As the grenade burned, Brzozowski ran back outside to the two Bradleys to get everyone loaded up and back to the interchange. Then he realized he hadn’t initiated the timing fuses on the four C-4 charges he had set up. He had to run back inside, initiate the fuses, then race back outside and climb into his Bradley. The team had traveled most of the way back to the intersection when the C-4 charges went off, triggering an enormous explosion. Chunks of shrapnel and weapons and debris rained down on the southwest corner of the intersection in what Captain Hubbard later described as a “Nagasaki-Hiroshima black mushroom cloud–type explosion.”
The detonation put an end to the threat from the neighborhood. By early afternoon, there was a lull in the fighting. Hubbard could feel his body shutting down; he hadn’t slept in days. He was soaked through with sweat, and his legs and feet were swollen and aching from standing in the turret for two days straight. At one point he felt himself nodding off, so he handed off his duties to his executive officer and fell into a hard sleep. He woke up an hour later, refreshed and ready to get back into the fight.
Enemy gunfire picked up again late in the day. Hubbard had seen enough. He got permission from Twitty to call in three artillery missions of six big 155mm rounds each. The artillery exploded on top of enemy fighters dug into the date palms to the northwest and the southeast, and the ground shuddered each time the shells slammed down. Afterward, there were no more RPG volleys and only a smattering of small-arms fire by the time the sun went down. The battle for Objective Larry was over. Hubbard figured his men had killed up to four hundred enemy fighters and had destroyed perhaps eighty vehicles. A single American soldier had been injured—a minor shrapnel wound.
The highway was littered with corpses and with the burned-out hulks of vehicles. Piled among the trucks, cars, and motorcycles that had been packed with soldiers and armed men were the smoldering remains of a tan 2003 Toyota Camry. The car, driven by Bashar Hindi, had sped into the interchange on April 7, bound north to Baghdad. Hindi, twenty-eight, and his brother Waddah Hindi, thirty-four, who was in the passenger seat, apparently had not realized that they were driving into a firefight. They were leather dealers returning to the city from a trip to pay their employees, unaware that American forces had invaded. The Hindi brothers were partners in a leather business that exported skins to Italy and Spain—two wealthy, expensively dressed, educated men with an older brother who had attended George Washington University. Waddah Hindi, whose wife of three weeks was pregnant, apparently was struck in the head by fire from the combat team at Objective Larry and killed instantly. Bashar Hindi was severely wounded and bled to death on the highway. The brothers’ relatives, who recovered their corpses on April 11, did not know whether warning shots had been fired at the two men, or whether the brothers simply had not realized they were supposed to stop and turn around. Captain Hubbard was certain that his men fired warning shots at every vehicle that approached the interchange, and he did not recall that any civilians had been killed in cars there.
Farther south, at Objective Curly, the men from 2-7 Infantry had come under sustained fire shortly after relieving the combat teams from the China battalion on the afternoon of April 7. Major Rod Coffey, the unit’s operations officer, whose leg had been broken by a shrapnel blast, gave the arriving commanders an assessment of the enemy threat as the new combat team took up positions in place of the men from the China battalion. At sunset, thirty to forty fighters, backed by a BMP, began firing on the interchange from bunkers behind a wall about three hundred meters to the south. As engineers moved in to destroy the wall with a combat excavator, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Hollinsaid, twenty-seven, was killed by enemy fire. Later that evening, after the wall had been toppled and the bunkers cleared, the interchange was attacked by four BMPs and a group of soldiers. The men from 2-7 destroyed all four armored vehicles and killed or drove off the soldiers. The next day, the unit killed several more fighters who had attacked the forward aid station about eight hundred meters south of the interchange.
By the end of the day on the eighth, the battle was over. On the ninth, families began to emerge from their homes on either side of the highway. Some of them collected their dead from the tangle of corpses in the trench lines to the west. Others set upon the adjacent warehouses and businesses, dragging out supplies and office equipment. It seemed to Coffey a highly sophisticated form of looting, not at all frenzied or convulsive. The looters were orderly and intent, more opportunistic than predatory. Coffey watched old women and young children drag out bathtubs and office desks, and some of them waved gaily.
