Schwartz mentioned that his tanks were parked outside Iraq’s Ministry of Information about one and a half kilometers to the northeast. He had hoped that Sahaf would be addressing the media from the building, though the minister was actually just across the Tigris, at the Palestine Hotel overlooking the river’s east bank. The ministry building had been abandoned.
“He’s just across the street from us,” Schwartz said, deadpan. “We’ll go over and talk to him. They can look right outside their window. They can see us.”
DeCamp was asked whether the brigade’s thrust into Baghdad was significant tactically or symbolically. His face lit up.
“Today is symbolic in the sense that we already had it,” deCamp said, speaking rapidly in a hoarse voice. “The victory was won a long time ago. Now, today, we’re just securing the symbol of the victory. About five days ago, his [Saddam’s] regime was done. He was just continuing his propaganda. Today we just ended his propaganda campaign—because he can continue to show his lies on TV, but we’re showing the American public where we are.”
A tank cannon erupted somewhere behind them and Schwartz said, “There are a lot of bad guys still out there. There’s not a lot of celebration going on yet, but we’re feeling very good about being here. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
Perkins felt his own confidence surge. Standing next to his personnel carrier, looking out over the blanket of smoke and haze that draped the parade grounds, he asked deCamp and Schwartz for situation reports. Both commanders assured him that their positions were secured, and both said they felt just as strongly as Perkins about staying the night. They didn’t want to have to fight their way back out of the city. They were certain they could defend and hold their ground.
Perkins thought he was close to persuading Blount to let him set up for the night, and he was confident that the brass was flexible enough to let the commander on the ground make the call. Already, the senior command seemed to be focused on how to manage any American tactical victories inside Baghdad. Even before the Saddam statue fell, Perkins had received word from higher headquarters, through Austin, not to fly the American flag. Someone at the higher command, watching the Fox feed, had seen Major Rick Nussio hold up a three-by-five-foot American flag on the parade grounds. An order came down: there would be no overt displays of triumph, no lording it over the Iraqis. Perkins radioed Nussio and told him to put the flag away. But he later suggested that his men turn their right shoulders—the shoulders with the Stars and Stripes patch—toward the Fox camera.
Perkins confirmed for Blount that the Rogue and Tusker crews had shut down their tanks to conserve fuel. It was standard operating procedure; the brigade had shut off the tank engines down south after seizing terrain and securing their positions. The turbine engines burned fifty-six gallons of fuel an hour while rolling at full clip, about thirty gallons an hour when maneuvering in battle. They had left on the mission that morning carrying eight to ten hours of fuel—conservatively, four hours to get into the city and four hours to get back. The mission was now approaching Hour Four—the hour Perkins had set for himself for reaching the decision to stay or retreat. The crews could still fire their weapons systems, but each hour the tanks were turned off bought Perkins another hour. He wanted to make sure he had enough fuel to get out of the city if it came to that, although he was confident Steph Twitty’s China battalion would hold the Highway 8 interchanges that the tank battalions had just blasted through.
At the Spartan Brigade TOC—eighteen kilometers south of the city center—Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley was feeling vindicated. The battle plan he and Perkins had been discussing for months was playing out almost flawlessly. The tank battalions had penetrated to the heart of Saddam’s regime without losing a single man—a remarkable achievement considering the number of forces arrayed against them and the size of Baghdad itself, a sprawling metropolis of more than 5 million people.
Wesley was in charge of the TOC, which was running smoothly and efficiently that morning. The TOC was the brigade’s computerized brain. It was a portable command center created by parking armored communications vehicles back to back, like covered wagons in a circle. The TOC had been set up inside the abandoned agricultural warehouse complex, in an open courtyard framed by two-story buildings. Officers monitored battles on laptops and radar screens, and via secure FM and satellite radio networks. They stood at map boards and sat at terminals arranged on folding tables. Olive drab canvas had been stretched over metal frames to provide walls and a roof. All information and data were routed through the TOC—division headquarters at the airport, Perkins and the tank battalion commanders in the city, warplanes circling the city and spy planes high overhead, and the artillery and mortar teams and scout platoons. Wesley and his crew of battle captains and NCOs inside the command tent were monitoring the battle, receiving and relaying updates and situation reports.
