Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  Wolford called up the infantry platoon, which pushed through the intersection and set up on the north end, facing the park. Then Wolford got on the radio to Lieutenant Redmon, who was still south of the main arch with his platoon. “I need you up here right now!” he told him. “Haul ass, get up here!”

  Redmon led the platoon into the intersection, the incoming rounds skittering off all four tanks. He saw the four Bradleys from the infantry platoon in a tight half-moon formation at the edge of the two parks, just north of Middleton’s tank. Redmon swung hard to the right and set up past Gibson, toward the foot of the bridge, with the Ministry of Planning on his right.

  The entire planning building was infested with snipers and RPG teams. Redmon could see them firing from windows and the rooftop. In the commander’s hatch of the tank next to him, Staff Sergeant Michael Lucas saw a sniper in an upper window firing down on Redmon. Lucas, twenty-nine, had been in firefights down south, but nothing as intense as this. He had a wife and two young sons. His wife was so worried about him that she couldn’t bring herself to watch TV newscasts about the war. Lucas was worried, too, and terrified, though he didn’t tell his wife until much later.

  When he saw the sniper, Lucas reacted without conscious thought. His training overcame his fear. He traversed the turret over and up. He fired a main gun round that tore into the window in a flash of flame and smoke. The sniper’s legs were blown back into the room. His torso toppled out the window and landed somewhere on the pavement below.

  To the west, Wolford was trying to mount an effective volume of fire. He believed volume of fire was the key to winning any firefight. The side that builds effective fire the quickest will prevail. But in this case, the enemy had the upper hand. The Iraqis had mounted their volume of fire faster, and it was just as effective as Wolford’s tanks. Two bunkers at the edge of the park were putting down a particularly heavy flow of fire, and Wolford was trying to get his tanks to focus on them.

  He radioed back to the battalion command post at the palace with a situation report. “I’m getting hammered up here,” he said. Major Rideout heard the frustration and agitation in Wolford’s voice, and that concerned him. Wolford was usually calm and even-tempered. If he was getting riled up, Rideout thought, the situation must be getting desperate. Rideout was worried that Wolford didn’t have enough firepower and was in danger of being overrun. He radioed Colonel Perkins and asked for permission to blow up the Jumhuriya Bridge—and the two bridges north of it—to cut off the flow of enemy reinforcements. Perkins told him he would have to get clearance from higher command.

  At the intersection, Wolford had already fired more than five hundred rounds of .50-caliber ammunition in just five minutes, and now he needed to reload. He screamed down at his loader to hand up another box of ammunition. The loader had a stricken look. “Sir, get down in the tank!” he yelled. He had just seen more than two dozen automatic-rifle rounds ricochet off the tank’s skirts. The Iraqis were walking the rounds right up the pavement to the tank.

  Wolford felt something slam into his neck. It was hard and heavy, like a blow from a metal baseball bat. His head snapped back and smacked against the hatch. He tumbled down into the turret, unconscious. The loader looked at the captain’s slack face and got on the battalion net. “Assassin Six is down! He’s been hit!” he said.

  The report sent a shock wave through the company. When a commander goes down—especially a popular and dynamic commander like Wolford—there is a brief moment of paralysis and confusion as his soldiers try to come to grips with the loss. Wolford’s crews kept firing, but in a suspended way, waiting and wondering, listening on the net for more information and for guidance. Wolford had been in charge of the entire fight, and now he was down.

  Wolford’s loader checked him for wounds. There was no blood—just a red welt on the captain’s neck. Wolford was breathing and muttering, “Holy shit . . . holy shit.” Finally he mumbled, “I’m all right, I’m all right.” He was stunned and disoriented. He looked down in his lap and saw an expended .50-caliber brass ammunition jacket. Something had hit the brass as it lay on the turret, sending it whistling into Wolford’s neck. The blow had briefly knocked him unconscious, but now he was coming out of it.

  “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said again. “Let’s go.” He climbed up into the turret to get back on the .50-caliber. It was dented from the small-arms fire. Wolford tried to fire it but the gun was jammed.

