Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  Twitty was in the middle of a firefight south of the brigade operations center on the afternoon of April 6 when he got a radio call from Perkins telling him that he had a mission for him. Perkins didn’t say what the mission was; he wanted Twitty to send someone to receive it in person. Twitty pulled his operations officer, Major Roger Shuck, away from the battle to go see Perkins. He couldn’t go himself because his battalion had not quite finished destroying the remnants of the Medina Division’s Fourteenth Brigade, which was putting up a bit of a fight and actually had crews still manning several T-72 tanks. It took the rest of the afternoon to kill them off.

  The fight was still under way when Shuck radioed to tell Twitty that the brigade was attacking into Baghdad the next morning—and that China had been ordered to secure Highway 8. Twitty was surprised to hear that tanks were going into the city. Like other commanders in the brigade, he had been told that airborne units would clear the capital. But he was not surprised to be told that China would go in behind the tank battalions. His guys were infantry, and what infantrymen did was clear and hold ground. They had been ordered two days earlier to hold a key bridge over the Euphrates that had been seized by a tank battalion, and they had been drawn into a nasty little fight when Iraqi units counterattacked. Twitty expected a much worse fight on Highway 8. Just by glancing at a map, he could see that the highway was as significant to the Iraqis as to the brigade. It was the only direct route into the city, and the regime’s last line of defense. The Iraqis would fight to the death to hold it. He was sure of that.

  Twitty was a supremely confident man—confident in his abilities as a commander and confident in the capacity of his men to fight and prevail. He was thirty-nine, a polished speaker with a frank, engaging manner. Raised in the tiny town of Chesnee, South Carolina, Twitty had graduated from the military studies program at South Carolina State University and earned a master’s degree in public administration from Central Michigan University. A career officer with a wife and fourteen-year-old daughter, he had fought in Operation Desert Storm. That experience, combined with the previous two weeks of firefights in Iraq, had afforded Twitty a certain sureness of purpose in the way he planned a mission. He knew, even before he finished up with the stubborn Fourteenth Brigade and pushed north to the Spartan Brigade command center, that he would require a guaranteed reserve force in case everything went to hell on the highway. And he knew, too, that he would have to meet face-to-face with his commanders to make sure they realized what they were being asked to achieve.

  By late afternoon on April 6, the brigade planners had completed the detailed mission orders and Perkins was ready to lay out the attack for his commanders and senior NCOs. The brigade command staff had moved earlier in the day, tearing down its tents and tarps and moving about a kilometer across Highway 8 from the dusty field to an abandoned warehouse compound just off the highway. The warehouses apparently had been used to store agricultural products; huge bales of red and blue plastic grain sacks were stacked in the cement courtyard. The compound was dirty and bedraggled—part of it was still under construction—but it contained a two-story building with a ground-floor room big enough to accommodate Perkins’s battle briefing.

  The brigade leadership cadre filed into the room, their tan desert boots leaving footprints in the dust of the cracked linoleum floor. Many of the officers were still recovering from the shock of being told that they would be going into Baghdad in a few hours. Even with the thunder run the day before, most of them still assumed that the brigade would serve as a blocking force for airborne units—not as the strike force itself. Now they were suddenly being asked to lead the charge into the capital for the entire coalition. The weight of this responsibility showed in their clenched jaws and in the intense way they studied the operation orders thrust into their hands as they sat down to await the battle briefing.

  Flies were buzzing and the late afternoon light was slanting through cracked windows as Perkins walked to the front of the room. The engineers had connected portable generators to the fluorescent lights and ceiling fans, and now harsh shadows accentuated the worry lines in the soldiers’ faces and highlighted the dark streaks of caked dirt along their necks. The fans beat the hot air. There was no PowerPoint presentation, no computer graphics. It was just a commander talking to his subordinates in a battle zone. Perkins spoke without notes, the flat pitch of his New England voice dominating the crowded room.

