Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  Twitty told Johnson to escort the rest of the convoy to Moe, then continue on, as Perkins had ordered, to secure the highway that ran east from Moe to Perkins’s command post at the Sujud Palace. It was an opportune time to launch the convoy. For the first time that day, there was a lull in the fighting. Twitty sank back in the hatch of his Bradley, overcome by a sudden sense of weariness bordering on exhaustion. He felt overwhelmed. For nearly eight hours straight, he had been fighting and screaming into the radio and drawing up a battle plan and worrying about the resupply. Now he felt his body starting to shut down. He had not had a decent night’s sleep for more than a week. He had not slept at all the previous two nights. He was filthy with dust and soaked with sweat. He lay back and shut his eyes. For fifteen blissful minutes, even with his gunner still firing below him, he sank into a fitful sleep.

  First Sergeant Jeff Moser was surprised to find himself out on the perimeter and under fire at Objective Moe. He was in charge of the company trains—two medical tracks, a maintenance vehicle, the operations officer’s command Bradley, and Moser’s own M113 armored personnel carrier. Moser had expected the company trains to be in a more protected spot, perhaps under the overpass, where the medics could work in relative safety. That was the way it usually worked, and he assumed that’s the way it was laid out in the mission brief. But, in truth, Moser had missed most of the mission brief the night before. He and his men had come under RPG fire as they were preparing for the mission, so things were a bit disjointed. He barely got a chance to glance at the map imagery to see where they were supposed to go. He ended up having to tell his driver just to stay on the tail of the Bradley in front of them all the way up Highway 8 that morning. The next thing he knew, they were setting up just past the northwest on-ramp at the big spaghetti intersection—at Moe—with RPGs zooming over their heads.

  Moser was thirty-seven, an experienced NCO, a seventeen-year lifer. He had joined the army right out of high school in Dearborn, Michigan, where his father worked the assembly line for the Ford Motor Company, putting together Mustangs. Moser had grown up with Arab neighbors, and he had learned a few Arabic phrases, which he thought he might put to good use in Iraq. He had combat experience, too, in Panama, but that was nothing like what was confronting him now, at Moe.

  Their little group out on the northwest perimeter was getting pounded. Moser saw exploding RPGs and small-arms tracers, plus antiaircraft guns lowered to direct-fire mode and an occasional mortar round. He figured there were several hundred gunmen unloading on them. Moser’s men were protected from the rear by the elevated concrete on-ramp, but they were exposed to their front, where a field and a park led to an enormous mosque with twin minarets. It was the Um al-Tabul Mosque, one of the biggest in Baghdad, a towering pale yellow structure where hundreds of Baghdad’s middle-class Sunnis worshipped. It seemed to Moser that some of the enemy fire was originating from the direction of the mosque.

  On the edge of the mosque compound closest to the interchange was a stout fence anchored by concrete pillars. Moser could see gunmen ducking and running next to the fence, and he opened up with an M-240 from the open hatch of his personnel carrier. He was still firing when word came over the radio of the first casualty of the morning. It was Specialist Steven Atkinson, one of the infantrymen. He had run into the open to grab a wounded enemy fighter who was bellowing in pain on the western edge of the company perimeter. Atkinson was trying to drag the man in for medical care when an AK-47 round tore into his abdomen, just under his combat vest.

  One of Moser’s responsibilities as first sergeant was casualty evacuation. He tried to get one of the medical tracks over to Atkinson, but enemy fire was too heavy. The infantrymen in Atkinson’s platoon put him into an armored vehicle that delivered him to Moser’s group. One of the medics treated Atkinson, but the wound was serious enough to require evacuation to the forward aid station three kilometers to the south, just north of Objective Larry. Moser put Atkinson in his personnel carrier and got one of the Bradleys to escort him. They took heavy fire all the way down the highway; an RPG destroyed an M-240 machine gun mounted on the Bradley, which got everyone’s attention.

