Phillips was on Gregory’s right as they made their way to a meter-wide gap in the first support wall. Phillips told Gregory to poke his head around the wall and see what was on the other side. Gregory peered into the shadows and saw a boot next to the wall. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the boot move. Somebody was down in the dirt on the other side of the wall, next to several RPG rounds.
Gregory leaped back and said to Phillips, “RPG team!”
“Prep your grenade,” Phillips told him.
Gregory withdrew a hand grenade from his combat vest and removed the pin. As Phillips covered him, he leaned forward and tossed the grenade through the gap. The explosion reverberated off the cement support walls and the underside of the ramp. Phillips poked his head through the gap. Two shots rang out from the other side of the wall.
From his gun position on the Humvee, Agee saw Phillips duck just as the rounds tore into the wall where Phillips’s head had been. It looked to Agee like a scene from an action movie, right down to the little spray of concrete chips from the impact of the bullets. Phillips dropped and rolled. Neither shot had struck him, but his eyes were filled with flying grit and his vision was blurred. He and Gregory stumbled back to the Humvee, covered by Agee, who fired into the opening with the machine gun.
Phillips had no idea how many RPG teams were behind the walls, but he knew it would take more than two soldiers to clear the dark expanse underneath the ramp. He had been joking around earlier that morning, telling everybody that April 7 was his wedding anniversary—“not a good day to die.” Now, as he wiped the grit from his eyes, he was deadly serious. He told Agee to take his machine gun off the Humvee mount and follow him and Gregory. They were going back under the ramp, this time joined by a sniper Phillips had called over.
Agee’s M-240 machine gun was a crew-served weapon, meaning it was designed as a two-man gun—the gunner and the loader. But Agee had served in a weapons squad, and he had trained to fire the heavy gun on his own. He felt comfortable with it. He was tall and big-boned, with huge hands and powerful shoulders. He was strong enough to fire the gun from the hip. He slung a belt of ammunition across his back and hauled the big machine gun toward the underbelly of the ramp.
The four-man team moved back to the opening in the wall, Phillips and Gregory in the lead with Agee and the sniper covering them. Their helmet liners were soaked with sweat now, and their heavy flak vests jostled as they crept along, the stiff Kevlar collars digging into their damp necks. They could hear the pounding of the Bradleys up on the overpass and the hiss of RPGs flying somewhere across the highway above them.
Phillips and Gregory stood on either side of the opening. Each man withdrew a grenade, pulled the pin, and flipped the grenade through the opening. All four men followed the sound of the explosion, darting through the narrow passageway. At least six men armed with RPGs and AK-47s were on their bellies in a shallow trench, stunned and bleeding. Gregory opened up with his M-16, killing some of them, and the sniper and Phillips got the rest. Agee came in behind them, the low groan of the M-240 echoing off the support walls. He was shooting from the hip, the big 7.62 rounds tearing into the gunmen’s bodies. Even in the dark, with all the smoke and noise, Agee noticed that one of the men had lost both his legs. They were lying next to his torso, like two burned sticks. Agee kept firing.
The team moved from one support wall to the next, tossing grenades through the openings, killing everybody they saw. Beyond each wall was a network of trenches littered with RPG tubes and AK-47s. A few of the gunmen wore green uniforms, but most wore civilian clothes—jeans and sport shirts, mostly, topped by green army-issue web belts and ammunition pouches. They seemed startled by the sight of American soldiers on foot, and the few who managed to fire their weapons shot wildly, with no effect. Phillips kept wondering: Did these guys have any training, any tactics, any common sense? They seemed to be the very opposite of his soldiers, who had trained endlessly on how to move and clear an area.
As Gregory took cover behind one support wall, Phillips was able to see a gunman lying on the opposite side, waiting for Gregory to come through the opening. “Hey, there’s a guy behind your wall!” Phillips yelled. Gregory backed up, ran around to the next opening, and shot the gunman from behind with his M-16.
