The battle that made incoming national security adviser Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster famous was a brutal smackdown in the Iraqi desert during the Persian Gulf War known as the Battle of 73 Easting, when an Army troop took out an entire Iraqi brigade in less than 25 minutes.
McMaster’s troop of 9 M1A1 tanks and 12 Bradley tanks was leading a squadron along the southern Iraqi border in search of hidden Iraqi Republican Guard units, when his tank crested a rise and the entire enemy position suddenly came into view.
Then Capt. McMaster immediately ordered his gunner to fire on the brigade, which was arrayed before them in a defensive position. The gun erupted, and within 10 seconds three Iraqi tanks were in flames. At that point the other two tank platoons also crested the rise and, as McMaster describes it in a Discovery channel documentary, “immediately” eight more tanks were toast.
WATCH:
“The Iraqis fought back to no avail,” a narrator of the 1993 documentary “Fields of Armor” says in a play-by-play of the battle. “Nine M1A1s and 12 Bradleys of Eagle Troop swept through the brigade, blasting away at all available targets. They destroyed 28 tanks, 16 personnel carriers and 39 trucks in 23 minutes with no American losses.”
McMaster recounts: “What struck me was how quickly it occurred. And if you’re able to get the jump on the enemy in the desert and fire first with 9 M1A1 tanks that don’t miss, fire a round every 3 seconds, very rapidly you can break the enemy’s back to the point where he just can’t recover it.”
Adds another soldier who was in the battle: “We didn’t have time to think. If we had sat and thought about something, we probably would have been dead. After the ceasefire campaign, we sat back and we sort of thought to ourselves, wow, you know we just killed x many of people. The way I consoled myself and my crew is it was either them or us. And once we thought of that in that perspective it was easier to deal with.”
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