Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  At deCamp’s order, Wolford requested mortars and air support. The battalion’s fire support officer at the palace, Captain William Todd Smith, was in direct radio contact with air force officers. A-10 Thunderbolts—squat, ugly tank-killing planes nicknamed Warthogs—were already up in the air over Baghdad. Smith was told that they were “on station” and available. He radioed Wolford and told him, “Phil, I’ve got you air support for the rest of your life.”

  That brightened Wolford’s mood. He loved the Warthogs. They were wicked little planes that pulverized bunkers—they just killed everything in sight. Each Warthog was armed with an enormous Avenger 30mm Gatling gun that was twenty-two feet long and weighed two tons. The seven-barrel guns were flying cannons. They fired thirty-nine hundred rounds a minute, either armor-piercing or high-explosive. The armor-piercing rounds contained a slug of depleted uranium so dense that it self-sharpened as it penetrated armor, burrowing and turning steel into hot molten metal that ignited and burned. The Warthogs also carried five-hundred-pound bombs, high-explosive rockets, and Maverick and Sidewinder missiles. Wolford was eager to see what the Warthogs would do to the bunkers and buildings at the Yafa Street intersection.

  Earlier that morning, Major Jim Ewald had taken off in his Warthog from Jaber air base in Kuwait. He didn’t know what his mission would be; his tasking assignment normally didn’t arrive until he was on station, circling in the skies over Iraq. Ewald assumed he would be supporting the Third Infantry Division, which at the moment was the main show in Baghdad. He had flown in support of the Rogue thunder run on the morning of the fifth, hitting Iraqi antiaircraft artillery positions in the so-called Triple A Park just west of Highway 8, and his wingman, Major Don Henry, had made several formation attacks on the fifth, destroying the Triple A vehicles and infantry with eight five-hundred-pound bombs, a couple of Mavericks per pass, high-explosive rockets, and six hundred rounds from the Gatling gun.

  The fifth had been a beautiful day, so sunny and clear that everything on the ground was sharp and brilliant. Ewald could see the tan tanks and Bradleys on the highway, the antiaircraft pieces dug into pits, and the sparkling muzzle flashes from the Iraqi roadside bunkers. He could see military trucks bearing down on the armored column, and he radioed warnings that were passed on to Rogue by forward air controllers on the ground. He saw white puffs of antiaircraft fire, like popcorn popping in the sky. He saw bright red secondary explosions and it was beautiful. It sounded strange, but beautiful was the word for it.

  At thirty-seven, Ewald was a veteran pilot, and he loved flying. He had been an air force pilot for nine years before taking a job as a commercial pilot for United Airlines. That lasted fifteen months before he was laid off. As the military geared up for the Iraqi war, he was called up to the Michigan Air National Guard in January and sent to Kuwait. His call sign was Chocks.

  Now, on the morning of the eighth, the weather was much worse. The skies were blotted by yellow haze and dirty brown smog. The cloud ceiling was below eight thousand feet, and visibility was terrible. Ewald had been on station for about thirty minutes when he and his wingman, also in a Warthog, got the call to support American ground forces at the foot of a bridge. Ewald had to drop down below eight thousand feet to see anything, and on his first pass he could make out the bridge and the shapes of American tanks and Bradleys toward the palace. But he couldn’t clearly identify enemy targets, and he held his fire because the forward air controllers were concerned about friendly fire with the armored units so close. He got a good look at men and vehicles near the bridge, and he was certain they were enemy. He needed to make sure; the forward air controllers were also concerned about collateral damage—killing civilians.

  Ewald pulled the Warthog back up to prepare for a second pass. This time, he dropped down very low. As he swung down over the bridge a second time, the men and vehicles were gone. Ewald assumed they had been alarmed by his first pass and had run for cover. He and his wingman pulled up and flew in a broad arc west toward the airport to await further instructions from the ground.

  Ewald never saw the surface-to-air missile, but his wingman did. He saw it streak in from the left side and punch into Ewald’s right engine. The Warthog was jolted by the impact. The aircraft, in the vernacular of pilots, “departed control flight.” Ewald was able to regain control. He wasn’t hurt; a Warthog pilot is enclosed in a titanium armor “bathtub” that also protects the cockpit. In his control panel, Ewald could see the reflection of red flames from the missile’s detonation.

