Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  From time to time near the Jumhuriya, sniper fire rang out and an occasional RPG sailed overhead. But the Iraqis on both riverbanks were beaten now, and the Assassin crews knew it. They came up out of the hatches, filthy and exhausted, but relieved to be done with it. Some of them lit up cigarettes. A knot of vehicles was gathering at the foot of the bridge, where Colonel Perkins was in his M113 command carrier, joined by deCamp and other officers from the Tusker battalion. Some of them were on the street, talking to the crews.

  Behind them, in the two city parks, the stiff corpses of the Iraqi dead were splayed in awkward poses in the dirt next to their fighting holes. Some of the faces were smooth and young and almost peaceful. If viewed from a distance, where the congealed black blood and the half-burned uniforms and the torn pink flesh were not so apparent, some of them could have been men resting in the sun after a hard morning’s work. It was past midday. The sun was fighting through the blanket of haze, and a warm breeze was beginning to disperse some of the smoke from the battle. It was developing into a fine April day in downtown Baghdad.

  To the north, Barry’s men moved to secure his two assigned bridges, and the sounds of the firefight echoed along the riverbank. The Iraqis were able to mount several intense volleys against Barry’s company, but were unable to sustain their counterattack. It seemed to Wolford, who had fought them all night and all morning, that the Iraqis had such poor command and control that each group of men was essentially fighting on its own. The soldiers apparently had been told that holding the bridges was crucial, so they fought bitterly to keep them. When they were at last driven off the Jumhuriya Bridge, they fell back to the next bridge to the north. And when they encountered Cyclone Company there, they leapfrogged north to the next bridge, where they fought Cyclone all over again.

  Barry called in two mortar missions of twelve rounds each that drove out Iraqi soldiers dug in along the riverbank between the bridges. His tanks fired HEAT rounds to destroy three Russian-made BMPs that had tried to maneuver and attack. His infantrymen spent the rest of the day chasing down and killing small groups of fighters moving through the streets. At one point, one of Barry’s crews fired on a boat full of armed men trying to cross the river, sinking the vessel and killing everyone aboard. The firefights were infused with moments of intensity but they lacked the sustained ferocity of Assassin’s battle at the bridge. Barry had seen the carnage at the Jumhuriya. When he pushed past Wolford’s intersection, he had asked him over the radio, “Assassin Six, what the hell were you fighting up here—World War Three?”

  At the Jumhuriya Bridge, Wolford’s request for an air strike on the beige high-rise directly across the bridge had been held up following the deaths at the Palestine. Early in the afternoon, as Perkins was in his command vehicle at the foot of the bridge, two missiles fired from the building sailed over his head. At the same time, pilots overhead were reporting armed men moving in and out of the rear of the high-rise. Gunfire was starting to pick up again from across the river.

  By this time, Major Rasins had arrived with the Iraqi civilian and his information that Iraqi military intelligence was in the building. Rasins got out of his Bradley to talk to Wolford, whose tank was at the base of the bridge. As he climbed up on Wolford’s tank, Rasins realized that the captain was in “open protected” position, with only a six-inch opening in the hatch. The battle seemed to be over, so Rasins asked Wolford why he was still in open protected. “Because it’s fucking dangerous out there,” Wolford told him. “They’re still shooting from across the river.”

  Rasins climbed down into the safety of the turret and told Wolford what the Iraqi civilian had said about the high-rise. As Rasins ran back to his Bradley, two Iraqi gunmen opened fire from a building just north of the bridge, on the near side of the river. Assassin Company returned the fire, and Rasins fired his 9mm pistol, killing one of the men.

  Concerns about civilian casualties and possible friendly fire had delayed approval of the air strike. But now, with hostilities on the increase, the bombing of the high-rise was approved. Marine Major Mark Jewell and his mixed air liaison crew of marines and Third Infantry soldiers had been parked on the bridge inside their Bradley since shortly after noon, awaiting clearance to guide the fighter planes in. It was hot and airless inside the Bradley, and Jewell let the crewmen step outside for fresh air. But when an RPG screamed overhead and exploded against a wall next to the planning ministry, everybody hustled back inside and buttoned up. Then Jewell got word that the planes were tasked and ready.

