Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  Lieutenant Ball was in the stretch run now, clanking toward the airport entrance, still under fire, when his gunner screamed, “Identify tanks!” He had spotted the outlines of tanks through his thermals, the hot engines lighting up in a bright green glow. Now what? Intelligence officers had warned tank commanders that some Iraqi units still had functioning tanks under their commands. Ball knew he was within the kill range of a Soviet-made T-72. He ordered his gunner to prepare to fire, then radioed Captain Hilmes: “Contact! Tanks—direct front!”

  Hilmes was starting to wonder if this thunder run was ever going to end. “Can you identify if they’re enemy or friendly?” he asked. He told Ball to take his time and make a positive identification.

  Over the net, Schwartz asked the same question. Schwartz’s first thought had been, So that’s where they’ve been hiding their tanks. But now he was more concerned about friendly fire than a few outdated relics of Soviet armor. With Ball so close to the airport, Schwartz was terrified that he might accidentally blow away one of the First Brigade’s Abrams tanks. “Don’t pull a trigger until you confirm!” he ordered.

  As Ball rolled closer, he could see through his sights that the tanks were low, sleek, and painted desert tan. They were Abrams tanks—the lead element of the First Brigade, manning the airport entrance. Ball took a deep breath. He ordered the gunner to lift the main gun tube to alert the First Brigade tankers to friendly tanks approaching.

  Farther back in the column, the battalion operations officer, Major Donovan, had just made radio contact with the First Brigade battalion at the airport entrance to warn that the column was heading in. Donovan was relieved to hear the familiar voice of the operations officer from one of the First Brigade battalions, Major Rod Coffey, an old buddy from a previous assignment.

  Ball’s tank rumbled on, its gun tube raised. From the tree lines, and from more bunkers along the highway, enemy gunfire intensified. As the tank passed through the airport entrance, past the First Brigade tanks, the gunfire stopped abruptly. Each passing tank and Bradley had the same experience—a final, furious burst of automatic rifle fire and RPGs, then silence. It was like turning off a faucet. They were home free.

  On the airport tarmac, the crew of Charlie One One popped the hatch and came out for air. Their faces were smeared with black grime from the fire. Their eyes were red and burning, and the backs of their throats were coated with the fumes of seared chemicals. There was a foul, bitter taste in their mouths—a taste they would remember for months afterward. But as miserable as they felt, they felt worse about Booker, and about Shipley and Schafer. Lieutenant Gruneisen pulled everybody together and ordered the crew to account for all sensitive items, especially those they had tossed on the first sergeant’s vehicle or had been retrieved from Highway 8 by the first sergeant’s crew. In addition to their personal gear, they had lost their sponson box, the big metal box that held all the tools needed to maintain and repair the tank. They felt defeated and bereft.

  The lieutenant, Diaz, and Hernandez went to find out about Shipley and Schafer; they had heard over the radio that the first sergeant had finally located the medevac Black Hawk helicopters after Lieutenant Ball had the other lead vehicles clear the barricades. The three men jogged across the tarmac to the ambulance exchange point. Tanks and Bradleys were still pouring in from the highway. Diaz was shocked at the sight of them. It was the first time he realized just how fierce the fight had been. Every vehicle was shot up with dents and holes and jagged scrapes that peeled the tan paint back. They were leaking oil and hydraulic fluid and trailing smoke from burning bustle racks. A couple of tracks were streaked with blood. There was shattered glass from the windshields of cars that had rammed the tanks and thousands of expended brass ammunition casings that sparkled in the morning sunlight. Diaz ran past the bullet-pocked medic tracks and saw Sergeant Booker’s body bag, still and lonesome in the deep shade of the open hatch.

