Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  “Shoot him!” Barry yelled again. Spangaro opened up with coax, blowing the man apart. The gunner turned to his captain. “That didn’t feel too good,” he said.

  Afterward, Specialist Jarrid Lott, a tank driver, saw one of the tank commanders taking photographs of mutilated bodies in the vehicles. He was appalled. He asked the commander why he wanted to capture such horrible images. The man had his reasons. “If my son says he wants to join the army,” he told Lott, “I’ll show him this and tell him: ‘ This is what the army does.’”

  Even after vehicles stopped speeding over the bridge, Cyclone Company was still taking small-arms fire. Barry realized that gunmen were creeping across the bridge along a pair of narrow catwalks below the elevated roadway. The gunners managed to kill some of them, and the rest fled back across the river. After that, things settled down. For the moment, the Fourteenth of July Bridge and traffic circle were secure. For the first time, Barry allowed himself to believe that the war in Iraq was coming to a close—if not that day, then very soon.

  Inside Lightning 28, Mark Jewell was still trying to get the Bradley’s main gun to work. Jewell was a feisty character, full of energy and good cheer. He was thirty-nine, short and solidly built, his light brown hair clipped into a tight marine crew cut. He had been a marine for fifteen years, commissioned right out of school after graduating from the University of Louisville. Jewell had a wife and three children back in the States, and they were constantly on his mind. He had used a reporter’s cell phone to call a friend in the States and have him send a bouquet of flowers to his wife for their wedding anniversary that week.

  Now Jewell was struggling with the ammunition feed on the main gun. At one point, the gun accidentally went off, firing a round harmlessly into the tree line. It scared the hell out of Steve Barry, who got on the radio and asked Jewell, “Two Eight, what the hell?” Jewell explained and apologized, and went back to work on the gun.

  Jewell wasn’t an armor officer. In fact, he had never commanded a Bradley until two weeks earlier. He had received an hour-long training session in Kuwait from Tom Slago, the Bradley commander from the Tusker battalion, but after that he had to learn from on-the-job training during the march up through the desert. He knew enough to realize that he needed a special wrench to crank the ammunition feed chains to clear the jammed main gun. He radioed one of the Cyclone crews and asked to borrow the tool.

  Jewell’s Bradley was still buttoned up when the crew heard someone pounding on the rear hatch. Parks swung it open. And there in the morning haze, wrench in hand, wearing a decidedly non–military issue helmet and flak vest, stood Geoff Mohan of the Los Angeles Times. Mohan was Cyclone’s embedded reporter. He had volunteered to deliver the wrench because he desperately needed to get outside in order to crank up his satellite phone and transmit updates to his story in time to meet his paper’s final deadline. It was well before midnight in Los Angeles, still time for Mohan to make the April 7 editions. It was a fortuitous arrangement for everyone involved. Mohan got his story, and Jewell got his wrench.

  Outside Lightning 28, Lieutenant Hanks noticed an RPG launcher in a grassy expanse of date palms and eucalyptus trees a few steps beyond the Bradley. He walked over and saw a series of bunkers covered by corrugated metal and camouflaged with palm fronds. Jewell yelled at Hanks to stop and wait for help. He didn’t want him probing the bunkers alone. He summoned Parks, who volunteered to be, as he called it, a tunnel rat.

  Parks took Jewell’s 9mm pistol and a flashlight. With Hanks and Corporal Havens covering him, Parks crawled into one of the bunkers. Around a bend in the tunnel, his flashlight lit up the terrified faces of several Iraqi soldiers huddled in the dark, their arms upraised, begging not to be shot. Jewell heard Parks scream, “You hajji motherfuckers! Get out of the hole!” Soldiers called all Iraqis, civilian or military, hajjis— for hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. It was not a complimentary term. Parks emerged from the bunker, his fatigues caked with dirt and his pistol trained on a column of Iraqis in filthy green uniforms. The scarlet insignia on some of the men’s epaulets identified them as Special Republican Guards.

