Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  The platoon commanded by Lieutenant Jason Redmon had all four tanks on Readiness Condition Two, with two men up and two down. The crews were scrambling now. Redmon was young and enthusiastic, a 2001 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University with short-cropped blond hair and a slight gap between his front teeth that gave him a wholesome, boy-next-door look. He heard the first two RPGs slam into Lustig’s tank on the far end of the perimeter and tried to get Captain Wolford on the radio. He couldn’t make contact. He tried Middleton. No luck. Then he heard Lustig say he’d been hit. Redmon wasn’t sure if Lustig meant himself or just his tank. For an instant he thought, Oh, my God, they’re coming down and killing us all.

  Wolford wasn’t available on the radio because he and his crew were trying to get his tank to start. They had been having problems with bad batteries for several days, but they had been unable to locate replacements. The slow and spotty supply lines had been a chronic problem the entire war. The crews had learned to either bring their own replacement parts or horse-trade with other crews.

  Wolford’s gunner and driver were yelling at each other, trying to get the tank started. They were under fire. Lustig’s tank had just been hit twice, and RPGs were exploding into the roadway and up against the palace walls. Wolford had just been on the radio to Lustig, trying to get a read on the enemy, and now his tank was stalled and his crew was bickering. His feet were hurting. He had finally found a pair of boots to put on, but they belonged to his loader.

  “Listen!” he screamed. “Shut the fuck up! Let’s go!”

  The company executive officer pulled up in his tank and tossed out his slave cables. They were like jumper cables—they connected one tank battery to another. The two crews managed to hook up the cables under fire and get the company commander’s tank started.

  Now Wolford was able to function properly. He realized the RPG teams had seized control of the fight. He had never seen the Iraqis lay down such an effective volume of fire. They were really taking it to his men, and at the moment Wolford had only two tanks in the fight—Lustig’s and the tank of Lustig’s wingman, Staff Sergeant Kennith Leverette.

  But then Gibson opened up, followed by Redmon. Wolford radioed Lieutenant Middleton and told him to pull up to support Lustig and Leverette. He also called Lieutenant Jeff McFarland, whose Bradley infantry platoon was still manning the riverbank behind the palace. Wolford ordered McFarland to bring his Bradleys to the front of the palace. He knew he would need the infantry to clear the woods across the road. Some of the RPG teams had fled into the woods to escape fire from the tanks.

  Lustig and his driver had managed to position their tank so that the main gun tube was pointed down the roadway. The RPG teams on the right side of the road had moved so close that they were now trapped between the tanks and the two-meter wall that ran down the right side. Lustig’s gunner fired several main gun rounds and Lustig worked the .50-caliber. Several gunmen went down, and the others scattered.

  Lustig thought they were retreating back to the small stone arch about three hundred meters up the road. He wasn’t certain. He had spent so much time squinting through the bright thermals that he had become night-blind. When he tried to look out from the top of the cupola, everything was black. There was no moon, no streetlights. He had to keep ducking back down and looking through the thermals.

  Wolford radioed Lustig and told him to push forward toward the small arch to get a better idea of how many fighters they were up against. He told him that the infantrymen were now on the ground, moving through the wood line to the left of the roadway. Wolford had ordered them to clear the woods on foot, and he wanted to make sure Lustig didn’t fire in their direction.

  At the arch, Lustig was able to see through an opening in the wall along the right side of the road. Men carrying AK-47s and RPGs were moving around, slowly and deliberately, apparently unaware that an American tank was moving up behind them. Lustig’s gunner asked for permission to fire on them, but Lustig told him, “No, wait. These guys are going to walk right into us.” He put the targeting reticle on the sidewalk and roadway just in front of the opening in the wall. Moments later, four of the men walked through the opening and onto the roadway. Lustig squeezed the triggers and all four men went down, torn apart by a blast of coax.