  He flew south, trying to reach American lines. He fought to keep the plane under control, straining his arm and leg muscles. He was losing oil pressure and hydraulics. The plane was shaking, and Ewald couldn’t focus to read his emergency checklist. He had to radio his wingman and ask him to read the list to him, to walk him through it. Ewald went through the procedures on the list, watching pieces of the burning engine break off and tumble away behind him.

  The engine was now lost. Ewald lost control as the Warthog veered into a right flat spin. Ewald pulled the ejection handles and was catapulted out of the canopy in the pilot’s ejection seat. There was a blast of air. His chute popped open and he floated down, looking out at farms and canals and roadways.

  He hit the ground with a jolt, landing in a farmer’s field. From somewhere came the sound of gunfire. Ewald disconnected his parachute and began evasion maneuvers, as dictated by his training. He ran to a nearby irrigation canal and hid among tall green reeds. He was equipped with a handheld radio and he used it to call for help. Then he waited. He realized that what he had thought were gunshots was actually the Gatling gun’s 30mm rounds cooking off inside the burning wreck of the Warthog somewhere in the distance.

  For the next fifteen to twenty minutes, Ewald hid among the reeds and waited. He wasn’t sure whether he had landed in enemy territory, where Fedayeen and Iraqi regulars were still posted, or in areas secured by the American military. He decided not to venture out.

  He heard an approaching vehicle, and then voices. He debated whether to turn and sneak away down the dry bed of the canal. The voices drew closer and Ewald heard someone saying something in English. He didn’t know what to do. He was worried that it was an Iraqi soldier who had gone to language school and was posing as an American soldier. Then he heard another voice call out, in distinctively American-accented English, “Hey, pilot dude! Come out! We’re Americans!”

  Ewald poked his head up and saw soldiers from an American army engineer battalion. They had seen him eject and had rushed to the canal. He stood up and saw young American soldiers grinning and running over to grab him.

  Two days later, Ewald was back on duty with his unit, ready to fly again. He was able to find out the name of the National Guard ariman who had packed his ejection seat and parachute—a staff sergeant named Andrew Hansen in Boise, Idaho. When Ewald got back home, he made sure to send Hansen a bottle of single-malt Scotch.

  Phil Wolford and his men had no idea that a Warthog had gone down—or that a second Warthog also had been hit and had limped back to base. The captain was in his tank on Haifa Road, a couple of hundred meters back from the archway leading into the intersection. He wanted to be close enough to direct mortar fire, which he had requested prior to the strikes by the Warthogs. The mortars had damaged the bunkers, softening them up for the air strikes.

  When the Warthogs swooped down, Wolford was amazed at how low they flew. He had seen Warthogs in action in the Gulf War, but never this low. There were four of them, attacking in pairs. They were dropping flares to confuse and deflect surface-to-air missles. Their Gatling guns gave off a deep, low groan, a grinding noise like a chain saw tearing at a tree. It was a thrilling sound, and it had a visceral effect on Wolford and his tankers. They had been hammered hard at the intersection, and now they watched as the homely little planes tore into the bunkers in the parks.

  When the Warthogs were finished, Wolford waited for the air strikes he and deCamp had requested. He wanted hits on the
Ministry of Planning and on a three-story building at the northwest corner of the intersection where snipers and RPG teams had pounded his tanks. He couldn’t see the planes, but he could hear them. An F-18 dropped a JDAM bomb—a joint direct-attack munition—that missed the ministry building and exploded on top of a pile of rubble in front of the building. A second JDAM slammed directly into the three-story building with a tremendous wallop that leveled the structure, collapsing all three floors.

  Wolford was ready now to go back in, this time with four extra tanks that had been assigned to him by deCamp. He now had fourteen tanks and four Bradleys. Just before the company rolled back into the intersection, the infantry platoon destroyed the remaining gun positions on top of the arch with wire-guided TOW missiles fired from the Bradleys. That eliminated some of the threat from the south.

