Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  The first time Twitty had looked at Highway 8 on his map, he thought: registered artillery. Certainly the Iraqis had registered the artillery and mortar coordinates at each interchange. That’s what he would have done if he were in charge of defending the capital. He also would have fortified each major interchange to block and trap any forces trying to set up there. Twitty knew the brigade’s two tank battalions would blow past the intersections. What he didn’t know was what the Iraqis would do in the interval before Twitty’s own mechanized infantry battalion arrived to seize and hold the interchanges. This uncertainty weighed on him. It didn’t help that Colonel Perkins had taken two of Twitty’s platoons—about eighty soldiers and eight Bradleys—as a reserve force to protect the brigade command center. It would be left vulnerable once the brigade’s three combat battalions pulled away at dawn, so Perkins had to weaken Twitty in order to strengthen his command post. But that left Twitty shorthanded at Objective Curly, the southernmost interchange. He had asked Perkins whether he could call on the two platoons if he got into trouble. “Whatever you need,” Perkins had assured him.

  Twitty decided to put one of his two full companies on Objective Moe, the northern interchange at the spaghetti junction, which provided access to the city center to the east and the airport to the west. The second full company would take Objective Larry, two and a half kilometers south, where an intersecting highway led to the strategic Al Jadriyah Bridge across the Tigris River to the east. The third company, minus two platoons, would move into Objective Curly, about six kilometers north of the brigade command center and the reserve force.

  Now Twitty faced his commanders and staff and laid out the battle plan, with all its unknowns. He could tell that the men were still adjusting to the shock of charging straight into Baghdad—or in their case, straight into the three main interchanges controlling access to the city—after being told for months that they would be setting up blocking positions outside the capital.

  “Guys, this is it,” Twitty told them. “We’re going to take the fight right into Baghdad. And what I’m going to ask you to do is hold some terrain. You have one choice here. You can hold it and be successful. Or you can hold it and die.”

  Normally, the commanders and staff goofed around during meetings, throwing out asides and wisecracks. Now there was silence. Twitty knew what his men were thinking: We could lose people on this one. They’d been lucky so far. They had not lost a single man to combat, and just three men had suffered battle wounds.

  Twitty tried to reassure them. “We’re going to hold this terrain,” he told them. “I want the enemy to die here. The key to your success is, you have to get in there and protect yourself. And the way you protect yourself from these suicide bombers is you cut down all the light posts, you drag all the cars you can find, berm them up around the intersection so the suicide cars can’t get through.”

  Twitty saw looks of concern on the faces of his men and he said: “This is it. We could lose a few people. We’ll probably take some casualties on this one, and that’s okay. Some of us in this room may die, and that’s okay, too. Just know it’s for a good cause.” Then he offered a short prayer before sending the commanders off into the night to prepare their crews for the fight ahead.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Major Sean Mullen had pulled up to the last American checkpoint on Highway 8 in a small convoy and asked the soldiers on duty how far ahead the road had been cleared and secured. The sentries told him that, as far as they knew, it had been cleared only to that point. Mullen had been ordered to go farther north and have a look. He was the brigade S-4, the officer in charge of all supplies—from ammunition and fuel to food and water. He wanted to make sure the fuel and ammunition convoys had a secure section of highway to assemble their vehicles while waiting to be sent up Highway 8 the next day to resupply the tank battalions once they had fought their way into the city. Colonel Perkins had made it abundantly clear that getting the R2 package—the refuel and rearm convoy—into the city was crucial.

  A short distance north of the checkpoint, Mullen and his men made a discovery that would stir considerable interest at the brigade command center. They came across rows and rows of what appeared to be dirty black spots in the northbound lanes. The spots turned out to be land mines—hundreds of them. Somehow, Iraqi teams had managed to creep out onto the roadway and plant a minefield that snaked four hundred meters up the highway. The entire mission was now at risk. So were Mullen and the little convoy of Humvees and MP vehicles he had led up the highway. Shortly after discovering the minefield, they came under attack by Iraqi fighters in technical vehicles and had to flee back south, past the minefield. Mullen radioed Captain Larry Burris, who sent a platoon of tanks north to assist him. But the Abrams tanks could not move past the minefield, so Mullen’s convoy had to outrun the technicals before reaching the safety of the tanks. Along the way, a piece of shrapnel sliced into Mullen’s face.

