Thunder Run (5 page)

On
Creeping Death,
Gruneisen was struggling to catch up to the rest of the column. The crew had piled all the gear and rucksacks and extra weapons right in his field of vision. The stuff was like a little mountain in front of his face. He could see to fire the .50-caliber off to his right flank, and he could see behind him and off to his left. But in front of him all he saw was gear and rucksacks. He was under fire, on an unfamiliar highway, trying to catch up to an armored column, and he couldn't see a damn thing.

THREE

DOUBLE TAP

A
t the head of the Rogue column, Lieutenant Ball was relieved to be on the move again. Like everyone else in the battalion, he had spent the thirty-minute wait on Highway 8 fighting to keep enemy dismounts away from his platoon's tanks. He found it hard to believe, but a couple of Iraqi soldiers had actually tried to charge the Abrams on foot.
What were they thinking?
Ball tried popping off a few rounds from his M-4, but he wasn't quite capable of the acrobatics required to fire a carbine accurately while talking on the radio and maneuvering his tank. His wingman, the gunner in the tank behind him, took care of the dismounts with a blast of coax. But Ball couldn't stop worrying about some Iraqi fanatic sneaking up his rear end and tossing a grenade into the hatch.

Ball felt much better now that they were back on track and heading for the airport, even though the delay had given the Fedayeen and the Syrian street fighters time to regroup. Ball could see men with weapons jumping off of trucks that were now arriving from the city and from the increasingly congested warrens of houses and commercial buildings along the divided roadway. Air force pilots, circling far above the battle, were warning the battalion's air liaison officer that more vehicles were on their way from the city center. The pilots were warning, too, about a collection of antiaircraft guns in a grove of date palm trees just off the highway—what they called Triple A Park, for antiaircraft artillery. The Iraqis had leveled some of the guns and shot them in direct-fire mode, aiming directly at the tanks and Bradleys. The Rogue crews could hear A-10 Thunderbolt II planes pounding away on the antiaircraft batteries, their 30mm Gatling guns emitting low groans that echoed across the landscape.

Highway 8 was taking Ball closer to the city center now, and the traffic patterns were becoming more complex and confusing. Ball studied the military map pinned to his hatch, checking the coordinates against his Plugger—his handheld global positioning satellite device. He saw highway signs warning of upcoming exits, but his map didn't show exit numbers or the names of major highways or neighborhoods. Even so, he was thankful that someone in the Baghdad roads department had thought to post huge blue highway signs that read, in Arabic and English:
AIRPORT
. His company commander, Captain Andy Hilmes, had told Ball to look for the signs.

Enemy fire was intensifying as they drew near the city center. Some of the fighters near the roadside bunkers and trenches were trying something new. They would lie next to the ditches, pretending to be dead. After the tanks had passed, they would leap up, aim an RPG tube, and fire grenades at the rear of the tanks. The soldier who had taken out Charlie One Two may have just gotten off a lucky shot, but he also may have known about the tanks' vulnerable rear engine grills. And if he did, then some of these fighters probably did, too.

From the commander's hatch of his Bradley, Captain Larry Burris, the commander of a mechanized infantry company attached to Rogue, spotted two Iraqi fighters in the median. One was waving a white rag and the other had hoisted a white plastic chair over his head. They were making wild “don't shoot” gestures. Burris let them go. But just after he passed them, the two men picked up weapons and opened fire on Burris's trail platoon. The platoon returned fire and killed them, but Burris realized he now had one more complication to deal with. One of his men already had taken a piece of shrapnel to the face from an exploding enemy truck, and Burris's crews were struggling to tell the difference between civilian cars and military vehicles. He thought his men were showing restraint, holding their fire and waving away errant civilians or firing warning shots. But now they had to deal with gunmen in civilian clothes pretending to surrender. Burris was determined to bring all 160 men in his company back home alive. He realized that the enemy tactics were putting both Iraqi civilians and American soldiers at risk, and that angered him.

Over the net, other commanders were complaining about the phony dead men rising up and firing weapons. They wanted permission to make sure people who appeared to be dead really were dead. Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz had heard enough. He got on the net and ordered his men to “double tap.” Anything you see, he instructed, don't assume it's dead. Double tap it. Shoot it again—especially anyone near a weapon. Schwartz wanted them to check their work. At the rear of the column, Lieutenant Shane Williams, who had put the kill shot into Charlie One Two, would do the final check, making sure no threats with weapons survived. He would execute the final double taps.