  Several Cyclone tankers ran over and searched the other bunkers, yanking out more Iraqis, some in dirt-encrusted civilian clothes—eighteen in all. The prisoners got down on their bellies. The tankers hog-tied them with plastic handcuffs and rifled through their pockets, tossing aside cigarettes and wallets. Staff Sergeant Anthony J. Smith, a silver-haired tank commander, screamed at them, “Republican Guard? Yes?” One of the men nodded. In English, he mumbled, “Thank you! Thank you!” Smith grinned at him. “This is a good thing for you. You’re going to live,” he told him.

  A prisoner who had not yet been handcuffed lay on his belly and held out a tiny Koran. Smith motioned for him to flip through the pages to show it wasn’t booby-trapped. Then Smith gingerly took the book, inspected it, sealed it in a plastic bag, and gave it back to the prisoner. Still on his belly, the man mumbled his appreciation for this small act of kindness in a war zone.

  The Iraqis had been living in filth. The bunkers were dark and strewn with trash and rotting food and flimsy bedding. There were piles of uniforms, berets, and helmets, all of it abandoned by soldiers who had fled. The soldiers had been subsisting on moldy bread and dried dates, but they were well armed nonetheless. The bunkers contained dozens of AK-47s, seven RPG launchers, sixty rockets, forty grenades, and five thousand rounds of ammunition.

  Parks stared at the weapons. “They could have easily killed us all,” he said. “They could’ve hit us before we even knew where they were.” He seemed more mystified than relieved.

  A mile to the west, Colonel Perkins had arrived at the gates of Saddam’s modern concrete palace across from the Baath Party headquarters on the Kindi Highway—what the brigade called the New Palace to distinguish it from the older and larger Republican Palace two and a half kilometers to the east. The formal name of the structure was the Sujud Palace, a squat, blocky edifice of pale tan concrete built in 1990 for Saddam’s first wife. Part of the ornate entry vestibule, built of pink marble and cascading stalactite molding, had been collapsed by a direct hit during the U.S. Air Force bombing campaign the previous week. The palace was deserted when Perkins, in the hatch of his M113 command armored personnel carrier, arrived on the Kindi Highway in the middle of the armored column.

  Perkins had just survived a close call on the highway after the column had come down the ramp off the spaghetti junction. A white Toyota pickup had sped toward Perkins’s carrier from the rear, its headlights burning in the early morning haze. Captain Shannon Hume, a Bradley commander from the Tusker battalion, spotted the vehicle and ordered his gunner to fire a warning burst of coax. The pickup plowed ahead, closing to within 150 meters of the command carrier, even after a second round of coax was fired into the pavement. Hume ordered his gunner to fire armor-piercing rounds from the 25mm main gun directly into the pickup. The first round slammed into the engine block. The second tore through the windshield, killing the driver, and the third struck the cab and ignited an explosion that lifted the pickup off the highway. A series of secondary explosions convinced Hume that the truck had been a suicide vehicle packed with explosives.

  Attack Company, attached to Tusker and Task Force 4-64 from another battalion, searched and secured the palace and grounds. Perkins set up his TAC—his tactical command post—at the top of a palace ramp that led to a covered walkway and the partially collapsed vestibule. The TAC was Perkins’s mobile command post, a set of armored communications vehicles parked back to back to form the brigade’s battlefield headquarters. From here, Perkins could direct the fight, talking by radio and satellite phone to General Blount at the airport and Lieutenant Colonel Wesley at the brigade operations center eighteen kilometers to the south.

  From his perch at the top of the ramp, past the blooming red and pink roses in the palace’s manicured gardens, Perkins could see the hazy outlines of Saddam’s entire downtown government complex—from the
Republican Guard headquarters to the west and Zawra Park to the north. To the east, obscured by haze and smog, lay the Fourteenth of July Bridge and, beyond it, the Republican Palace. Downtown Baghdad seemed to be on fire. Columns of black smoke swirled on the horizon, fed by oil fires set in ditches by Iraqi forces to obscure targets from American warplanes, and by flaming Iraqi vehicles and bunkers destroyed by tanks and Bradleys. Perkins believed he had accomplished his first goal—to create chaos, to disrupt Iraqi defenses with the speed and violence of the armored thrust. He had managed to cut through the concentric layers of defense, and now his tanks and Bradleys were behind the enemy. The second goal was now attainable—to fight from the inside out, to establish a foothold in the center of the capital and push outward and collapse the regime from within.