  They found the Black Hawk medevacs. One chopper had just taken off with Schafer aboard. The medics had Shipley on a stretcher, strapping him down for the Black Hawk ride to the mobile surgical hospital tent at the brigade operations center eighteen kilometers south of Baghdad. Gruneisen ran up and tried to talk to Shipley. The private’s arm was still bleeding and his eye was covered with a bulky bandage. He was conscious but groggy. Gruneisen asked how he was doing, and Shipley mumbled something. Gruneisen grabbed Shawn Sullivan, the young medic, and looked him in the eye. He asked about the condition of his two soldiers. He wanted an honest answer. Sullivan said, “They’re both stable. They’re gonna be all right.” The three tankers walked back to their tank and collapsed in the shade of the turret. Gruneisen waited for a wave of emotion, something like relief or despair or sorrow. But he didn’t feel a thing.

  The rest of the column was rumbling in and lining up, motor pool–style, on the tarmac. The crews piled out, their Nomex jumpsuits dark with sweat. Some of them searched the scorched bustle racks for undamaged boxes of water. Caught up in the battle, they had forgotten to drink, and now they were severely dehydrated. They had lost all track of time. Some of the crewmen thought they had been fighting for most of the day; they thought it was mid-afternoon. Actually, it was mid-morning. The battle had lasted just over two hours and twenty minutes.

  On the third tank in, Joe Bell was drained and exhausted, but he got out and searched the bustle rack for the toy dog his wife had sent him. He found it, slightly scorched but still upright. He squeezed the toy, and out came the silly, sweet strains of the pop tune “Puppy Love.”

  On Alpha One Three, Gibbons and Gilliam and Hofer were badly shaken. The stress of reconfiguring the tank after Booker had gone down, of trying to fight through relentless enemy attacks with a three-man crew, had kept them focused on the mission. They had been compelled to focus, to function, in order to stay alive. They had not had the luxury of thinking about Sergeant Booker and what it meant not to have him beside them anymore. Now, in the relative calm and quiet of the tarmac, the terrible reality of what had happened crushed them. Gilliam was in the worst shape. For a long time, he couldn’t get out of the tank. He sat inside the turret, head down, staring, crouched in the dark with Sergeant Booker’s blood splattered everywhere. After a while he climbed out and sat on the tarmac and smoked one cigarette after another. He would not feel whole again until much later, after he had talked to the battalion chaplain and then, much later, after he had relived every sight, sound, and smell during therapy sessions with the army shrinks. He decided right there on the tarmac that he was not going to reenlist, and he wasn’t going back into Baghdad.

  Colonel Perkins, joined by Captain Hilmes, walked over to Gibbons and Gilliam. The two crewmen leaped to their feet and saluted. Perkins saw that they were still smeared with Booker’s blood. He returned their salutes—it was his honor to salute them, he told them—and he said he had never been more proud of any two men. He told them they had played a central role in helping the battalion achieve a defining moment in military history.

  Jeffrey Ellis, the gunner who had roomed with Booker, went over to say good-bye to his friend. He found Book’s body bag in the hull of the medic’s track, and he had a quiet little conversation with his old friend. The two of them had always talked about taking a cruise after the war, just sailing off to Bermuda or Cancún, someplace warm with lots of cold beer. Now Ellis told Book that he would take the cruise for him. He cried a little bit, and that made him feel better. He said good-bye and told Book as he left, “I’ll drink a beer for you.”

  To spare Booker’s young crew the ordeal of cleaning up the mess inside their tank, one of the lieutenants from Second Platoon came over with a couple of soldiers carrying buckets and rags and sponges. It was important to get the tank cleaned up right away, before the rest of the battalion came by and saw the whole awful splash of blood and tissue. It took a long time. The inside of a tank turret is a cramped place, with crevices and levers and handles. But finally the lieutenant, Ryan Kuo, and his platoon sergeant,
Eric Olson, got it all cleaned out, and the tank was good to go.

  Across the tarmac, Captain Hilmes had run over to the medical track that held the bagged remains of Sergeant Booker. He saw the physician’s assistant, Mike Dyches, sitting on the ramp and shaking his head. “There was nothing I could do for him,” he told Hilmes.

  The captain let his emotions rise up and overflow. He didn’t try to stop them. He had known Booker for three years. Booker was more than just his best platoon sergeant—he was a good and loyal friend. Hilmes looked up and saw Rick Schwartz, his face caked with tan dust.

