Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  Within minutes, RPGs were sailing over the tops of the trucks. Polsgrove and Bailey realized that the RPG teams firing from the buildings east of the highway were targeting the trucks, trying to ignite them. One truck was hit by an RPG that failed to explode. The dud grenade bounced off and rattled down the highway. Bailey rounded up one of the engineers and asked him to try to clear rubble from the west shoulder of the highway so that some of the trucks could be moved to a spot partially protected by the raised curve of the western on-ramp. The rate of enemy fire from the west was less intense than from the east now that the mortar teams had demolished the troublesome building there.

  At the same time, Polsgrove ordered the gunners on crew-served weapons to stay in the vehicles and lay down suppressive fire to the east, where RPG teams were in the windows and on rooftops. He ordered the rest of his men out of the trucks and into the trench system that had been cleared by the infantrymen. They were needed to help hold the perimeter. The men ran, ducking and weaving, and crawled into the trenches with their automatic rifles. Some of them had to shove aside enemy corpses to make room.

  Dr. Schobitz’s medics treated the wounded men from Stever’s personnel carrier. They bagged up Stever’s remains and lay him behind the aid station, next to one of the concrete support beams beneath the overpass. It was a protected spot, as safe as any other place around the aid station, given the fact that occasional rounds were smacking into the support columns, spraying the medics with flying bits of concrete. It seemed somehow disrespectful to just stick Sergeant Stever off in the corner, but the firefight was in full throttle and there was no time to think of a better way.

  The arrival of the supply convoy triggered a surge of confidence for the commanders leading the fight at the interchange. For Captain Hornbuckle and Command Sergeant Major Gallagher—and for Captain Johnson, who was now in charge of the entire combined combat team at Curly—the fresh fuel and ammunition eased their fears. Separately, each man had harbored a dread that the situation was deteriorating into another Mogadishu. They had envisioned being overrun, short on combat power and ammunition, with no way for reinforcements to get through. Now their men were unloading ammunition for the Bradleys and the infantrymen, and Lieutenant Woodruff’s mortar crews were getting fresh loads of the high-explosive, 120mm mortars that had been so effective in demolishing the buildings housing RPG teams. Hornbuckle, Gallagher, and Johnson knew they were now in a position not only to hold the interchange, but also to eventually kill, capture, or drive off the gunmen surrounding them. Johnson figured his men had killed at least 130 enemy fighters and destroyed two dozen vehicles. Hornbuckle thought his men had probably killed another 150 fighters and destroyed perhaps a dozen vehicles.

  They were now superior in every respect—armor, infantry, ammunition, and fuel. They thought they had seized control of the fight.

  Beneath the overpass, hunched over the radio inside his command vehicle, Major Denton Knapp had been monitoring the radio nets, keeping abreast of developments up and down Highway 8 and inside the palace complex. As the executive officer for Task Force 3-15—China battalion and its assets—Knapp was the number two man below Twitty. More than anyone at Curly, he had absorbed the full scope of the Spartan Brigade’s battle for Baghdad that morning. Knapp had monitored Twitty’s conversations with Colonel Perkins on the brigade command net and, on the task force net, the discussions between Twitty and his commanders at the three interchanges. He had also monitored the Rogue and Tusker thrusts into the city. It was Knapp, in fact, who passed on to Twitty the reports that Tusker had seized the palace.

  Knapp hated being stuck inside his command vehicle while the battle raged outside. He wanted to be part of the fight. It was hot and stuffy in the hull, and he felt trapped and claustrophobic. He could hear the RPGs exploding outside, and the vehicle had pitched and rocked when the short 155mm artillery round detonated next to the overpass.

  At one point, Knapp’s driver came tumbling down into the hull from the upper hatch of his M577 armored command vehicle. The driver had been firing a .50-caliber machine gun north up Highway 8, trying to subdue the gunmen in the trenches and inside the buildings. Knapp’s vehicle didn’t have a gun mount, but he had rigged one up by tying the .50-caliber tripod to the top of the vehicle with green parachute cord. Now his driver was crashing down beside him, his arm bleeding. It had been torn open by shrapnel. Knapp took a look at the wound, but before he could do anything about it the driver yanked his arm away and said he was okay. He climbed back up top and resumed firing.