  After a brief introduction, Perkins asked the brigade’s intelligence officer to describe the enemy. Thirty-six-year-old Major Charles Watson, a slight, studious officer, stood before a satellite imagery map of Baghdad taped to a wall. Watson had marked the areas on the capital’s periphery as amber zones—areas that were secured, or at least somewhat secured. The rest of the city was marked red—hostile—including all the targets assigned to the tank battalions. The entire capital was, in essence, a question mark. Watson acknowledged that no one in the coalition had reliable intelligence on Baghdad. The city was still under the control of Saddam’s Special Republican Guards, some the same units that had joined with the Fedayeen and Arab volunteers to battle Rogue battalion the day before. The Guards, once believed to number thirty thousand to sixty thousand men, had been reduced by casualties and desertions to perhaps ten thousand, Watson estimated. He did not believe they had many tanks left, but they did have armored personnel carriers, artillery, antiaircraft guns, mortars, and virtually inexhaustible supplies of RPGs and AK-47 assault rifles.

  “Their strength is that they are now so well dispersed,” Watson said. They would almost certainly be dug into bunkers and trenches, on rooftops and on side streets. If significant numbers managed to mass in a single area and coordinate a counterattack, Watson warned, “we are in serious, serious trouble.”

  Watson delivered more warnings—familiar by now to the Rogue commanders and to most of the officers who had fought down south, but still worth repeating. Many Republican Guards and ordinary soldiers had thrown off their uniforms and were fighting in civilian clothes, he said, in some cases literally hiding behind civilians but in all instances taking advantage of the confusion caused by civilians wandering in and out of the kill zones. And Iraqi RPG and recoilless rifle teams, Watson said, seemed well aware that the rear grills of the tanks were vulnerable. They knew to let the tanks pass, then hit them from behind.

  The biggest unknown, Watson told the group, was the willingness of the enemy to fight and die for Saddam Hussein. Nobody knew. Iraqis—and Syrians and Jordanians and Palestinians, too—had certainly fought and died on Highway 8 the day before. It seemed only logical that they would fight even more tenaciously to hold the capital itself—to keep the palaces and ministries out of American hands.

  “They’ve done an outstanding job of propaganda,” Watson said. “Their people actually believe the regime is defeating the United States.” That, he said, was reason enough for them to stand and fight.

  Perkins was glad Watson had mentioned the propaganda war. He wanted his men to understand how important it was not just to take Baghdad, but to prove that they had seized control. They would be performing in front of the world. Theirs was a mission of persuasion as well as force. The thunder run the day before had been a tactical success, but the brigade hadn’t managed to refute the regime’s claims of an Iraqi victory. Perkins wasn’t worried about the tactical details of his Baghdad plan. He trusted his commanders to make sure that their crews knew exactly where to go and what to do. They had been pulling it off since the brigade crossed into Iraq more than two weeks earlier. Perkins thought it was more important to explain to his men why they were going into Baghdad. For any commander, tactics are the easy part. Soldiers were trained to follow a battle plan. But what they needed in order to fight—to fight with vigor and determination—was motivation and inspiration. It wasn’t enough to know their mission. They had to know their purpose.

  Perkins began: “We have set the conditions to create the collapse of the Iraqi regime. Now we’re transit
ioning from a tactical battle to a psychological and informational battle. This is the last big battle tomorrow, gentlemen. They said it would take five divisions to win this war, but there’s no question now that we can really do it ourselves tomorrow. We’ve got to seal the deal now.”

  The Medina Division was gone, he said. So was the Hammurabi Division, another Special Republican Guard unit that had been eviscerated that week by coalition aircraft and American tanks. Baghdad was surrounded. All that held Saddam’s regime together was concentrated now in that narrow stretch of palaces and ministries and monuments along the Tigris. “We get all that out of there, it’s all political maneuvering from here on out,” Perkins said.

