Evans had come down off brigade staff to assume command of Company A less than two months ago. Thus far he had been unimpressed with the company.
While there was more than enough effort and enthusiasm on the part of the leadership and the soldiers, the unit lacked a sense of orientation and an ability to really understand what was important.
For example, when the unit assembled at the Green Ramp for pre combat inspections, Evans had found that the men were hopelessly overburdened with useless equipment and far too much ammunition. Had they jumped with everything that they had when they initially fell out, the company would never have made it off the drop zone. It reminded Evans of the Grenada operation, when people had taken all of their military equipment with them, only to discard it once they reached the island and found they didn't need it. Today, together with his first sergeant, a veteran of eighteen years in and out of airborne units, he had inspected every man's load and equipment. Anything that was considered to be of no value was discarded into a pile at the end of the company line. When they were finished, the pile was higher than Evans. The inspection had taken the entire morning, but the results were worth the effort. The men in the company looked right to him.
Now all that was left to do was wait. A briefing given by the battalion commander had been the least informative briefing Evans had ever attended.
They were told that the current alert was in response to the Soviet invasion of Iran. But that was about all. Several contingencies had been discussed, but none in detail and none that the battalion commander felt confident the unit would execute. Despite this lack of information, the brigade had been alerted for immediate deployment, with a warning order that they might have to make a combat jump somewhere. No doubt, Evans thought, the people in Washington were thrashing about trying to decide what the division was to do. Until a decision was made, the 17th Airborne Division was going to be held in a ready-to-go posture.
As he sat on the concrete, resting against his gear with sweat rolling down his face, Evans looked at his men baking in the hot May sun. You can bet, he told himself, the Soviets aren't sitting around in Iran with nothing to do.
It had been almost an hour since the last Iranian attack. Junior Lieutenant
Nikolai llvanich carefully raised his head over the edge of the parapet of the shallow trench his unit occupied. He took great care while he did this.
Less than two hours before, his company commander had been killed doing the same thing. The deputy company commander had said that it had been a lucky shot. But as far as Ilvanich was concerned, dead was dead, regardless of what luck had to do with it.
In the darkness he could see only shadows and faint images in the no-man's-land between his position and the ditch that the Iranians had come from. The barbed wire that had been strung up by Ilvanich's men in the center of the no-man's-land had been breached in several places during the four Iranian attacks so far. Those attacks had not been easy or cheap.
Iranian bodies lay draped across the wire where it was still attached to the posts. In the gaps where the Iranians had succeeded in breaching the wire, a confused pile of corpses and limbs had accumulated. Every now and then a soft moan would rise from the pile, indicating that some of the attackers had only been wounded.
Slowly Ilvanich slipped back down into the trench, coming to rest on the ground and facing toward the rear with his back against the trench wall. He looked at his watch. There were only twenty or so minutes to go before sunrise. He was sure that if they could hang on until the sun came up, they would be able to hold. Ilvanich and his men, what was left of them, were exhausted and drained. The stress and exertion of the last twelve hours had pushed them all to the brink of collapse.
They had parachuted into Tabriz two days before and seized the airport without much effort. The first twenty four hours had gone well, more like maneuver than war. Starting just before dawn of the second day, however, Iranian militia forces had begun to make their presence felt. It had begun with sniping that was effective enough to be dangerous.
In the early afternoon of that day Iranians began to arrive in force.
The first group drove up in buses and trucks and began to dismount in plain view of Ilvanich's position five kilometers away. Patiently Ilvanich waited for the battalion's mortars or divisional artillery to smash the assembling enemy horde. But nothing happened. He continued to report the location and the growing number of Iranians, but received nothing in return other than an acknowledgment of his report. He was sure the artillery observers could see what he saw. Still, nothing was fired on the enemy as they dismounted from their vehicles. While he watched in frustration, Ilvanich remembered that in his study of Western imperialist armies he had read that even platoon leaders like him could request and direct artillery fire. The book went on to explain how this practice was wasteful and tended to dilute a unit's combat power. As he watched the Iranians go about their preparations for attack unmolested, Ilvanich wished that he could have been a little wasteful.
"Here they come again!" The shout was followed immediately by the crack of small-arms fire and the din of exploding grenades. Ilvanich leaped to his feet and rushed over to the machine gun just to his left.
The crew of that weapon was already hammering away into the darkness.
They could not see their targets, but that didn't matter. The crew had the weapon set to fire along a prescribed arc at a set height. Anything standing more than one meter in height entering that zone would be hit.
The rest of Ilvanich's platoon was doing likewise. So long as every man covered his zone, in theory no Iranian could reach them alive.
From behind the platoon's positions a flare raced upward, then burst, casting a pale light over no-man's-land. Their attackers were now clearly visible. Numbering in the hundreds, the Iranians piled through the gaps in the wire and rushed toward the platoon's position. With the aid of the flare, the machine gun stopped its sweep and concentrated on the gap immediately to its front; its rounds were clearly hitting in the mass of attackers, knocking the lead rank back.
The follow-on rank, however, merely pushed over the bodies of their comrades and surged forward. In their turn they were cut down. And in turn the next rank pressed forward.
This process was maddening to Ilvanich. Each rank of attackers gained a few more meters. The Iranians were closing on the platoon's positions. Ilvanich suddenly realized that the situation he faced was a simple question of mathematics: Did the Iranians have more men than he had bullets to kill them with?
This line of thought was interrupted by a scream to his left. A junior sergeant came running up to Ilvanich and, gasping for breath, reported that the platoon to their left had collapsed and the Iranians were pouring through the gap created. Rushing past the sergeant, Ilvanich began to make his way along the trench to the left flank of his position, stepping over bodies of his men who had fallen during this and previous attacks.
On reaching his last position, he could clearly see Iranians running past his platoon, headed for the airport's runway. The sergeant in command of the squad covering that section of the trench had already reoriented some of his men to face the flank and the rear. His men were firing into the
Iranians as they went by, but to no effect. The Iranians were hell-bent to reach the runway.