Rideout had a lot on his mind. He was an intense, driven officer. He could be brusque and short-tempered, and he had a reputation as a no-nonsense commander. But he was respected within the battalion as a soldier who knew his stuff, and one who demanded top performance from himself and others. That week, in particular, Rideout was a deeply troubled and conflicted man. He was haunted by a friendly fire incident, an accident three days earlier that had cost the battalion its first death in Iraq.
On April 4, on a narrow road about fifteen miles southeast of Baghdad, Rideout had been at the tail of an armored column attacking Iraqi positions. A Russian-made T-72 tank had just been destroyed, and the crews were watching it burn. Without telling anyone, a captain on the convoy, Ed Korn, climbed out of his armored vehicle and headed into a forest of date palms. Korn was not well known within the battalion; he had joined the unit just six days earlier. He was thirty-one, an energetic and enthusiastic Gulf War veteran who had volunteered for the Iraqi war in March and had rushed north to join the battalion in the southern Iraqi desert. Known to his friends as Jason, not Ed, Korn had told fellow soldiers on the ride up through the southern Iraqi desert that he was not going to let the fear of death hold him back, or paralyze him, once he got into combat.
It was hot on the fourth, and Korn was wearing just his flak vest over a brown T-shirt as he disappeared into the palms. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going, or why—he may have been trying to scout enemy positions—but a sergeant got out and followed him. When Korn stumbled across a second T-72 camouflaged by palm fronds, he sent the sergeant back to the column to retrieve an antitank weapon.
From his vehicle, Rideout noticed a campfire just beyond the burning tank, well over two hundred meters away. A teapot was on the fire, and there were sleeping bags on the ground and chickens wandering around. Rideout assumed it was a campsite for Iraqi tank crews. Suddenly he saw someone near the campfire drop down, then stand up and hide behind the second T-72 tank. Rideout’s driver, Specialist John Durst, saw him, too. Durst asked Rideout for permission to fire. Both men were convinced the man was an Iraqi tank crewman. “Engage,” Rideout said.
Durst took aim and fired a single round from his M-16. The man went down. It was an incredible shot—the most amazing shot Rideout had ever seen. He slapped Durst on his helmet. “Great fucking shot!” he told him.
Next to Rideout’s vehicle, a captain commanding a Bradley was scanning the area through thermal sights and spotted the second tank, just beyond the burning tank. He also saw the man Durst had hit. He was on the ground, his hand raised in the air. The captain ordered his gunner to destroy the tank to prevent it from firing on the column. Rounds from the 25mm main gun tore into the T-72, setting it aflame and sending ricochets tearing into the wounded man on the ground.
At that moment the sergeant who had accompanied Korn emerged from the tree line behind Rideout and yelled to the major: “Captain Korn is in the woods, sir!” He pointed to the trees.
Rideout couldn’t believe it. “You have got to be fucking kidding me!” he said. He radioed a cease-fire order to get the attention of the Bradley commander, then raised his fist, the signal to the Bradley crew to stop firing.
Rideout’s heart was pounding. He gathered up a few men and walked through the woods to the campsite. He hoped desperately that he would stumble across Korn along the way—that he would see the captain grinning and bullshitting about finding an enemy tank. But when they reached the campsite Rideout could tell that the dead man on the ground, his torso blown in half by the Bradley, was Ed Korn. His glasses were still on his face. It was the worst day of Rideout’s long military career, and it weighed on him terribly. He knew he would have to live with it for the rest of his life.
Three days later, Korn’s death was still a crushing weight as Rideout worked to solidify the battalion’s positions around the Republican Palace. He had not slept in three days, and he was exhausted. Around 11 p.m., when things seemed at least somewhat under control, Rideout realized he needed to sleep for a couple of hours. He would be no good to anybody if he didn’t get some rest. He went inside the palace and dragged a mattress from one of the bedrooms. He flopped it on the driveway outside, next to his Bradley, and fell into a light slumber.