  Knapp had not anticipated a fight of such intensity. On the march up from the Kuwaiti border, the battalion had always taken the fight to the enemy. He and his men were the aggressors, seeking out enemy positions and surprising them and killing them. Curly was different. The Iraqi soldiers and the Syrian mercenaries had surprised the battalion with their tenacity and their ability to attack from all sides. Knapp had never imagined that they would deliver fighters to the front in civilian buses and taxis and even motorcycles. Nor had he anticipated the sophisticated trench system or the prepositioned weapons caches dug into both sides of the highway.

  Knapp was not a man who was easily cowed, but there were moments, especially early in the fight before Ronny Johnson arrived with reinforcements, that he feared being overrun. Knapp was a veteran officer, thirty-eight years old, with nearly seventeen years in the army. He was a West Point man, commissioned in 1987. He had grown up in Gillette, Wyoming, the son of a surveyor and part-time country-and-western musician. He played army with the kids in his neighborhood, where his next-door neighbor went off to attend the Air Force Academy. Knapp decided in high school that he, too, would be a military officer.

  Until he crossed the border into Iraq, Knapp had never been in combat. Even after several firefights down south, he had been edgy and apprehensive as he sat through Lieutenant Colonel Twitty’s impassioned briefing the night of the sixth. He sensed that the fight on Highway 8 would be like nothing he had experienced before. He lay down in the middle of the night, still wearing his helmet and flak vest, and tried to get a couple hours’ sleep. It was impossible. He was too agitated.

  Now, with the fight raging in all directions, Knapp couldn’t stand it inside the vehicle any longer. He had to see what was going on. He climbed out and stood beneath the overpass in the command and control area framed by armored vehicles backed up butt to butt, their rear hatches touching. He couldn’t see much because the air was a milky yellow, with swirling dust and pungent black smoke from the massive loads of ammunition being expended. From time to time, Sergeant Major Gallagher and Captain Hornbuckle ran over to discuss the progress of the fight. By this time, late in the morning, they all agreed that the situation had stabilized. The infantrymen and Bradleys were slowly extending the perimeter. In military terms, Knapp felt, they had established “positive control” of Objective Curly.

  Then, over the brigade command net, Knapp got a FRAGO—a fragmentary order—just before noon. Colonel Perkins, determined to set conditions that would allow the tank battalions to spend the night in the city center, had decided to move the combat team from Curly. He was worried about the mile-long stretch of the Kindi Highway that connected the spaghetti interchange at Moe to Perkins’s command center at the Sujud Palace. General Blount had already designated a battalion from the division’s First Brigade at the airport as a backup force. Blount and Perkins had decided to send that force, the Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry—known as 2-7—to relieve the combat teams at Curly and provide security for Lieutenant Colonel Wesley’s vulnerable new TOC. Knapp was ordered to round up everyone now at Curly—Captain Hornbuckle’s team, Captain Johnson’s team, and the resupply convoy—and roll north on Highway 8 after coordinating a handoff to the 2-7 battalion.

  The move would allow Perkins to meet two of his primary goals that morning. The supply convoy would be able to drop off ammunition and fuel designated for the combat teams at the three interchanges, bolstering them in their
fight to keep Highway 8 open. Johnson’s combat teams would then secure the unsecured stretch of the Kindi Highway, shoring up Perkins’s exposed rear. There was also the added benefit of having more combat power inside the city.

  For Knapp and the other commanders at Curly, the order created a tactical and logistical nightmare. It was difficult enough to hand off positions from one unit to another in secured areas. But now they had to accomplish the handoff under the battalion’s heaviest firefight of the war, with the enemy dug in across a 360-degree perimeter. There was also the issue of the fuel tankers and ammunition trucks. Bailey and Polsgrove were still trying to move as many of the vehicles as possible out of the line of fire on the east side of the highway to a more protected site on the west side. Now they had to get them arranged back in convoy formation while under fire.