At one point, one of the tanks lit up a truck that was unloading dismounts. The soldiers were torn apart, and their remains lay in smoking heaps. In the middle of the mess sat a soldier, who at first appeared to be dead but was now moving. He was reaching for an RPG launcher. Captain Conroy spotted him, but the hydraulic system on his tank was still malfunctioning. His gunner couldn't traverse his main gun and coax.

Conroy got on the radio to the Bradley behind him and said, “There's a guy with an RPG,” and he indicated the spot. The Bradley opened up with coax but Conroy couldn't tell if the man had been hit. A gunner on one of the tanks saw him moving, so he opened up with his coax. The soldier was rocking back and forth now, still reaching for the RPG tube.

“Would you
please
kill this guy!” Conroy said.

The soldier was still rocking when the Bradley hit him with a blast of Twenty-five Mike Mike—the 25mm Bushmaster chain gun. The man's body blew apart. Nobody worried anymore about the guy playing dead.

On the west side of the highway, Schwartz noticed a series of flower shops and greenhouses. It looked like one of those nurseries commonly seen on highways outside American suburbs. There were drooping awnings, perennials in big plastic pots and trays of annuals, shrubs and hanging baskets, and sheets of plastic blotting out the hot April sun. Behind the plants were rows of heavy clay plots, and behind them were men with automatic rifles and RPGs, crouching and hiding, apparently in the mistaken belief that a half inch of baked clay and a few pounds of dirt would shield them from coax rounds or Twenty-five Mike Mike. They were all reloading, having pelted the front of the column. Now they were setting up to unload on Schwartz and his vehicles. Schwartz was amazed. The gunmen appeared to have no idea how vulnerable they had left themselves.

Schwartz yelled to his gunner, “Spray some ammunition in there.” That would get their attention, Schwartz thought. It would keep their heads down until the Bradley gunners behind Schwartz could get a fix on them. Schwartz radioed the Bradley commanders: “There's a florist, a nursery coming up on your left. Destroy that nursery.”

The Bradleys obeyed. Schwartz watched the clay pots explode, right down the row, one by one. Twenty-five Mike Mike is a high-explosive round. It hits and pops. The clay pots disappeared, and so did the men behind them. They evaporated in a spray of dirt and clay, their weapons flying. Four of the Bradleys went at it, killing a few, then passing the targets back to the next Bradley, which killed a few and passed the work back. They were finishing their work. They put perhaps a hundred rounds of Twenty-five Mike Mike into the nursery, and then it was gone, and a couple dozen fighters, more or less, were gone, too.

“Okay, you're done,” Schwartz said. “Shut it off.” The 25mm gun tubes swung back north and the Bradleys plowed forward, the gunners searching through their thermal sights for more targets.

The enemy kept coming. Soldiers and civilian gunmen were arriving now in every available mode of transportation—hatchbacks, orange-and-white taxis, police cars, ambulances, pickups, big Chevys, motorcycles with sidecars. Major Nussio, the battalion executive officer, opened fire on a huge garbage truck with a soldier at the wheel. He was thinking to himself as the soldier keeled over and the truck crash-landed:
A garbage truck? These people are so stupid—stupid but determined.

They were not giving up. It seemed suicidal—men with nothing more than AK-47s or wildly inaccurate RPGs were charging tanks and Bradleys. It was like they
wanted
to die, or worse, they just didn't care. That disturbed some of the tankers. They weren't trained to fight people who didn't give a damn. Nor were they quite prepared to fight people who didn't have a plan—didn't have a clue. As each RPG team or pack of dismounts attacked with utter disregard for what the
other
Iraqis or Syrians were doing, the tankers kept thinking:
It's all a big trap. They really do have a plan. They're just luring us in with these haphazard, disjointed tactics. Sometime soon, they're going to get organized and attack with some serious tactics.

At one point, a little white Volkswagen Passat suddenly appeared on the highway. It came off one of the access ramps. Before anyone could react, the Passat turned sharply and smacked into one of the Bradleys. Everyone thought it was a suicide car, but nothing exploded. The driver opened the door and stepped out, his hands raised over his head. He was a portly middle-aged man with a trim black mustache and wavy silver hair. He wore an Iraqi military uniform with a colonel's gold rank on his epaulets. There was a pistol on his hip.