  To Wolford’s east, closer to the foot of the bridge, Sergeant First Class Phillip Cornell had set up his tank behind Redmon, his platoon leader. Cornell was the platoon sergeant. He was thirty-four, a Gulf War veteran from Orlando, Florida, with a wife and eight-year-old son. He was garrulous and extroverted, with stiff red hair and a thin red mustache. His narrow face was often creased with a wry smile, as if he were about to relate a funny story.

  Cornell had seen Wolford go down in the hatch and had ordered his driver to back up. He wanted to get over and help cover the captain’s tank. He was up in the cupola, trying to direct the driver while struggling to get his .50-caliber elevated to fire into the planning ministry. As the tank turned, he saw muzzle flashes erupting from behind palm trees in the park to the north. He yelled to his gunner, “Come left! Come left!” trying to get him to fire into the trees.

  In the middle of the intersection, Lustig saw Cornell standing up in his cupola, exposed to fire. He said to his crew, “Hey, that guy’s going to get hit if he doesn’t get his ass down inside.” Cornell liked to be up and out of the hatch, where he could get a clear look at targets and help direct fire.

  As Cornell was shouting instructions to his gunner, something exploded against the front of his tank. Hot shrapnel ripped through the machine-gun mount and tore into Cornell’s chest. He was wearing a tanker’s vest, which is smaller and lighter than the standard body armor worn by infantrymen. A shard sliced through the base of his throat, just above the top of the vest, and tunneled down through his chest. Another piece of shrapnel tore a hunk of flesh from his elbow. The blows slammed Cornell down into the turret. For an instant he thought something had smacked into his vest, and he started to say something. But then he saw blood spurt from his chest and splatter his gunner, Sergeant Paul Harris. Cornell thought, Oh, damn, this is serious.

  Harris knew he had to get pressure on the wound right away. It was flowing like a geyser. He looked around and spotted a rag. He grabbed it and pressed it against Cornell’s chest, hard. Even in his pain and terror, Cornell was mortified. The rag was filthy. It was smeared with grease and oil. What the hell kind of infection was that going to cause? Then he had another odd thought: This tank is going to be hell to clean. The crews had been told when they were issued their tanks in Kuwait that they would be required to turn them in as clean as they had found them. Cornell envisioned spending days trying to get all the blood out.

  Harris rummaged around inside the turret and found the first-aid kit. He pulled out a compression bandage and replaced the dirty rag, stanching the surge of blood. Cornell’s feet felt warm and wet. His boots had filled with blood.

  Cornell’s loader that day was Staff Sergeant Greg Samson. Normally, a tank’s loader is the most inexperienced man on the four-man crew. But Samson was a veteran NCO who was normally a tank commander. He instantly took control of Cornell’s tank, giving the crew a swift, seamless change of command. Samson got on the radio and said, “Sergeant Cornell is hit!”

  Lieutenant Redmon asked how bad it was.

  “It’s pretty fucking bad,” Samson said. Cornell was down and bleeding.

  Redmon radioed Wolford and said, “White Four just got hit. Looks like it’s in the chest. Looks pretty fucking bad.”

  Wolford was still groggy, but he was able to order Redmon to mount a medical evacuation back to the aid station near the palace. Redmon knew what to do. The company had trained over and over on medevac procedures. He had two tanks back up to form a protective wall, then ordered Samson to pull his tank back throu
gh the arch and on to the aid station. Under fire, escorted by a second tank, Samson directed the driver through the arch, sped down Haifa Street, and got Cornell loaded into an ambulance back near the palace. DeCamp rushed up from the palace to the ambulance exchange point, for he believed it was important for a wounded man to see his battalion commander. He was startled by Cornell’s pale and bloodless look, though the sergeant was still conscious and talking.

  At the intersection, Wolford was back up in the cupola, still unable to fire his .50-caliber. He was trying to get his gunner to fire the coax into the two troublesome bunkers to his left, at the edge of the park. The gunner was focused on a building where soldiers were running back and forth and firing. Wolford was getting irritated. He couldn’t seem to get the gunner’s full attention.

  “Listen to me!” he screamed. “Left! Left! Left!”

  “I’m right there, sir,” the gunner said.

  He still wasn’t hitting the bunkers. “No, I said left! Left!”