  The Rogue commander, Rick Schwartz, had seized and secured the Rashid Hotel, the convention center, the parade grounds, the tomb of the unknown soldier, the amusement park in Zawra Park, and the adjacent zoo, where some of the Rogue crews later fed hogs to the neglected and emaciated lions. Rogue was also preparing to seize the Ministry of Information, where Schwartz hoped to encounter Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, the troublesome information minister. DeCamp’s men were in the process of taking control of the entire palace complex, from the Sujud Palace east through the Fourteenth of July Circle past the bend in the Tigris River and then north to a small stone archway on a palace roadway that led to the broad Jumhuriya Bridge. DeCamp told Perkins he was prepared to spend the night, assuming he could get his battalion’s fuel and ammunition safely up Highway 8.

  Perkins was now more determined than ever to spend the night. Steph Twitty’s China battalion was still moving up to secure Highway 8, so it was too early to know whether the fuel and ammunition convoys would get through. But things had gone so smoothly that Perkins felt a surge of confidence. He thought he could persuade General Blount to let him stay the night. It would then be up to the general to convince the higher command to shift from a quick-strike thunder run to an overnight occupation of the capital.

  The U.S. military had come a long way since Vietnam, Perkins thought. The men directing the Iraqi campaign had come of age during the Vietnam conflict, when the top brass tended to micromanage every firefight, robbing ground commanders of initiative and spontaneity. There was more willingness now to let officers in the field respond and adapt to fluid situations. During the thunder run two days earlier, the command at V Corps—the next level above the Third Infantry Division—had monitored events from a UAV spy plane but had not interfered with Perkins’s decisions on the ground.

  Perkins had fought Saddam’s army all the way up from Kuwait. He had studied the enemy for months, preparing himself for this day. He had punched his way into Baghdad not once but twice, and he had taken the measure of Saddam’s defenses. He knew now, more than ever, what was required to topple the regime. If he could hold his positions through the night, he thought, Baghdad would belong to him.

  There was also a strategic matter Perkins knew he needed to address. He had to outflank Mohammed Sahaf. He believed the minister was somewhere in the city center, and he anticipated another barrage of claims describing a decisive Iraqi military victory. It wasn’t enough for Perkins to set up his command post inside Saddam’s palace and government complex. He had to prove he was there. He had to compete with Sahaf for the international TV audience. Sahaf had the international press corps at his disposal across the river. Perkins had . . . Fox News.

  Greg Kelly, Fox’s square-jawed, energetic correspondent, had ridden in the back of Perkins’s command vehicle. Kelly and his cameraman were embedded with brigade headquarters. As Attack’s infantrymen cleared the palace, Kelly set up his camera out front, framing the palace portico as a dramatic backdrop. He was ready to file live from downtown Baghdad. It was mid-morning now, the middle of the night back in the States but the beginning of the workday in the Arab world and in European capitals. Kelly went live—and gestured for Perkins to come over.

  Perkins knew exactly what he wanted to convey. He wanted the world to know that American forces were moving at will inside the government complex—and there was nothing Saddam Hussein could do about it.

  “What we have in the city now is an entire armored brigade,” Perkins began. His helmet strap was pinching at his chin, and his delivery was swift and clipped. “Right now, we really have control of the center of Baghdad and what is the heart of his governmental structure,” referring to Saddam.

  Kelly asked how long Perkins intended to stay in the city. Perkins thought for a moment, then lapsed into vague military-speak. He didn’t want anyone to know he intended to stay overnight—and he certainly didn’t want to reveal just how dependent his tank battalions were on keeping Highway 8 open for fuel and ammunition. “We’ll continue to develop the situation,” he said, gesturing toward the city center. “We’ll see what our tactical requirements are and how they fit into the overall situation. There’s a lot of ways we can control this ground, a lot of ways we can control entrance and exit.”

  When Kelly asked if the end of the war was near, Perkins was careful not to claim victory but to make it clear that the U.S. military was dictating the fight. “Tactically, we’ve obviously already crushed his armed resistance and the American soldier has been victorious from that point of view,” he said. His flak vest was cinched tight and his pistol was strapped to his leg. The fight was still very much on. In the background, Perkins could hear the booms of tank cannons and mortars. “We still have resistance throughout the city,” he went on. “We’re taking our armored forces and pushing all the way through and completely securing this so that we have freedom of maneuver in the city.”

