Thunder Run (16 page)

Slago's crew had killed quite a few Iraqis down south, and it disturbed him that after a while killing people had become almost routine. He had talked to his crew about it, and he had decided to rationalize his feelings by dehumanizing the enemy. He did not think of the Iraqis there on the roadway as people but as obstacles. They were in his way; in fact, they were trying to kill
him.
He was not interested in dying for his country. He wanted them to die for their country. He wanted them out of his way.

Just before the day's mission, Slago had pulled aside his gunner, Specialist Gary Techur, who had developed a habit of calling out “Contact RPG!” or “Contact machine gun!” to alert Slago to give the order to fire. Slago told Techur: “You see anybody in a uniform, anybody with a weapon, don't ask me for permission to shoot. Just kill 'em. They're enemy. Take 'em out.
Then
you can yell ‘Contact RPG.'”

Slago was anxious about the mission. He had not been able to sleep the night before. In fact, he had not slept in several days. Maybe it was the nickname the crew had given the Bradley:
Nocturnal
. Slago could not shake the feeling that somebody was going to die on the run into Baghdad—maybe a member of his crew, maybe himself. His wife's parents had mailed him a Bible, so he stashed it in the Bradley's coax “ready box,” the ammo tray. He felt better just knowing it was there, close by.

That morning, as his crew prepped the Bradley for the mission, Slago had tried to kid around with Techur, hoping to relax them both. They even managed to laugh when they passed the minefield and realized that the Iraqis had just dumped the mines right on top of the asphalt. It seemed so amateurish, so silly and ineffective. It felt good to laugh. But when Slago saw the sleeping forms of the guys assigned to the tactical operations center, still snug and warm in their sleeping bags at dawn, he felt a deep longing for sleep.

Slago was also worried about his Bradley. It had taken two frightening RPG hits down south—hits so jarring that Phil Wolford started calling Slago an RPG magnet. The first time, an RPG had torn through the front headlight, pierced the Bradley's front armor, and exploded out the side. Slago was amazed that no one had been hurt. But the second time, just south of Baghdad three days earlier, a Syrian guerrilla wearing a green headband had launched an RPG that ripped straight through the driver's hatch and sent a fireball exploding through the rear hull. The driver, a nineteen-year-old kid named Robert Sciria, had his back lacerated by shrapnel. One of the infantrymen inside the hull was hit, too, and Techur, the gunner, took a sliver of shrapnel in the thigh. Sciria had saved them, driving madly for a mile and a half out of the kill zone with his back bleeding and his wounds burning. Now, on Highway 8, Slago was confident that his crew knew how to respond to any crisis, but he couldn't help but wonder how many more RPG hits his battered Bradley could withstand.

As soon as they passed the cloverleaf at Objective Curly, Slago heard the RPG teams open up from the roadside bunkers and from alleyways to the east. In an instant, he was focused and alert. He was intrigued by the way the battlefield always shifted so suddenly from calm to chaos. It was like going from zero to 120 mph in one wild burst of energy. One minute he was anxious and apprehensive, and the next he was intense and energized, the adrenaline pumping so hard that his ears pounded. He saw Techur in the gunner's mount, scanning the right side. “Yeah, go for it, Techur!” he hollered. Slago had complete confidence in Techur, who was young—just twenty-three—but tough and decisive, a wiry little guy from the Palau Islands.

Techur had spotted three men coming out of a house and into an alleyway about five hundred meters to the east. He watched them close a gate behind them and lay their RPG launchers on the ground, as though they had all the time in the world. Then one of them reached down, lifted the launcher to his shoulder, and loaded a grenade. The launcher was aimed at the battalion executive officer in a vehicle just behind the Bradley. Techur put his magnified sight right on the launcher and punched up a HEAT round. He was thinking:
Ain't no way you're getting that round off, man.
He squeezed the trigger and the round exploded on top of the three men. Techur couldn't see any blood or body parts. It was a very clinical scene. The men were just gone, evaporated.