  As Knapp huddled with the battle captains to coordinate the pull-out, an advance team from 2-7 sped into the intersection on Highway 8 from the south. Major Rod Coffey, the 2-7 battalion S-3, or operations officer, had fought his way up from Lieutenant Colonel Wesley’s rebuilt brigade TOC in a Bradley, accompanied by a Humvee. Knapp was relieved to see him. The two majors had already spoken on the radio, but face-to-face coordination was essential amid the chaos of a battlefield handoff, where friendly fire was a very real possibility. Two of Knapp’s men had already been winged by friendly fire—the two soldiers hit by the 155mm short round. Now, instead of trying to talk by radio to strangers in a battalion from another brigade, Knapp had Coffey right next to him, talking directly to his own men. Even with the barrage of enemy fire, Knapp felt confident about the handoff.

  After climbing down from his Bradley, Major Coffey made his way toward the command post under the overpass at Curly. He wanted to get briefed right away on the situation at the interchange. His battalion had been given just two hours to prepare for a dangerous and complex mission—to take over for another unit in the middle of a furious firefight. Coffey was forty-one, a confident, experienced fifteen-year army veteran, but this was a unique challenge. Coffey had spoken briefly at the Second Brigade command center with Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley, the brigade executive officer, but now he needed an on-the-ground description of the enemy as well as the plan for the handoff. He recognized Sergeant Major Gallagher, who described the enemy tactics and mentioned that many of the fighters were Syrian mercenaries. Coffey spoke briefly with Captain Ronny Johnson, then made his way to the command post to huddle with Major Knapp. He realized the interchange had been under fire for hours, and he thought the soldiers there looked fatigued. He ducked inside the rear hatch of Knapp’s command armored personnel carrier and the two majors discussed details of the handoff. Knapp said he wanted to begin the transition with one company from 2-7 at the southern perimeter, gradually moving north until all units had been replaced. He wanted a step-by-step boundary change.

  As Coffey made his way back to his Bradley parked at the northern edge of the overpass, it seemed to him that not all the soldiers at the interchange were returning fire effectively as they took cover. The soldiers were not under his command, but the situation angered him. He started screaming at some of the men, “Move forward and engage the enemy!”

  Coffey also realized that the combat teams now at the interchange were loading up and preparing to move north. He had assumed that the handoff would be a “relief in place”—a step-by-step transition, with soldiers pulling out of fighting positions as the new unit’s soldiers moved in. But now, Coffey feared, the relief in place wasn’t going to happen. He decided to go back to confer with Knapp. Rounds were pinging off vehicles now, gouging out hunks off asphalt from the roadway and chips of concrete from the overpass. Coffey thought the safest route back to Knapp’s command vehicle was through the front of the Humvee that had accompanied him to the interchange. As he crawled through the vehicle, he saw the flaming head of an RPG flash to his left. The round exploded against the Humvee, sending shrapnel ripping through Coffey’s leg and ankle. His lower left leg bone was shattered. A second RPG thundered in, setting the Humvee on fire.

  Coffey had an uplifting thought: I’m not dead yet. He crawled out of the Humvee and limped across the asphalt to Knapp’s command vehicle, dragging his bleeding leg. An RPG whizzed in behind him and slammed into the left side of his Bradley, which was parked near Knapp’s vehicle. Two rucksacks hanging on the side erupted in flames, but Coffey could see that the grenade had not penetrated the Bradley’s armor. He reached Knapp’s vehicle and hobbled inside. As Knapp tried to get a look at Coffey’s leg wounds, the two men quickly discussed the handoff. They agreed that the lead company from 2-7 should move up right away. Knapp wanted a controlled handoff.

  Coffey limped over to his Bradley, only to discover that his driver had disappeared. The two soldiers who had been in the Humvee that was now burning were also gone. Coffey yelled for his driver, who sprinted up from the south, where he had taken cover behind a concrete abutment after the Bradley was hit. One of the two infantrymen who had ridden up Highway 8 in the back of the Bradley was now in the Bradley commander’s hatch. Coffey told the soldier to move aside, but the crew insisted that he get his leg bandaged first. Specialist Nicholas Cochrane, an infantryman from the two-man team, managed to get a pressure bandage on the major’s leg to stop the bleeding.

  Coffey was focused at this point on helping Johnson’s combat team keep suppressive fire on the Iraqis so that the handoff could take place. He crawled up into the commander’s hatch and ordered Cochrane and the other infantrymen to get out and lay down suppressive fire with their M-16s. He yelled at his driver to pull forward and told his gunner to fire. The Bradley plunged into the fight.