In addition to Hollinsaid, Sergeant First Class Marshall and Staff Sergeant Stever had died in the fight to hold Curly—Marshall and Stever during the ambush of the resupply convoy just south of the interchange. Nine American soldiers were wounded seriously enough at Curly to require medical evacuation, and thirty more were wounded but returned to the fight after treatment.
The friendly fire at Curly from the 2-7 Battalion became a contentious issue. Members of the China Battalion said it made the battlefield handoff even more complicated and dangerous. Lieutenant Colonel Scott E. Rutter, the 2-7 commander, later suggested that enemy fire—or fire from China itself—was actually responsible. Rutter said his battalion had rescued China, which he said had failed to fully clear Objective Curly.
On the morning of the eighth, Captain Anthony Butler, commander of the battalion’s headquarters company, rode down Highway 8 with several other soldiers to try to find Marshall’s body. Marshall had been left behind as the resupply convoy, under Captain Aaron Polsgrove, tried desperately to escape the ambush and avoid further casualties. Marshall’s Humvee was still intact and still being used by his crewmen, Specialist Krofta and Private First Class Cruz. Across the roof of the vehicle, they had written in flowing black letters: “In memory of SFC Marshall—‘Big Time’ not forgotten.”
Searching Highway 8, Captain Butler questioned American soldiers near the interchange at Curly. One told him that a local resident had claimed earlier in the day that he had seen the half-buried body of an American soldier nearby. But the soldier had not had the presence of mind to detain the resident so that he could lead the way to the body. Butler drove up and down the highway, searching north and south of the spot where Marshall had been blown out of his Humvee. His little search party came across an Iraqi civilian who said he had seen a dead American. He led Butler to a uniformed corpse that was swollen and overrun with flies. The body was dressed in an American uniform top with a US ARMY tag, but it also bore an Iraqi military web belt and Iraqi military boots. Butler looked closely. It wasn’t Marshall—it was an Iraqi fighter.
The search party did not find Marshall that day, but they did find pieces of Stever, which one of the chaplains recovered and bagged for burial. The next day, Butler had flyers printed in both Arabic and English, offering a $100 reward for information leading to the recovery of the remains of Sergeant First Class John W. Marshall.
Four days later, on April 12, a young Iraqi boy approached soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were patrolling along Highway 8. He told them he had seen the remains of an American soldier in a shallow grave not far from the cloverleaf at Objective Curly. He led the soldiers to the grave, where they saw an arm and a leg protruding from the dirt. The corpse in the grave wore desert tan American combat fatigues. The rank—Sergeant First Class—was still on the sleeve, and over the right breast pocket was the name: MARSHALL. The remains of John Marshall were gently laid into a body bag and draped with an American flag to be shipped to the United States for burial with full military honors.
The recovery of Marshall’s remains was a balm for Aaron Polsgrove, who had been consumed by guilt and regret for leaving Marshall behind during the ambush. He did not second-guess himself for his decision under fire; he believed it was the right call, and that it had almost certainly prevented further casualties. But he knew that if Marshall had not put himself at the head of the column—Polsgrove’s usual pos
ition—it would have been Polsgrove’s own corpse there on the highway. And even now, with Marshall’s remains on their way back home to his family, there was still a troubling question for Polsgrove: Why hadn’t God protected Sergeant Marshall, too? Polsgrove promised himself that when he reached heaven, he would ask God why.
The following winter, Polsgrove and his wife were told that she was pregnant with their first child. Polsgrove believed with all his heart that the small life growing inside her would not have been possible without the sacrifice of John Marshall.
In downtown Baghdad on April 9, the tanks and Bradleys of Captain Chris Carter’s Attack Company were killing off the last holdouts among the soldiers and miltiamen who had infiltrated Rogue’s sector from across the Tigris River. The company was hit by several volleys of RPGs and small-arms rounds during the day, returning fire each time until the volleys stopped. From across the river, RPG teams hiding behind a wall next to a mosque opened fire. Carter’s Bradleys tore down the wall with several blasts of Twenty-five Mike Mike, and the fighters fled. By the end of the day, there was only sporadic contact, and the two northernmost bridges were secured.