  The way to convince the world that the regime was falling was to put American tanks and Bradleys in the palace complex overnight, he went on. That was the ultimate goal—to go beyond a thunder run and hold the palace complex for the entire night. And the only way to spend the night in the city was to keep Highway 8 open for fuel and ammunition. Perkins himself would make the call on spending the night at Hour Four—four hours after the launch of the mission at 6 a.m. It all depended on the lines of communications up and down Highway 8. The China battalion absolutely had to keep the LOC open. “That’s our lifeline,” Perkins told them.

  He repeated his order from the first thunder run: go in fast and hard, and don’t stop. He reminded his company commanders that they would not stop this time to deal with a downed vehicle. He looked at the tank battalion commanders, Flip deCamp and Rick Schwartz, and said, “Flip, I want you to stay on his ass.”

  There was a brief discussion of the importance of avoiding friendly fire. Marines, who were fighting their way into Baghdad’s southeastern districts, had been advised that the Spartan Brigade would be operating on the west bank of the Tigris, across the river from the marines’ assigned zone. The air force had been notified that, along the length of Highway 8, the brigade would not venture beyond the roadway and the main interchanges. Thus “deconflicting” close air support targets on either side of the highway would be quick and straightforward. And, finally, Special Forces A Teams would be driving up Highway 8 to collect intelligence on enemy forces, political maneuvering, and any evidence of chemical or biological weapons. They would be driving two Toyota pickups—dangerously similar to Iraqi technical vehicles—distinguished by fluorescent orange VS-17 panels draped over the hood and roof. Perkins gestured toward several men wearing jeans, boots, and baseball caps at the rear of the room. “Their vehicle is right outside,” he said. “Go take a good look at it.”

  Perkins mentioned Sahaf, the information minister. He had to admit it—he was becoming obsessed with that cocky little functionary in his military costume and beret. Perkins didn’t want to spin his own lies and propaganda. He just wanted the truth to get out. “So we’re going to the back of the room where they give the news conferences and ask a couple of questions—and ask for validation for parking for a hundred tanks,” he said.

  Up to this point, the officers and NCOs had worn their battle faces—tight, tense looks of concentration. But now a rumble of laughter rolled through the room, a little exaggerated, but a welcome break in the tension. A minute later, a major piped up and asked Perkins, “Will there be water in the palace swimming pools? We could all use a good bath.” Perkins gave a dry, short laugh.

  But the light mood passed swiftly, and soon the men bent back over their orders and their briefing books. They all believed that taking Baghdad was their ticket home. Once Baghdad fell, the war would be over. Their job would be done. There had been virtually no talk of postwar reconstruction and nation-building. The division had been given no guidance for the postcombat phase, no orders for what to do with Baghdad once it was in American hands. Their focus was on the next day’s mission. They knew people were going to die—a lot of Iraqis and, almost certainly, a few Americans, perhaps someone hunched over a folding chair in that cramped little room under the lazy spinning fans.

  “This is not going to be an easy mission,” Perkins said. To seize a city of 5 million people defended by thousands of troops, they were sending in about 970 combat soldiers in sixty tanks and twenty-eight Bradleys, plus a few armored personnel carriers. They were sending just thirty Bradleys, fourteen tanks, and a few hundred soldiers to hold ten kilometers of Highway 8. Perkins looked around the room. Outside, the bright spring sun was setting, and the low buzz of mosquitoes stirred the air. “Tomorrow is our last big fight. Good luck, gentlemen.” Everyone shouted out, “Hoo-ah!,” the military’s all-purpose acknowledgment, and the officers and NCOs filed out to brief their units camped in the surrounding fields.

  That evening, some of the officers and men squeezed into a darkened room behind the cinder-block room where Perkins had delivered the battle brief. Inside, the brigade chaplain, Father Patrick Ratigan, was setting up his portable altar. Ratigan was a major, an ordained Catholic priest, a stout man with graying hair and solemn eyes. He was wearing an officer’s uniform with a major’s gold leaf sewn into one collar and a dark chaplain’s cross stitched into the other. He unfolded a little camouflaged communion kit on top of an old table he had found in the room. He withdrew a small Bible with an olive drab cover—he had not been issued one of the new, desert tan Bibles—and lit several candles. Father Ratigan was now ready for the sacrament of confession, for the granting of general absolution upon danger of death. It was something he always did for Catholics on the eve of battle.

