Now, on the morning of April 7, Dayni was back in the bunker, fearing the worst. When the American column sped up Highway 8 just after dawn, the tanks and Bradleys shot at everything on either side of the roadway. The Fedayeen and Syrians—and a few small units of Republican Guards—fought furiously, but even their recoilless rifles and antiaircraft artillery pieces had little effect on the column. Their technical vehicles were pulverized by tank and Bradley cannons. Dayni could not see anything from inside the bunker, but he could feel the impact of the rounds and hear the cries of men dying. At the far end of his bunker, there was a sudden explosion and a flash of flame. Dayni saw the burning body of a man who lived on his street, a middle-aged retiree like himself. Dayni moved to help the man, but it was pointless. He was dead. There was not much left of him.
Dayni stayed down. Thirty minutes later, it was over. The Americans had moved on into the city center. The Fedayeen and Syrians climbed out to collect their dead. There was talk of reinforcing the interchange, of moving in behind the Americans and cutting off Highway 8. Dayni thought it was futile. Now that the Americans were inside the city, he thought, the regime could not survive. And when it fell, there would be chaos. He thought about his home. He had evacuated his family, and the house was unprotected. As one of the few residents still living in his neighborhood, Dayni had taken it upon himself to watch over his neighbors’ abandoned homes. As the fighters around him geared up for another confrontation with the Americans, he debated whether to stay in the bunker or walk back to check on his house. After a while, he got up and walked home.
In the city center, civilian cars were blundering into the fight. Many residents were not yet aware that American tanks had penetrated downtown districts, and they went about their normal business. Government-run radio was announcing that American forces had been defeated outside the capital. Traffic was lighter than usual, but some shops and gasoline stations remained open, even as Fedayeen and Baath Party militiamen surged through the streets.
Salah Mehdi Baqir al-Muosawi, a translator and driver for the Daily Telegraph newspaper of London, listened to the radio reports inside an office building in the well-to-do Mansour district on the western edge of the city center. He was debating whether to try to reach the Palestine Hotel, where the British reporters who had hired him were staying. Muosawi had heard that American forces were attacking the capital, but the government radio reports persuaded him that it was still safe to venture out. He took his job seriously, and he knew his services were needed on this important news day. Muosawi was proud of his impeccable English. He was fifty-two, a distinguished-looking man, a father of four with silver hair and a black mustache. He had been working for Western correspondents for more than a decade, and he considered himself a progressive. He often told his wife that he welcomed the American invasion and looked forward to the fall of the Baath regime.
Sometime after 8 a.m., Muosawi decided to drive into the city center. He got behind the wheel of his white Oldsmobile and headed east toward the Palestine, taking the same route he had used to reach the Palestine the day before. He made it as far as Zaidtoun Street near Zawra Park. There, coax rounds fired by an Abrams tank hidden beneath an overpass tore through the windshield, blowing off the driver’s door and ripping into Muosawi. Witnesses who recovered his body told Muosawi’s widow, Zubida Rida, that Muosawi had not appeared to notice the tank. His car, and two or three others behind it, had driven straight toward the tank and were fired upon, they told her. Several other civilians died along with Muosawi. Because of the chaos and danger, they told the widow, no one noticed whether the tank had first fired warning shots. But later, they said, the Americans dragged the cars across the road—with the bodies still inside—to create a barricade.
Half an hour later, Mohammed Hassan Jawad, sixty-two, a retired policeman, drove his blue Mercedes toward a gasoline station near the zoo at the edge of Zawra Park. Jawad had loaded his car with food and bottled water to deliver to his daughter, Mervet Jawad, who had been evacuated from the family’s home to the northern city of Kirkuk. He was hoping to find gasoline at a station next the zoo, near a junction that connected to the main road to Kirkuk. As he approached the gas station, machine-gun rounds from an Abrams tank at the edge of the park shattered the car’s windshield and collapsed the hood. Jawad was hit several times in the chest, and three fingers of his hand were blown off. Later, witnesses who led Jawad’s relatives to his corpse told them that they had not seen the tank fire warning shots. It appeared to them, they said, that Jawad never noticed the tank and drove directly toward it. His car, too, was used by the Americans to create a barricade.