  Wolford and Lustig had some of the crewmen toss grenades over the wall to kill or maim anyone hiding behind it. They didn’t want RPG teams sneaking out from behind the wall later to fire at the tanks’ rear ends. Wolford believed in using every weapon available to keep dismounts away from tank crews. He had often fired his automatic rifle and even his pistol from the commander’s hatch. He had lobbed so many grenades into trees and shrubbery down south that Kent Rideout had nicknamed him Hedgerow Phil.

  Wolford brought up more tanks from the palace. He swung his gun tube over the left side and told McFarland, the infantry commander, to clear everything behind the tube. The tank would roll slowly up the road, guiding McFarland and his men as they cleared the woods. The infantrymen went at it with methodical precision, pumping automatic-rifle rounds into each flimsy bunker and fighting hole, then finishing things off with grenades. It took them at least forty-five minutes to clear the wood line, killing some of the gunmen who sought refuge there and sending the others fleeing north toward the Jumhuriya Bridge.

  One of the gunmen crawled out of a bunker on the left side of the road, ahead of the advancing infantry. He was holding an RPG launcher. The company executive officer, Lieutenant Mark Tomlinson, spotted him from the commander’s hatch of his tank. He radioed Wolford and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Kill him,” Wolford said.

  Tomlinson opened up with coax, killing the man where he lay.

  Wolford came to a stop. He believed he had now eliminated the immediate threat to the battalion command post at the palace by securing the roadway and woods between his position and the front of the palace. He called Lieutenant Redmon and told him to push forward past the small arch with his platoon of four tanks.

  As Redmon rolled up the roadway, he could see that the infantrymen were flushing more gunmen out of the woods and onto the road. His gunner, Sergeant John Heath, saw the outline of two men through his thermal sights. They were about a hundred meters away.

  “Sir,” he said to Redmon, “do you see this shit?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Redmon said. He told Heath to wait until the two men moved closer together. Heath was feeling anxious. He had survived the thunder run up Highway 8 the previous morning, and now he had been thrown straight into another firefight. He had just blown a man apart with his coax, and he was ready to kill more of them. He had to. He had promised his wife that he wouldn’t get killed. She had pleaded with him, saying, “You better be careful. I don’t want you to get your ass blown up. I don’t want to have to explain to our children what happened to you.” Heath was determined to keep his promise, to eliminate any threat as quickly as possible.

  Redmon waited a few moments, then gave the order to fire. Heath launched a HEAT round that incinerated the two men. He couldn’t see them through the thermals anymore. They had evaporated.

  They pushed forward, unleashing HEAT rounds into every bunker they saw. There were government buildings on the sides of this section of Haifa Street, and snipers were firing down from some of the rooftops and windows. All four tanks in Redmon’s platoon were firing—coax, .50-caliber, main gun rounds, through the windows and into the rooftops. Heath put an IMPAT round into a concrete bunker where he had seen a gunman crouching. He was shocked to see the man crawl out from the spray of white smoke and pulverized concrete, blood oozing from his mouth and ears. Heath left him there. An infantryman came up from behind, strapped plastic handcuffs on the wounded man, and put him in a Bradley to be transported for medical treatment.

  The platoon came to an intersection about six hundred meters north of the small arch. Redmon saw a small blue guard booth in the median. Two men were crouched behind it. He saw a puff of white smoke and he
ard a loud screech. An RPG slammed into the tank’s left front ballistic skirt, rocking the crew inside. Heath tried to put the targeting reticle on the booth; it was too close to get a range. He squeezed the trigger anyway, and an IMPAT blew out the bottom of the booth. Redmon couldn’t see either man, but he assumed they were dead.

  At least a dozen more fighters appeared at the intersection, trying to set up to fire RPGs. Sergeant First Class Phillip Cornell, a tank commander and platoon sergeant in Redmon’s platoon, saw a young man wearing a red flannel shirt and work boots emerge from the shrubbery and launch an RPG. The round flew over the back of Redmon’s tank and exploded against a second guard booth. Heath fired a main gun round that sent the man flying. Cornell looked back and saw that the gunman had survived—he had been bowled over and bloodied by the concussion.

