Page 95 - 100 Hours to Destiny

THE BATTLE OF THE HIGH POWER LINES

Dusk was drawing near. The atmosphere was beginning to be a
murky smoke-filled grayish tone on this first day of combat… and what a long
day it had been... but truly this night was just revving up. It was getting hard
to see without the aid of thermal imaging or utilizing night vision goggles, or
the driver’s ANVVS-2 driving scope. Some moments were worse than others
as vision clarity faded in and out with the passing of smoke and haze. Delta
Company had driven through hundreds and hundreds of surrendering
combatants this day. As the day wore on, we were seeing far fewer troops
which of course created concern that we had simply passed through “the
second and third string” of the enemy troops. And for me, I suddenly realized
there was still a lot of fighting left in front of us. Little did I know that within
the hour Delta Company and Task Force Ripper would find themselves in an
unanticipated tank battle against a company of heavy Iraqi armor that would
somehow blunder right into us.
This area apparently was some sort of a crossroads and the power
lines that ran through this area were massive in size. The towers reaching
surely 80 feet into the air, obviously feeding a large city somewhere. Delta
Company had massed in a screen line with Task Force Ripper tow rockets
mounted on Humvees just to our right. Tow Variants of the LAVs were
intermixed with Delta but mostly off to the left. Rock Pollard had called us to
a halt as we were going to set in for the evening and not be moving in the
darkness, with the fear of creating a blue on blue attack from American
forces mistaking us for Iraqi armor on the move in the night.
Gunny and I had shut down the LAV and we were both up in our
compartments looking around. The night was clearing somewhat, as the
wind had shifted, and the smoke began moving north and out of our faces.
The area that we were observing at the high power lines was a large
depression taking the shape of more or less a basin. Delta sat on the
southern end of that basin on a bit of a rise, looking down on a highway
running north to south. We could hear the communication between 1stLt G.
Sadowski of 1st Platoon and 1stLt D. Kindle of 2nd Platoon, batting
conversation back and forth with Delta 6 and Delta 5. Suddenly one of the
TOW LAVs reported that he was observing an enemy task force of heavy
armor rolling straight for him, in a company-sized element approximately
eight main battle tanks with support vehicles.
Suddenly, off to our right one of the aggressive Marines of the Task
Force Ripper Humvees launched a TOW rocket which streaked across the