As Shawn Gibson’s tank crashed through the metal gates of the Republican Palace complex at mid-morning, RPG teams opened fire from a series of bunkers dug into the woods on the left side of the palace roadway. Straight ahead, on the road in front of the palace, soldiers were unloading from troop trucks. A few fired automatic rifles toward Gibson’s tank, but most of them tried to jump back onto the trucks. As Gibson surged forward, he could see that some of the soldiers in the bunker were climbing out of their holes and fleeing through the woods. Gibson had a name for soldiers who fired off a few rounds, then ran away. He called it “shittin’ and gettin’.” Gibson managed to kill quite a few of them, and his gunner got more of them with the coax.
Over the radio came Lieutenant Maurice Middleton’s voice: “Hey, Sergeant Gibson, slow down! I need to get back up there with you.” Gibson had pulled away from the rest of the column after blasting through the gates at the main archway, and now the other tanks were rushing to pull up behind him. He let Lieutenant Middleton swing ahead of him, then fell back into Assassin’s regular formation, with Sergeant First Class Jonathan Lustig’s tank directly behind him.
Farther back in the column was Captain Wolford, the company commander, whose tank had just rolled over the metal gate that had been smashed by Gibson. Wolford could see Iraqi soldiers scrambling out of the bunkers. They were poorly constructed fortifications—just holes in the woods covered by planks or metal sheeting topped with dirt and brush. The Iraqis’ fighting positions were oriented to the northwest, with the soldiers’ backs to the palace. It was obvious to Wolford that they had anticipated an attack from the north, through the woods. It seemed to him that the logical point of attack was the roadway from the west—the roadway Assassin had just taken. The miscalculation crystallized for Wolford the outlines of the entire battle for the city. Colonel Perkins’s battle plan was designed to penetrate behind the Iraqi defenders, then to fight from the city center outward, attacking the enemy from the rear. That was precisely what was happening at the Republican Palace. The Iraqis had left their rear end exposed.
While many of the soldiers were fleeing, others were crawling out of the first sets of bunkers and turning around. They flopped on their bellies, facing the roadway, firing madly with RPGs and automatic rifles. The rate of fire was intense but inaccurate. They were completely exposed. Wolford ordered the tanks to open up with MPAT rounds and the Bradleys with coax. It was a slaughter. The soldiers pitched backward and died, and the bunkers exploded. Soldiers in the next set of bunkers leaped out and fled north through the woods, some of them toppling as the coax rounds tore into them. Dozens more escaped, running through the broad gap between Assassin Company and the Rogue companies to the north and west near the parade grounds and the park, or south across the palace ground to the riverbank. Butchering all those men left Wolford with a hollow feeling. It was his job to kill the enemy, but he got no satisfaction from mowing down soldiers who seemed so incompetent, so vulnerable, so poorly led. He didn’t exactly feel sorry for them, but whatever he was feeling, it wasn’t good.
The tanks moved on to the palace, past gardens and walkways and imposing stone mansions tucked behind walls draped with flowering vines. There were two entrances to the palace, each framed by guard shacks and wrought-iron gates that were left wide open. Wolford was amazed. It was like an invitation to walk right i
n. A couple of tanks rolled through the gates and stopped in the shadows of the four bronze busts of Saddam on the roof. The rest of the column set up in defensive positions on the main roadway; some of the crews were still killing a small group of Special Republican Guard soldiers who were firing from a small bunker complex directly across from the road.