  Redmon radioed Wolford to let him know about the heavy contact. The captain decided to push forward to the intersection with more tanks. Every tank that arrived opened fire, but it still took another twenty minutes to clear the intersection and the bunkers and buildings around it. The intensity of the fire set some of the date palms ablaze.

  It was nearly dawn now. Assassin Company had been fighting, off and on, almost three hours. Wolford suspected that the fighters he was seeing were just an advance guard. He was afraid there were many more up near the Jumhuriya Bridge, which lay at the far eastern end of the unsecured gap between the Rogue and Tusker battalions. He radioed Lieutenant Middleton and told him to take his platoon farther north to get a look at the big intersection where Yafa Street rose up to meet the foot of the bridge. The company was now back in regular formation, with Middleton in the lead.

  Middleton moved to within less than a kilometer of the towering stone arch that separated the palace and government complex from the intersection. Through his magnified sights, he could tell that the arch was very similar to the arch that Staff Sergeant Gibson had smashed through the previous morning at the western entrance to the complex. And, like the western arch, the top of this arch was defended by what appeared to be either antiaircraft guns or heavy machine guns.

  On the far side of the arch, a remarkable scene was unfolding. Middleton had never seen anything like it. The entire intersection was filling up with vehicles and soldiers and equipment. Vehicles were speeding across the bridge—sedans, SUVs, taxis, buses, motorcycles, military trucks—and dropping off soldiers and gunmen in civilian clothes. There was a network of bunkers in two city parks north and west of the intersection. The bridge ramp and intersection appeared to be part of an elaborate set of military fortifications.

  Middleton got on the radio to Wolford. “Assassin Six, this is Red One. Sir, I’ve identified—” he said, and then he paused. Wolford thought he’d been hit.

  “Red One, Assassin Six? Red One, Assassin Six,” Wolford said, trying to raise Middleton.

  The lieutenant’s voice came back over the net. “Sir, I have a shitload of vehicles up here dropping dismounts all over that intersection to the north. They’re all over the place,” he said.

  At that moment, Wolford realized that a massive Iraqi counterattack was being mounted. His and Flip deCamp’s fears that the Iraqis would capitalize on the unsecured gap leading to the bridge had been realized. Wolford radioed deCamp back at the palace command post and described the situation.

  “Sir, we’ve got to seal that bridge right now,” he said. “I’ve got to make it to that bridge, through that intersection, because if we don’t, they’re just going to keep loading up and coming at us all day long.”

  DeCamp agreed. He was concerned that the Iraqis would move west and then south to try to outflank Wolford’s tank company by exploiting the seam. He told Wolford to move forward and try to take control of the intersection and the western end of the bridge. Wolford wanted to soften up the intersection before he attacked. He requested a mortar suppression-fire mission from the mortar platoon set up on the palace lawn, then radioed Middleton to warn him to have his crews button up. The mortar rounds exploded on the southeast corner of the intersection, next to a ten-story redbrick building that housed the Ministry of Planning. Wolford could hear the explosions and could see gray smoke drifting skyward. He called for an adjustment, sending a second volley of mortar rounds exploding north of the intersection, into the bunker complex in the park.

  At about 6:45 a.m., with the sun rising up over the Tigris, Wolford ordered Middleton’s platoon to lead the company into the intersection. The mortar mission had just ended. Middleton’s gunner fired a HEAT round into the metal gates attached to the arch, blasting them open. The tank crashed through the wreckage, followed by the rest of his platoon, with Captain Wolford right behind them.

  The tankers of Assassin Company did not know—they could not have known—all that awaited them at the foot of the Jumhuriya Bridge.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE BRIDGE

  As Maurice Middleton’s lead tank crashed through the ruined metal gates of the palace complex and into the Yafa Street intersection, the first thing he saw was a recoilless rifle, aimed right at him. He happened to have an MPAT round in the tube, and he let it fly. The big truck-mounted recoilless rifle exploded and burned as the multipurpose round penetrated its steel armor and detonated. It was like some sort of trip wire that set off what sounded like a series of thunderclaps. Gunfire and grenades and rockets erupted from all directions—from the park bunkers straight in front of Middleton, from street-side bunkers to his far left, from a three-story building to the northwest, from the foot of the bridge to his right, and from the looming red Ministry of Planning building to his far right. It was like driving into a hailstorm. Middleton realized that he was surrounded—and he hadn’t even set up his platoon yet.