  Mullen rushed back to the brigade command center, blood streaming down his cheek, to find Colonel Perkins. The news of the minefield triggered a brief moment of panic. If the Iraqis could sneak in and plant a minefield just a few kilometers from the brigade headquarters, they might also have been able to plant minefields and barriers all the way up Highway 8. There was talk of postponing the mission. The brigade’s planners began devising contingencies and alternatives to a thunder run that was now just hours away.

  Perkins and Eric Wesley, the executive officer, decided to request a UAV drone for a spy flight over Highway 8. UAVs were in short supply and difficult to obtain on short notice, but division headquarters prevailed on V Corps to put one of the small aircraft up over the highway. While he waited for the UAV report, Wesley asked Perkins what conditions would force him to postpone the thunder run.

  Perkins turned to Wesley and said sharply, “Eric, this brigade is going to Baghdad tomorrow morning.”

  Wesley asked if Perkins would still attempt the mission if the UAV found minefields and obstacles all the way up Highway 8 into the city. Perkins thought for a moment and said, “Then we’d have to delay,” but only, he added, if the highway were completely blocked.

  It was not until much later—about 4 a.m. on the seventh, or less than two hours before the thunder run was to launch—that division headquarters reported that the UAV had detected four or five barriers on Highway 8 made from burned-out vehicles and debris, but no more minefields.

  Wesley asked Perkins if the mission was still on. “Roger,” the colonel said.

  Earlier in the morning, an emergency call had gone out to the combat engineers and sappers of Second Platoon, Delta Company, of the Tenth Engineer Battalion, commanded by Captain David Hibner. Regardless of what the UAV flight would uncover, the minefield had to be cleared right away. The thunder run was still on pending the UAV report, with a launch time of 5:30 a.m.

  Combat engineers tend to be inquisitive and dexterous types, the sort of men who, as children, dismantled small household appliances to find out what made them work. Many of them have survived childhood encounters with firecrackers, chimney fires, and cherry bombs. During combat operations, engineers are asked to lay down bridges or blow them up, to set up minefields or clear them. And early on the morning of April 7, a team from Delta Company was sent racing up Highway 8 to figure out a way to dispose of a minefield before the lead tanks of Rogue battalion rolled through on the thunder run into Baghdad at first light. After considerable discussion at the brigade command center, it had been decided to mount a covert breach—an attempt to clear the highway safely and quietly, without alerting the enemy.

  This was not the first covert breach for the company. The engineers had cleared a similar minefield in Najaf a week earlier, so they knew what to expect. That gave them a certain confidence, though the Najaf field had been only about seventy meters deep, not even a quarter the size of this monster minefield. What they did not know, and what weighed on them as the rode north up Highway 8 in the dark, was whether the enemy was
out there waiting for them. It was standard U.S. military doctrine to “overwatch” minefields, to make sure that the enemy doesn’t tamper with them. The engineers had no idea what Iraqi doctrine dictated, or whether anyone in the Iraqi military paid attention to doctrine. But if enemy soldiers were out there and decided to fire on them, the covert breach would become a breach under fire—the last thing anybody wanted to deal with in the middle of the night on the highway to Baghdad. As an emergency backup, they hauled up a trailer loaded with a MCLC—pronounced micklick—a mine-clearing line charge. It looked like a rocket trailed by sausage links. The rocket was designed to be fired into a minefield, scattering links of C-4 plastic explosive that would detonate on impact and clear the field. It created a hell of a mess, and so it was not the preferred method for clearing a highway for a thunder run.