The Bradley commander radioed Captain Hilmes. “Sir, we got an Iraqi general here,” he said, misreading the colonel's rank. “He just crashed his car into our Bradley. What to you want us to do with him?”

“Capture his ass,” Hilmes ordered.

Several infantrymen climbed out of the Bradley's hull and snatched the colonel and dragged him inside. Later, under interrogation by U.S. military interpreters, the Iraqi said he was the military quartermaster for all of Baghdad. He was a brown shoes guy, a desk officer. He had been driving to work, minding his own business—and suddenly he was involved in a fender-bender with an American Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He told his interrogators that he had had no idea American forces were in Baghdad. From what he had been hearing on government-controlled radio, American forces had been stopped cold below the Euphrates River, well south of the capital. He certainly never expected to see tanks in Baghdad. Every officer he knew was convinced the Americans were afraid to bring tanks into a city.

It was baffling. Senior Iraqi officers in the capital seemed content to believe their own lies, that the war was going well and the Americans were bogged down south of the city. Even many ordinary civilians seemed unaware that there was a war going on. Despite the columns of black smoke from burning vehicles and the thunderous pounding of the tanks and the Bradleys, civilians in family sedans were coasting down the southbound lanes of Highway 8 and along the access roads, like it was just another Saturday morning in the suburbs. For all they knew from listening to government radio, the war was confined to the southern desert, where American forces were being routed. It was only the Fedayeen and Syrians, and unknown numbers of Special Republican Guards, who seemed to understand that American forces were invading the capital. And if these soldiers and fighters and militiamen were disorganized and poorly trained, they did not lack for determination or gall—and there seemed to be an endless supply of weapons and ammunition, and of gunmen eager to fight and die.

Lieutenant Ball was approaching the spaghetti intersection. His map showed the exit ramp splitting into two ramps. He knew he wanted the ramp to the right, the one that hooked west to the airport highway. He tried to focus. He was under fire, worrying about the antiaircraft guns, talking on the radio, checking his Plugger, glancing down at the map, searching for highway signs to the airport. He had been following blue
AIRPORT
signs all the way up Highway 8, with their distinctive white airplane symbols, but now black smoke from a burning Iraqi personnel carrier obscured the entire cloverleaf.

In the web of overpasses and off-ramps, Ball found the ramp he wanted, despite the smoke, and stayed to the right. He was halfway down when he noticed that the exit had three ramps, not two.
Dammit,
he should have taken the middle one. Now he was heading east into downtown Baghdad, toward Saddam Hussein's palace complex and government center, the opposite direction from the airport—and the entire column was following him. Everybody was going the wrong way.

It was too late to radio back and stop them and get them to turn around, so Ball called Captain Hilmes and said, “The road forks. I took the wrong one,” so that the column would slow down and give him time to think.

Hilmes could sense the anxiety in Ball's voice. He realized that the last thing Ball needed was an ass-chewing for screwing up the turn. Hilmes was thirty, an eight-year veteran, a West Point grad who had served in Bosnia. He was an army brat, the son of a thirty-three-year army lifer who had served two tours in Vietnam. Hilmes's two older brothers were armor officers. He had learned over the years how to deal with men under stress, and so he tried to encourage Ball and to calm him.

“All I need you to do is find a bypass,” Hilmes said slowly. “Just take your time and let me know when you've got it.”

Ball checked his grid on the Plugger and looked at his map for a bypass. He figured out which highway he was on and realized that all he needed to do was cross the median and head back in the opposite direction. He was reassured when he glanced across the highway and saw a blue sign pointing back the way he had just come:
AIRPORT
.

There were metal guardrails on both sides of the divided highway, but they might as well have been made of tissue paper. Ball was in a seventy-ton, solid-steel Abrams M1A1 tank, for God's sake. He could go anyplace he wanted. In the U.S. military, officers are constantly under orders to “stay in your lane,” to stay out of matters they don't know anything about. This was one occasion when First Lieutenant Robert Ball was not going to stay in his lane. He radioed back to Hilmes: “I'm gonna jump this guardrail and go back left.” The driver gunned the engine and the guardrails were crunched under the tracks like cardboard. He swung left, onto the westbound lanes, and they were back on track, headed back through the spaghetti junction and on to the airport, following the blue
AIRPORT
signs.