  “Three minutes, men!” Jewell yelled. “We’re taking this building down.”

  Jewell was on the radio to pilots who had been pulled off the “stack,” a sort of parking lot in the sky for pilots awaiting orders, and assigned to attack the high-rise. Jewell was having trouble understanding one of the pilots, a British officer flying a Tornado. The pilot was speaking English, but it was British English, and the accent was throwing Jewell off. But he worked through it, and finally the two found a common, military language.

  It was Jewell’s job to mark the targets for the pilots. His laser range finder had been destroyed in a battle against the Medina Division three days earlier, so he had to ask a lieutenant in a fire-support Bradley nearby to fire a laser at the high-rise and pass its GPS grid coordinates on to him.

  In the rear of Jewell’s Bradley, Marine Captain David Cooper had painstakingly converted the GPS grids to longitude and latitude coordinates used by the pilots to program their bombs. Cooper’s face was dotted with red welts and cuts, and an ugly crimson bruise snaked across both eyes, which were badly bloodshot. The day before, shortly after Cyclone Company had taken the Fourteenth of July traffic circle, Cooper had been standing in the street, consulting with Captain Barry. Geoff Mohan, the embedded Los Angeles Times reporter, was standing beside them.

  Cooper and Mohan heard someone shout “RPG! RPG!” A grenade exploded against either a street sign or a tank turret, and Cooper and Mohan went down hard. It felt like hot iron filings were being blasted into their faces. Mohan reached up and felt his face, but he was afraid to look at his hands because he thought he’d be holding pieces of his face. He asked Cooper, “Is my face okay?”

  Cooper said, “You’re fine.”

  Mohan looked at Cooper and told him, “You’ve got a cut on your cheek.” Cooper smirked and wiped it away. He told Mohan they had to get back to their vehicles.

  They ran back to Jewell’s Bradley, Lightning 28, where Jewell washed out Cooper’s eyes. A medic worked on Mohan’s eyes, which were clogged with dirt and grit, and told him he’d live to die another day. Cooper escaped with a bad headache and two black eyes, but it had been a sobering experience. Now, on the bridge, he was glad to be inside the Bradley.

  From the turret, Jewell fired a laser toward the top of the high-rise, indicating the target. The laser shot just over a portrait of Saddam Hussein mounted on a small arch stretched across the crest of the bridge. A British Tornado GR4 fighter-bomber roared over the city, somewhere high above. A pair of thousand-pound Mark-83 JDAMs swooshed down. Their inertial navigation systems, programmed with the three-dimensional location of the target, directed the bombs to the high-rise. They tore two black gashes into the tan face of the tower, unleashing a spiral of gray smoke. Jewell’s voice came over the radio inside the Bradley: “Outstanding hits!” The Bradley crewmen scrambled out to watch the smoke pour from the building. One of them pulled out a disposable camera and snapped off a few photos.

  For the next strike, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Scott Toppel, known to his colleagues as Skweez, was piloting a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet high over the Tigris. Toppel and his wingman, also in a Super Hornet, had taken off that morning from the USS Nimitz. They had their “kill box,” the area designated for close air support. Ground controllers had told them to switch to a frequency that connected them to Lightning 28. Toppel heard Jewell’s voice describe the target as a tall building on the east bank of the Tigris. Jewell also warned that an A-10 War
thog had been shot down in the area that morning.

  Toppel’s wingman went first, banking over the river. The gray form of the jet was barely visible from the bridge against the curtain of smoke. A bright flash burst from beneath a wing, and a black streak slammed into the building, unleashing a ball of orange flame framed by white smoke. A second laser-guided Maverick missile ripped another jagged hole in the tower. Toppel followed, his first missile locking on to the laser beam. He pressed the red PICKLE button on the control stick, heard the whoosh of the missile, and watched it shoot toward the building. He thought it was going to miss high, but then it pitched over and exploded against the top story. The second missile misfired and locked up on the rail. By the end of the mission, five missiles from three F-18s had scored direct hits on the high-rise.