In front of the sprawling palace was an expanse of manicured lawn that surrounded a circular fountain and beds of roses. The two main entryways led past stone porticos and towering palm trees into the palace itself. The complex was deserted. There were no bunkers, no gun emplacements, not a single soldier. It looked like a museum that was closed for the day. The palace walls rose up against the hazy morning sky, an expanse of pale tan stone and polished marble, silent and implacable. On the rooftop at each of the palace’s four corners stood the huge bronze busts of Saddam. They depicted the dictator wearing a pith helmet over an Arab headdress, with a plume of feathers at the peak. Shawn Gibson wanted to put a tank round through one of them, but it was forbidden. The palace was a protected site.
Wolford sent a platoon of infantry to the back of the palace to clear an expanse of sandy ground that led down to the Tigris River. The palace was built on a sharp bend in the river, where the Tigris flowed west toward the spaghetti junction. Access roads on either side led down to a ragged beach, where antiaircraft pits and bunkers had been dug into the sand.
First Lieutenant Jeff McFarland, a tall, rangy West Point graduate, rode in the commander’s hatch of a Bradley, making his way down the access road on the east side. He could see the barrels of the antiaircraft guns jutting from the sandy bunkers. Other bunkers contained military trucks and at least one ambulance. All had been abandoned. There were two Russian-made military helicopters on the beach, both also abandoned. Farther down the shoreline were more bunkers, and McFarland could see the helmeted heads of Iraqi soldiers. Behind them were more soldiers, but these men were sprinting away from McFarland, tossing aside their weapons and running up the river road or diving into the thicket of weeds at the water’s edge. It seemed ludicrous, but some of them were paddling madly, swimming out into the river toward the opposite bank. Now that’s desperation, McFarland thought. The river had to be a quarter mile wide, and it was flowing swiftly.
The soldiers in the bunkers opened fire. McFarland had four Bradleys in his platoon, and each one sprayed the bunkers with coax. Instead of staying down, the Iraqis kept popping their heads up—only to have their skulls splattered by the heavy coax roads. It was brutal, but some of the gunners laughed about it. It was a huge joke—a slow-motion Nintendo game, they thought, and not a very challenging one. They wondered if the Iraqis had ever had a single day of training. They seemed so clueless. The bunkers were cleared in less than half an hour.
McFarland was struck by the differences between his men and the Iraqis. He and his soldiers had been through months of training—in the States and in Kuwait. They trained for every conceivable situation, including clearing bunkers on a beach. There was a rigidly prescribed method, and it was ingrained into each man. The soldiers fell instinctively into their roles. They didn’t have to think about it. Their movements were choreographed and effortless. The Iraqis, on the other hand, weren’t an army—they were an unwieldy collection of individuals, none of them disciplined. They didn’t know how to coordinate or maneuver. Each man acted independently of the others. McFarland was just twenty-five, with only three years of service, but he felt that he or any other American infantry lieutenant was better trained than any of the generals directing the Iraqi defenses of the capital.
After the bunkers had been cleared, McFarland ordered his infantrymen out of the Bradleys. They moved forward on foot, methodically searching each bunker, firing M-16 rifles or shotguns down into the dark holes and blowing each one with grenades. They fired into the weeds along the shoreline, hitting some of the swimmers. They dragged soldiers out of the water, some of them badly wounded, and turned them over to the medics for treatment. They gathered up huge piles of weapons and ammunition for the tanks, which lit them up with HEAT rounds. They searched the helicopters, finding leather executive seats and tray tables set with English china and crystal goblets.
At the front of the palace, Wolford finished setting up the perimeter and brought his tank down the access road to check on McFarland’s progress. At the corner of the palace, where the road came to a T-intersection and turned right, a wounded Iraqi soldier crawled out onto the roadway. Wolford, in the commander’s hatch, never saw him. He was focused on the beachfront. He felt the tank hit something and swung his head to the rear. He saw a man’s head and neck, flattened and oozing.
He yelled at his driver, Sergeant Carlos Johnson. “Johnson! Did you see that?”
“No, sir. I didn’t”
“Johnson, you didn’t see that fucking guy right in the middle of the road?”
“No, sir, I really didn’t.”
