Thunder Run
Page 26
One of the wounded men was a staff sergeant who had just arrived with Johnson’s platoon. Sergeant First Class Phillips was briefing him on the situation near the trench line when a bullet tore into the staff sergeant’s arm. Private First Class Gregory was hit, too. Chunks of concrete blasted from the support walls by automatic-weapons fire under the on-ramp tore holes in Gregory’s elbow and leg. He stayed in the fight. Only later, when he found an M-16 round that had penetrated his ammunition pouch, did he realize that he had come under friendly fire from infantrymen clearing the trenches behind him.
But enemy fire was also pouring through the openings in the support columns. Private Christopher Nauman, one of the infantrymen beside Gregory, went down with a wound to the leg. Nauman held on to his shotgun as two medics loaded him on a litter and hauled him back to the aid station beneath the main overpass. Along the way, Nauman spotted a wounded Iraqi fighter reaching for an AK-47. “That guy’s still alive!” he yelled. Some of the infantrymen saw Nauman suddenly rise up on the litter and fire a shotgun blast. The story of Nauman and his shotgun later grew to legendary proportions. All you had to do was mention Nauman’s name and guys who hadn’t even been at Curly would start telling the shotgun story.
By now, the arrival of Captain Johnson’s reinforcements had freed up several Bradleys to help the infantrymen clear the trenches. Backed by the Bradleys, Gregory, Phillips, and Specialist Agee were able to move past the on-ramp to an access road that ran parallel to Highway 8. Technicals and suicide vehicles had been using the road to break through the perimeter, so Agee got down on his belly and trained his M-240 machine gun on the roadway.
From time to time a civilian motorist would creep down the road, spot Agee and his machine gun, and back up and speed away. But then a small white sedan appeared. It didn’t slow down—it actually picked up speed and headed straight for Agee. He opened up with the machine gun, trying to hold it steady enough to pump a few of the heavy 7.62mm rounds into the windshield. The entire car erupted in a ball of orange flame and black smoke. Agee was amazed that the M-240 had caused such a violent explosion. It was a big machine gun, certainly, but he had never imagined that it was capable of destroying a car. Then he heard the clanking of treads behind him. It was one of the Bradleys—it had fired several high-explosive 25mm Bushmaster chain-gun rounds into the sedan.
Agee saw the sedan’s front doors pop open. Two men inside were on fire, trying to escape. Agee fired the M-240 and knocked both men to the pavement. He felt no guilt for killing them like that. They had come speeding straight into the fight, asking to be shot. At this point, after seeing the arms and legs of so many Americans ripped open by shrapnel, Agee was beyond worrying about who he shot. He thought those two guys in the sedan deserved to die. And anyway, he was growing accustomed to the level of violence and brutality required to do his job. He embraced it. Between him and Phillips and Gregory and the sniper, their little ad hoc team had killed more than twenty people.
After a while, Agee and Gregory and Phillips pulled back and let the Bradleys finish clearing the trench system. The way the coax and the Twenty-five Mike Mike ripped into the trenches was remarkable. Agee had never stood so close to a Bradley at work. He kept muttering under his breath, Goddam, Goddam. It was astonishing. It was like the whole underground system was turned inside out, with ammo belts and RPG tubes disgorged into the air and the gunmen’s bodies disappearing in the smoke as the soft mounds of earth shuddered with each impact.
Beyond the trenches, in the flat sandy expanse that led to the little warren of houses, Phillips saw an Iraqi soldier walk out of a tent. The man looked as though he had just decided to step out for a breath of fresh air, apparently oblivious to the firefight raging all around him. Phillips was baffled by the soldier’s detached attitude. He attributed it to poor Iraqi training and discipline. He watched the man tumble into the dirt, his torso ripped open by a blast of coax from one of the Bradleys.
From one of the smoking trenches, Agee saw a man wearing a red-and-white kaffiyeh rise up and fire an AK-47 from the hip and then duck down again. One of the Bradleys unleashed a spray of coax, and Agee didn’t see the man again. Another fighter rose up halfway, with a tentative look. He appeared to be trying to surrender. While Agee debated whether to shoot him or gesture for him to come out, one of the infantrymen behind him shot the man dead. Agee made a mental note: don’t be the first guy to surrender.