  When Sergeant Steve Oslin got his first look at the minefield, he was puzzled. It looked like it had been set up by amateurs. The mines—hundreds of them—had been lined up right on top of the asphalt. Each one had been covered with dirt in what appeared to have been a clumsy attempt to disguise them. It was possible, Oslin thought, that the dirt was hiding trip wires or antihandling devices—sensors that exploded if the mines were disturbed. He realized that, whatever the reason for the dirt, it would have the effect of slowing down the clearing teams. They would have to clear each mine by hand, checking it for antihandling devices or trip wires. Perhaps the Iraqis knew what they were doing.

  Whispering in the dark, the sappers unloaded their vehicles. Behind them was a platoon of four Bradleys from Captain Burris’s infantry company, the track commanders up in the hatches scanning both sides of the highway through night-vision goggles. Beyond the far northern end of the minefield, across a field east of the highway, they could see a technical vehicle, an antiaircraft gun, and a recoilless rifle. The gunners lined up each target in their thermal sights, ready to hit them with coax if they threatened the sappers. This was a covert breach; the Bradley crews were there to provide security, not to initiate a firefight.

  The sappers were not aware of the enemy. Their focus was on the mines—and how they were going to clear them in just a couple of hours. It was after 3 a.m. by the time they set up and unloaded. The armored column was scheduled to launch at daylight, or sometime after 5:30 a.m. Two squad leaders, Sergeant Jason Deming and Staff Sergeant Eric Guzman, decided to test a couple of the mines for antihandling devices. They would “lasso” them. A lasso was a length of engineers’ tape made of thick cloth, a long strap, dragged into a minefield to “lasso” mines and haul them in. They had used the technique in Najaf to drag mines from a safe distance to test them for antihandling devices or booby traps. Here on Highway 8, they decided, they would lasso eight mines—the first two rows of four mines each—dragging them across the asphalt to see if they detonated.

  Specialist Alfred Hassan, a sapper everybody called Bear, walked slowly onto the highway, tiptoeing between the mines. He carefully draped a length of strap around the first mine. He could see that all the mines were Italian-made antitank mines, powerful enough to flip over a seventy-ton tank. They were about ten inches in diameter and five inches high, roughly the size and shape of a birthday cake. Hassan tied the strap into a slip knot, cinched it tightly around the mine, and slowly made his way back to the rest of the engineer team, careful to avoid getting his feet tangled up in the strap leading back to safety. Now that would truly be embarrassing, and probably fatal, he thought—to trip over the strap and set off an antitank mine. Hassan made it back to the vehicles, where the rest of the team was lying flat on the highway, staying low for protection in the event of a blast wave. Hassan got down, too. Somebody whispered the countdown . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . and Oslin yanked on the end of the strap. The mine slid across the highway. The men braced for an explosion. There was nothing. The mine came to a rest, still intact.

  The sappers repeated the lasso process for seven more mines. Each attempt produced the same result—no explosion. The squad leaders talked it over. They didn’t have time to lasso all four hundred mines. That would take all night. They decided to take a chance and assume that none of the mines had trip wires or antihandling devices. They would remove them by hand, checking each one by using a quicker but much more dangerous method—the two-finger sweep, checking for wires or sensors by running two fingers around each mine. If anybody got hurt, the medics would treat the casualties and evacuate them. The company commander would then decide whether to abort the mission or press on. Nobody talked about casualties. Nobody even thought about getting hurt; they had faith in their training. In fact, faith was the fulcrum of their training—faith that if they performed exactly the way they had been trained, nothing bad could possibly happen.

  Just four men would go out and remove the mines, checking each one and then lifting it and setting it carefully on the shoulder of the highway. The squad leaders didn’t want to risk losing more men if a mine went off. Two more men would follow behind, isolating the cleared areas by creating small berms from trash and debris scattered along the roadside. Two of the squad leaders, Guzman and Staff Sergeant Matthew Oliver, would scan the perimeter through night-vision goggles, providing security. Other engineers would haul out orange traffic cones to mark the cleared roadway for the armored convoy.