The Iraqis were easy to kill. They didn’t wear helmets or flak vests, so just one round through the head or torso put them down. Most of them didn’t even get a chance to raise their weapons. They seemed to have no sense of cover and maneuver tactics. Agee didn’t feel anything for them. He had never killed a man before, but the deaths of these strangers in the dark had no effect on him. He didn’t even think about it. He just kept hosing down targets with the big M-240, hitting everything he saw. It did not occur to him to be afraid—in fact, it was an invigorating experience, almost thrilling. Combat was different than he had anticipated. It was . . . interesting. That was the only way to describe it—and, in fact, it was the word Agee used later when people asked him about the war. He made a point of soaking up every detail beneath the on-ramp, and everything was sharp and brilliant. He was intrigued by the way he was able to subsume himself to his training, and how straightforward it all was. It was just like his NCOs had always told him: pay attention, do it like you were trained, and things will take care of themselves. Agee glanced over at one point and made eye contact with Gregory. He could tell from the transfixed look on Gregory’s face that he felt the same thing. He was enjoying himself, too.
As they cleared and moved, Phillips spotted a recoilless rifle beyond one of the support walls. It was mounted on a tripod, with a two-man crew crouched down beside it. Phillips motioned for Gregory, Agee, and the sniper to hold back and take cover. He wanted to get a clean shot at the weapon and its crew. He had mounted a scope on his M-16, and it gave him a clean view of the target. He squeezed off a few tracer rounds. The effect was astonishing. The recoilless rifle exploded in a shower of red sparks. It flipped up and cartwheeled through the air, the twelve-foot cannon spinning wildly. Phillips figured he must have somehow hit the priming charge.
The big gun came flying toward Agee, a huge, tumbling tube of metal. For an instant he thought it was going to crash down on him, but it landed about twenty meters short and tumbled away in a flash of smoke and flame. At the spot where the recoilless rifle had been mounted, the two crewmen were on fire. They were being burned alive. Phillips was shocked. He hadn’t expected to take out an entire recoilless rifle and crew with just an M-16.
Phillips heard American voices behind him. Somebody was yelling, “We’re moving up! We’re moving up!” He turned to Gregory and said, “Oh, good, we’re getting some more help.”
The four of them had been fighting on their own for a good while, and Phillips was eager for backup. He glanced back and saw that several Special Forces soldiers were moving up just beyond the first support wall. Phillips had been briefed on the Special Forces A team that had been attached to the China battalion, but he wasn’t quite sure what they were supposed to be doing. He didn’t know any of them by name, but from chatting to them briefly the night before he and his men had sensed that the Special Forces guys thought they would be strolling out and talking to Iraqi civilians and imams, collecting intelligence. The A team had driven up to Curly with the rest of the convoy in two Toyota pickup trucks—one black and one silver—that looked a lot like Iraqi technical vehicles except for the bright orange fluorescent VS-17 panels that identified them as American vehicles. At the command briefing the night before, Colonel Perkins had ordered everybody to take a good look at the SF vehicles so that they didn’t shoot them by mistake.
Now, in the tangle of debris and garbage below the on-ramp, Phillips saw the Special Forces team creeping up behind him. He said to Gregory, “The SF is coming up. We’re good now.”
One of the Special Forces medics had just run up to within a few feet of Agee when Agee heard him grunt—a low, involuntary grunt of pain and surprise. Agee looked around and saw the man
go down, shot through the leg. Suddenly automatic rifle rounds were kicking up bits of sand and gouging holes in the cement support walls. A Special Forces soldier ran over to help the wounded medic. Agee shouted at him, “Hey, where’s the fire coming from?” The soldier pointed south, to a trench system beyond the support wall.
Agee swung his machine gun around and started working the whole trench system, laying down a good seventy-five to a hundred of the big 7.62mm rounds. He could see gunmen crawling in the trenches, their boots sticking up. He heard the Special Forces soldier ask him if he was a medic. Agee thought it was an odd question. He yelled back, “No!” and hollered that he had his own job to do right then—to suppress enemy fire from the trenches. For the first time, it occurred to him that combat cut two ways, that he could get killed at any moment. If an SF guy was down, with all his high-speed training and skills, then a regular infantryman like Agee was liable to take a hit, too. And just then he heard another Special Forces soldier yelp and drop down, his knee and thigh ripped open in a huge scarlet wound.