The next day, April 10, Staff Sergeant Tom Slago, whose Bradley Nocturnal had been damaged twice in RPG attacks the previous week, was on duty on the west bank of the Tigris River, next to one of the northern bridges. His gunner, Specialist Gary Techur, was scanning through his sights across the river, where he could see people waving and celebrating on the balconies of their homes. The platoon commander motioned for Slago to move his Bradley toward an alley. Slago had his driver pull to the edge of the alley, where Techur could scan the buildings and Slago could keep an eye on a crowd of civilians gathering at the far end. Slago was watching the crowd when he noticed a white cloud of smoke. He was wondering what it was when something exploded against the Bradley and slammed him down to the floor of the turret. He yelled up at Techur, “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” and heard the other tanks and Bradleys open up. Then he realized that his face was burning and his eyes were swelling shut. Suddenly a sergeant from another vehicle was grabbing at him and yanking him up and out of the turret. He laid Slago down on the sidewalk, saying something to him in a low voice. Slago asked the sergeant to pat him down and check for wounds. The soldier looked at him and said, “I don’t see no blood.”
Slago heard a medical vehicle drive up and the sounds of the medics yelling something. The sergeant yelled back at them, “He’s got really bad burns to his face—and shrapnel wounds to his stomach!” Someone lifted Slago and put him in the back of the medical vehicle. Slago lay there, afraid to touch his own belly because he feared that his intestines would spill out into his hands. He began to weep, not for his injuries, but because at that moment he believed he had let his family and his buddies down, and he worried about what they would think of him. Later, at the trauma center, he thought the medics had left him out in the hot sun. His face was burning and he screamed, “Kill the pain!” and then, “Roman Catholic—A positive!” A voice asked if he wanted morphine. “Oh, yeah,” he heard himself reply. He felt a warm flow wash over him and the pain was gone.
Later that summer, Slago’s face healed and his eyebrows and eyelashes grew back. The shrapnel to his belly had gone straight through him, a clean wound, and the scars soon healed. Slago felt blessed to be alive. When he returned to duty, he checked the ammo ready box on the Bradley, where he had stashed the Bible his wife’s parents had sent him. It was still there, intact, with only the gold-leaf trim on the pages burned away.
Two more wounded men from the Tusker battalion also recovered—Private First Class Synquoiry Smith, the gunner wounded in the arm at the Jumhuriya Bridge intersection, and Sergeant First Class Phillip Cornell, the tank commander shot through the chest. As Cornell was being medevaced, he happened to look across at the next stretcher and saw the young Iraqi fighter in the red flannel shirt and work boots he had seen lying wounded on the palace roadway before the fight at the intersection. Even in his pain and confusion, this struck Cornell as an absurd coincidence. He thought about it for a long time, even as he was recuperating back home and joking about his wife treating him like a houseplant, dusting him off every few hours and turning him toward the sun. Cornell returned to duty at Fort Stewart later that year. A chunk of flesh was missing from his arm. Rough scars snaked across his chest and abdomen, and a piece of shrapnel the size of his pinkie was still lodged in his shoulder blade.
Beneath the crossed sabers on the military parade grounds, the Charlie Company crews from Rogue who had lost Charlie One Two to the tank fire on the fifth had survived the thunder run on the seventh while fighting from inside replacement tanks. Staff Sergeant Jason Diaz, the tank commander on Charlie One Two, served on the seventh as the gunner for Lieutenant Roger Gruneisen on a tank commanded by the lieutenant. Gruneisen’s own tank, Charlie One One—Creeping Death—was still being repaired following the crash into the bridge abutment on Highway 8 on the fifth. Afterward, Sergeant Carlos Hernandez, the gunner on Charlie One One, had told the tank manufacturer’s repair representative that the tank’s gun tube had been bent. The rep insisted that an Abrams gun tube could not possibly be bent—until he got a good look at Charlie One One. The tank was later repaired and returned to service. Much later, Charlie One Two was recovered just north of Objective Curly and towed to Kuwait to be cannibalized for spare parts.
