Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  They got back to the vehicles and unloaded a directional panel, a stretch of canvas marked with a huge white arrow. The armor crews had been instructed to follow the arrow and the cones through the cleared lanes. The engineers set up the panel, tied it down with parachute cord, braced it with dirt, and made sure the arrow was pointing away from the mines. Then everybody loaded back up and the vehicles pulled away, the Bradleys staying behind to cover their retreat back south to the brigade command center. The sun was coming up over the desert. It was 5:40 a.m.

  The engineers had been riding south for just a few minutes when they heard a series of explosions. The Bradleys had opened up with their coax and Twenty-five Mike Mike. A week would pass before the engineers learned that, while they had been creeping through the minefield that night, they were being watched by Iraqi soldiers manning two technicals, an antiaircraft gun, and a recoilless rifle. The Bradleys destroyed them all. The engineers knew nothing of this now as they encountered the lead Rogue tanks of the armored column, rolling north at dawn on Highway 8 toward the freshly cleared minefield, bound for the palace complex of Saddam Hussein. The thunder run was on.

  SEVEN

  THE PALACE GATES

  Before taking off on any mission, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Gantt always reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of Bazooka bubblegum to hand to Dave Perkins. It was a little ritual they had developed during the firefights down south, a sort of prebattle talisman—the passing of the lucky gum. They had done it before the thunder run on April 5, and now, just before dawn on April 7, Gantt reached for his gum.

  He had just climbed aboard Perkins’s command vehicle, an armored personnel carrier equipped with so many communications antennae that it looked like it was carrying a load of heavily armed fishermen with their poles swaying in the back. Perkins would direct the day’s fight from the commander’s hatch, talking on various radio nets with the division commander, General Blount; the two tank battalion commanders, Rick Schwartz and Flip deCamp; and executive officer Eric Wesley at the tactical operations center at the intersection of Highways 1 and 8, where the armored column was lined up now, ready to launch on this still, foggy morning south of Baghdad.

  Gantt was an artilleryman, the commander of the Battle Kings, the First Battalion, Ninth Field Artillery Regiment. He rode in the carrier’s hatch at Perkins’s right elbow, working the battalion and brigade fire nets to control all “indirect fires”—all artillery and rockets. Gantt, forty-two, was a tall, long-limbed man with a worldly air. He had a master’s degree in Near Eastern studies from Princeton, and he spoke Arabic and Hebrew. He had served a stint as a United Nations military observer in the Middle East, and another stint as a Middle East political-military analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. With his knowledge of the region, as well as his expertise in artillery, Gantt was a valuable asset to Perkins, who kept him at his side during battles.

  Gantt’s big guns were set up now in a farm field just south of the operations center, the long tan tubes of the Paladin howitzers upraised and pointed north through the mist and fog. The Paladin was a 155mm howitzer that had been brought into service after Operation Desert Storm, and the Iraqi war was its first real combat test. Gantt loved the new guns. The Paladins were mounted on tracks and capable of speeds of up to fifty-six kilometers an hour—not quite as fast as the tanks and Bradleys, but impressive for self-propelled artillery. They looked like bulky tanks, but with oversized cannons capable of flinging a ninety-five-pound projectile twenty-four kilometers. They could fire accurately on the move and were designed to “shoot and scoot”—to fire off a series, then speed away to escape counterbattery fire. On this particular morning, a dozen Paladins were lined up across a farmer’s field at a place designated Objective Trista, where they were primed and ready. It was Gantt’s responsibility to make sure the Paladins laid down accurate fire at several interchanges along Highway 8 precisely ten minutes before the armored column arrived at each overpass. It was a complex, delicate mission requiring exquisite timing and coordination. It was the first time during the war that the brigade had attempted to combine artillery with a fast-moving armored raid.