  Someone was firing into the bunkers, but it wasn’t Wolford’s tank. The captain looked over and saw Private First Class Synquoiry Smith, the loader on Sergeant Gibson’s tank. Smith was firing his M-240 machine gun into the bunkers.

  Wolford yelled at Smith. He didn’t bother with the radio. Smith was close enough to hear him. “Keep firing! Stay on those bunkers! Stay on ’em!”

  Gibson heard Wolford yell something and saw him pointing wildly. He assumed the captain wanted more fire directed at the bunkers, but Smith was already right on them. He was pounding away so hard on the M-240, in fact, that he fired off all his ammunition. Smith dropped down into the turret, grabbed more rounds, and popped back up to reload. Gibson heard Smith yelp and shout, “Sergeant Gibson, I’m hit!”

  A bullet had ricocheted off the M-240 gun mount and sliced into Smith’s upper arm. He dropped straight down into the turret. “Smitty!” Gibson screamed. He went down after him and saw that his face was smeared with blood. He wiped at it, trying to locate the wound.

  “It’s not my face—it’s my arm,” Smith said. He spoke calmly, as if he were giving someone traffic directions.

  Gibson found the bright red wound in Smith’s arm and grabbed the first-aid kit. He applied a pressure dressing, squeezing Smith’s arm with his left hand while he reached up and fired the .50-caliber machine gun with his right hand, using the elevation handle. They were still taking fire from the bunkers.

  As Gibson fired, Smith broke free from his grasp. He climbed back into the loader’s hatch with a 9mm pistol in his hand and started pumping rounds toward the bunkers. He was cursing and screaming. He emptied the clip, then dropped back down to reload. The tank rocked and he lost his grip on the gun. It tumbled to the turret floor. Before Smith could retrieve it, the gun was crushed as Gibson traversed the turret. Smith cursed again.

  To Gibson’s left, Wolford had given up trying to get his gunner to locate the bunkers. He hit the override switch, giving himself control of the main gun and the coax. He laced the bunkers with coax, backed by Gibson’s spray from his .50-caliber. The return fire from the bunkers eased long enough for Wolford to fire an MPAT round into each of the bunkers, effectively destroying them.

  Gibson stopped firing and got on the radio to tell Middleton that Smith had been hit. “I got to get him back to the palace,” he said. Middleton radioed Wolford and said, “Red Two Lima has been hit.”

  “Dammit, holy shit!” Wolford yelled. They were getting pounded. He had taken two casualties. He had already lost two tanks to medevac Cornell, and now he was losing Gibson’s tank as it pulled away through the arch to medevac Smith. The company had still not managed to mount an effective volume of fire. Even after the tanks had pounded buildings and bunkers with main gun rounds, and had expended thousands of rounds of .50-caliber and coax, the Iraqis were still returning effective fire. If anything, their rate of fire was intensifying as more reinforcements poured across the bridge. And Wolford’s crews were running low on ammunition; they had been fighting since 3:30 a.m. Lustig’s tank alone had fired eight thousand rounds of M-240 and coax ammunition, and nine hundred rounds of .50-caliber.

  They were taking more and more enemy mortars now. Wolford had already called in seven mortar missions of his own from the crews on the palace lawn. The rounds had slammed down north of the intersection, in the grassy areas of both parks, where the bunkers were concentrated. Wolford couldn’t tell how much damage the mortars had done, but it was obvious that they had not significantly reduced the rate of fire from the bunkers.

  Wolford realized that the situation was getting out of control. If he stayed much longer, he was going to take more casualties—probably KIAs. He decided to pull out. He would call in mortars and artillery and close air support to pound the bunkers and take down the buildings. He radioed Lieutenant Colonel deCamp and told him that the situation was untenable. He could no longer hold the intersection.

  DeCamp didn’t try to second-guess him. He trusted Wolford’s judgment. He told him to withdraw.

  Wolford gave the order over the company net. He wanted the crews to retreat in an orderly fashion. Retreats can be dangerous and chaotic; sometimes the worst casualties come when units are desperately trying to withdraw from a fight. Wolford told Redmon’s platoon to go first, because it was down to two tanks, followed by McFarland’s infantry platoon and then Middleton’s platoon.