In the next alleyway, also to the east, men with RPGs and AK-47s were running back and forth, trying to get into position to fire on the column. Techur had discovered down south that it was virtually impossible to track and hit men who were on the move. Instead, he had learned to ricochet coax rounds off streets and buildings. Now he fired into the pavement and watched the coax bounce crazily through the alleyway, sweeping the gunmen off their feet. They went down and stayed down. It was like bowling with a machine gun. Techur felt no sorrow or even pity. He was killing in order to survive. It was more than a job, more than a mission. It was pure survival.

Even with Techur's spectacular kills, Slago was still uneasy. Slago had been unnerved when his Bradley passed by Bell's disabled tank, and then the remains of Charlie One Two. Slago hadn't heard the story of Charlie One Two. He thought the tank had just been hit. It was a sobering sight. He thought:
Damn, they've already taken out two Abrams tanks! This is
incredible. An Abrams is supposed to be indestructible!

Slago was up in the hatch, his head and shoulders exposed, and now he felt more vulnerable than ever. He had just seen what RPGs or recoilless rifles had done to the two tanks, and now he imagined what a single 7.62 AK-47 round would do to his head. His head would explode. He tried not to think about it. He concentrated on the reports on the radio from the tanks and Bradleys ahead of him. They were providing the coordinates for enemy positions. Slago marked them on his map. He wanted to be able to tell Techur exactly where to lay down his rounds. Nobody was going to get off a first shot at his crew.

Just south of the spaghetti junction, beyond the row of greenhouses on the west side of the highway, Yusef Taha and his brother Ziad were huddled in the rear downstairs room of their two-story stucco home in the shade of the green nursery awnings. The Taha brothers owned one of the greenhouses, which had been shredded by coax from the Rogue Bradleys two days earlier. They had stayed in the war zone to protect their house—not from the Americans, but from the Syrian mercenaries who had arrived several days earlier to seize control of the entire greenhouse complex. The brothers knew that if they fled, the Syrians would have set up snipers' nests on their roof, drawing tank rounds that would have flattened their modest little home. So now they were hunkered down inside with twelve family members—aunts and uncles, in-laws and children—praying that the Americans would pass by quickly and leave their house intact.

Yusef was a heavyset forty-two-year-old, with a thick mustache and the beginnings of a beard. Ziad was twenty-six, thin and handsome and had a trimmed mustache. The brothers had pleaded with the Syrians, begging them to find some other place to fight the Americans. But the Syrians said the greenhouses and nurseries occupied a strategic stretch of territory along the Hillah Highway—Highway 8—controlling access to the airport and to the government palace complex downtown. They set up RPG teams inside the greenhouses, joined by Republican Guard troops in their dark green uniforms with distinctive maroon insignias. It seemed to the Taha brothers that the Syrians were in charge. They were certainly more fanatic and energized than the Republican Guards. They spoke often of jihad, of dying while killing Americans infidels. Some of them strapped packs of explosives to their chests and spoke of ramming suicide cars into the tanks and Bradleys. Some of them brandished swords, like Saladin, the Arab conquerer. The brothers did not particularly welcome the American invasion—and certainly not the devastating firepower brought to bear on their nursery business—but they resented the Syrians, who were invaders in their own right. When the brothers asked one of the Syrian fighters to move away from in front of their house, the man cursed them and asked why they weren't fighting to defend their own country.

During the highway battle two days earlier, several of the Syrians—along with a few Fedayeen fighters in black robes—had died in a horrifying series of explosions behind a row of heavy clay planters. The families of the Fedayeen had arrived later in the day to retrieve what remained of the fighters' corpses, and the Syrians dragged away their own dead countrymen for burial. The Taha brothers had hoped the brutal deaths would discourage the other fighters, but the Syrians and Fedayeen had regrouped for today's fight. They were crouched behind concrete walls and in the cinder-block frames of unfinished homes, armed with RPGs and AK-47s. Across the highway, the Republican Guards had set up inside a cement granary.

When the American tanks appeared through the yellow haze obscuring the highway, the brothers and their family members got down on the floor, below the level of the windows. The floor shuddered as grenades roared from RPG tubes and the automatic rifle rounds beat a steady
thunk
thunk thunk
. The blasts of the tank and Bradley cannons rattled the windows and the shells struck with a heavy thud somewhere next to the highway. The Taha family could not see the battle—they could only hear it, and feel it thumping through the floors and walls.