  Moser made it back to Moe just in time to deal with another casualty. It was Sergeant William Staun, the gunner in a tank that had set up on Highway 8 just south of the interchange. His tank commander, Sergeant First Class Robert Ford, had been up in the commander’s hatch when he heard Staun scream. Ford couldn’t figure out how Staun had been hurt; he was down in the turret, protected by several inches of steel. He looked down and saw that Staun’s coax gun had jammed. Somehow, one of the rounds had cooked off and ripped through Staun’s left bicep. Ford put on a pressure dressing and got him to the medics. Moser evacuated Staun, too.

  The casualties kept coming. Two engineers were hit with shrapnel as they tried to tear down light poles and palm trees to build barriers to fend off suicide vehicles. Then a Bradley on the southern perimeter was rocked by an RPG that tore straight through a TOW missile launcher and exploded against the commander’s hatch. A piece of shrapnel ripped a hole in the right shoulder of the Bradley commander, Sergeant First Class John Morales, while he was looking through his integrated sight unit. The medics treated Morales on the spot and got him returned to action, but it was the second time someone presumedly safe inside a tank or Bradley had been wounded. Moser thought things were starting to get out of control.

  The fire from the mosque was getting heavier. Moser was certain now that fighters were taking advantage of the structure’s protected status, using it for cover in the belief that the Americans would not fire back. From what Moser could see, the fighters were being supplied with ammunition and weapons stored in the mosque compound. He was worried that the Iraqis would fire on the trailer the engineers had parked at the edge of the perimeter. It was loaded with mine-clearing charges—the sausagelike links of powerful C-4 explosives. If gunfire detonated the charges, the explosion would probably level the mosque—and kill every American on the perimeter.

  Moser radioed Captain Wright in his command Bradley to the east. “We’re taking fire from the mosque,” he told him.

  Wright was busy fielding radio reports from all his track commanders, but he was aware of fire coming from the direction of the mosque. He scanned the compound through his sights and spotted an RPG team on the roof and one team on each minaret. He was not eager to destroy a huge mosque in the middle of Baghdad, but he wasn’t about to just stand by and let his men get pounded.

  “Roger,” he told Moser. “Let me clear it up and see what’s going on.”

  From his command and control Bradley next to Moser, Major Roger Shuck had also radioed Wright to report fire from the mosque. Shuck was the battalion S-3, or operations officer, in charge of monitoring the battle at Moe and keeping Wright appraised of events up and down the highway. At first, Shuck thought the enemy fire was coming from the park and gardens in front of the mosque. But then he scanned the mosque through the Bradley’s sights and saw a two-man RPG team standing on a railing midway up one of the minarets. He described it to Wright. He was dying to take them out.

  Wright radioed Twitty and described the RPG teams firing from the mosque, and the ammunition and weapons cache within the mosque compound. Opening fire on a mosque was a sensitive subject. The rules of engagement clearly listed mosques as protected targets. Along with schools and hospitals, the houses of worship were the sites most often discussed by combat commanders. But the rules of engagement also permitted American forces to return fire from the enemy—even if the enemy was firing from a mosque. Twitty and Wright had a brief discussion. Twitty knew Wright’s team was getting hammered. He gave the captain permission to return fire from the mosque.

  Shuck was a senior officer, but he didn’t mind being in the middle of a firefight. Eight days earlier, near Karbala, his Bradley had been ambushed by an RPG team. A grenade had torn through the back of his turret, severing the heater hose and punching through to the ammunition rack inside the
turret. Two high-explosive Twenty-five Mike Mike rounds exploded, slamming Shuck into the turret. The concussion had ruptured his eardrum, and now he couldn’t hear anything out of his left ear. He could monitor only one radio net at a time, so he had to have his gunner monitor the brigade net while Shuck listened to the task force net with his good ear.

  But Shuck was still able to fire a weapon, and he thought of himself as a pretty fair shot. On the way up Highway 8 that morning, he had shot and killed two enemy fighters with his M-16. One had been lying on the right shoulder of the highway, playing dead, and Shuck got him from about seventy-five meters. Later, as he passed under an overpass, Shuck noticed an orange-and-white taxi parked on the elevated roadway. He thought it was odd that a taxi would just be sitting there in the middle of a firefight. He had his gunner traverse the turret to the rear. As he looked back, Shuck saw two men get out of the taxi and lean across the vehicle with an RPG launcher. He braced himself against the turret, aimed his M-16, and shot one of the men through the head. His gunner chopped down the second man with a burst of Twenty-five Mike Mike.

