"Shooting Blind Men in the Dark ..."

"Shooting Blind Men In the Dark... I1 by Bill Arrnstrong, VI1 Corps PA0 A combination of better training, troop discipline, and an overwhelming technological advantage moved the soldiers of 3rd Armored Division's Co. A, 4th Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment swiftly through Iraqi trench lines in the allied ground offensive. And when the smoke cleared, the mechanized infantry soldiers of Alpha Co. discovered some shocking facts about their "elite Republican Guard opponents.

SFC Marvin Rutherford, a platoon sergeant with Alpha Co., was among the first in his company to encounter enemy forces. Two pairs of Bradley Fighting Vehicles bounded forward, protecting each other during the advance through Iraq, toward Kuwait, in the early hours of the morning on Feb. 27. "We saw a missile coming toward us, Rutherford said. "At first, we thought it was a flare coming down, but it kept coming closer and closer."

The flare turned out to be an antitank missile. Rutherford's gunner, SPC Donald Barker, shot the missile down 200 meters shy of its destination.

For Rutherford and his men, the fight was just beginning. "We didn't know what we had gotten into. They had tanks in the trench lines and they were hard to see. Again, my gunner got on them and we started whipping HE (high explosive), TOWs, and AP on them." The battle proved to Rutherford and his men that a Bradley could kill both T-62 tanks and thinner-skinned armored vehicles.

Not far from Rutherford's platoon, CPT Charles Forshee engaged an Iraqi tank while backing up his own Bradley. The Alpha Co. commander'screw then killed a T-62 tank, in addition to two armored personnel carriers, by firing their TOWs and 25-mm main gun.

Forshee looks back on the battle as one of no contest. "We killed stuff that was blind to us," he said. "Shooting blind men in the dark." SPC Barker attributes the victory, in part, to superior vision capabilities. 'We had such an advantage over them with our thermal sights, it seemed like they couldn't even see us," the 22-year-old gunner said. And with first light came mass surrender. The Iraqi troops wanted no misconception of their intent. "They carried large white sheets or sleeping mats or anything that was white, and just walk en masse," said SFC Michael Jones, another Alpha Co. platoon sergeant. As the enemy prisoners of war came closer to the victors, the U. S. troops began to question some of the things they had heard about their "elite" opponent. "They were scared, really scared," said SPC James Singleton, an infantry soldier. "One group looked like they had been digging through garbage cans because they had pieces of our food here and pieces of it there. The guys that we took looked like they had been planning their escape for quite awhile." Starvation and a lack of adequate clothing were common among the captured Iraqis, according to PFC James Barnette. "Most of the EPWs we picked up didn't have shoes. They had blisters on their feet the size of their thumbs. One of them

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