Just before midnight, Rideout bolted upright. There was a huge explosion that reverberated off the palace walls. As Rideout leaped to his feet, still in his underwear, some of the officers who were awake started laughing at him. The engineers had just blown up a cache of enemy weapons and ammunition, but nobody had told Rideout. Now ammunition was cooking off and some of the palm trees were on fire. The whole city was probably awake. And if the enemy had been wondering where the Americans were, they certainly knew now.
Rideout was furious. “You guys are a bunch of idiots,” he said. “You just gave our fucking position away. That’s just super.” He gave an order to stop blowing up weapons caches, then tried to go back to sleep.
It was the first chance in several days for members of the battalion to sleep. Lieutenant Colonel deCamp went inside the palace to catch a quick nap. He hadn’t slept much over the past few days. Captain Ed Ballanco, who had brought up the fuel and ammunition convoy, also went inside the palace to try to get a couple of hours of sleep. He foraged through one of the bedrooms and found a bed and plopped down. He kept thinking how strange it was—how no one would ever believe it—that he was sleeping in Saddam Hussein’s palace.
Phil Wolford’s tank crews were beat, too. After nightfall, Wolford put four tanks on Ready Condition One—up and ready to fire, with all crewmen at their battle stations. He put the other tank crews on Ready Condition Two—ready to fight in fifteen minutes. Two crewmen on each tank would be able to catch quick naps, then switch with the other two crewmen assigned to scan through the thermals and monitor the radio. They had turned off their engines early that afternoon to conserve fuel.
Staff Sergeant Shawn Gibson had stood so long in his tank turret that his legs and feet had swollen grotesquely, and they throbbed with a searing pain. He was glad to get off his feet. He climbed up on the turret and lay flat on his back. He put his M-4 carbine next to him and lay his 9mm pistol across his chest. He didn’t expect to fall asleep—he was notorious in the platoon for never sleeping. He always told his crew, “I’ll sleep when I get home.” Gibson was voluble and easygoing, a thirty-eight-year-old NCO who had spent almost seventeen years—nearly half his life—in the army. He was born in Philadelphia, but his mother had packed up the family and moved to Virginia when Gibson was seven to get away from drug gangs in North Philadelphia. A veteran of the first Gulf War, Gibson had a wife and three children anxiously awaiting his safe return from Iraq.
On this dark night, outside the palace, Gibson kept bolting upright every time he heard noises in the dark, but he was at least able to take the pressure off his swollen legs and feet. After stretching out for a while, the swelling subsided and the pain eased. Later on, unable to sleep, he crawled down next to the tank to relieve himself.
On the command tank, Wolford managed to get a radio call through to his good friend Captain Steve Barry from Cyclone Company. Barry was holding the Fourteenth of July traffic circle and bridge, just a kilometer west of the palace. The two commanders discussed the seam between their positions and Rogue’s and the fact that neither of them had a clear picture of exactly where Rogue’s guys were set up. Barry told Wolford it was fairly quiet at the circle, but he expected a counterattack at some point. Wolford agreed. “This can’t be all there is,” he said. “There’s got to be a lot more.”
When the time came for Wolford and his loader to take a break, they switched with the driver and gunner on Wolford’s tank. Wolford hadn’t taken his boots off for days. His feet were foul, and he wanted to air them out. He and his loader both took off their boots and stretched out on top of the tank. They fell asleep almost instantly.
Just beyond the northeast corner of the palace, Sergeant First Class Lustig had been posted on the perimet
er with three other tanks from his platoon. The crews were watching the main palace road, known as Haifa Street, which broke sharply to the north and led through the palace complex to the foot of the Jumhuriya Bridge about one and a half kilometers away. Straight up the roadway, a few hundred meters away, Lustig could see a small stone archway that separated the main palace grounds from the rest of the palace complex.
By 3:20 a.m., Lustig had been down in the turret for about half an hour, scanning the roadway through the thermal imaging system while two of his crewmen dozed atop the tank. It was hot and stuffy inside, so Lustig climbed up through the hatch to get some fresh air. When he came back down and squinted again through the thermals, he saw the glowing green forms of two men several hundred meters away. They were casually strolling down the road toward the arch. Lustig thought they might be from the company’s infantry platoon. The infantry was supposed to be posted on the beachfront behind the palace but, he thought, perhaps they had sent a patrol down the road without telling anyone.
