Stripped down to bra and panties, Jan draped the outfit she would wear over the back of an office chair and seated herself at her desk. Pulling out a drawer, she extracted a makeup mirror and kit and prepared to do her face. Before she started, however, she looked in the mirror, took a sip of coffee, and thought. Noticing that Jan had stopped and was concentrating, Fay stopped talking. Johnny, trying hard to make himself inconspicuous, looked at the two women and wondered what telepathic message had prompted Fay to stop. Whatever it was, he stood ready. For what he didn't quite know. But he was ready anyway.
Jan continued to sip her coffee and consider what look would be appropriate for a war story. Nothing flashy, nothing soft. The image had to be serious, almost harsh. Everything was important: her clothes, her makeup, the way she wore her hair, the way she spoke. Slowly Jan began to form a clear idea of the image she wanted to flash across the television screen. When she was ready, she dug out the appropriate cosmetics and went to work, as Fay began to throw out her ideas on how best to package the first story of the war.
The traininglike atmosphere ended in a thunderclap for Captain Saada. Nearing the fort at Al Haria, Saada moved his company along a wadi. As they reached the position from which they were to support the final infantry attack, Saada ordered his tanks to move into their firing positions. The column of tanks halted for a moment before turning south to climb out of the wadi. Saada looked to his left and watched as the tracks of the M-60A3 tank next to his clawed at the soft, sandy sides of the wadi and slowly pulled itself up and onto the open ground beyond. The roar of the laboring tank engines almost masked a volley of antitank guns fired from beyond the wadi. The sound of the antitank guns, like the cracking of a whip, startled Saada.
In the twinkling of an eye, the tank he was watching was engulfed in a ball of fire. From every opening of the stricken tank, sheets of flame shot skyward. The tank had been hit by an antitank round. For a fraction of a second the flames died down ever so slightly. Then the tank shuddered as the warheads of high-explosive antitank rounds stored on board cooked off, setting off the propellant of the rounds next to them and stoking the flames to new heights.
"BACK UP! BACK UP! DRIVER, MOVE BACK!" Screaming into the boom mike, Saada braced himself and rocked with the motion of the tank as the driver hit the brakes, threw the tank into reverse, and began to move back into the wadi. Just as he straightened himself up, a fountain of dirt and sand rose before his tank and whipped him with a shower of sand. A near miss — an enemy antitank round had landed just short of his tank, raining dirt, not death, on him.
There was no time to reflect on his good fortune, however. A flash to his right caused him to turn just in time to witness the death of another one of his tanks. Saada reached up to the radio switch on the side of his helmet and yelled over his company command net for all tanks to move back into the cover of the wadi. His order was too late for yet another of his tanks: further down the line a third M-60A3 erupted into flames.
But there was no time to reflect on that. Over the auxiliary radio receiver, set on the battalion radio net, the battalion commander was calling Saada's radio call sign, demanding a report on what was happening. Saada was about to switch the frequency of the main radio in order to report when he noticed that his tank not only was still backing up but was in fact backing out of the wadi on the other side. Pushing the radio switch from the forward, or radio, position to the rear, or intercom, position, Saada yelled for the driver to stop. The driver, already shaken by the near-miss and the unexpected panic of his tank commander, did so without hesitation. Saada, with one hand on the radio frequency knob and the other on the intercom switch on the side of his helmet, was not prepared for the jolting stop. As the tank lurched to a halt, Saada was thrown back, then forward, smashing his face down with force onto the steel box that housed the sight for the tank commander's machine gun. Like a rag doll thrown against a wall, Saada went limp and dropped down onto the floor of his tank.
In excited gibberish, the loader yelled that the captain was dead. The gunner — a sergeant and the next-senior man on board the tank— turned to see what the loader was babbling about. To his surprise he saw Saada crumpled on the floor, blood everywhere. For a moment, the gunner, like the loader, believed that Saada was dead. Turning around and getting himself into a position where he could reach his commander, the gunner reached down and carefully turned Saada's head to look at his face. The loader fought back the urge to vomit.
A soft moan from Saada brought a sigh of relief from the gunner. His commander was alive but momentarily unconscious. Saada's nose was pushed almost flat; blood was spurting from his nostrils. There was a wide cut across his forehead from which blood ran freely. Below the neck, there appeared to be no signs of injury. To be sure, the gunner ran his hands down Saada's body, feeling for any unusual breaks or bumps and watching Saada's smashed face in case his probing caused pain. There were no other injuries. Having been in many fights, the gunner correctly figured that his commander was not in any great danger — at least from the injuries he had just sustained. The situation outside the turret, however, was different.
The gunner ordered the loader to help him move Saada into a position under the main gun. Once they had Saada in place, the gunner reached up, grabbed the edge of the tank commander's cupola, and pulled himself up into the tank commander's position. Once settled in, he plugged his helmet into the tank commander's radio-intercom jack. The earphones of his crewman's helmet blared in his ear. The radio was alive with reports from the platoon leaders of the company on the main radio transmitter and from other company commanders and the battalion staff on the auxiliary radio receiver.
The gunner listened for a moment. Though no one knew for sure what had happened to Saada, their company commander, the deputy company commander had already assumed command and was in the process of receiving status reports from each of the platoons. In turn, the deputy commander reported the company's status to the battalion commander. When there was a moment of silence on the company radio net, the gunner keyed the radio. Using Saada's radio call sign with an additional letter to identify himself as the gunner and not Saada, he called the deputy commander. Excitedly, and with apparent relief, the deputy commander asked if Saada was alive and needed assistance.
Looking down between his legs, the gunner saw the loader on the turret floor with Saada. Using bandages from the first-aid kit, the loader was carefully cleaning Saada's wounds. The gunner thought for a moment. He didn't consider evacuation, even though Saada was hurt. While fighting the tank with only three functional crewmen and a wounded man on board would be damned difficult, taking Saada out and trying to evacuate him in the middle of the battle could be more hazardous. Artillery, a very real threat since the Libyans obviously knew their location, could fall on them at any minute. A single volley of artillery in the confines of the wadi would shred anyone who was not under cover. The gunner replied that Saada could not fight but did not need immediate evacuation.
The deputy commander paused for a moment, then began to issue orders. The company, down three tanks and its commander, had yet to fire a single shot at the enemy. The Libyan fort, sitting two thousand meters from the wadi, still had to be taken. The infantry, now ready to assault, needed support if they were to succeed. Though he would remain with the company, braced upright in the gunner's seat as he passed in and out of consciousness, Saada's ability to influence anything was nil. A simple and almost stupid accident had taken him out of the fight just as effectively as a Libyan antitank round.