  Just forty-five minutes had passed since the company had retreated from the intersection, but now the battlefield was a much different place. Wolford’s tanks were peppered again by RPGs and small arms as they rolled through the archway and set up again in the intersection. But this time, the rate of fire was not as heavy or as concentrated. It appeared to Wolford that the Iraqis had dragged off their wounded and some of their dead, piling them into police cars and sedans and trucks and ferrying them east across the river. But he could also see that more vehicles were still speeding west across the bridge and into the intersection, bringing in reinforcements to replace the fighters killed by the air strikes.

  This time, with more tanks and a weakened enemy, Wolford’s company was quickly able to mount an effective volume of fire. The tanks and Bradleys poured fire on the bunkers and the buildings, and toward gunmen running back and forth beneath the bridge supports. Gibson fired coax at arriving trucks, and at RPG teams that were piling out of an ambulance near the bridge. Lustig had his gunner lay down fire in every window where he still saw people with weapons. He felt more confident now because he knew where most of the enemy soldiers were and how they were attacking. Even so, Lustig was still surprised by their dogged resistance. Even after the Warthogs and the JDAMs, they were still fighting, and fighting hard. He hated them but he had to admit that he also respected them, in a purely military sense.

  Now that Wolford had mounted an effective volume of fire, he ordered Lieutenant McFarland to dismount his infantrymen from the Bradleys to clear the park. He set up Redmon’s platoon facing southwest to cover the infantrymen.

  “I want you to go up and down the road and fuck it up,” Wolford told Redmon over the radio. “I want you to give equal love to both sides of it. Do you understand—equal love to both sides?”

  “Roger,” Redmon answered. He had all four tanks fire their main guns, clearing the way for the infantry.

  McFarland’s troops hustled from the rear hatches of the Bradleys and into the parks. The bunkers were burning. The park was littered with enemy corpses, many of them smoldering and giving off the sharp, sour smell of burning flesh. The infantrymen went from bunker to bunker, firing into the holes and clearing them with grenades. McFarland didn’t bother trying to take prisoners. The few fighters who were still alive were in horrible shape. They were not going to live long. The Iraqis had not managed to remove all their dead. McFarland counted at least sixty corpses.

  Wolford spotted several fighters running toward a bunker to the north. He radioed McFarland, “Scorpion on the Ground, this is Assassin Six. I want you to clear that bunker about two hundred meters north of you where a couple of guys just went. I’m going to soften it up for you, and you get ready right after. Stand by.”

  Wolford got back to Redmon. “You see that bunker I’m talking about? You see it? I want you to hit it with your coax for thirty seconds using a Z-pattern.”

  He returned to McFarland. “Scorpion on the Ground, you ready?”

  And then he told Redmon, “Okay, White One, fire.”

  Redmon’s gunner laced the bunker, ripping up everything and everyone inside. Wolford’s adrenaline was pumping hard now, and he could sense the battle swinging his way.

  “Yeah!” he screamed into the radio at McFarland. “Scorpion on the Ground, you like that? You like that, don’t you. Okay, go in and kill ’em!”

  At the southwest corner of the intersection, Redmon’s platoon was fighting to protect the infantry’s rear flank. The tanks were firing coax into buildings and rooftops. Then the first suicide cars appeared. They came from the west, speeding up the roadway toward the tanks. Redmon was astonished. A late-model Mercedes was bearing down on them—on a platoon of tanks in the middle of a firefight. Redmon thought, Damn, that’s a nice car. Then he fired a warning burst from his .50-caliber machine gun. The Mercedes kept coming. He hit it with the .50-caliber and the car swerved and crashed.

  Another car emerged and sped toward the tanks, and then a truck. Neither vehicle slowed down, even after warning bursts of .50-caliber fire. Redmon’s platoon hit those vehicles, too, killing whoever was inside. The occupants were too far away for Redmon to see whether they were armed, but he didn’t care. Anyone who threatened his men was going down.

  After about thirty minutes of heavy fighting, Wolford felt he was in control of the intersection. The Iraqis were retreating toward the bridge and into the crowded neighborhoods north and west of the intersection. He heard over the battalion net that his friend Steve Barry—whose tanks and Bradleys were several blocks west—had pushed north and east to the next two bridges up the river, helping to stabilize Wolford’s north flank. Barry’s tanks and Bradleys were also driving Iraqi fighters back toward Wolford. At the same time, Wolford’s company was forcing some of the fighters at the intersection north toward Barry’s company. They had them squeezed, beginning to seal the gap between the two companies.