  “Sir,” he said, “Sergeant Booker is dead.” And he began to weep. Schwartz put his arms around Hilmes and led him away. Schwartz had fought in the first Gulf War, and he knew what it meant to lose a comrade.

  Hilmes was crying, but not just for Booker. He was crying because he felt guilty—guilty for feeling so relieved to have survived, and guilty for the elation that had swept over him as he brought his soldiers back alive, save for one man. It was a confusing, conflicted feeling, and it overwhelmed him. He wouldn’t feel right about the whole thing until days later, after he had written a long letter to Booker’s mother, after he and his men had sat around and traded stories about Booker, and after he had delivered a eulogy at Booker’s memorial service without breaking down.

  American military doctrine says tanks cannot fight effectively in an urban environment, but Rogue’s thunder run had stood doctrine on its head. The armored column’s fight up the highway had shown that, on this day and under these circumstances, tanks could not only fight in urban areas, but prevail. The Desert Rogues battalion had just killed between eight hundred and a thousand enemy soldiers. They had destroyed whole networks of bunkers on both sides of the highway. They had taken out thirty to forty vehicles and unknown numbers of artillery pieces and antiaircraft batteries. It had cost them one dead, several wounded, a burned-out tank, a busted turret, and a damaged Bradley. Schwartz was convinced that they had rattled the Iraqi leadership, hitting their forces in a way they had not expected. They had exposed the limits of Baghdad’s defensive fortifications. And now, he knew, they would have to ratchet up the pressure, to go back in for more.

  Perkins knew it, too. On the tarmac, Schwartz had saluted Perkins and told him, “Mission accomplished.” The two commanders exchanged an awkward hug, their bulky flak vests bumping. Perkins told Schwartz that the next time they came up Highway 8, they were going straight downtown to the palaces. Schwartz gave Perkins a sharp look. This time, he believed him.

  At a Republican Guard command center north of the airport highway that morning, Brigadier General Mohammed Daash was dispatched by his commander to check out a report of fighting at the airport. The center had no radio communications with Iraqi units at the airport, and no one knew the situation there. To guard against coup attempts, Saddam Hussein had balkanized his armed forces. Each military unit had a separate chain of command, unconnected to any other unit. The Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards commanded by Quasi Hussein did not communicate with the regular army, which did not communicate with Uday Hussein’s Fedayeen Saddam or the Baath Party militia. In fact, the units competed for resources—for the best weapons, the choice supplies, the rare working radios and cell phones. The only glue binding these competing armies were the Saddam cronies and loyalists placed in charge—many of them tribesmen from Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit.

  For commanders like General Daash, the only source of information at this moment of crisis was the government’s bombastic minister of information, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf. That very morning, Sahaf appeared at the Palestine Hotel wearing his trademark beret and pistol. He told the international news media that Iraqi forces had repulsed an American attack, that the airport was still in government hands. But now Daash was told that three or four American tanks had been spotted at the airport. He was ordered to conduct a surveillance mission and report back. He had to find a military vehicle and persuade the driver to venture out into the streets.

  Less than an hour later, Daash returned to headquarters in a panic. He stormed through the offices, cursing his fellow commanders. “Four or five tanks!” he yelled. “Are you out of your minds? The whole damn American army is at the airport!”

  FIVE

  THE PLAN

  At the Baghdad airport on the morning of April 5, Major General Buford C. Blount III had watched the progress of the thunder run on Blue Force Tracker, the satellite communications system that depicts friendly forces as blue icons on a computer screen. Blount, a tall, laconic southerner known to close friends as Buff, was the Third Infantry Division commander. He had been up at the airport entrance all morning, ready to send out a rescue battalion from his First Brigade if the Rogue battalion had been overrun. Blount had watched on his screen as the column stopped to deal with the burning tank and when it took the wrong turns at the spaghetti junction. Every time the column slowed or stopped, Blount worried that Iraqi soldiers and Arab guerrillas would cut it in two and isolate a company or a platoon and hammer it. Another Mogadishu—that’s what he and Dave Perkins had talked about avoiding, and so far they had pulled it off.