  When Perkins was finished, Kelly summoned deCamp, who was in a celebratory mood. He was considerably more animated than Perkins. His face was streaked with sweat and grime, giving him a desperate, hooded look. “Saddam Hussein says he owns Baghdad,” deCamp said loudly. “Wrong! We own Baghdad. We own his palaces, his downtown district, his hotel.”

  DeCamp grinned and introduced his Attack Company commander, Captain Chris Carter, who described the haphazard and disorganized nature of the resistance by Iraqi irregulars in the city. DeCamp joked about taking a shower in Saddam’s palace, then began unfolding a red banner. The Fox News anchor in the United States told his early morning viewers that the tankers were unfurling the brigade’s colors. Actually, the banner was a University of Georgia Bulldogs flag. DeCamp and Carter had graduated from the school, and they had hauled the flag through Iraq for this moment. Each man grabbed a corner of the flag and unfurled the school colors.

  “How ’bout them Dawgs?” deCamp hollered.

  “How ’bout them Dawgs?” Carter yelled back.

  “Hoaah!” deCamp said.

  Across the Tigris River, barely two miles from the Sujud Palace, Sahaf was putting on his own show for the cameras. He stood at his usual perch, a mezzanine roof on the second floor of the Palestine Hotel conference center. He wore his trademark black beret and a starched olive Baath Party uniform bearing two small medallions—an Iraqi flag and a portrait of Saddam. As he had two days earlier, Sahaf spoke with a flourish, denying that American forces had entered the capital.

  “There is no presence of American columns in the city of Baghdad at all,” Sahaf said, addressing a crush of reporters. “They were surrounded, and they were dealt with and their columns were smoldered. The American mercenaries will commit suicide at the gates of Baghdad. I would encourage them to increase their rate of committing suicide.”

  The reporters were openly contemptuous. Some of them had watched through binoculars from their hotel rooms upstairs as Bradleys from Phil Wolford’s Assassin Company rolled onto the riverside grounds of the Republican Palace one and a half kilometers across the Tigris. From across the river came the steady rattle of gunfire and the occasional dull thud of a tank round exploding. That, Sahaf explained blithely, was the sound of American soldiers being slaughtered.

  And what
about the American commanders who had appeared before American cameras at Saddam’s palace? It was all an elaborate fraud, Sahaf said; the commanders had been filmed inside the ornate reception hall at the Baghdad airport—a facility Sahaf had said two days earlier was firmly under Iraqi military control.

  “They are really sick in their minds,” Sahaf said of the Americans. “They said they entered with sixty-five tanks into the center of the capital. I inform you that this is too far from the reality. This story is part of their sickness.” He advised reporters not to repeat their lies.

  As Sahaf delivered his performance, Salar Mustafa Jaff watched in silence. He despised Sahaf, though he never dared let it show. Jaff’s narrow face betrayed no emotion. Jaff was an English speaker, a polite and reserved functionary who worked for Sahaf’s ministry as a “minder” charged with monitoring and controlling the movements of foreign reporters. Sahaf had almost gotten Jaff killed two days earlier, when he had ordered him to drive into the city center to translate for Iraqi interrogators questioning American soldiers purportedly taken prisoner during Rogue’s battle along the airport highway. Sahaf told Jaff that the interrogations would be videotaped and broadcast on state-run television so that the world could see that the Americans were caged like ulooj—an Arabic insult that translated loosely as “animals.” Jaff had driven straight into a furious firefight. He managed to turn around and escape, but only with the assistance of wildy gesticulating Fedayeen militiamen. There were no American POWs, of course, but Jaff did not raise the issue with Sahaf; the man carried a pistol, and Jaff had heard rumors that Sahaf had taken shots at underlings. Jaff merely reported to one of Sahaf’s aides that he had been unable to locate the American prisoners.

  As Sahaf described for the international media an overwhelming Iraqi victory over the American infidels, Jaff glanced around the conference center. He caught the eye of one of his fellow Iraqi minders. The man was snickering, covering his mouth with his hand, trying with all his might to keep from laughing out loud.