Wolford turned to his first sergeant and said, “You know, if this is all there is, I think this war is over in a couple of days. I really think this is it.” But after considering the situation for a few more minutes, Wolford had second thoughts. It just didn’t seem possible that the Iraqis would surrender the entire palace complex so easily. He was worried about the gap between his battalion and Rogue. He feared the Iraqis would counterattack through the eastern edge of the gap, or down the river road behind the palace, to his rear. He told his tankers to stay alert. This thing wasn’t over yet.
TEN
GOD WILL BURN THEIR BODIES IN HELL
Captain Jason Conroy had finally set up a secure perimeter around Saddam Hussein’s parade grounds and the tomb of the unknown soldier by mid-morning on April 7. He was beginning to believe that things in his little world—his company’s stretch of flat terrain between the VIP reviewing stand and the concrete tomb—were very much under control. He eyed the equestrian statue of Saddam and thought about how satisfying it would feel to put a tank round through it.
And then the mortars hit. They kept coming, one after the other, slamming down all around Conroy’s positions. One round landed between two of the engineers’ armored personnel carriers, exploding with a metallic rattle that peppered the vehicles with shrapnel and shook up the crews. Conroy was amazed that no one was hurt. Then another round splattered shrapnel within twenty meters of one of his tanks. Conroy had to reposition several tanks to move them out of the line of fire. He felt a rising sense of frustration and anger. Mortars always pissed him off—they were light and mobile, and it was hard to return fire. And in this case, Conroy didn’t know where to return fire. The mortar rounds seemed to be falling out of the sky. People were asking one another over the radio net: “Where the hell are they coming from?”
As the morning wore on, the mortars began to slam down closer to the battalion command post. It had been set up hastily, and under fire, by backing up four command and medical tracks into a tight little circle a short distance from the tomb of the unknown soldier. The vehicles had been positioned around a concrete pavilion with a corrugated metal roof—what turned out to be a public toilet. The stench was overpowering, but the concrete walls afforded some protection from shrapnel.
Now, with the mortars inching closer, the command and control center for the entire Rogue battalion was under threat. It was a crowded place. Wounded American soldiers were being treated inside, and four or five enemy prisoners were under guard. Outside, the bodies of dead civilians had been collected for burial. Normally, the brigade’s counterbattery radar would pinpoint the location of enemy mortars and relay grid coordinates for artillery or aircraft to run counterfire on them. But on this morning, the radar was not functioning properly. The Rogue battalion was on its own. Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz arrived on his tank and made it clear to everyone that he wanted somebody to figure out another way to locate the mortars—and quickly. Already, three or four men had been wounded by mortar shrapnel, including a medic and Captain David Hibner, the engineer company commander.
Inside one of the personnel carriers that formed the command center was Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Brown, a U.S. Marine assigned to the battalion to help coordinate close air support. He had ridden up Highway 8 that morning in the carrier commanded by Major Rick Nussio, the battalion executive officer. Brown was thirty-three, a father of two young boys. He had joined the marines fifteen years earlier to avoid working on a car plant assembly line like everyone else in his hometown of Detroit. Brown was a jack-of-all-trades, a graduate of several Marine Corps specialty training schools. One of his skills happened to be crater analysis—the esoteric art of poking through mortar or artillery craters to determine the type and location of enemy fire. In fact, Brown had taken a refresher course in crater analysis aboard the ship that had brought his unit to Kuwait.
Now a round whistled down and smacked into the wall of the toilet, exploding with a loud crack and scattering everybody inside the command center. That was it for Brown. He was starting to get angry now. He had survived the thunder run into the city that morning, killing two Iraqi soldiers with his M-16, and was in no mood to take mortar fire. He decided he was going to personally find out where the hell the rounds were coming from.
With only his helmet and flak vest for protection, and with mortars still raining down, Brown hustled out to inspect the fresh craters outside the toilet walls. The first thing he noticed was how small they were, about twelve to fourteen inches in diameter, no bigger than a pizza pan. He figured the mortars couldn’t be any bigger than 60mm—but they still packed enough punch to disrupt Rogue’s operations and they were quite capable of blowing a man in half. Another round exploded nearby, and Brown checked that crater, too. From the angle of impact, Brown figured the mortars were being launched from the northwest, about the ten o’clock position as he stood facing north. He went back inside to find Major Rick Nussio, who had a good set of satellite imagery maps. He wanted to see what was to the northwest.