  Now, as the tankers and the Bradley crews rested in the shade of their battered vehicles, Blount stood on the tarmac next to Perkins and plotted his next move. Blount wanted to keep the pressure on Saddam’s regime. He knew the Iraqis would reinforce Highway 8. He knew they would dig in and defend the capital. The Fedayeen Saddam, the Arab volunteers, and some Special Republican Guards—there were several thousand of them still in and around the city—had fought ferociously, even as some Republican Guard and regular army units were throwing off their uniforms and fleeing. Blount expected them to mine the highway and erect barricades.

  Fifty-four years old, with thirty-two years in the army, Blount had spent virtually his entire adult life as a tanker—ever since he was commissioned as an armor officer after graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1971. The military was in his blood. His father had been an air force colonel—Buford Blount II was now the mayor of little Bassfield, Mississippi—and an uncle had been an army general. Buff Blount had earned a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies, and he believed tanks could do more than a lot of people assumed. They had proved themselves in the south, where they had blown past the main cities and raced directly to Baghdad. They had proved themselves again that morning, ramming past a determined enemy dug in at the edge of a sprawling metropolis and fighting off speeding vehicles on a superhighway. Now Blount wanted to maintain momentum and send his tanks and Bradleys right back into the city.

  The general had seen intelligence suggesting that Special Republican Guard units were being sent into Baghdad to reinforce the capital. But in truth, he really didn’t have good intelligence. It was too dangerous to send in scouts. Satellite imagery didn’t show bunkers or redoubts inside buildings, or camouflaged armor or artillery. Blount’s division had access to only one unmanned spy drone, and its cameras weren’t providing a whole lot either. Enemy prisoners of war in Najaf and Karbala had told U.S. interrogators that the Iraqi military was expecting American tanks to surround the city with what the Americans called FOBs—forward operating bases—while infantry from the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne cleared the capital block by block. And that was the U.S. plan, at least until the thunder run that morning changed the equation. The Iraqi quartermaster colonel the battalion had captured that morning was saying the same thing. One of the Arabic translators had just told Blount and Perkins that the colonel had believed his own military’s propaganda—that U.S. forces had been stopped cold south of the Euphrates River. Until the very moment that he drove his Passat into a Bradley, the colonel had been convinced that his army was winning.

  Blount wanted another thunder run, and quickly. He thought his superiors at V Corps would agree, especially after Rogue’s charge up the highway that morning. Blount told Perkins that he might send him back into the city in two days, on Monday th
e seventh. Instead of one battalion, Blount was considering sending in the entire Second Brigade, with two tank battalions and a mechanized infantry battalion. Blount wanted them to test the city’s defenses, kill as many troops and equipment as possible, then come back out to prepare for more thunder runs and, ultimately, the siege of the capital. That morning, he sent the proposal up to V Corps and the rest of the chain of command for approval.

  At midday, the Rogue column lined up for the short trip back to the brigade operations center south of the city. The crews took the back way, down a secured highway—Highway 1—that led south and east from the airport. The brigade had seized the intersection of Highways 1 and 8 two days earlier and had set up the command post there because the interchange controlled access from the south to the city and the airport. It had been the staging area for Rogue’s thunder run that morning, and now it would be the starting point for any subsequent strike into Baghdad’s city center, eighteen kilometers north.

  As Perkins rode down Highway 1 in his command vehicle, he thought about the best way to put his tanks and Bradleys into the city. Even before talking to Blount, he had anticipated another thunder run. He welcomed the opportunity. Like Blount, he didn’t accept the conventional wisdom that tanks were at a disadvantage in urban terrain. That morning’s thunder run was proof of that. He was eager to go back into the city, but not for a thunder run. He wanted to stay.

  Perkins was a calm, patient, perceptive New Englander with a deceptively placid demeanor. He was six feet tall and, like most tankers, slight of build. He had a smooth face and rosy cheeks that made him look younger than forty-four. But Perkins also had the grave and studious manner—focused, curious, intent on results—of a much older man. He was a devout Catholic, with a wife and a teenaged son and daughter at Fort Stewart. His wife, Ginger, sent him regular issues of Our Daily Bread devotionals, which he tried to read daily.