  Now, staring at the mosque, Shuck was trying to point out the RPG team on the minaret to a .50-caliber gunner on the personnel carrier next to him. The minaret was about 250 meters away. Shuck aimed his M-16 and fired. One of the men on the minaret went down. The .50-caliber gunner saw where the M-16 rounds had hit and opened up with the big gun, sending the second man toppling from the minaret. Then Shuck’s gunner let loose with the 25mm main gun, blowing up two ammunition and communications trucks parked in the mosque compound. Moser followed up with his AT-4, the antitank rocket launcher. He hit a small trailer in the courtyard, unleashing a tremendous explosion as the ammunition stored inside cooked off.

  The fire from the mosque stopped, but gunmen were still moving up and down the fence in front of the mosque compound. Moser sprayed them again with his mounted M-240 medium machine gun. The gunmen were dressed in black, and Moser assumed they were Fedayeen. They were poorly organized. They didn’t coordinate their fire. One man would pop his head up and shoot off a few rounds or an RPG, then hunker down and let somebody else fire. But several of them stayed up too long, and Moser was able to kill each man as he rose up. The others would try to recover the dead men’s bodies and weapons, only to expose themselves to Moser’s M-240.

  Some of Moser’s soldiers started laughing and making cracks like, “How stupid are these guys?” Moser thought he should reprimand them, because it really wasn’t funny. They were killing people. But he had to admit that his men were right. These people were inept. Moser had been harping on his men to be smart, to stay alert, to remember their training. They had all seen dead Republican Guard soldiers hauled off the battlefield down south, their boots poking from the trunks of cars. Moser often told his men, “Don’t be the guy with his boots sticking out of the trunk.” Now it was the enemy doing stupid things, and it struck everybody as comical.

  Moser did not enjoy killing these men. He hated the carnage. Earlier that morning, along Highway 8, he had seen a dog feasting on the spilled entrails of a dead Iraqi soldier, and that image poisoned the fight for him. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.

  * * *

  The interchange at Moe was more complex than the simple figure-eight intersections at Larry and Curly. Several highways merged at Moe into a tangle of on-ramps and overpasses that took motorists in all directions—north toward the exclusive neighborhood of Yarmouk, east to the palace complex, west to the airport, and south down Highway 8, the desert route to the city of Hillah. The overpasses were stacked on top of one another, their concrete support pillars overlapping in a maze of light and shadows. Below them were neighborhoods and shops and markets. Objective Moe wasn’t part of a clear open highway. It was a dense urban cluster, and a nightmare to defend.

  One of Josh Wright’s military instructors had once told him to analyze the countryside anytime he was driving his car, just to practice thinking about how he would defend the terrain. Wright had trained to maneuver in open desert, and his battalion had even trained briefly in Kuwait for urban combat. But he had never expected to be fighting at a highway interchange. It wasn’t something he had ever thought about. And only after the battle was raging did he realize that combat wasn’t like the fights he had seen in Hollywood movies. It was chaotic. Everything overlapped. It wasn’t linear and confined. It was three-dimensional, with threats beating down from all directions.

  Wright thought his most effective weapon at Moe was mortar fire. Thick stands of date palms blocked some of the fields of fire for the tanks and Bradleys, but the high arc of the mortars brought the rounds over the trees and straight down on the targets. A volley of 120mm mortars destroyed a technical mounted with a heavy machine gun to the southwest and killed several fighters using the vehicle for cover. In the wood line north and east of the interchange, groups of soldiers were advancing on Wright’s infantrymen. He walked in seven “danger close” mortar missions, some to within a hundred meters of his infantrymen, and the mortars drove back the enemy with no harm to Wright’s men. Wright was planning to bring in mortars on gunmen firing from buildings to his west, but then he got the apologetic radio call from the mortar platoon lieutenant at Curly, saying that he had used up all his rounds.