  Gantt had survived the thunder run two days earlier. He had cringed every time the command carrier rolled under an overpass, where Republican Guards and Fedayeen had launched RPGs and fired AK-47s straight down toward the roadway. The Rogue battalion had been fortunate to lose just one man that day. For this thunder run, Perkins wanted those overpasses cleared—but without destroying them or blocking Highway 8 with rubble from the impact of heavy artillery. Gantt and Perkins decided to drop HEPD on the overpasses—high-explosive point-detonating rounds. Their fuses were timed to explode ten to fifteen meters above ground, spraying hot shrapnel straight down. HEPD was like a little neutron bomb. It killed people but left infrastructure intact. The shells would eviscerate any human being within roughly 150 meters of the airburst but spare the overpasses and the highway any serious structural damage. Gantt was confident his crews could pull it off. The Paladins had performed well just the night before, when Stephen Twitty’s China battalion was harassed by mortar fire. They had swiftly and efficiently destroyed every last mortar position.

  But just before the armored column pulled out, Gantt got another order, for prep fire. The spy drones and the scouts had detected Iraqi mortars and antiaircraft guns a little more than one and a half kilometers north on Highway 8. Gantt would have to eliminate them to clear the way for the column. He ordered a series of strikes from a battalion of multiple rocket launchers posted near the intersections of Highways 1 and 8. The rockets were highly efficient killers; they could destroy everything inside a square kilometer grid in fifteen seconds. Twenty-four rockets screamed from their launchers and exploded in the distance. Minutes later, the forward observers reported back: targets destroyed.

  Things were moving quickly. The column lurched to life, rolling up Highway 8 to the final American checkpoint. Minutes later, the Paladins targeted the first interchange, the thirty-nine-inch projectiles erupting from the tubes in bursts of orange flame and black smoke. The shells whined overhead and detonated in the air above the overpass, two overlapping rounds at each corner of the interchange. Gantt wanted a scattershot effect—overlapping concentric circles of 40 meters’ diameter each for a kill zone of perhaps 150 meters. He heard the deep thud of impact. He knew that any human being standing anywhere on or near the overpass at Curly was now flat on the ground, dead or mortally wounded. An exploding 155mm round does ghastly things to people, but these people were en-dangering the lives of his men, and Gantt felt no remorse. He was energized by the mission into Baghdad, eager to prove his battalion’s effectiveness in battle, and anxious to finish off things in Baghdad so that he and his men could go home. There was also the matter of propaganda—specifically, Sahaf the information minister. Gantt and Perkins had discussed how satisfying it would be to pull their tanks up to the information ministry and expose Sahaf as a fraud.

  Toward the front of the column, Rick Schwartz was up in his cupola, listening to the 155s whistle overhead and then slam down. They were hitting just a kilometer or so ahead of his lead tanks. Schwartz was on the radio to his field artillery officer, who was talking to Gantt’s artillerymen back in the farm field. Schwartz was calling out latitudinal grid lines known as northings: “I’m at the seventy-nine, I’m at the eighty. Shoot it!”—telling Gantt and his men precisely when to launch the rounds. Schwartz was pleased by how smoothly the communication was flowing; artillery was treacherous stuff, and if you got careless it could drop right on your head. But even though the brigade had not previously used artillery to cover a speeding armored column, everyone on the combat team had learned to synchronize and communicate during all the firefights down south. Schwartz was able to call in his position and, in less than three minutes, the rounds would crash down right on the mark.

  It was a magnificent thing, Schwartz thought—this great humming flow of radios and machinery and weaponry, al
l flowing north to Baghdad. The mission was playing out as planned. The column had rolled past the cleared minefield without incident, herded into the western lanes by the engineers’ orange cones and white directional arrow. Just north of the minefield, the Iraqis had erected a barrier on the highway, stacking up burned-out cars and hunks of concrete and road debris. But the spy drones had picked it up the night before and transmitted the imagery down to the brigade operations center. The information was passed to Schwartz, who had his lead tanks prepare their plows. Lieutenant Bobby Hall’s platoon was in the lead again—Captain Andy Hilmes had put him back up front, despite his missed turn two days earlier, telling him, “This is your highway.” Hall could see that the Iraqis, for some reason, had left convenient two-meter gaps between the barriers. These obstacles were not as effectively placed as the barriers the Iraqis had erected near the airport two days earlier. Hall’s plow tanks were able to wedge between the barriers, get low for leverage, and shove the piles of junk and debris off to the side of the highway.

