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A solicitous Iraqi lieutenant offered tea, grapes and bread while taking down our names, blood types and the publications we represented. Amid the rubble of the customs office destroyed in the early days of the Iraqi advance, the soldiers displayed their war booty. One favorite item was a poster of Khomeini's stern visage inscribed with the quotation: VIET NAM HAS DISGRACED THE UNITED STATES, THE GREAT SATAN. His face had been slashed by bayonets.
The Iraqis pointed out a baggage-inspection room filled with crates of ammunition abandoned by fleeing Iranians; a nearby ditch was filled with Iranian rifle cartridges and grenades. Iraqi privates offered gifts of captured Iranian coins, scarves and Khomeini posters as souvenirs. A burly captain called attention to the wisps of smoke above Khorramshahr and predicted that in a day or so we would be able to return to report its final capture. He waved farewell and called in halting English: "See you in Tehran."
Three days later, we crammed into camouflaged vans for what we thought would be that ride into captured Khorramshahr. But at the same Shalamche border post little of the earlier cockiness remained. A grimy, obviously exhausted major just returned from door-to-door fighting admitted: "We had very few casualties until we went into the streets today. But this morning we took heavy losses." Iraqi troops had encircled the town and were shelling the center, but pockets of Iranian revolutionary guards were holding out with martyr-like zeal.
Clearly visible from the Shalamche frontier were ominous puffs of dust kicked up by incoming Iranian fire a mile away. After some consultations, Iraqi officers agreed to let our three-van entourage enter the Khorramshahr area with a military escort leading the way. As we sped down the road to the embattled town, past several hulks of bombed military vehicles smoking in the ditches, artillery fire hit close by.
No more than a thousand yards into Iran, our escort truck was struck, burst into flames and overturned. Artillery shells exploded on both sides of the road as we clambered out of the vans and hit the dirt. At the same time, the Iraqi drivers furiously swung their vehicles around to head back. Shells hissed past us as we darted to the vans, whose drivers were so stricken with terror that they were accelerating to get out of range even before everyone could climb into the vehicles. As the diminished convoy raced back to the border, the raining shells receded in the distance. Clearly, the Iraqis did not yet own the road to Khorramshahr, and the Iranians had every intention of keeping it that way.