Wolford felt ill. He didn’t blame Johnson. It was just one of those things that happen in combat. There was nothing he could do for the poor bastard now. He continued rolling down to the beach to watch the infantrymen finish off the bunkers.
After the waterfront had been cleared, Wolford brought McFarland’s platoon back up to clear the palace itself. They had not taken a single round from inside the huge structure. It was probably deserted, but Wolford wanted it carefully searched and secured nonetheless. The palace had been designated as the operations center for the Tusker battalion and, much later, as the postwar headquarters for an American-led occupation authority.
The infantrymen were in awe as they went from room to room inside the darkened palace. They had never even seen a photograph of the place. Few Iraqis had ever seen it, either; the palace had been sealed off as part of a restricted government zone reserved for top-ranking Baath Party and Republican Guard officials. It took fifteen minutes to walk from one end to the other, down marble hallways and through archways of polished stone. The infantrymen were like tourists, staring up at chandeliers and poking their heads into the marble-tiled bathrooms. There was a wrapped bar of scented Lux soap at every sink, and a fresh box of pink tissues next to each gleaming brass faucet. The toilets and sinks had not been used in a while. There was no electricity or running water.
The entire palace and grounds had been evacuated. The beds in the upstairs bedroom were made up, and blotters and telephones were neatly arranged on the desks in the offices downstairs. There were rotting eggs and vegetables in the stainless steel refrigerators in the various kitchens, and china and silverware in the cupboards. Each main hallway opened into a rotunda, the vaulted ceilings decorated in brilliant mosaic tiles. Doors leading into the high-ceilinged offices and drawing rooms were made of polished wood with inlaid mahogany. There were chandeliers in every room, small ones in the offices and massive fixtures and gilded mirrors in the grand ballrooms. In the main rotunda was a scale model of the palace, across from a huge mural depicting Saddam himself handing a brick to workers during palace construction.
It was a massive facility. Later, Lieutenant Colonel deCamp had his men count the palace rooms. He kept the tally on index cards tucked into his pocket: 142 offices, sixty-four bathrooms, twenty-two kitchens, nineteen meeting rooms, a movie theater, five ballrooms, and one “monster ballroom.” The soldiers figured the palace was a good four football fields long.
After McFarland’s men had finished clearing the building, everyone else in the company wanted to have a look. Wolford gave them ten minutes each for a quick tour, a handful of men at a time. They rushed through the halls, snapping photographs and posing under paintings and murals of a smiling, benevolent Saddam. It was only later, when the soldiers had more time to poke around, that they realized that some of what had seemed elegant and classic was actually fraudulent and almost vulgar. A few of the larger chandeliers were made of crystal, but most were made of ordinary glass and many were plastic. Some of the gilded furniture was made not of hardwood but cheap pine painted gold. The m
arble was expensive, but it was crudely cut and lumpish. The four massive Saddam heads on the roof, it turned out, were plated with bronze that was barely a quarter inch thick. The Republican Palace wasn’t exactly Versailles. It was more like Las Vegas, with touches of Graceland.
Out back, the infantrymen found a garish swimming pool and ornate patio area decorated with brightly colored tiles. There was a recreation area with Ping-Pong tables, tennis courts, and exercise bicycles. Down a slope toward the shoreline was a ragged animal pen containing five feeble lions, a malnourished leopard, and an emaciated bear—apparently Saddam’s private zoo. Later, some of the scouts dragged a sheep into the pen and watched the lions and leopard struggle weakly with the terrified animal before finally killing it and feasting on the bloody carcass.
Wolford set up a command post in the front driveway and arranged his tanks in a defensive perimeter. The battalion mortar teams set up on the lawn. There had been no enemy contact since the Special Republican Guard soldiers dug into a thick stand of trees across the main road had been killed or driven off shortly after the company’s arrival. Wolford could hear explosions in the distance, but the immediate palace complex was quiet. Soldiers sat and smoked cigarettes or posed for photographs in front of the tanks, with the palace as a backdrop.
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