Phillips saw it, too, and he grabbed Gregory and ran back to help. One of the wounded Special Forces soldiers was incoherent and bellowing in pain. The other was limping with a bloody ankle and foot, but still able to walk. Phillips realized that both soldiers were medics. He had a strange thought: What were the odds that two medics would get hit and need treatment?
The wounded men needed to be taken right away to the medical aid station, which had been set up on Highway 8, under the main overpass. Phillips, Gregory, and a Special Forces soldier lifted the badly wounded man out of the dirt and started hauling him back. One of the Special Forces men had already wrapped a thick field dressing around the medic’s knee and thigh. The second wounded man limped after them, supported on one arm by a fellow Special Forces soldier. Agee kept up a steady rate of fire at the trenches, trying to cover their retreat.
They all ran back toward the highway, under fire, ducking under the narrow entryways through the support walls. Agee ran backward, still firing the machine gun. They made it to the highway and hustled north to the protected area beneath the overpass, where they found the medical aid station, protected by a semicircle of parked armored vehicles.
The battalion surgeon was Captain Erik Schobitz, a doctor from Fairfax, Virginia. Schobitz was thirty, but he looked younger, with his boyish features and his dark blond hair swept straight back under his helmet. He had no combat experience. In fact, he had never learned to fire an M-16 until a month earlier, when infantrymen in Kuwait gave him a quick lesson. He had spent his entire military career treating army dependents at military hospitals in the States. He was a pediatrician, a family man with a psychologist wife—today was her birthday—and three-year-old twins. In addition to his helmet and flak vest, Schobitz wore his pediatrician’s stethoscope with a yellow plastic bunny attached.
The doctor had not found out until the night before that he would be sent into battle somewhere near Baghdad. He had planned to ride up in an ordinary Humvee until someone told him it was a sure way to get killed, and he was transferred to an armored vehicle. He had been stunned by the intensity of enemy fire when he arrived at the interchange, which he knew was somewhere on Highway 8. He did not learn until several days later that it was known as Objective Curly. The flat, dusty cloverleaf reminded him of the bleak futuristic landscape of the Mel Gibson movie Mad Max.
Schobitz told Phillips to take the wounded Special Forces soldiers into one of the armored medical vehicles. He knew instantly that one of them was in shock. He was pale and incoherent, his leg soaked through with blood. He was muttering, “I just been shot in the leg. Leave me alone!” He seemed to know he was being treated because he yelled at Schobitz, “Doc, it’s just my damn leg!”
The back part of the man’s knee had been blown out and the main artery shredded. Half his knee was gone, all the way into the thigh. It was a horrible wound. Schobitz removed the bloody dressing and bound the wound with pressure dressing to ease the bleeding. He was trying to quickly stabilize the man. In a few minutes, the soldier would be taken by armored vehicle to the forward surgical team. Schobitz decided not to put on a tourniquet, which would slow the bleeding but also increase the risk that the leg would have to be amputated. He wanted to give the man every chance to save his leg.
The medics evacuated the soldier and Schobitz turned to the second wounded SF soldier. His ankle was bloody and broken, but it was not a life-threatening wound. He was a medic, and he joked about treating himself as Schobitz dressed the wound and prepared him for medical evacuation to the forward surgical team.
At that moment, it dawned on Schobitz that they were now in a vicious firefight and might be pinned down at the interchange for a long time. The dust and explosions and smoke were disorienting. His face was flushed and streaked with sweat. He had no concept of the battle tactics being pursued, or what role the combat team at the interchange was playing in the larger battle for control of Baghdad. One of the captains looked at Schobitz and grinned. “Get used to it,” he said. “We’re going to be here for a while.”
There was a brief lull of about twenty minutes—and then waves of casualties began to flow into the aid station. Soldiers suddenly began appearing with ragged pink shrapnel wounds—to the hands, the arms, the feet, the neck. A sergeant came in cradling his elbow with his free hand. The bone had been shattered by an AK-47 round. Schobitz told him he had to be medevaced right away for treatment, but the sergeant argued with him, saying he couldn’t leave his men. He was near tears when the doctor handed him off to the medics for evacuation.