More heads popped up from the trenches, and the Bradleys held their fire. Enemy fighters were tossing aside their weapons and raising their hands. The infantrymen shouted and gestured for the men to strip off their clothes. That was standard procedure with EPWs, enemy prisoners of war. They were forced to strip naked to make sure they weren’t hiding grenades or explosives. The infantrymen had heard about guys down south getting suckered by phony surrenders. The fighters tore off their clothing. They looked small and pale, their bellies soft and hairy and their genitals tight and shriveled by the howling winds.
One of the engineers drove up with an ACE, an armored combat earthmover, a huge excavating machine equipped with an enormous shovel-like bowl with collapsing jaws. The infantrymen herded half a dozen prisoners into the bowl—a perfect little mobile holding cell. A couple of them were wailing and crying as the jaws closed on them. It wasn’t exactly humane, but it was the most efficient way to corral the prisoners until a pen could be fashioned from concertina wire. Later, the battalion intelligence officer and some of the Special Forces soldiers interrogated the prisoners, most of whom wore long beards—unlike most Iraqis, who in-variably sported standard Saddam-style black mustaches but were otherwise clean-shaven. The interrogators found Syrian passports in the prisoners’ abandoned clothing, along with wads of Iraqi currency, confirming them as foreign mercenaries.
For all the enemy fighters who were dying or surrendering at Curly, there seemed to be no shortage of willing replacements. They kept coming, and the tanks and Bradleys and infantrymen kept killing them. This effort required prodigious amounts of ammunition, and by late morning supplies were running low. The radio reports from Curly reaching Lieutenant Colonel Twitty at Objective Larry now included urgent requests for an ammunition resupply. It was one more piece of information that filled out Twitty’s mental picture of the situation at Curly, and one more factor to be considered as he continued to sketch out his battle diagram.
The reports from Objective Moe, two and a half kilometers north of Twitty, were more disturbing. There, at the spaghetti intersection, the company commanded by Captain Josh Wright was struggling to keep its perimeter intact. Wright was an aggressive young officer who had grown up in a small town in Illinois, watching old war movies like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Green Berets. Intrigued by the military’s emphasis on duty and patriotism, Wright had signed up for ROTC at Eastern Illinois University, earning his commission as an infantry officer in 1995. He had trained for desert combat, and even for urban combat, but he had never trained to fight on a highway cloverleaf. It was an alien landscape. He had to adapt his whole combat thought process on the fly.
Wright was in the commanders’ hatch of his Bradley, parked atop the overpass, with the enemy on all four sides. From the north, gunmen were firing from a mosque, supplied with weapons and ammunition from outbuildings inside the mosque compound. From the south, RPG teams were unleashing grenades from three-story buildings. From the east, soldiers were shooting from a forest of palm trees. And from the southwest, a mob of fighters backed by a heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup was advancing on the interchange. Suicide vehicles were speeding down the access roads, trying to penetrate the perimeter.
Two of Wright’s three platoon sergeants had been wounded, and two engineers had gone down with shrapnel wounds. A gunner was hit with a ricochet. An infantryman dragging a wounded enemy soldier to safety was hit in the wrist and stomach. Every tank and Bradley was tattooed with small arms and shrapnel. The TOW missile launcher on one Bradley was destroyed by an RPG. Two more Bradleys had thei
r coax guns go down, ruptured by shrapnel. One of the tanks lost the use of its main gun.
With the help of mortars fired by the crews at Curly, Wright was holding his own. But Wright’s tank and Bradley crews were beginning to run low on rounds. They had already “cross-leveled” ammunition—trading coax, tank rounds, and .50-caliber ammunition back and forth. From the perimeter, the track commanders radioed Wright to tell him they were now going amber on both ammunition and fuel.
Then the mortars stopped. Wright got an urgent call from Lieutenant Josh Woodruff, the mortar platoon commander at Curly. Woodruff sounded apologetic. He felt terrible, he said, but he could no longer provide mortar support. He hand-fired every last round—his entire allotment of 240 mortar shells. He was black—completely dry.