  On the second Assassin tank through, Shawn Gibson rolled up over a high median strip in the middle of the intersection. Machine-gun fire was ricocheting off his turret, an insistent metallic hammering. His driver swung the tank hard to the right, trying to get it into position facing east toward the bridge to form a tight arc, with Middleton to his left rear. Gibson heard the loud kick of a recoilless rifle somewhere nearby, and he was afraid one of the cannon blasts would hit his rear grille and disable his tank right in the middle of the intersection.

  On the third tank, Jonathan Lustig punched through the arch and swung his tank to the west, where his locked-up turret could fire down Yafa Street. He set up to form a tight circle next to the two lead tanks, with Kennith Leverette’s trail tank completing the ring behind him, to the southwest corner of the intersection. It crossed Lustig’s mind that they were circling up like Custer’s last stand, surrounded and under assault. He had never seen the Iraqis produce such a withering volume of fire—not during the desert firefights down south, and not on the thunder run the previous morning. It seemed well coordinated, and nothing like the wild, scattershot attacks on the highway or the desperate volleys from the bunkers during Assassin’s charge to the palace. The Iraqis were bringing in artillery and mortars. Mortar rounds were crashing down onto the pavement in front of him. Some of them were duds, and Lustig saw one round cartwheel past his turret, bounce off a light pole, and go spinning down the roadway.

  Lustig felt disoriented. He had been up all night, scanning the thermals, fighting his way up Haifa Street, killing and killing. Now he was surrounded, taking fire from ground level, from bunkers belowground, and from snipers and RPG teams on the rooftops. It was a three-dimensional attack, the kind of lethal urban trap that traditional army doctrine often cited as a reason not to bring tanks into a city. Lustig dropped down in the turret to talk face-to-face with his gunner and loader. “Men, I hope this gets over with quick because it’s starting to get dark and I damned sure don’t want to be sitting at this intersection at night,” he told them. They stared back at him. It wasn’t getting dark. It was just past daybreak. Lustig thought he had been fighting all day. Now he realized he had been at it for only a few hours, and that the real fight was just beginning.

  As the
platoon got into position, Captain Wolford pulled his tank into the center of the intersection. He was shocked by the rate of enemy fire and by the way the Iraqis were able to concentrate it on his tanks. They were pouring so much fire on the tight little circle that some of the rounds were flying past the tanks and hitting Iraqi soldiers in the bunkers dug into the parks. But the rounds were also banging against the tanks, gouging out holes in the thick steel armor and blowing out some of the vision blocks. The tank crews could hear the hollow pop of streetlights exploding above them.

  On the northwest corner was a multistory apartment building where RPG teams and snipers were running from window to window. Each time they fired, the windows were marked by flashes and swirls of gray smoke. Wolford radioed Lustig and said, “You better give that building some love.”

  Lustig had his driver pivot-steer—holding one side of the driver’s handle to lock up one track in order to pivot on it—so that the gun tube was pointed at the building. He elevated and fired five quick main gun rounds, the loader shoving fresh shells into the breech after each recoil. The building shuddered, but the fire from the northwest didn’t stop. Lustig was impressed, despite his fear and anxiety. The Iraqis were relentless. They were standing and fighting.

  The crews were expending huge loads of ammunition—.50-caliber, coax, M-240, machine-gun, and main gun rounds. They were setting vehicles and buildings on fire, and spirals of black smoke were now obscuring the intersection. Wolford had intended to try to seal all four roads and then expand his perimeter, but that wasn’t possible now. It was all he could do to hold his position in the middle of the intersection.