Yusef looked through the front window and saw his neighbor, Saad Fadhil, running into the courtyard toward his car. It was on fire. Machine-gun fire from the American column was tearing through the metal front gate and gouging holes in the stucco walls. Fadhil was splashing the flames with water from a plastic jug when something caused his body to pitch backward and explode. Yusef could see that Fadhil had been killed instantly, but he thought he should try to recover his body before the machine gun mutilated it even more; already, Fadhil's arm was gone and part of his midsection was missing. Yusef crept through the front doorway. The American machine gun opened up again, the rounds slapping against the stucco, and Yusef ran back inside and threw himself back down on the floor.

The brothers' elderly mother was hyperventilating, and Ziad was trying to calm her. He had to shout over the roar of the battle. Some of the date palms in front of the house were on fire now, and the family feared that the flames would spread to the house. The incoming rounds tore the flowering petals from the bougainvillea vines hanging from the second-floor balcony, and the ground outside was covered with a bright scarlet carpet. The family huddled together on the floor for many long minutes, listening to bullets ping against the metal gate and watching the flames flicker and die on the date palm fronds. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shooting stopped. The clanking of the tank treads faded and the only sounds were the shouts of the Syrians and Fedayeen. They were collecting their dead.

A half mile up the highway, the helmeted head of Lieutenant Maurice Middleton was visible above the commander's cupola of a tank that had the nickname
Apotheosis
stenciled on the gun tube. Middleton had already passed the greenhouses and was following the tail vehicles of the Rogue battalion. He was commanding the lead tank for Flip deCamp's Tusker battalion. It was Middleton's job to lead the entire tank battalion into Saddam Hussein's palace complex, where his company—Captain Phil Wolford's Assassins—had been ordered to seize and hold the hulking Republican Palace with just seventy men, ten tanks, and four Bradleys.

The night before, Wolford had briefed Middleton on the route into the city center. He had stressed the importance of getting a smooth separation from Rogue battalion, which would split off north along the six-lane Qadisiya Highway toward Saddam's parade grounds and reviewing stand, and the tomb of the unknown soldier. It was crucial that Middleton split off to the east, along the four-lane Kindi Highway. If he missed the turnoff, Wolford told him, the whole damn battalion would be headed in the wrong direction. There was no way to turn around and go back. Wolford had told Middleton, “Don't . . . fucking . . . miss it.”

Middleton was twenty-three, a slender, soft-spoken graduate of Emory University who exuded a quiet confidence. He had only been in the army for two years after being commissioned right out of college, but he had seen enough combat on the march up from Kuwait to feel comfortable leading the column. He knew from his maps and his satellite imagery that just past the spaghetti junction he needed to take a ramp that led to a service ramp, which led in turn to the Kindi Highway. His only concern was the weather. A dust storm had kicked up and the sky was a strange yellowish-gray, streaked with wisps of black from all the gunfire up Highway 8. Middleton was worried about being able to see the exit ramps. He had heard about the Rogue guys getting lost at the junction two days earlier.

Up to this point, Middleton had been concentrating on firing his .50-caliber machine gun into the roadside bunkers. It was so hazy that he couldn't see any enemy dismounts, only their muzzle flashes. He directed his gunner on the coax and main gun while also monitoring the platoon and company nets. At one point, he heard Captain Wolford's voice over the net, screaming, “Watch out for indirect!”—for mortars. An RPG had been fired straight up into the air, like a mortar, and had exploded on the highway next to Wolford's tank, rocking him in the turret. He knew it was an RPG, not a mortar, but he yelled out the warning because it had crashed down just like a mortar. He was intrigued by the bizarre ways the Iraqis used their weapons.

As Middleton rolled past the spaghetti junction, he concentrated on the roadway. He was searching for the spot where the Rogue column would continue on the Qadisiya Highway and Middleton would peel off onto the Kindi Highway. Middleton had marked the turnoff on his maps and had entered the GPS coordinates on his Plugger. The enemy gunfire had died down, so he was able to concentrate—and suddenly there it was, a clearly defined exit ramp exactly where it was supposed to be. Middleton followed the ramp, which led to an access ramp, which took him straight onto the Kindi Highway, trailed by the rest of the column. It wasn't all that difficult, but still he felt a small sense of triumph.