At that moment, another marine from Brown’s unit rolled up in an armored personnel carrier. Gunnery Sergeant William “Butch” Deas was riding with a military intelligence team and its Arabic-speaking interpreter, delivering a load of captured Iraqi soldiers to the command center. Deas was just the man Brown needed—he was a bona fide expert at crater analysis. In fact, Deas had taught the crater analysis course aboard ship. He was an easygoing, good-humored thirty-eight-year-old, an eighteen-year Marine Corps veteran from Asheville, North Carolina. He had started out as a military meteorologist, gauging wind speed and direction to adjust artillery fire. He seemed to have an instinctive feel for the trajectory of flying projectiles.
Deas was feeling miserable that morning. Two days before, on Rogue’s first thunder run, his personnel carrier had been rocked by RPG and machine-gun fire on Highway 8. Deas had been up in the hatch, working his laser range-finder to locate targets for air strikes on Iraqi positions. The impact knocked him down. He was back on his feet and checking on the vehicle’s stunned driver when he realized that blood was gushing from his own face. A piece of shrapnel had sliced through his nose and lodged in the back of his sinus cavity. Bright red blood was gushing from the wound. A medic finally got the bleeding stopped, and that night a surgeon used five stitches to close the hole in Deas’s nose. He didn’t want to risk moving the metal fragment, so now shrapnel the size of a marble was still lodged in Deas’s sinus. It looked like a big pimple on his cheek, right beside his nose.
Now Brown called Deas over and asked him to take a look at the craters. Mortars were still whistling overhead as Deas crouched down in the soft dirt. The Iraqi crews were “walking” the rounds in, each one falling a bit closer. Some were hitting on the pavement, virtually worthless for crater analysis, but some were leaving perfectly preserved little craters in the packed dirt. Deas was intrigued by the craters’ signatures. The pattern of spikes from flying dirt and debris suggested low-angle rounds—artillery shells. But Deas also found sections of a mortar fin and bits of shell casing from small mortars, probably 60mm. Mortars are typically fired at high angles—seventy or eighty degrees. But these were flying in at low angles, about forty-five degrees, like artillery. It was an unorthodox way to launch a mortar, but it had the advantage of concentrating rounds in a tight area. Deas had never seen mortars fired that way. He figured the Iraqis were either desperate or woefully trained, or both.
Deas talked it over with Brown. Deas told him he was convinced that the mortars were coming at a very low angle from the southwest, at about seven o’clock. He and Brown both knew the maximum range for a 60mm mortar was thirty-eight hundred meters, but Deas estimated the range of these rounds at about two thousand meters, factoring in the reduced distance due to the low angle. Brown took that as gospel. He had absolute faith in Deas’s judgment. Deas couldn’t offer anything more; his vehicle was pulling out, and he rushed off, leaving Brown to finish the analysis.
A minute later, a mortar round tore int
o a clump of trees outside the toilet. Brown went out to have a look and saw that the round had left a perfect hole in one of the trees. It was like an exit wound. Brown stood in the crater and looked up through the hole. He pointed his compass through the opening and shot an azimuth through it. He got a reading, then went back inside to plot the azimuth on Major Nussio’s 1:25,000 scale map.
Brown ran a back azimuth, based on his readings from the hole in the tree, drawing a straight line using a coordinate scale and a straight edge. The line ended at an Iraqi military compound two kilometers away—a compound that was already programmed into the brigade’s computerized target list. It had not yet been hit by coalition warplanes.
An air force officer attached to the battalion pulled out imagery photos taken during recent overflights by unmanned spy planes. Brown studied the imagery and noticed two rows of palm trees along the edge of the compound, just beyond a tall fence encircling the site. He was certain the mortar tubes were hidden in the palms; the Iraqis had put mortars and artillery in palm groves down south. And besides, the mortars could not have been fired from inside the compound because of the low angle and the height of the surrounding fence. He wrote down the map coordinates for the rows of palm trees.