Wesley had guided Perkins up Highway 8 that morning, relaying feeds from 150-foot-long E-8C surveillance planes equipped with JSTARS radar—the joint surveillance and targeting aperture radar system. The radar system’s MTI—moving target indicator—provided real-time warnings of approaching vehicles by transmitting data to radar screens inside the TOC. Wesley was able to see blinking lights on a screen, superimposed with a map depicting Highway 8, and then warn Perkins by radio of any approaching enemy vehicles. Commanders in tanks and Bradleys kept track of other American vehicles by watching blue icons on digital maps displayed via the FBCB2 system. Through on-board GPS systems, each command vehicle constantly relayed its changing location to other vehicles equipped with FBCB2.
Through the system, also known as Blue Force Tracker, Wesley was able to communicate by text with Perkins if Perkins’s vehicle was out of FM radio range. The TOC also relayed reports from air force pilots scanning the highway. Lieutenant Colonel Gantt’s artillery was under TOC control, as were the mortar crews, the multiple rocket launchers, and the fighter planes providing close air support. The entire battlefield—from the tank crews at the Republican Palace and parade grounds to the infantry now setting up on the Highway 8 interchanges—was being choreographed at the TOC that morning.
Wesley had also been mindful of the propaganda war. He had been monitoring the intelligence radio frequency, listening for word of any media reports of American tanks in the city so that he could keep Perkins updated. The BBC was particularly significant because of its global reach and because the network had failed to report the presence of Rogue’s tanks in the city during the April 5 thunder run. When Wesley told Perkins that the BBC was reporting American tanks inside the palace complex, cheers went up over the radio net.
At the same time, Wesley had been holding two embedded reporters at bay. Julio Anguita Parrado, a Spanish reporter, and Christian Liebig, a German journalist, had been pestering Wesley for permission to alert their home offices about the American incursion into central Baghdad. The two young men had decided not to ride in on the thunder run, judging it too dangerous, and now they were desperate to keep up with competitors embedded with units inside Baghdad. Wesley did not want Parrado and Liebig filing too early and revealing the brigade’s battle plan prematurely. But when Wesley heard from Perkins that the tank battalions had secured the palace area, he nodded to the two reporters and said, “Go!” Cheers rose up inside the TOC as the reporters bolted from the TOC to call their offices on their satellite phones.
It was an emotional moment for Wesley. He and Perkins had been preparing for this mission for months, and now the brigade had taken over Saddam’s government complex in a matter of hours. Things had moved more swiftly and dramatically than Wesley had ever imagined. He wanted to talk to Perkins privately, away from the monitored radio net, to congratulate him and share his own sense of elation. He walked out of the TOC to retrieve his iridium satellite phone from his Humvee, which was parked just inside the front gate of the compound. He took off his helmet and set it down on the hood, then stripped off his flak vest and tossed it insi
de the vehicle. He punched in Perkins’s satellite phone number and wandered through the compound in the aimless way that people pace while talking on a mobile phone.
Perkins sounded upbeat and invigorated. He was standing inside Saddam’s government complex now, and he tried to explain to Wesley how surreal it felt to be in control of a place that had been at the heart of the regime’s command and control apparatus just days earlier. Wesley congratulated his boss, and the two men reflected on their planning sessions back in Kuwait and their preliminary bull sessions back at Fort Stewart.
“Eric, you wouldn’t believe it,” Perkins said. “It’s everything we would’ve hoped for.”
Wesley said, “Congratulations, sir, I—” and at that moment he heard what sounded like the whine of a low-flying airplane. For an instant Wesley wondered why close air support would be flying over the TOC, and so low. Then an orange fireball blew past him and a thunderclap slammed him to the ground. He was in the dirt now, struggling to catch his breath. All the oxygen seemed to have been sucked from the air. The sky had turned black. He felt an intense heat.