  Oslin would be clearing the mines. He unshouldered his rifle and removed his fatigue jacket. He didn’t want anything flopping down on the mines while he was crouching down to clear them. None of the sappers wore protective gear; it just got in the way and made it difficult to move freely. Oslin took a deep breath, adjusted his kneepads, and walked out to the first row of mines. He got down on his knees and went at it. He carefully cleared the dirt from each mine, slowly running two fingers around the sides and top, ready to stop abruptly if he felt a wire or antihandling device. He tried not to think about what he would have done if he had set up the minefield, because he would have drilled holes in the asphalt beneath the mines and booby-trapped them to explode if anyone tried to lift them. But he couldn’t not think of all that, and it haunted him. He kept thinking about his wife, and he ran through his life insurance policy in his head and thought: Well, at least she’ll be taken care of if I don’t come home. He had those thoughts for mine after mine, dozens of them, as he cleared each one and picked it up and carefully set it down on the other side of a concrete divider on the east shoulder of the highway.

  The other sappers worked the field the same way, sweeping, clearing, lifting, walking, setting the mines down. It was a cool desert night, but they were sweating under their T-shirts. All of the mines were covered with dirt, and a few were topped with human excrement. Apparently, at least a few of the Iraqis were not in such a hurry that they couldn’t stop and defecate. Nobody knew what to make of it, but they took it as an insult—just a filthy insult, as if they didn’t have enough to worry about already.

  The sappers worked steadily, silently, row after row. Oslin looked up at one point and felt a sudden stab of fear. He couldn’t see the security vehicles. The highway had bent to the right, and now he was out of sight. He could see the dark outlines of burned-out Iraqi vehicles destroyed during Rogue’s thunder run. He was worried about someone taking a shot at him. He could see faint streaks of light in buildings in the distance, and the wind was blowing trash all over the highway. At one point Oslin was startled by a loud crashing sound—the wind had torn a section of sheet metal from a roof, and it clanged across the field. Somewhere in the distance, a metal garage door was banging in the wind.

  Behind Oslin and the other sappers, in the lead troop carrier at the southern edge of the minefield, Sergeant Tony Raskin was scanning both sides of the highway with his night-vision goggles. His .50-caliber machine gun was primed to fire. He was under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon, but he intended to open up with the .50-caliber if anybody took a shot at his guys crouching and moving at the far end of the minefield. Raskin had spotted three or four people walking around ab
out three hundred meters off the west side of the highway. He couldn’t tell whether they were civilians or soldiers, or whether they had weapons. But they made him nervous, and he kept the goggles on them. From time to time, the squad leaders would walk back and give him progress reports to radio back to the platoon leader in the medevac track, First Sergeant Dale Vanormer. The operation was moving briskly, but not as fast as Raskin liked. He wanted to get it done and get out of there.

  Ahead of Raskin, Sergeant Deming and Staff Sergeant Christopher Turner were shuffling up the side of the highway, hauling stacks of orange traffic cones. They had their M-16s slung across their backs and their night-vision goggles strapped to their heads, struggling with armloads of cones. In the dark, they looked like eerie fluorescent orange shapes scooting up the highway, shedding bits of orange every fifteen meters as they dropped cones to mark the cleared lanes. Running back and forth to collect cones and drop them off, Deming and Turner had to pass a section of highway that was exposed to an alleyway off to the right. They heard noises from that direction but they couldn’t see anything, even with their goggles. They were winded and anxious, and worried about having to stop, drop the cones, and shoulder their weapons if someone took a shot at them. They kept thinking that if somebody got hurt way up there, it would take a while for the medics to run all the way up the highway in the dark. A man could bleed to death before anyone arrived to treat him. They were relieved, and more than a little surprised, when they finished setting up the cones without a shot being fired.

  After a little less than two hours, all 444 mines had been cleared, lifted, and moved to the shoulder. The sappers and the squad leaders hustled back down the highway, and everybody performed accountability, counting off in the dark. They felt enormous relief and a sense of pride. They had just pulled off a hell of a thing, clearing a massive minefield in a combat zone, in the dark, with no protective equipment. Deming kept thinking, Damn, how many guys can say they pulled off a sneaky covert sapper breach in the middle of the night—not in training, but for real, against real live bad guys? They were all exhausted and drained, but they felt somehow elated and giddy, and each man could tell by the look in the other guys’ eyes that they felt it, too.