  Sergeant Shawn Kemmer had been disappointed the night before, when his squad got the order to pull security at Objective Curly. Kemmer was a squad leader on a China mortar platoon, an aggressive young NCO from Hampton, Virginia, who was eager to prove himself in combat. He had envisioned an uneventful day on security duty, sitting around and swatting flies while the real fight played out in the city center. He had come all the way to the edge of Baghdad, he felt, only to be reduced to guarding a highway. He joked about being the water boy when everybody else was out on the field, playing in the big game.

  Now Kemmer was in the middle of the brigade’s biggest firefight of the war, and things were not going smoothly. Within minutes of pulling out on Highway 8, in command of the tail vehicle on Captain Johnson’s first reinforcement platoon, he had immediately encountered a problem. He had spotted a wounded Iraqi soldier at the side of the highway, crawling to retrieve his weapon, and he had ordered one of his soldiers to kill the man with his M-16. Kemmer was in the hatch of his armored personnel carrier, manning a .50-caliber machine gun, which he thought was too much weapon for killing just one man. But his own soldier hesitated; he didn’t want to shoot a wounded man. Finally Kemmer cursed and swung the machine gun around to fire—only to have his soldier, belatedly, kill the man with a burst from his M-16. Kemmer had no regrets about killing a wounded man, but he was troubled by the soldier’s hesitancy. It was a bad sign.

  Once Kemmer’s team arrived at Curly, he set up his personnel carrier on the southern perimeter, right on Highway 8, completely exposed. Kemmer was firing the .50-caliber into a building on the west side of the highway when bullets began ringing off the sides of the vehicle. He was ordering everybody to get down and close the hatches when something smashed into the handle of his machine gun. Kemmer felt a burning sensation in his arm. He hollered, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” He looked down and realized that a flaming piece of the handle had burned his arm. He felt foolish. “I’m fine! I’m fine!” he yelled.

  Kemmer radioed for permission to fire direct lay into the building to the west—to fire his 120mm mortars straight into the structure. He didn’t need spotters. He would just aim the tubes and adjust by sight. The building was only a few hundred meters away, and he could see it clearly. He had his crews fire four rounds from mortars mounted on the armored vehicles.
The first two rounds landed behind the building. Kemmer had the crews adjust their fire, and the next two rounds crashed down on the top of the building, caving in the roof and top floor. The enemy fire ceased from that direction, and Kemmer felt a small sense of accomplishment and vindication.

  But then one of his men screwed up one of the mortars. The soldier was cleaning the mortar tube with a swab—like a huge Q-tip cleaning out an ear—but he had neglected to oil the swab first. It got jammed in the tube. The soldier was crouched on top of an armored vehicle, under fire, yanking madly on the swab.

  “Didn’t I tell you to put fucking oil on the swab before you put it in?” Kemmer screamed.

  “Sorry, sorry, I tried,” the soldier said.

  Kemmer cursed him and told him to get down before he got killed. The soldier took cover, but not before he completely jammed the mortar by forcing the swab out of the tube. Kemmer had to jury-rig the weapon to get it to fire properly. He felt his frustration mounting. The middle of a firefight wasn’t the time or place to teach a guy how clean a mortar tube.

  The next threat came from the south—a sedan that was speeding north up Highway 8, directly at Kemmer’s personnel carrier. There were two men inside. Kemmer couldn’t tell whether they had weapons, so he followed the rules of engagement. He fired his machine gun into the pavement, but the sedan kept coming. He fired into the hood, but the car did not slow down. Then he shot out the windshield and saw the passenger go down. The car burst into flames and slowly rolled to a stop about fifty meters away. The left front door flew open. The driver raced to the right side of the highway and climbed down into a bunker. He was dressed in civilian clothes. Kemmer couldn’t tell if he had a weapon, but he was in an enemy bunker that had fired on his squad earlier. In Kemmer’s mind, that made the driver an enemy combatant.

  Kemmer laced the bunker with machine-gun fire. Some of the other gunners opened fire, too, and the driver went down and stayed down. It was the first time Kemmer had killed anyone, and he was struck by how impersonal it seemed. He felt no anger or hatred. He saw the target and he hit it. He had nothing against the guy. In fact, he figured the man probably had a wife and kids at home, just like him. So it was nothing personal.