Wesley heard Perkins’s voice: “What’s up?”
He realized he still had the satellite phone in his hand. His head cleared. Now he realized what had happened. It wasn’t an airplane he had heard. It was a surface-to-surface missile. The entire TOC compound was engulfed in flames.
Still on the ground, Wesley spoke into the phone. “Sir, we just got hammered.”
“What?”
“Sir, the TOC just got hit.”
Wesley heard Perkins shout to someone near him: “The TOC just got hit!”
Wesley couldn’t see the TOC anymore. It seemed to have evaporated behind a curtain of smoke. He couldn’t see his Humvee. He saw only a wall of flames. It was 10:24 a.m., just over four hours into the mission.
“Sir,” he said wearily. “I’ll have to call you back. It doesn’t look good.”
ELEVEN
GOING AMBER
The man in charge of putting the tactical operations center together and tearing it down was Captain William Glaser, the headquarters company commander. Glaser was thirty-three, a genial veteran from Tennessee, a state high school pole vault champion who had been recruited to West Point by the track and field team. Shortly after 10 a.m. on April 7, Glaser was sitting next to the battle board, with its magnetic icons depicting the tank battalions in downtown Baghdad. The icons showed a tight ring of American armor strung like a noose around Saddam’s palace and government complex along the Tigris. Like everyone else inside the TOC, Glaser was in a buoyant mood. Some of the guys were high-fiving, celebrating the brigade’s remarkable armored thrust into the capital.
Amid the tumult, one of the air force officers was busy arranging CAS—close air support—for the tank battalions inside the city. Glaser heard him shout out: “We have CAS on station!” At that moment, Glaser heard what sounded like the roar of an airplane, very low, just above the tree line. He thought: “Damn, that’s fast.”
Then he was tumbling across the TOC, blown from his chair by a tremendous blast of hot dirt and sand that collapsed the canvas roof and buckled the flimsy canvas walls. Computers and radios crashed to the ground, their cables snapping. The battle map was buried under debris. The light supports toppled and everything went black. Acrid smoke seemed to rise up from the ground and smother the dull light of morning.
A surface-to-surface missile—most likely an ANABIL-100 or a FROG-7—had just ripped into the courtyard, detonating next to a line of parked Humvees. Glaser struggled to his feet and saw that the entire walled compound had been swallowed by a fireball. The Humvees belonging to the brigade’s top officers, parked in a neat row along the north side of the courtyard, were burning out of control. So were the signal vehicles parked along the southern wall. Men were writhing in the gravel, their skin and uniforms seared and smoking. Bundles of red plastic rice sacks, used to store fertilizer or agricultural products, had exploded and were now scattered across the courtyard, draping everything with a coat of melting red plastic.
Inside one of the Humvees, Specialist George Mitchell had been sitting behind the wheel, drinking coffee. Mitchell was the driver for the brigade’s operations officer and a veteran of the first Gulf War. A father of three, he was thirty-five, much older than most specialists because he had spent time in the Army Reserves and had reenlisted after September 11 to, as he put it, “finish this thing off.” Mitchell was a neat freak. His bunk area back in Kuwait was a model of crisp army perfection. On his bedside table was a photo of his grandparents and another of his wife and children. In the middle was a small American flag. Captain Glaser had been so impressed that he e-mailed a photo of Mitchell’s bunk area to the Family Readiness Group Web site back at Fort Stewart.
Earlier that morning, Mitchell had managed to get a quick satellite telephone call through to his wife, Brenda, in the United States to assure her that he was fine. Now he was dead, killed instantly by a direct hit from the missile, his coffee thermos still in his lap and his dog tags around his neck.
