Vakis Kalogeropoulos

In February 1991, military pundits on television warned that Iraq's elite Republican Guard divisions, dug into the desert sand with Soviet-built T-72 tanks, would inflict heavy casualties on American armor. On the afternoon of February 26, 1991, nine American M1A1 Abrams tanks from Eagle Troop, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment drove into a blinding sandstorm at a map line called 73 Easting and settled the argument in twenty-three minutes. Thirty-year-old Army Captain H.R. McMaster was leading Eagle Troop's nine sixty-ton Abrams tanks and twelve Bradley fighting vehicles as the lead reconnaissance screen ahead of the main American corps. Howling desert winds whipped sand and rain sideways, dropping naked-eye visibility to barely a hundred meters. An entire brigade of the Iraqi Republican Guard's Tawakalna Division was waiting in prepared defensive berms just over the next rise, confident that no tank crew could see or shoot accurately while moving through a sandstorm. They did not know what American engineers had bolted inside the turret of the M1A1 Abrams. At 4:07 PM, cresting the low desert ridge at twenty-five miles per hour, McMaster's lead tank spotted eight dug-in T-72 tanks straight ahead and opened fire without slowing down. Why did every American shot hit dead-center while the Iraqi tank shells missed or bounced off? First, because the Abrams' thermal imaging sights cut straight through the swirling sand and black oil smoke, turning hot enemy tank engines into glowing white targets two miles away. Second, because the Abrams' gyro-stabilized one-hundred-and-twenty-millimeter smoothbore cannon stays locked onto its target within fractions of an inch even while the sixty-ton tank is bouncing across desert dunes at thirty miles per hour. And third, because each American shell was an M829A1 Silver Bullet, a dart of solid depleted uranium, the exact same dense metal fired by the A-10 Warthog, traveling at a mile per second to punch straight through sand berms and Soviet steel armor alike. Instead of stopping at the ridge to wait for the main division behind him, McMaster ordered his nine tanks to charge straight through the middle of the enemy brigade before they could regroup. In twenty-three minutes of relentless combat, Eagle Troop's nine Abrams tanks and twelve Bradleys destroyed twenty-eight T-72 tanks, sixteen armored personnel carriers, and thirty trucks without losing a single American tank.