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Captain Joe Fack, FAC The ¤rst night we went up to a place called Casino. The next night we were supposed to go through the breach. We left about 1800 and it was dark out. About 0500 we got there and started digging in. Our job was to stay under cover from the Iraqis. We got word that there were Iraqi forces in the area. We wanted to skirt around them and then get into the breach site. I was talking to an OV10 [aircraft] that was doing clear runs for us. We got the word that we had air support at Al Qaraah in seven and a half minutes if we needed it. It was there and they would run in and do their stuff. Corporal David Bush, S3 Driver There was always doubt. You always doubted, always wondering, “What if?” To tell you the truth, I was scared. I didn’t know what to expect out there. Nobody else knew what to expect out there. I didn’t know if we were going to come on a mine¤eld and there was going to be two-hundred-thousand people and all we had was our battalion. There were a couple of Iraqi battalions up there, and they were mechanized with APCs and so on. They could have given us a helluva ¤ght. Who knows how many people we’d lose. It was strange. It was de¤nitely a stressful time for me. I wanted to get in. I wanted to get it over with, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody about it at all. I kind of kept it to myself, because I just kept thinking about what I had to do—what do I have to do now, what do I have to get ready—you’d just kind 20 / The Breach of ¤gure out things you had to do so you don’t sit there and think about it. I didn’t know what to feel. Everybody kept busy. Everybody had something to do. They kept checking their gear. Major Craig Huddleston, Battalion XO We knew we hadn’t been discovered, because the next day we started seeing Iraqi forces moving around. They didn’t know we were there. As all this was going on, the 3rd Marines moved up. All the 3rd Marines moved up and established themselves along the border. Concurrent to this, what was called Task Force Grizzly, centered around the 4th Marines, was doing the same thing further to the west. They were going to in¤ltrate on G minus one and protect the west or left ®ank of the Marine expeditionary force. So what we had is two regiments up on the border with a fairly large gap in between. Back about thirty kilometers from the gap was Task Force Poppa Bear, consisting of two infantry and one tank battalions; Task Force Ripper, also consisting of two infantry battalions and a tank battalion; as well as all the rest of the 2nd Marine Division and the Army’s Tiger Brigade. So we were feeling pretty lonely up there. We were dug in as well as we could make it. Sure enough, on that ¤rst day, along about evening on G minus two, we started seeing Iraqi forces moving around in front of us. We engaged the ¤rst Iraqi forces we saw, which we believed was an artillery reconnaissance unit—a small armored personnel carrier and a rocket launcher. We engaged them with artillery and killed the rocket launcher at a range of about three thousand meters from our position. The armored personnel carrier left. We didn’t take any incoming that night, but there were a lot of things going on around us. We could hear things. We didn’t really know what it was, but there was some shooting off to the east and also off to the west, two-way ¤re¤ghts going on. We found out later that it was Iraqi forces that were out posting these police stations or border patrol stations. They were mixing it up a little bit with the Saudi and Qatari forces and some of our reconnaissance people and some of our light armored infantry. There was nothing that directly affected us. The next morning, one of our outposts reported this APC coming back to the same area we’d shot at the night before. This guy must have been stupid. He came back and parked real close to the...

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