  As the column approached the first big interchanges, at Objective Curly, Schwartz could see that the overpass was clear. The artillery had blown everything off the bridge—soldiers, vehicles, debris. But the airbursts had not disturbed the gunmen hiding in the creases, where the underside of the bridge met the support walls. Their RPG launchers were detected by the gunners as they scanned the creases through their magnified sights. Schwartz gave the order to engage, and the Bradley gunners sent Twenty-five Mike Mike rattling up into the creases. The way the rounds exploded and splattered reminded Schwartz of a paintball game. The gunmen simply disappeared in a black curtain of smoke, and the column rolled on.

  Back on the open highway, some of the bunkers that Rogue had hit two days earlier had been reseeded. The awful whoosh of RPGs rose up from both sides of the highway, followed by bursts of automatic weapons fire. Schwartz could see technicals and trucks moving into position on the access roads, and it became clear that the Iraqis had not adjusted their tactics over the past two days. They were still trying to break the order of march, still using RPG crews and recoilless rifles and suicide vehicles to hammer sections of the column in hopes of isolating and killing the crews. It seemed to Schwartz that the rate of fire was not as intense as during the first thunder run. He thought Rogue had broken much of the resistance two days earlier. If Saturday’s thunder run was a ten on a ten-point scale in terms of enemy resistance, he figured today’s was perhaps a six. He felt confident about blowing through the defenses on the highway and straight into the downtown government complex.

  Then Joe Bell’s tank took a couple of wicked hits. The tank had survived five RPG hits on the first thunder run, and even Bell’s toy dog, Puppy Love, had arrived intact. But now Bell, manning the commander’s hatch of the column’s lead tank, was wondering just how many more RPGs his shrapnel-pocked Abrams could withstand. He had just passed the scorched remains of Charlie One Two, which didn’t exactly build his confidence. He felt a little better after he pumped a few rounds from his .50-caliber into a Soviet-made tracked recovery vehicle—basically, a huge tow truck for tanks—that was parked next to Charlie One Two. He couldn’t believe it: it was hooked up to the stricken tank. The Iraqis were actually trying to tow an American tank in the middle of a battle. Bell radioed back and warned Captain Hilmes. Just to make sure the recovery vehicle was destroyed, the captain had his tank gunner put a HEAT round into it.

  Bell had just passed Charlie One Two when an RPG screamed toward him. It smashed into the right side of his tank, a tremendous blow. The whole tank rocked sideways, and Bell had to hold on tight. From the trailing tank, Sergeant First Class Ronald Gaines radioed Bell, “You just got hit,” as if Bell hadn’t noticed.

  A minute later a second RPG streaked in and ripped through the rear of Bell’s tank, straight through the hull. Gaines’s voice came over the net again: “You just got hit again. You’re leaking real bad.”

  Lieutenant Ball, the platoon leader, radioed and asked, “Hey, are you guys okay?” Bell’s voice came back: “Yeah, we’re all okay. We got a small fire going.”

  The rear compartment was burning. The automatic fire control system doused the blaze with a spray of Halon, and the crew pulled the emergency lever to fire another round of the flame retardant. The fire went out, but the fuel and hydraulic lines had been ruptured. Fuel and hydraulic fluid were leaking onto the highway. The tank rolled another hundred meters, then aborted, shutting itself down.

  Bell wasn’t particularly alarmed. He knew the drill. Colonel Perkins and Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz had made it clear that the column was not going to be held up by a disabled tank this time around. This time, recovery vehicles were standing by to push forward and tow any disabled tank back to the brigade operations center. Bell’s tank was only three and a half kilometers from the center. The rest of the column kept moving, and over the radio Bell heard a voice telling his crew, “Don’t worry. They’re coming for you.” It didn’t seem so bad. They didn’t have hydraulic power, but they could still fire the main gun, the coax, the loader’s machine gun, and their automatic rifles.