  By now, the enemy fire from the buildings and bunkers around the intersection had eased significantly. Wolford ordered Middleton’s platoon up to the base of the bridge in order to block it and stop the infiltration from the east bank. Middleton rolled forward, putting two tanks up on a side street just below the bridge and two more at the base, where Yafa Street rose up to meet the bridge. Almost immediately, the platoon came under fire—this time from across the river, and from a group of Fedayeen militiamen firing from a collection of houses on the west bank of the river, just below the Ministry of Planning.

  Wolford moved up and directed several tanks to pound the Fedayeen, and the enemy fire from the ministry eased. But the rate of fire from across the river intensified—RPGs, small arms, and a few mortar rounds. Middleton and Gibson moved their tanks up onto the bridge itself to get a better look at the east bank. The Jumhuriya Bridge is crowned, with its highest point in the middle, so the tanks had to creep out to exposed positions on the bridge in order for Middleton and Gibson to see the opposite bank.

  When they finally scanned through their sights, they saw the same frenzied movement of men and vehicles they had witnessed earlier in the intersection. Taxis, police cars, buses, and ambulances were dropping off soldiers and gunmen on the east bank, where Middleton could see fighting positions dug into the riverbank and muzzle flashes from behind walls and buildings. Snipers were firing from windows. Middleton thought it looked like an ant colony that had been disturbed.

  Middleton and Gibson were both scanning the opposite bank when a series of mortar rounds whistled overhead. Several rounds exploded on the pavement, rocking the bridge. A few of the rounds were duds, and Gibson watched them bounce across the bridge. Then an artillery shell screamed down and exploded next to Middleton’s tank. The bridge shuddered. For an instant, Gibson was afraid his tank would plunge into the river and drown the crew.

  The bridge stabilized and Gibson looked again across the river. A man and two little boys—it struck him as curious that two boys would be out in the middle of a firefight—were pointing underneath the bridge. Gibson could hear gunfire from under the bridge on his side of the river. He was afraid they were trying to set explosives to blow up the bridge.

  He radioed Midd
leton. “Hey, sir, we’ve got some motherfuckers up under the bridge here shooting at us! We need to back the hell up.”

  The two tanks rolled part of the way back toward the intersection to get a better angle on the gunmen beneath the bridge. At that moment, Sergeant Leverette moved over from the intersection and opened fire on several RPG teams hiding under the bridge on the northern side. From his vantage point, Leverette could also see men with weapons squatting in small boats that were launching from the opposite bank. Middleton, still on the bridge, saw them, too. The lieutenant and Leverette sank the boats with blasts of coax and .50-caliber machine-gun fire.

  Middleton and Gibson rolled back up the bridge, still trying to figure out what they were up against on the east bank of the Tigris.

  On a balcony outside Room 1502 of the Palestine Hotel, across the Tigris, photographer Faleh Khaiber was trying to get shots of American aircraft in the skies over Baghdad that morning. Khaiber was an Iraqi, a Baghdad native who worked as a photographer for the Reuters news agency. He was staying in Room 935, but he had come up to the Reuters room because its two balconies faced north and slightly west, affording a view of the west bank of the Tigris. Khaiber was forty-seven, but he looked much younger. He was short and trim, with small features, his black hair tinged with silver and combed forward. He was nimble and quick, and good with a camera.

  Khaiber was one of nearly a hundred reporters and photographers staying at the Palestine, a tan, seventeen-story high-rise on the east bank of the Tigris about a kilometer and a half southeast of the midspan of the Jumhuriya Bridge. Some of the journalists had moved in recent days from the Rashid Hotel across the river, which had been seized the morning before by the tanks and Bradleys of the Rogue battalion. All morning on the eighth, journalists had watched from the Palestine as Assassin Company fought off an Iraqi counterattack at the intersection at the foot of the bridge on the west bank. The hotel’s balconies and rooftop afforded a fairly good view of the fight, while far enough away, seemingly, to keep journalists from getting caught up in it.