Lustig looked again through the magnified thermals. The two men weren’t wearing Kevlar helmets. He shook his head to clear his vision. He was afraid he had dozed off and was seeing things in his sleep. He looked again. He had the sights set on ten-power magnification, and now he could see that the two men were dressed in civilian clothes. They wore backpacks, with satchels strapped to their chests. They were carrying automatic rifles—and suddenly at least twenty more men came into view behind them, all of them carrying weapons.
Lustig told the two crewmen atop the tank to wake up and get to their positions inside the turret. “We’ve got enemy dismounts coming up the road,” he whispered. The crewmen were slow to respond, so Lustig started cursing to get them to move. He got on the radio, trying to alert Captain Wolford back at the palace driveway. The captain was asleep on top of his tank, but his gunner was on the radio. The gunner heard Lustig whisper that dismounts were approaching. Lustig sounded angry with his crew. “There’s gonna be a fuck load of trouble if these guys don’t start getting down inside,” he whispered over the radio.
Lustig looked through the thermals again. The men on the road had split into two groups, with a dozen or so moving through the trees on the left side of the road and another ten to fifteen advancing next to a two-meter wall on the right side. Lustig charged the .50-caliber machine gun, preparing it to fire. He saw one of the men handing out RPG grenades from a backpack. He got back on the radio.
By this time, Wolford had been shaken awake by his gunner. He leaped up in his stocking feet and put on his communications helmet. Lustig was still whispering, trying not to give away his position.
“I have about thirty to thirty-five dismounts walking down the road straight toward you,” Lustig said.
“How far out are they—are they in RPG range?” Wolford asked.
“About five hundred meters.”
“Okay, don’t fire till I get the company ready,” Wolford said. It would take a few minutes for the crews to get into position and start up the tank engines.
Wolford reached down to put on his boots—and he couldn’t find them. He would have to command his company in his stocking feet. He got on the radio and issued orders to his platoon leaders. He wanted them to start their tanks all at once as soon as their crews were up and ready. Wolford knew the RPG teams would be able to identify the tanks the instant they turned over their big turbine engines, so it made sense to crank them all at once. The crews scrambled into position and Wolford gave a short countdown.
The tank engines roared to life. The gunmen on the roadway were only a couple hundred meters from Lustig’s tank on the northeast perimeter when his driver, Private First Class Donte Pirl, cranked the engine. Pirl had just slammed his hatch shut when the tank was rocked by a thunderous explosion. An RPG had rocketed in from the front, exploding against the steel frame where the gun tube is attached to the turret.
Lustig heard Pirl scream. Oh Christ, he thought, Pirl didn’t get the hatch closed in time. Then Pirl yelled that he was okay. He wanted to know how to position the tank. The turret was still locked up from a previous battle and would not traverse, so Pirl and Lustig had worked out a way to pivot the tank from side to side in order to position the main gun.
Lustig was climbing up to fire the .50-caliber machine gun from the cupola when another explosion jolted the tank. He ducked down. Something had slammed into the main gun tube. Lustig looked to see if any hydraulic fluid was leaking. There was nothing. The main cannon seemed fine. It was locked in the forward position, a multipurpose MPAT shell loaded in the breech. The RPG teams were moving closer. Lustig decided to fire the main gun, hoping to at least knock the gunmen off their feet with the concussion. He squeezed the cadillac triggers. The round exploded into the roadway, scattering some of the men.
But other fighters had managed to launch antitank rockets and more RPGs. One RPG slammed into the palace, just below one of the Saddam busts. The explosion jolted Kent Rideout awake. He leaped up from his mattress thinking, That’s no frigging engineer explosion. Still in his underwear, he ran inside the hull of his Bradley to get on the radio. Then he realized he wasn’t in uniform, so he hustled back and got dressed before getting back on the radio to help direct the fight.
Inside the palace, the exploding RPGs awakened Captain Ballanco in his darkened bedroom. He got dressed and rounded up two soldiers from the support platoon who had also taken refuge in the palace. Ballanco, fearing the palace had been overrun by Iraqis, told the soldiers to have their M-16s ready to fire. He slung his own M-16 across his back and took out his 9mm pistol so that he could hold the pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He cursed his own stupidity for leaving his helmet outside.