Wright radioed Twitty. He tried to give a precise and nuanced report, neither overstating nor understating his predicament. Wright and Twitty were comfortable working together, and Twitty felt he knew how to read the captain. When Wright mentioned that he was considering collapsing his perimeter as a way to help the tanks conserve fuel, Twitty knew the situation was serious. He asked Wright how long he could continue to fight without fresh supplies of fuel and ammunition. Wright answered quickly: a few more hours.
Twitty realized that the time had come for him to make a decision on fuel and ammunition. It would take a while to get the supplies all the way up to Captain Wright at Moe. Twitty had expected his combat teams to fight to keep Highway 8 open for the resupply convoy. He had not expected that they would also be fighting just to survive. The brigade could not afford to lose any of the three interchanges, but Moe was particularly crucial. If Captain Wright were overrun, the enemy would pour through the spaghetti interchange and hammer Rogue and Tusker from the rear—and the two tank battalions would be cut off from the fuel and ammunition supply.
Twitty called Captain Ronny Johnson at Curly. Johnson had just fought his way up the highway to Curly from the brigade operations center. He was now in charge of the entire combined combat team. Twitty wanted to get his sense of the threat level along that stretch of Highway 8. Johnson gave him an honest answer. It was hot, he told him—extremely hot.
Twitty also requested a fresh update on the fighting at Curly.
“Sir,” Johnson said, “what I can tell you is, it’s not as intense a fight as it was an hour ago but we’re still in a pretty good fight here.”
Twitty asked to hear from Command Sergeant Major Gallagher. He asked Gallagher whether he thought the fuel and ammunition trucks could survive the gauntlet of RPG and recoilless rifle fire on the highway.
“Boss,” Gallagher said, “we can get ’em through. I’m not going to tell you we can get ’em through without risk, but we can get ’em through.”
Twitty signed off and put the radio down. He lowered his head. He had to make a decision. And whatever he decided, American soldiers were going to die. He knew it. They would die at one of the interchanges, where they would be overrun if they weren’t resupplied. Or they would die on the resupply convoy trying to fight its way up Highway 8.
Twitty picked up the radio and called his executive officer. “All right,” he said. “We’re going to execute.”
Just before the missile exploded inside the TOC compound, Captain Aaron Polsgrove had been sitting on top of his Humvee with his helmet off. He was relaxing, enjoying the warm weather after a long cold night, and marveling at the fact that American soldiers were bearing down on Baghdad just two weeks after leaving Kuwait. His Humvee was parked on the dusty shoulder of Highway 8, a few hundred meters west of the TOC compound, a complex of dull beige buildings set against a swaying backdrop of tall green date palms.
Polsgrove was twenty-six, a native of Louisville, a cheerful and engaging young officer, and a devout Christian. He had joined a Christian officers’ group at West Point, and he served along with Lieutenant Colonel Wesley in the Officers’ Christian Fellowship. He carried a Bible with him at all times. Every day, he tried to find a few minutes of privacy in his Humvee to read the “Daily Bread” devotionals his chaplain had given him.
Polsgrove was the support platoon leader, in charge of keeping the fuel and ammunition trucks intact and moving as a unit. They were lined up behind him now on the highway shoulder, engines idling. The convoy was awaiting the order to move up and resupply the China battalion combat teams at the three interchanges.
Polsgrove had not seen a lot of action on the march up from Kuwait. (His wife was videotaping hours of TV news coverage for him.) The supply convoys tended to stay to the rear, behind the combat teams. In fact, Polsgrove’s support platoon had not yet conducted a resupply under fire in Iraq. But now battles were raging up Highway 8, and he wasn’t sure what to expect. He had only two radios, and neither could pick up transmissions from the men in the firefights at Moe, Larry, and Curly. The radio reception was so bad, in fact, that Polsgrove’s boss, Captain J. O. Bailey, had taken three vehicles from the supply convoy and moved a few kilometers north so that he could talk to the commanders at Curly and get a feel for the situation there.
Polsgrove heard what he thought was a low-flying aircraft. The sound puzzled him. He thought the plane either was on an extremely low bombing run or was about to crash, and neither possibility made sense. Then the TOC exploded. Polsgrove saw a fireball erupt from inside the TOC compound, just over his right shoulder. He felt a blast of heat. Shards of flaming metal were raining down on the convoy. He thought they were under an artillery attack. He dove into his Humvee, put on his helmet, and reached for the radio. He had to move the convoy out of harm’s way. The twenty-five-hundred-gallon fuel tankers were mobile bombs. The ammunition trucks were portable fireworks factories. A single shard of hot shrapnel could trigger a conflagration.