  The rest of the column pulled away. Bell and his crewmen sat there, buttoned up, a lone tank at the side of the highway. Bell felt even more exposed when the rest of the column moved out of radio range and he couldn’t raise anybody on the net to find out when the recovery vehicle was coming. It was like to trying to reach an AAA road repair dispatcher from the side of the interstate. He tried to concentrate on security, to keep the crew focused and alert for the enemy. Sergeant David Gibbons, the gunner who had brought his crew home safely after Staff Sergeant Booker was killed two days earlier, was scanning through the gunner’s primary sight, checking to make sure no one was creeping up on them.

  At one point, Gibbons spotted three Iraqi dismounts poking around. He killed all three with a sudden burst of coax that startled the crew. There was steady gunfire in the distance. The four crewmen sat there for the next thirty minutes, cut off, scanning, sweating, waiting. At last they heard a sharp banging on the front deck. They looked out the vision blocks and saw a man in a uniform. It was a friendly—a young infantryman from the China battalion. He said, “We got you. Come on out.” Within minutes, the tow bar was hooked up and the disabled tank was dragged back to the rear, Bell’s Puppy Love still tucked safely into the bustle rack.

  Up ahead, inside the commander’s hatch of a Bradley from the Tusker battalion, Staff Sergeant Thomas Slago thought the rate of fire was exceptionally intense. He and his crew had survived several fierce firefights down south, but nothing on this scale. He could see muzzle flashes and RPG trails on both sides of the highway. Slago, thirty-five, was an experienced veteran, a stocky, boisterous NCO with a gift for gab. He loved commanding a Bradley; he had named his nine-year-old son Bradley, although his wife had made him abandon the middle name he had selected: Gunner.

  Slago’s crew had killed quite a few Iraqis down south, and it disturbed him that after a while killing people had become almost routine. He had talked to his crew about it, and he had decided to rationalize his feelings by dehumanizing the enemy. He did not think of the Iraqis there on the roadway as people but as obstacles. They were in his way; in fact, they were trying to kill him. He was not interested in dying for his country. He wanted them to die for their country. He wanted them out of his way.

  Just before the day’s mission, Slago had pulled aside his gunner, Specialist Gary Techur, who had developed a habit of calling out “Contact RPG!” or “Contact machine gun!” to alert Slago to give the order to fire. Slago told Techur: “You see anybody in a uniform, anybody with a weapon, don’t ask me for permission to shoot. Just kill ’em. They’re enemy. Take ’em out. Then you can yell ‘Contact RPG.’”

  Slago was anxious about the mission. He had not been able to sleep the night before. In fact, he had not slept in several days. Maybe it was the nickname the crew had given the Bradley: Nocturnal. Slago could not shake the feeling that somebody was go
ing to die on the run into Baghdad—maybe a member of his crew, maybe himself. His wife’s parents had mailed him a Bible, so he stashed it in the Bradley’s coax “ready box,” the ammo tray. He felt better just knowing it was there, close by.

  That morning, as his crew prepped the Bradley for the mission, Slago had tried to kid around with Techur, hoping to relax them both. They even managed to laugh when they passed the minefield and realized that the Iraqis had just dumped the mines right on top of the asphalt. It seemed so amateurish, so silly and ineffective. It felt good to laugh. But when Slago saw the sleeping forms of the guys assigned to the tactical operations center, still snug and warm in their sleeping bags at dawn, he felt a deep longing for sleep.

  Slago was also worried about his Bradley. It had taken two frightening RPG hits down south—hits so jarring that Phil Wolford started calling Slago an RPG magnet. The first time, an RPG had torn through the front headlight, pierced the Bradley’s front armor, and exploded out the side. Slago was amazed that no one had been hurt. But the second time, just south of Baghdad three days earlier, a Syrian guerrilla wearing a green headband had launched an RPG that ripped straight through the driver’s hatch and sent a fireball exploding through the rear hull. The driver, a nineteen-year-old kid named Robert Sciria, had his back lacerated by shrapnel. One of the infantrymen inside the hull was hit, too, and Techur, the gunner, took a sliver of shrapnel in the thigh. Sciria had saved them, driving madly for a mile and a half out of the kill zone with his back bleeding and his wounds burning. Now, on Highway 8, Slago was confident that his crew knew how to respond to any crisis, but he couldn’t help but wonder how many more RPG hits his battered Bradley could withstand.