It was a clean target. It was a clearly defined military compound. There were no civilian structures nearby, and there were no U.S. forces between the command center and the compound. Brown was radioing for approval to bring in an air strike when Schwartz arrived at the command center. He showed Schwartz the compound and palm trees on the satellite maps. “Yeah, go ahead. Go for it,” Schwartz told him. Rounds were still flying overhead. “This is getting tiresome.”
Brown called an immediate request for aircraft and was told that planes were already “on station”—up in the air over Baghdad. Because the mortars were hitting U.S. positions, the request for close air support got top priority. Within five minutes, two American F-18 fighters screamed overhead. Each one launched a pair of two-thousand-pound bombs known as JDAMs—joint direct attack munitions—on the palm trees next to the compound. Everybody inside the toilet building could hear the impact. Minutes later, the artillery unit unleashed a volley that echoed across the parade field.
The mortars ceased.
At the foot of the reviewing stand, Jason Conroy was up in the cupola of his tank, facing the statue of Saddam on horseback. With his perimeter now fairly well secured, he felt it was time to make a statement. The embedded Fox TV crew had arrived at the parade grounds, along with Colonel Perkins and the two battalion commanders, Schwartz and deCamp. Conroy had heard that they were getting ready for some kind of big powwow to determine where the mission was going from here. He thought it was an opportune moment to take down the statue.
He radioed Schwartz. “I got this beautiful statue here,” he said. “Can I blow it up?” Schwartz told him to stand by. He wanted to talk to Perkins, who was busy talking on the radio to division headquarters at the airport.
Perkins had spent the previous half hour trying to persuade General Blount and his assistant division commander for maneuver, Brigadier General Lloyd Austin, that the strategically sound plan was to stay in the city center rather than pull back out. Perkins explained that he had taken a great risk and expended significant combat power to take every single strategic objective the brigade had targeted inside the palace and government complexes. He didn’t want to have to fight his way back out. Nor did he want to surrender territory he had just seized. He was convinced that he could collapse the regime from within now that he was literally standing on Saddam’s center of power.
The senior commanders at V Corps and, higher up, at U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, were still envisioning the mission as another thunder run—one of several being planned to slowly chip away at Baghdad’s defenses. If any of Perkins’s units ended up spending the night, they thought, it would be the companies now setting up at the three main interchanges on Highway 8. V Corps expected Perkins’s tank columns to punch to the edge of the city center, then pull out and return to the brigade TOC at the edge of Highway 8 south of the capital.
Inside the international passenger terminal at the Baghdad airport, V Corps had set up its ACP—its assault command post. The day’s battle was playing out on military computer screens inside the terminal, where blue icons on digital maps depicted the tank battalions inside the palace complex. The computers were linked to a satellite-transmission system called FBCB2, for Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below. The system was maintained by civilian technicians working for the FBCB2 contractor, Northrop Grumman.
That morning, one of the contractors, Ron Legros, was summoned by a V Corps officer who was staring intently at his computer screen. The officer complained to Legros that the system was malfunctioning. Its icons were showing Second Brigade tanks and Bradleys set up in defensive positions inside the downtown palace complex. That wasn’t possible, he said, because he had been told that no American forces would be setting up inside the capital. The officer was tapping on the computer screen, trying to dislodge the blue icons, like someone tapping a stuck speedometer needle.
Legros ran a diagnostic test of the system. It was working perfectly. The officer wasn’t convinced. He continued to insist that there were no American tanks inside the city. Legros repeated that the system was in good working order. The officer did not seem inclined to accept the diagnosis, but Legros didn’t want to get into a protracted argument. He walked away, leaving the officer still tapping at his screen.