  The retreat went smoothly until only Wolford, Middleton, and Lustig were left in the middle of the intersection. As Wolford prepared to move out, an RPG exploded near the front of his tank. He saw an RPG team in the park, moving toward him. With his .50-caliber still jammed, he had to move his tank back so that his gunner could fire toward the park.

  “Back up! Back up!” he yelled to his driver.

  The driver backed straight into Lustig’s tank with a heavy jolt. The two tanks locked tracks.

  “Shit!” Wolford shouted. He asked his gunner what he thought; the gunner was quite knowledgeable about the M1A1 Abrams. He wasn’t sure. “I don’t know if we’re going to get off of here without popping track,” Wolford said. The gunner said he didn’t think so, either.

  Wolford asked Lustig what he could see. “I can see the whole bottom of your tank,” Lustig told him. “You have to pull off.”

  They were taking heavy fire now. Every Iraqi soldier at the intersection seemed to be focusing on them, especially from the bunkers in the park. Middleton pulled his tank in front of Wolford and Lustig, directly in the line of fire from the park, and opened up on the bunkers.

  Wolford ordered his driver to pull away from Lustig’s tank. The tank lurched and groaned. There was a sharp noise as the number one and number two steel skirts on the front of Lustig’s tanks were torn off. Now Lustig was not only fighting with a locked-up turret, but he had also lost much of the ballistic armor on the front of his tank. He rolled out of the intersection and through the arch, his gun tube locked and firing over the left side. Middleton and Wolford followed, their main guns booming, racing back toward the palace and safety.

  For the first time, after nearly three weeks of fighting, a combat team from the Spartan Brigade had been forced to retreat under fire.

  Back at the Republican Palace, Flip deCamp and his executive officer, Kent Rideout, were still trying to persuade the Rogue battalion to move east and secure the Jumhuriya Bridge and the five bridges directly to the north, at the edge of the Rogue sector. Based on the brigade boundary line, deCamp contacted Rogue to request that they push all the way to the bridges to seal them. Soldiers and vehicles were pouring across the bridges now, infiltrating Rogue’s sector as well as Tusker’s. Rick Nussio, the Rogue executive officer, understood the predicament, but he had his own battles to deal with. Again, he told deCamp and Rideout that he couldn’t spare anyone to push to the bridges. To do so would create even worse gaps and vulnerabilities at the margins of his sector. He would keep his forces where they were in Rogue’s sector, three or four blocks west of the bridges.

 
; Meanwhile, Rideout’s request to block the bridges by blowing them up had been denied. A central tenet of American military strategy was to leave intact as much infrastructure as possible in order to support the eventual postwar—and presumably pro-American—Iraqi government. If the bridges were to be shut down, they would have to be blocked with tanks and infantry, not by blowing them up.

  DeCamp now had a seven-kilometer stretch of hostile territory to secure. He decided to pull forces from his other two companies and send them north and east to block the bridges. That required a difficult and complex shuffling and reallocation of platoons and sections within his task force. He did it on the fly, working the radio to hand off platoons and sections from one company to another—what he later called a task organization shell game.

  He pulled Captain Steve Barry and most of his Cyclone Company off the Fourteenth of July Bridge and traffic circle and sent them to secure the first two bridges north of the Jumhuriya. He replaced Barry with an engineer company, leaving behind one of Barry’s tank platoons for protection. Later, deCamp had Captain Chris Carter from Attack Company take a tank platoon and an infantry platoon from the Sujud Palace to secure the two bridges above Barry. Those moves, deCamp hoped, would take some of the pressure off Wolford’s company at the Jumhuriya intersection. He intended to send Assassin Company back into the intersection after pounding the intersection with artillery and close air support.

  At the Republican Palace, Wolford’s tanks and Bradleys pulled in for more ammunition. DeCamp came over to have a look and to get a first-hand feel for the fight from some of the crews. The vehicles had taken a thumping, but they were still in fighting condition—even Lustig’s battered tank, with its missing skirts and locked-up turret. Lieutenant Redmon was surprised at how generous the support platoon guys were with their ammunition supplies. Normally, they restricted the tank crews to prescribed amounts of ammunition. But now they were dumping boxes of ammunition onto the tanks, telling Redmon, “What else you need?” and “Take all you need—we got plenty!” They had all been listening over the net to the battle at the intersection.