The palace hallways were pitch black. The three men tiptoed down the marble hallways toward the northeast portico, one of two main palace entryways. But once they found the portico, they decided not to go outside for fear their own men would mistake them for infiltrating Iraqis and open fire. They backtracked, trying to find the southwest portico. Their footsteps echoed off the marble walls. They kept wandering down the wrong hallways, getting lost in the maze of corridors. It took ten minutes to find the portico. Ballanco peeked outside and caught a glimpse of Captain Rich Blenz, the support platoon leader, crouching down behind the fuel and ammunition trucks. He ran over and grabbed Blenz, followed by the other two soldiers.
Blenz was worried about friendly fire—that the support platoon drivers and mechanics would mistakenly fire on the tankers. Ballanco started to tell the support platoon guys to keep weapons tight, meaning not to fire unless a target has been clearly identified. But then he realized that they might not be familiar with the term, so he just told them: “Don’t fire a round unless you know he’s an enemy soldier.” Ballanco wanted them to be wary, but also ready to open fire in order to keep the RPG teams away from the tankers. A single grenade fired into the fuel trucks might torch the whole line of vehicles clustered in the main palace driveway. The support platoon soldiers held their fire and let the tanks do the fighting. Rideout called on the radio and told Ballanco to make sure he protected the fuelers. Ballanco assured the major that he was on top of it.
At the opposite end of the palace, along the main roadway at the building’s southwest corner, Shawn Gibson was down on the pavement next to his tank, squatting on the roadway. His pants were down and his rear was, literally, exposed.
From inside the tank, Gibson’s loader yelled out, “Sergeant Gibson! Where you at?” He had just heard Lustig’s whispered warning over the radio.
“I’m using the bathroom!” Gibson hollered.
“Hurry up! Here they come! They’re coming!”
“What?”
An RPG flashed through the night, punching straight through a blue metal road sign on the palace road. It shot directly over Gibson’s head and exploded against the side of his tank, just above the left front fuel cell. Gibson dove to the pavement and crawled under the tank. He could hear bullets p
inging off the steel skirts. He hid behind the road wheels, hitching up his pants, and pulled out his 9mm pistol. He didn’t know who was firing at him or where they were. He could hear his gunner firing the tank’s coax. He screamed up at him, “Keep shooting at those guys! I’m going to come up there as soon as I hear a break in the fire!”
Gibson waited a few moments until the enemy fire seemed to wane. He climbed into the commander’s hatch and got on the radio to Lieutenant Maurice Middleton, the platoon leader who had led the company’s charge up Highway 8. Gibson was worried about a road that ran down the southwest side of the palace to the riverbank. He was afraid enemy soldiers had infiltrated the roadway. His tank was exposed from that direction. Gibson knew the company’s infantry platoon had been posted somewhere along the shoreline behind the road, but he wasn’t sure they were still back there. He didn’t want to fire on them by mistake.
“Let me know where those guys are at, because if I see somebody coming down that road, I’m going to take them out,” Gibson said.
Middleton wasn’t sure, either, so he radioed Wolford and found out that the infantry was still behind the palace. “They’re still down there,” Middleton told Gibson. “If you see somebody running across that road, it’s them. So don’t shoot.”
Gibson was still worried about his rear flank, and still disoriented. He focused his .50-caliber machine gun on what he assumed were RPG teams on the far roadway, and he had his gunner lay down suppressive fire with the coax. He didn’t want to use the main gun with the tanks from Lustig’s platoon so close by.
Just down the roadway, Middleton was still getting his crew together. When the RPG slammed into Gibson’s tank nearby, Middleton had been in the commander’s hatch of his tank. His loader had been jarred awake, and was still half asleep as he leaped into his hatch. Something on his Nomex jumpsuit caught on the hatch and he was left dangling in the turret, screaming for help. Middleton thought he had been shot. The gunner reached up and yanked the loader inside, ripping his entire jumpsuit right off him. The loader fought for the next several hours wearing just his boxer shorts, tanker’s vest, a T-shirt, and combat boots.
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