The sergeant was the last wounded man the medics were able to transport to the forward surgical team. Enemy fire was at murderous levels now. Rounds were penetrating the protected little cove they had set up beneath the overpass. Bullets were pinging off the support pillars and the underside of the expressway. It was worse out on the highway. The medics couldn’t risk the lives of the crews to send the wounded through the gauntlet on Highway 8. Schobitz would have to stabilize them under the overpass until the combat team was able to get control of the interchange.
A private was brought in with a back injury and Schobitz strapped him to a backboard. A specialist came in with a piece of his finger shot off. There were leg wounds, shoulder wounds, neck wounds. Schobitz’s surgical gloves were slick with blood, and he kept changing them. A soldier arrived with his leg impaled by a jagged strip of shrapnel. The shard had shot straight through the thick muscle and was protruding from either side. Schobitz left the piece in place; he feared he would tear the man’s arteries if he tried to pull it out. He wrapped it tightly with a field dressing and administered antibiotics. The surgeons would have to cut the shrapnel out.
The wounded men kept coming. By mid-morning, the count had reached twenty. Remarkably, there were no head wounds, no sucking chest wounds, no wounds to vital organs. Schobitz was impressed by how thoroughly the soldiers’ body armor and helmets had protected them. He had never fully appreciated their value, but he did now—especially after getting a good look at the ghastly wounds suffered by one of the poorly outfitted enemy soldiers dragged in for treatment.
The battalion chaplain had hauled him in. Captain Steve Hommel, a Baptist minister, had been out near the perimeter, trying to calm some of the infantrymen, when one of them motioned him over. “Sir, there’s this hajji who’s wounded real bad,” the soldier said. “He’s over there next to some dead guys. What do we do?”
Hommel saw a bloodied man in civilian clothes, badly burned and lying next to three dead enemy fighters. The chaplain made his way over to the man and managed to make eye contact. The fighter gestured to his forehead and spoke in broken English. It was clear to Hommel that the man wanted him either to help him or to put him out of his misery with a shot to the temple. Hommel ran back to find a litter and returned with two soldiers to help him. They carried the wounded fighter back to the aid station.
Schobitz examined him. He was badly burned over mos
t of his body. He had shrapnel wounds in his arms and leg. His chin had been gashed and there was a hole through his cheek. He was delirious. The doctor sedated him with Demoral and gave him the muscle relaxant succinylcholine to temporarily paralyze him so that he could insert a breathing tube down his throat.
The vocal cords of a healthy adult male are pearly white. The fighter’s vocal cords were stained black. He coughed up black, carbonaceous sputum. Schobitz tried twice to insert a breathing tube, but the man’s vocal cords were nearly swollen shut. The doctor tried the smallest tube he carried in his bag—the size for an eight-year-old child—but that attempt also failed.
As he withdrew the tube, Schobitz heard a loud crack. Machine-gun rounds raked the ground next to the fighter’s feet and tore through the aid station.
One of the medics yanked the doctor to the ground. “Sir, it’s not worth dying for this guy . . . it’s not worth it. He’s dead,” the medic said.
The medics treated another enemy casualty, a Syrian fighter in his late thirties, dressed in civilian clothes and sporting a bushy beard streaked with gray. The man was not critically injured. In pidgin English, he told the medics that he was a mercenary. He pulled a wad of blue Iraqi 250-dinar notes from his pocket and offered to pay for his release. The mustachioed portrait of a young Saddam Hussein was printed on the currency. The medics ignored him and treated his wounds.
Afterward, the Syrian lay in the dirt and methodically tore each dinar note in half, right across Saddam’s face, and let them flutter away in the wind. “Bye bye, Saddam!” he chirped. “Bye bye, Saddam!”
They were taking more enemy fire now. Unlike Schobitz, Hommel had been in combat. He had fought in the first Gulf War as a combat infantryman, but he had never seen an Iraqi attack as terrifying as this one. From his vantage point beneath the overpass at the center of the interchange, it was obvious that the combat team was taking fire from all directions. They were surrounded. Hommel began to think that, even with their Bradleys and their superior equipment and training, they were in danger of being overrun. He felt a sense of alarm, though he hid it from the young infantrymen around him as he patted their backs and tried to joke with them.
Thunder Run Page 24