  In the glow of the candles, the priest spoke of courage and faith as the soldiers lined up before a bullet-pocked wall to receive communion. The men bowed their heads and prayed. “Help us overcome war and hardship,” Father Ratigan said. “May Almighty God bless you all.”

  The priest was still conducting the service when an officer burst into the room. “We’ve got full enemy contact to the south! Everybody’s gotta get in full battle rattle!” he yelled. The crunch of mortars sounded in the distance, and then the low drumming of small-arms fire. Everyone bolted from the room, only to have the sounds of fighting suddenly fade away. One of the brigade’s units on the far perimeter had absorbed a brief hit-and-run attack, and a nearby convoy returning from a firefight to the south had also been attacked with mortars. One of the battalions had lit up a couple of enemy vehicles, and the ammunition inside them cooked off with a steady pop pop pop. It went on that way for the rest of the night—a series of probes and feints by an unseen enemy, firing and moving in the dark. Patrols were dispatched to seek out the enemy while the rest of the officers and men of the Spartan Brigade prepared for the biggest battle of their lives.

  Sometime after midnight, Perkins set up his cot in a tiny space behind the room where Father Ratigan had conducted the service. At that moment, he was alone, and it was a startling sensation. A commander in combat is almost never alone; he is constantly besieged by staff officers with updates or by subordinate commanders seeking guidance. Perkins had already conducted a final, top-level review of the mission with Wesley, Schwartz, and deCamp. He outlined which decisions were theirs to make and which were his. He had heard horror stories about command helicopters stacked up in the air over battlefields in Vietnam, jammed with top commanders micromanaging platoons on the ground. He wanted his commanders to know that he would let them make the decisions they needed to make.

  Perkins also had identified several key decisions he knew he would have to make the next day: whether to spend the night in Baghdad; how to reposition units on the ground as the battle evolved; how to best use artillery and close air support; how to resupply his tank battalions; and when to send the fuel and ammunition convoys up Highway 8. Perkins bore ultimate responsibility for more than four thousand soldiers. He was taking almost a thousand of them into the most heavily defended city in the world. He knew American soldiers would die the next day. It sounded callous, but he told his commanders that the mission’s main goal was not to avoid getting anyone killed. It was to force the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He could not—and
they could not—get distracted by the death of one man or several men. The soldiers and the medics had been trained to treat and evacuate casualties, and the brigade had worked hard to have the forward surgical teams in place. When the battalions began to take casualties the next day, it would be Perkins’s responsibility to press forward based on the course of action that best served the mission in the long run, not what seemed right for an isolated situation at a particular instant. The execution had to be hard, fast, and violent. The greater the speed, the greater the violence, the fewer lives that would be lost.

  Inside the little room, Perkins took advantage of the solitary moment to pray, and to complete the sacrament interrupted by the mortar attack. He took out his small army-issue Bible and turned to Isaiah 6:8. The brigade’s motto, “Send Me,” was taken from the verse. Members of the brigade often punctuated their salutes by shouting, “Send me!” Perkins read the verse: I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. He opened an Our Daily Bread devotional from his wife and turned to the daily passage for April 7. On the same page was the passage for April 8. It was from Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He thought the verse fit his situation, and in it he found strength.

  Later Eric Wesley set up his cot in the same tight space. The two officers wanted to get a couple of hours of sleep before the dawn mission. Sitting on their bunks in the dark, finishing up the operation order, they discussed the various ways the Fedayeen and Special Republican Guards might attack the palace complex if the tank battalions managed to get in and set up for the night. They did not doubt the wisdom of the goals they had set or the ability of their men to achieve those goals. But they did wonder what it would cost them. Perkins stared out a window and said, “Damn, it’s dark out there. If we end up staying tomorrow night, it could get pretty tough.” Wesley nodded. There was nothing more to say. They stretched out and tried to steal a bit of sleep.