There were twenty-one vehicles in Polsgrove’s convoy. With only two radios on hand, communicating with the driver of each vehicle was a maddening endeavor. Polsgrove had devised a series of hand signals to alert the drivers behind him to his orders. The only other radio was in his platoon sergeant’s vehicle, the last one in the convoy. Polsgrove called him.
“Support Seven, this is Support Six, we’re rolling,” he said. He gave a circular wave of his arm to signal the drivers behind him.
The convoy sped north on Highway 8, past the flaming TOC and its funnels of black smoke. Polsgrove radioed Captain Bailey up ahead. Bailey was unaware of the missile strike. “The brigade TOC just got hit!” Polsgrove told Bailey. “I’m moving out. It’s too dangerous here.” Bailey told him to get up to his position as quickly as possible.
Bailey had managed to make radio contact with some of the officers and NCOs at the three interchanges, but he had not been able to get a clear picture of their fuel and ammunition needs. Most people were telling him they were amber. Others were red, and a couple said they were close to going black—not enough to sustain the fight. And now his support platoon was fleeing a missile hit.
Just as Polsgrove and the main body of the convoy pulled up, several mortar rounds whistled down and exploded in the barren fields at the edge of the highway. It was a nuisance, mostly, but it reinforced the sense of vulnerability that both Bailey and Polsgrove had felt all morning. They were hauling 110 tons of tank, Bradley, mortar, and small-arms ammunition and twenty thousand gallons of highly combustible JP8 fuel. One of their trailers was loaded with the engineers’ mine-breaching device, a twisted sausagelike link of powerful C-4 explosive charges. And they had no armor to protect them—no tanks, no Bradleys.
The Humvee with Bailey’s little group was mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun and the armored personnel carrier with him had another .50-caliber in the turret. But Bailey’s own armored track had no crew-served weapon; he had only his M-16 automatic rifle. Polsgrove’s twenty-one vehicles had just six crew-served guns—three .50-caliber machine guns and one MK-19 grenade launcher on four ammunition trucks, an M-240 medium machine gun on the platoon sergeant’s Humvee, and a grenade launcher mounted on Polsgrove’s Humvee.
Polsgrove knew one of the scouts, Sergeant First Class John Marshall. Marshall was fifty, ancient by combat standards, where many infantrymen were teenagers and most of the company commanders were still in their late twenties. Polsgrove figured Marshall was probably the oldest guy in the whole battalion. Hell, he was eleven years older than the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Twitty. Marshall had volunteered for combat duty after the September 11 terrorist attacks, even though he had a wife and children. He told people that he felt a responsibility to get involved, though seemingly he had done enough already—he had fought in the first Gulf War.
Polsgrove welcomed Marshall’s combat expertise; he was a good man to have around. Marshall took enormous pride in being a scout. He was unflappable, with an even disposition. He was always smiling and pleasant, and he rarely cursed or even raised his voice. Polsgrove knew Marshall would keep his cool under fire.
Marshall joined Polsgrove in firing on the mortar spotters, squeezing off bursts from his M-16. Then Marshall called his two scout Humvees over and had the gunners open up with their .50-caliber machine guns. Polsgrove couldn’t tell if they hit anything, but the mortars soon stopped. Things had calmed down considerably by the time Captain Bailey got the radio call ordering him to launch the convoy north up Highway 8.
Bailey had serious misgivings about taking a convoy of soft-skin vehicles on an exposed highway in the middle of a firefight. He knew from the radio traffic that the combat team at Curly was being pounded with RPGs and small-arms fire. He had no idea where he was going to park nearly two dozen vulnerable tankers, ammo trucks, and other vehicles at a highway interchange with ordnance flying all around. He had gotten on the radio and asked the battalion executive officer, Major Denton Knapp, to send down Bradleys to escort him. Not possible, Knapp told him. Knapp was in the middle of a ferocious firefight. The combat teams couldn’t afford to give up their Bradleys at this crucial interlude, he told Bailey. Holding Curly was paramount. The resupply convoy would have to fight its way up with the help of the scout vehicles and the crew-served weapons.