  Over the radio came Cooper’s voice: “Good effects on entire building. Building still standing, but I guarantee you there’s nothing left inside.”

  The bombing of the building was an oddly anticlimactic coda to the battle for the bridge, and for the city itself. The tank and Bradley crews cheered and slapped palms at the sight of the burning black holes ripped into the building, but they did not feel the same satisfaction they had experienced upon driving the enemy back across the bridge. It was beginning to dawn on them that the war was rapidly drawing to a close, and weeks earlier than anyone had anticipated. It was something they wanted, something they had risked their lives to achieve, but somehow they were not quite prepared for the finality of it. It was so sudden. They were sleep-deprived and stoked up on adrenaline and fear, almost giddy with relief at having survived. Now the thunder run was over. They knew what they were supposed to do next—to set up a perimeter behind new berms being built by the engineers from burned-out cars and toppled lampposts, to stay alert and hold their positions through the night, and to fight another pitched battle if it came to that. That much they knew. But they did not know what was coming next, in the half-light between war and what passed for peace, and this uncertainty weighed heavily on them for a long time.

  No one in the Spartan Brigade was able to define with any certainty the moment when the balance tipped, when the second thunder run reached that point in any battle where men on both sides realize that the outcome has been ordained. It may have been when the first fuel and ammunition convoy reached Objective Curly at the height of the battle there. It may have been later, when the same convoy resupplied the beleaguered combat team at Objective Larry, or still later, when the tank battalions’ relief convoys rolled into the palace complex. It may have been when tanks from Objective Moe stole into the city at night for fuel and ammunition. And if there was an emblem for what they had achieved, it was probably the American flag that Rick Nussio had waved in the parade grounds, or perhaps Jason Conroy’s kill shot into the equestrian statue of Saddam Hussein.

  They couldn’t say. They knew only that their experience was bewildering and shattering and utterly unique, and something that no one who had not been with them could ever comprehend. It occurred to Staff Sergeant Tom Slago on the eighth, as he was eating an MRE of beef and mushrooms inside his Bradley in the downtown district, that all the killing he had accomplished had left an indelible mark on him. Through his sights, he caught a glimpse of an Iraqi soldier, armed with an AK-47, poking his head around a building. Slago watched and waited, certain that the Iraqi would draw closer. And the soldier did creep closer. At last Slago fired a burst of coax that tore the man in two, and with barely a pause he resumed his beef and mushrooms. Those same involuntary impulses also affected Specialist Benjamin Agee, the infantryman who had used his big M-240 machine gun to help his four-man team kill at least twenty men in the gloom beneath the overpass at Curly on the seventh. By April 8, Agee was deployed inside the downtown parade grounds complex. The firefights had eased considerably by then, and it was clear to him that the war was ending. Agee was uneasy, and he found himself actually wishing somebody would take a shot at him so that he could get back into the fight. He missed the wild intensity of it all, the purity of effort and will.

  The next day, the ninth, the marines fought their way into the downtown neighborhoods of the east bank of the Tigris after a punishing two-and-a-half-week march of their own. At Firdos Square, just across from the Palestine Hotel, television news crews captured a scene of celebration and triumph. With the help of a marine armored recovery vehicle, the marines and a mob of Iraqis toppled a towering statue of Saddam Hussein that had dominated the square for years. The figure crashed to the pavement and shattered. Men and boys stomped the remains and pelted them with garbage. Some Iraqis swatted the statue’s fallen head with their shoes, a grave insult among the Arabs. The images were relayed live around the world, symbolizing a startling and decisive military victory for millions of Americans watching back home. The men from the Spartan Brigade did not see the footage until much later, but it made no difference. For them, it wasn’t the end of anything, only the beginning of something worse than war.