  Wright had managed to get his snipers and infantrymen on the rooftops and upper stories of buildings to his north and south—though one infantryman was stabbed in the leg with a bayonet while clearing one structure. That not only gave Wright the high ground to fire down on the enemy, but it also gave him more pairs of eyes—and thermal scopes—up high so that he had a better understanding of the battlefield. His fire support officer was also feeding Wright reports from air force pilots overhead of enemy armored vehicles approaching the interchange. Wright’s tanks had already destroyed two BMPs, the Russian-made armored personnel carriers, and Wright warned the tank commanders to prepare for more.

  By mid-afternoon, the losses had begun to pile up. Eight men had been wounded, including two of Wright’s three platoon sergeants. Every vehicle had been struck at least once by an RPG. Staff Sergeant Jamus Patrick lost the coax gun on his Bradley to an RPG that punched through the front and sent a fireball streaking between Patrick’s legs. A second Bradley coax was also knocked out, along with the main gun tube of a tank, which had a hole ripped straight through it by antiaircraft fire.

  From the west and north came suicide cars and trucks, nearly twenty of them by mid-afternoon. One sedan was speeding at nearly one hundred kilometers an hour before a tank HEAT round blew it off the highway. The driver somehow survived and emerged firing an AK-47 until a burst of coax cut him down. From the west, a blue Chevrolet Caprice roared up to two Bradleys and was stopped by a blast of 25mm fire. The driver crawled out, holding a grenade. It detonated, blowing the man in half. Sergeant First Class Ford blew up a taxi that sped toward his tank carrying a crude bomb in the trunk fashioned from a propane cooking canister.

  For Wright, the low point of the day came when an enemy team breached the perimeter. Somehow, a team of Iraqis rolled a 90mm recoilless rifle right under one of the main overpasses, behind Wright’s tanks and Bradleys. A team of engineers was preparing to build barricades on the west side of the highway when the recoilless rifle team fired on their armored vehicle. The engineers responded with their mounted .50-caliber machine gun, killing the crew. Then they destroyed the gun with thermite grenades.

  The incident alarmed Wright. The infantry had somehow missed the big gun when they cleared the interchange that morning. Wright started wondering how many more enemy teams had penetrated behind his lines. He pulled infantry platoons off the perimeter, one by one, and had them clear their quadrants again. They didn’t find any other enemy soldiers, but they did uncover huge caches of RPGs, AK-47s, and Italian-made land mines. Only then did Wright realize just how carefully the Iraqis had prepared for a fight at Moe.

  By about 3 p.m., Wright began to get urgent radio calls from his platoon leaders, w
arning him that they were amber on ammunition for both tanks and Bradleys, and amber on fuel for the tanks. They had already cross-leveled ammunition, trading off from crew to crew. Some of the crews were black—too low to sustain the fight—on .50-caliber and coax ammunition. Wright decided to consolidate his perimeter, to give up some of his gains in order to reduce the stress on men and machines trying to defend a bigger chunk of terrain. It was at that moment, and only at that moment, that Wright feared he might be overrun.

  Wright radioed Twitty and laid out his fuel and ammunition situation, including the fact that some of his tanks were on their last fuel cells. They could still fight while shut down, but they would not be able to maneuver—and Wright did not want to be in that predicament with nightfall only a few hours away. He felt more confident after discussing the situation with Twitty, who assured him he would not let Wright go black.

  Over the next hour or so, Wright’s spirits soared and plunged. First he heard over the net that the resupply convoy had been launched. Then he heard it was ambushed. Then he heard the convoy had reached Curly and had resupplied the mortar crews, which meant Wright could now request mortars again. Then he heard that several ammunition trucks and fuelers had exploded at Curly—his fuel and ammo. Then he was told he had priority for any requests for artillery. And finally, he heard that the resupply convoy had reached Larry, where it was reconfigured in order to move farther north to supply Wright’s team at Moe.