From the airport, General Austin had radioed Perkins about a half hour after Phil Wolford’s Assassin Company seized control of the Republican Palace. “Marne Six”—General Blount—“doesn’t want to stay,” Austin told Perkins. “The LOCs are too difficult to hold.” Blount was also concerned that the First Marine Division was still south of the city and not yet in position to secure the Second Brigade’s eastern flank on the east bank of the Tigris. And Blount wasn’t certain he had enough combat power to hold the airport and send a quick reaction force to rescue Perkins if he happened to get overrun in the city center.
Perkins continued to press his case. “I am more secure on the palace grounds than I am at Saints,” he told Austin, referring to Objective Saints, the code name for the tactical operations center at the junction of Highways 1 and 8 eighteen kilometers south of the city center. “We have a significant strategic opportunity that we wouldn’t want to miss.” He added, “Have spoken with my battalion commanders. If we hold the LOCs, stay the night, this war will be over.”
A few minutes later, Austin radioed back. “I’m concerned about the fuel situation and our ability to hold the LOC” on Highway 8, he said. “It’ll require significant combat power to do so.” Even so, he said, Perkins’s request to stay was being passed up the chain of command. “I’m working on it,” Austin told him.
Then Austin abruptly changed the subject. He asked Perkins if he had located a monument or statue suitable for a public display of destruction. Blount, Austin, and Perkins had discussed beforehand the need to demonstrate in a very public and dramatic way that American forces had penetrated the heart of the city. Perkins asked Schwartz and deCamp to find a statue or monument of Saddam.
Schwartz radioed Captain Conroy and told him that higher command was “looking for a real good monument.”
Conroy said, “This is a great monument—Saddam on a horse.”
Schwartz cleared it with Perkins, and Conroy was finally given permission to take the statue down. He already had an MPAT round in the tube. Perkins radioed Conroy. “Don’t miss,” Perkins told him.
Perkins then radioed Austin on the division net. “We’ve found a statue of Saddam at the review stand—with key vantage points.”
Austin asked Perkins, “Method of destruction?”
“One-twenty millimeter,” Perkins said.
“Feel free to use as many rounds as it takes,” Austin told him.
Blount’s voice came over the net. “If
you make any speeches, keep it short,” he told Perkins. He didn’t want American forces acting like occupiers—or worse, gloating before the Fox News camera.
“There will be no speeches,” Perkins assured him.
From his commander’s hatch across from the reviewing stand, Conroy told his gunner to let the round fly. An MPAT round is designed to punch a hole through the thick steel armor of a tank or personnel carrier before detonating a high-explosive shape charge in its warhead. The round pierced the statue’s thin bronze shell and exploded in an eruption of brown smoke, shattering the horse and blowing Saddam’s head from its torso. Conroy’s crewmen retrieved the head later and hauled it around on the bustle racks, a singular war trophy.
Conroy had never experienced such euphoria—not during the sprint up from Kuwait, and not even on the momentous thunder run to the airport. He felt a sense of achievement and finality, a conviction that all his soldiers’ training and sacrifice had built to this moment of triumph. He believed that this very moment, preserved for history by the Fox crew, would define the American defeat of the Iraqi regime. For the first time since leaving Kuwait, Conroy let himself believe that the end of the war was close at hand. His company had now secured optimum positions in and around Saddam’s parade grounds and reviewing stand, a perfect 360 degrees of control, with clean, overlapping sectors of fire. There was no doubt in his mind that they were spending the night—and many more nights after that.
Just across from the reviewing stand, Schwartz and deCamp were interviewed live on Fox TV by correspondent Kelly. The two lieutenant colonels played off each other like a stand-up team—deCamp the energized and frenetic front man, Schwartz the restrained and confiding straight man. The overall effect was of two men thrust suddenly into unfamiliar surroundings, still getting their bearings but somehow persuaded that they stood at the crest of an irreversible tide. For TV viewers, it was a jarring and disorienting tableau. The split screen showed Information Minister Sahaf on the left, jaunty and boastful in his beret and gold-rimmed spectacles, describing Americans dying at the gates of Baghdad and vowing, “God will burn their bodies in hell!” On the right screen were deCamp and Schwartz, helmeted little men grimy with dust and sweat, squinting through the smoke, their voices straining over the steady pounding of Rogue’s tank cannons at the far end of the parade field.
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