The Charlie Company crews fought battles downtown near the Baghdad train station and the national museum throughout the day on the seventh. On the eighth, their tanks were attacked by half a dozen suicide vehicles. The tank commanded by Gruneisen was actually rammed by one car, rocking the Abrams but causing no serious damage. Gruneisen’s platoon destroyed at least two suicide cars that day. The lieutenant never found out who or what had been inside the vehicles, but he didn’t care. He figured that if a driver kept charging a tank after taking warning shots to the pavement and through the grille, he was either an imbecile or intent on suicide. Either way, Gruneisen had no regrets about what he had done.
Private First Class Don Schafer and Private First Class Chris Shipley, the Charlie Company tank crewmen who had been wounded after transferring to an armored personnel carrier during the thunder run on April 5, were shipped to a U.S. Navy hospital in Spain and later to the States. The last thing Shipley remembered after an AK-47 round tore through his right eye was vomiting up blood. He did not know that Schafer had been wounded in the same incident until he awoke in his hospital bed in Spain and saw Schafer in the same ward, his arm wrapped with a huge bandage.
Later, Shipley had reconstructive surgery on his face and a prosthesis was created to replace his ruined right eye. His left arm healed reasonably well, but he did not have his previous range of movement. He turned twenty that autumn. He made plans to go back home to Arizona after his medical treatment was exhausted. He planned to leave the army. He wanted to go to a technical school and earn a computer science degree.
At the hospital in Spain, Schafer developed a bacterial infection, slowing his recovery. Back in the States, doctors pieced his upper right arm back together after drilling metal pins into his elbow and shoulder and connecting a reinforcing bar to help the bones regrow. Schafer could no longer lift his arm above his head or behind his back, and the doctors told him he probably never would. Schafer planned to get out of the army and go home to Baltimore to take criminal justice classes at a junior college. He intended to transfer to Florida State University. He had always wanted to be a police officer, but now that seemed unlikely, given his arm problems and the fact that he couldn’t run very far without gasping for breath. He thought he might try something in the police field, perhaps forensics. He was ready to leave the army. It seemed to him that the military medical people, at least, didn’t want much to do with him once they had him all patched up.
Between the train station and the Special Republican Guards headquarters in downtown Baghdad, Captain Jason Conroy’s company from Rogue fought a series of running street battle
s on the eighth with bands of Special Republican Guards, Fedayeen, and Syrians. RPG teams were on the rooftops, firing down on the tanks and Bradleys. Suicide vehicles attacked from the flanks, and on some streets antiaircraft guns were shooting in direct-fire mode. There were more antiaircraft guns on the roof of the train station. In front of the station was a series of bunkers infested with gunmen. The company killed dozens of soldiers and militiamen throughout the morning and afternoon, but more emerged from side streets and alleyways. On one street, the fighters used a long pole with a hook on the end—it reminded Conroy of the poles used in vaudeville to yank a struggling performer off the stage—to drag in their wounded and dead, and their weapons, too.
It took most of the day to secure the area, but the sniping and harassment from the enemy went on sporadically for another six days. Despite the intensity of the fighting in the city, Rogue did not lose another man. The loss of Staff Sergeant Stevon Booker on the fifth still weighed heavily on everyone, even months later, when U.S. Marines in south-central Iraq captured an Iraqi fighter and recovered an M-4 rifle. An investigation revealed that it was the M-4 Booker that had been firing when he was killed. The discovery didn’t bring Booker back, but it seemed to bring a certain closure to his passing.
Talal Ahmed al-Doori, the Baath Party militia leader in downtown Baghdad, drove home during the thunder run on April 7 and later found a job driving a taxi. Colonel Raaed Faik, the Republican Guard officer who got off the bus to Baghdad on April 7, went home to his family in the Yarmouk district. Brigadier Baha Ali Nasr, the air force officer, stayed in his downtown office until April 9 and then went home. General Omar Adul Karim, the warehouse commander, drove home in his uniform on April 9, stubbornly ignoring the jeers of defecting soldiers, who yelled at him, “Take off your uniform! It’s over!” And Nabeel al-Qaisy, the reluctant Baath Party militiaman on duty in the Baghdad bunker, walked home on April 7. Later he sold his AK-47, quit the party, and resumed his job as a fine arts teacher.
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