  EPILOGUE

  By the middle of the day on April 8, the firefight was over at Objective Moe. Captain Josh Wright’s company had spent the morning responding to sustained enemy fire, but by early afternoon the combat team had managed to expand and secure its hold on the intersection. The Iraqi and Arab fighters who had been attacking the interchange for two days melted away, dragging away their dead but leaving those who still lay in the fields of fire. Wright did not conduct a BDA, a battle damage assessment, and thus he did not know how many fighters his men had killed. Major Roger Shuck, the battalion operations officer, figured they had killed as many as two hundred and had destroyed at least forty-five vehicles. The company had not lost a man, though eight soldiers had been wounded, all during the fierce battles the day before.

  By late afternoon, civilians began to emerge from their homes in the poor, densely packed neighborhood of Ummal and from the middle-class district of Al Qadisiyah. They had the lost, dazed expressions of flood or hurricane survivors, for the battle had approached the scale of a natural disaster. Some of the residents were relatives of soldiers killed in the fight, and they scoured the sandy ground for their corpses. The English speakers among them, and there were many, told the Americans the names of Republican Guard or Fedayeen fighters they were seeking. The soldiers, of course, had no idea who they had fought, and they certainly did not know who among the enemy had lived or died.

  A few of the residents led Wright’s men to ammunition caches in their neighborhoods, and others complained bitterly that the Syrian mercenaries had turned their homes into fighting positions. Some families left with the bodies of relatives, but no one touched the corpses of the Syrians or other foreign mercenaries. Wright thought some of the dead Arabs looked like college students, with their jeans and sneakers and polo shirts, all accessorized with ammunition bandoliers and cloth combat vests with ammo pouches. Later the engineers dug graves and buried them.

  Wright and his men were exhausted, but also euphoric at having survived and having held the interchange in the face of surprisingly robust resistance. Some of the men said they never, ever wanted to endure a battle like that again. Wright thought he would do it all over again if he had to, and he would fight just as hard. But he also knew that when he got back to the States and back behind the wheel of his car, he would never look at a highway interchange the same way again.

  Down the highway, at Objective Larry, Lieutenant Colonel Twitty had been confident when the fighting eased around sundown on the seventh after a full day of fighting. He was convinced that the enemy had given up and would disappear overnight. But just after the sun came up on the eighth, the Republican Guards and Fedayeen and Syrians were right back at it, firing volleys of RPGs that were just as intense as the day before. Twitty radioed Colonel Perkins in the city and told him, “Sir, you’re not going to believe this—we’re back in contact!”

  Much of the fire was coming from the southwest, from the neighborhood of Hay al Qtisadiyin. First Lieutenant Mark Brzozowski
, a twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate from Hampton, Virginia, ended up leading two forays into the neighborhood to eliminate the threat. Brzozowksi hadn’t expected to spend more than a few hours at the interchange. Like his commander, Captain Dan Hubbard, and most of the men in the company, he had assumed they would stay just long enough to hold the highway until the Tusker and Rogue battalions returned after a quick thunder run into the city on the seventh. Now Brzozowksi was gearing up for another day of fighting after having spent the seventh in full-scale combat, losing his CD and DVD players and a CD containing his fifty-page personal war journal when his rucksacks burned up on the outside of his Bradley.

  On Brzozowski’s first foray into the adjacent neighborhood, his team of two Bradleys and seven soldiers discovered three trucks packed with RPGs, AK-47 automatic rifles, and ammunition. They rigged up explosives, then had to jump back in the Bradleys and pull out under fire to escape secondary explosions as the weapons caches detonated. The ammunition cooked off for several more hours.

  The second foray was more treacherous. The team stumbled across a mosque courtyard stacked knee-high with weapons and ammunition. Brzozowski got out of his Bradley and went into the compound to set up demolition charges of C-4 explosives to destroy the cache. He needed both hands, so he put his automatic rifle down. As he added incendiary grenades to the cache, an Iraqi soldier stepped around the corner of the mosque and fired an AK-47. The shots missed Brzozowski but tore into an incendiary grenade and set it off. Brzozowski drew his 9mm pistol from his thigh holster and fired, killing the soldier.