The two embedded journalists, the Spanish reporter Julio Anguita Parrado and the German journalist Christian Liebig, had been standing next to Mitchell’s Humvee. They were setting up their satellite phones to report to their home offices in Europe that the brigade’s combat teams had seized Saddam’s palace and government complex. They had decided against riding into the city on the thunder run, for it seemed too risky, and now they had their story. They had just grabbed their phones when the missile detonated next to the Humvee, digging out a ten-foot-deep crater. Both young men were incinerated in an instant, their bodies reduced to gray ash in the gravel.
Standing next to Perkins’s command Humvee—he had left the soft-skinned vehicle behind—was the colonel’s driver, Corporal Henry Brown, twenty-two, a devout young man who taught Sunday school back home in Natchez, Mississippi. Brown had married a fellow soldier just before shipping out to Kuwait, and she, too, was serving in Iraq. The fireball from the missile enveloped the Humvee and everything nearby. Brown was horribly burned, but he remained conscious and even managed to joke with the medics—“Hey, get that thing in there”—as they worked furiously to put an IV into his arm. Brown survived long enough to be evacuated, but he died later of his burns on a military hospital ship.
Across the courtyard from the Humvees, next to a low cement wall, stood Private First Class Anthony Miller, one of the brigade’s mechanics. Miller was just a kid; he had turned nineteen in September. He had joined the army to help support his mother. He had been walking across the courtyard when the missile hit. Something—a piece of shrapnel or a shard of metal from one of the Humvees or a piece of flying equipment—tore into Miller. He was slammed into the wall, mutilating his body and killing him on the spot.
Eric Wesley was a few feet from Miller, flat on the ground, still holding the satellite phone. He got up and tried to clear his head. Soldiers were already running over to comfort the wounded and attend to the dead. Some of them grabbed fire extinguishers and bottles of water from parked vehicles and were trying, futilely, to put out the roaring fire. Wesley decided right away to try to triage the casualties until the medics arrived—and also triage the communications vehicles in an effort to determine which equipment could be salvaged and reused. He made sure the wounded were treated, gathered up, and moved to the forward surgical team, which, fortunately, had been set up just across the highway, only a few hundred meters away. Wesley arranged for intact vehicles to be moved away from the flames and for all working communications equipment to be retrieved to help fashion a new, makeshift TOC.
In the row of Humvees, next to a flaming ten-foot-deep crater left by the missile, Wesley’s Humvee had incinerated. He had lost his helmet, his flak vest, all his personal gear—and the Humvee’s radio. Later that day, Wesley sifted through the smoking debris and fished out a small pocket Bible his father-in-law had given to him. He found it under the only piece of the Humvee that still existed—the c
harred engine block. The book was singed around the edges, but its pages were intact. It was the only item Wesley owned that survived the explosion, and he considered it a special blessing at a terrible moment.
Near the Humvee, sitting upright on the ground, was Sergeant Major Alexander Gongora. Several soldiers were trying to comfort him. Wesley could see that Gongora was badly burned and in shock. Glaser saw him, too, but he couldn’t tell who it was. Gongora’s face had been disfigured by the burns. Gongora was the operations sergeant major, and Glaser had known him for a year. But Glaser didn’t recognize him, and this moment of confusion at a time of crisis troubled him for a long while afterward.
Wesley came up to Glaser. He wanted his help in organizing the rescue and recovery operation. Wesley was the senior officer at the TOC and Glaser was the commander of the brigade’s headquarters company. The two men had a quick, urgent conversation. Glaser was struck by how calm and focused Wesley seemed, even amid the flames and smoke and the cries of the wounded. Wesley told Glaser to take charge of treating and evacuating the wounded. Wesley would handle the recovery of communications vehicles and equipment and the cobbling together of a new TOC, which he intended to set up in a clearing about three hundred meters to the south. Wesley had no radio communications with the men who worked in the TOC, so as he ran into each of them amid the tumult of the rescue effort, he issued the same clear, simple instructions. He told them they had four primary missions: triage and evacuate the wounded, recover serviceable equipment, set up the new command post, and reestablish perimeter security.
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