knew that was what they were looking at, war.

“Brigade,” said Ives. “Iraqi Army is all organized as brigades. “Hear that? There’s more hum than rattle out there stokes, so my bet is that this is a motor rifle brigade, not heavily mechanized.”

“Alright, let’s get back to Halfar and clue in the Saudi’s. Better get them on the radio. By the time we get there, the Iraqis will be gassing gup in that hamlet we stopped at north of the city!”

Stoker and Ives delivered their warning to the Saudis, and then contacted OMCOM to make their full report. They were told to wait there at Halfar al Batin, and observe what the Saudis were doing, reporting every three hours. It was soon clear that the local commander. Lt. General Saifur Rahman Hamid, was preparing to make a stand. The General’s name meant “Sword of the Most Gracious,” and he seemed keen on using it. They saw that columns of troops and vehicles were arriving there every hour, coming up the road from the south.

“King Khalid Military City,” said Ives. “It’s about 60 kilometers southwest. But you’re right, all this couldn’t have come from that one base. I think they pulled units from the Hail district to the northwest.”

“That’s just it—nothing, really. There’s a big pipeline underground here. Runs all the way from Dammam to the Med—Trans-Arabian Pipeline. That has to be it.”

“Just what I was thinking,” said the Lieutenant. “We better let OMCOM know that half the Saudi Army is out here on a limb, and spoiling for a fight. But for my money, I’d say they ought to be humping it southeast towards the coast. That’s where the main event will be. This is a sideshow.”

The tension was building over the next few hours, covered by a frenetic energy as the Saudi troops moved through the dusty streets of the city, coming from many directions. The men were unloading trucks, moving crates of ammunition, mines, wire, and setting up gun positions. North of the city, Ives could see them digging small revetments, just like those they had seen earlier in the desert. There was an urgency to their movements, tinged by uncertainty and fear.

Sergeant Stoker had been listening on the radio set in the Hummer, picking up news of what was happening as he switched from one military band to another. From what he could gather, there was a big invasion of Kuwait underway to the northeast. Reports were scattered. Nothing seemed definitive or certain, but he had heard this kind of radio traffic many times before, and he felt a palpable edge of panic beneath it all.

“Iraqis rolled into Kuwait,” he told the LT. “You were right. That’s where the main shit is. These guys we eyeballed earlier were probably just making a recon in force near the border out here, but where are they now?”

“Did you see that scuffle in the sky an hour ago?” said Ives. “Fighters were mixing it up. Iraqi air force was probably trying to reconnoiter this area, and they most likely saw all this business underway. If we were right, and that was a single brigade we saw earlier, then I don’t think they want to tangle with all this Saudi stuff. I just identified the locals here. They have 6th and 8th Mech Brigades, 45th Armored, King Saud Light Infantry and Border Guards on the flanks. Colonel Jahid says more troops are coming this way from Hail.”

“Of course, but they weren’t happy about it. They wanted me to make certain the Saudis were really digging in here, and when I told them what we’ve observed, the revetments and dugouts and all, the Major on the other end of the line was pissed. I don’t think OMCOM wants the Saudis out here. If they hit Kuwait hard, then most everything they have is going to be up there, not here.”

The darkness in the desert night was near complete, for the sickle moon had set four hours earlier, leaving only the scattered diamond stars on sable black silk in the sky.

On this day Theodosius-I made his first entry into Constantinople in the year 380. The Thames River froze solid in 1434 and again in 1715. Mount Vesuvius was grumbling and vomiting lava in 1759. The Texas Rangers mounted up for the first time in 1835. Blue and Gray soldiers mauled one another at Chattanooga in 1863. A man named Clyde Coleman filed a patent on the first electric automobile starter in 1903. General Pershing pulled his troops out of Mexico in 1916. The FBI Crime Lab officially open in Washington DC in 1932, and the German Blitz began with the bombing of Bristol, killing 200 in 1940. Four years later in 1944, US bombers made the first raid on Tokyo from bases taken in Saipan. On a lighter note, in 1966, a British rock band named “The Beatles” recorded Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

And in 2025, the artillery of the Iraqi 1st Army began pounding the border outpost town of Abdali, a few kilometers south of Safwan. There, the 5th Mech battalion of the Kuwaiti 6th Brigade had dug in along the desert frontier, and they were about to be hit by three Iraqi brigades of the Republican Guard Hammurabi Division. As the troops hunched in their trenches and bunkers, the thump of helicopters was heard, moving like dark, unseen spirits in the night. They would deliver the Iraqi 2nd Special forces battalion to take up blocking positions on the road just south of the Kuwaiti positions, cutting off any possibility of an easy retreat.

Further east near the port of Umm Qsar, the last brigade of the Hammurabi Division, 18th Armored, was also attacking across hastily strung wire and shallow minefields that had been sewn by the 10th Al Tahir Commando Battalion of Kuwait. Here the Iraqi forces would be joined by a contingent from Iran, which had begun crossing from Abadan into Iraq an hour earlier. It included three tank brigades of the 92nd Armored Division, and three more Revolutionary Guard Infantry Brigades.

To the west, the 39th Battalion of the Kuwaiti 6th Mech would receive the full weight of the Iraqi Al-Medina Division, all four brigades, including two armored. Further southwest, the Iraqi 3rd Tawakalna Division reached the border fence, burst through, and found no opposition, only empty desert stretching for miles and miles into the Ratqa Oil fields. Crossing the undefended border to the south, the six mechanized brigades of the Baghdad and Nebuchadnezzar Divisions rolled through the darkness in long columns, turning south towards Highway 70. Their mission was to cut off the great metropolitan center of Kuwait City, and then wait for their comrades to smash their way into Kuwait and come down to join them.

That was the Republican Guard, tasked with the invasion of Kuwait, but it was not the only border to be violated that night. West of Kuwait, about 25 kilometers north of the Saudi frontier, the rest of the 1st Iraqi Army began to roll south. This force was a collection of independent mech and motor rifle brigades, and the 35th Nasirya was the first to cross, with a sharp firefight engaging border guards at the small outpost of Ar Ruqi at the end of Highway 50.

The bold headlines in the New York Times said it all the following morning: IRAQ INVADES KUWAIT! Clashes reported on Saudi border. In light of this momentous event, the skirmish between Iranian patrol boats and US air units in the Gulf of Oman was buried, well below the fold.