Thunder Run (19 page)

Perkins was now more determined than ever to spend the night. Steph Twitty's China battalion was still moving up to secure Highway 8, so it was too early to know whether the fuel and ammunition convoys would get through. But things had gone so smoothly that Perkins felt a surge of confidence. He thought he could persuade General Blount to let him stay the night. It would then be up to the general to convince the higher command to shift from a quick-strike thunder run to an overnight occupation of the capital.

The U.S. military had come a long way since Vietnam, Perkins thought. The men directing the Iraqi campaign had come of age during the Vietnam conflict, when the top brass tended to micromanage every firefight, robbing ground commanders of initiative and spontaneity. There was more willingness now to let officers in the field respond and adapt to fluid situations. During the thunder run two days earlier, the command at V Corps—the next level above the Third Infantry Division—had monitored events from a UAV spy plane but had not interfered with Perkins's decisions on the ground.

Perkins had fought Saddam's army all the way up from Kuwait. He had studied the enemy for months, preparing himself for this day. He had punched his way into Baghdad not once but twice, and he had taken the measure of Saddam's defenses. He knew now, more than ever, what was required to topple the regime. If he could hold his positions through the night, he thought, Baghdad would belong to him.

There was also a strategic matter Perkins knew he needed to address. He had to outflank Mohammed Sahaf. He believed the minister was somewhere in the city center, and he anticipated another barrage of claims describing a decisive Iraqi military victory. It wasn't enough for Perkins to set up his command post inside Saddam's palace and government complex. He had to
prove
he was there. He had to compete with Sahaf for the international TV audience. Sahaf had the international press corps at his disposal across the river. Perkins had . . . Fox News.

Greg Kelly, Fox's square-jawed, energetic correspondent, had ridden in the back of Perkins's command vehicle. Kelly and his cameraman were embedded with brigade headquarters. As Attack's infantrymen cleared the palace, Kelly set up his camera out front, framing the palace portico as a dramatic backdrop. He was ready to file live from downtown Baghdad. It was mid-morning now, the middle of the night back in the States but the beginning of the workday in the Arab world and in European capitals. Kelly went live—and gestured for Perkins to come over.

Perkins knew exactly what he wanted to convey. He wanted the world to know that American forces were moving at will inside the government complex—and there was nothing Saddam Hussein could do about it.

“What we have in the city now is an entire armored brigade,” Perkins began. His helmet strap was pinching at his chin, and his delivery was swift and clipped. “Right now, we really have control of the center of Baghdad and what is the heart of his governmental structure,” referring to Saddam.

Kelly asked how long Perkins intended to stay in the city. Perkins thought for a moment, then lapsed into vague military-speak. He didn't want anyone to know he intended to stay overnight—and he certainly didn't want to reveal just how dependent his tank battalions were on keeping Highway 8 open for fuel and ammunition. “We'll continue to develop the situation,” he said, gesturing toward the city center. “We'll see what our tactical requirements are and how they fit into the overall situation. There's a lot of ways we can control this ground, a lot of ways we can control entrance and exit.”

When Kelly asked if the end of the war was near, Perkins was careful not to claim victory but to make it clear that the U.S. military was dictating the fight. “Tactically, we've obviously already crushed his armed resistance and the American soldier has been victorious from that point of view,” he said. His flak vest was cinched tight and his pistol was strapped to his leg. The fight was still very much on. In the background, Perkins could hear the booms of tank cannons and mortars. “We still have resistance throughout the city,” he went on. “We're taking our armored forces and pushing all the way through and completely securing this so that we have freedom of maneuver in the city.”

When Perkins was finished, Kelly summoned deCamp, who was in a celebratory mood. He was considerably more animated than Perkins. His face was streaked with sweat and grime, giving him a desperate, hooded look. “Saddam Hussein says he owns Baghdad,” deCamp said loudly. “Wrong!
We
own Baghdad. We own his palaces, his downtown district, his hotel.”

DeCamp grinned and introduced his Attack Company commander, Captain Chris Carter, who described the haphazard and disorganized nature of the resistance by Iraqi irregulars in the city. DeCamp joked about taking a shower in Saddam's palace, then began unfolding a red banner. The Fox News anchor in the United States told his early morning viewers that the tankers were unfurling the brigade's colors. Actually, the banner was a University of Georgia Bulldogs flag. DeCamp and Carter had graduated from the school, and they had hauled the flag through Iraq for this moment. Each man grabbed a corner of the flag and unfurled the school colors.

“How 'bout them Dawgs?” deCamp hollered.

“How 'bout them Dawgs?” Carter yelled back.

“Hoaah!” deCamp said.

Across the Tigris River, barely two miles from the Sujud Palace, Sahaf was putting on his own show for the cameras. He stood at his usual perch, a mezzanine roof on the second floor of the Palestine Hotel conference center. He wore his trademark black beret and a starched olive Baath Party uniform bearing two small medallions—an Iraqi flag and a portrait of Saddam. As he had two days earlier, Sahaf spoke with a flourish, denying that American forces had entered the capital.

“There is no presence of American columns in the city of Baghdad at all,” Sahaf said, addressing a crush of reporters. “They were surrounded, and they were dealt with and their columns were smoldered. The American mercenaries will commit suicide at the gates of Baghdad. I would encourage them to increase their rate of committing suicide.”

The reporters were openly contemptuous. Some of them had watched through binoculars from their hotel rooms upstairs as Bradleys from Phil Wolford's Assassin Company rolled onto the riverside grounds of the Republican Palace one and a half kilometers across the Tigris. From across the river came the steady rattle of gunfire and the occasional dull thud of a tank round exploding.
That
, Sahaf explained blithely, was the sound of American soldiers being slaughtered.

And what about the American commanders who had appeared before American cameras at Saddam's palace? It was all an elaborate fraud, Sahaf said; the commanders had been filmed inside the ornate reception hall at the Baghdad airport—a facility Sahaf had said two days earlier was firmly under Iraqi military control.

“They are really sick in their minds,” Sahaf said of the Americans. “They said they entered with sixty-five tanks into the center of the capital. I inform you that this is too far from the reality. This story is part of their sickness.” He advised reporters not to repeat their lies.

As Sahaf delivered his performance, Salar Mustafa Jaff watched in silence. He despised Sahaf, though he never dared let it show. Jaff's narrow face betrayed no emotion. Jaff was an English speaker, a polite and reserved functionary who worked for Sahaf's ministry as a “minder” charged with monitoring and controlling the movements of foreign reporters. Sahaf had almost gotten Jaff killed two days earlier, when he had ordered him to drive into the city center to translate for Iraqi interrogators questioning American soldiers purportedly taken prisoner during Rogue's battle along the airport highway. Sahaf told Jaff that the interrogations would be videotaped and broadcast on state-run television so that the world could see that the Americans were caged like
ulooj
—an Arabic insult that translated loosely as “animals.” Jaff had driven straight into a furious firefight. He managed to turn around and escape, but only with the assistance of wildy gesticulating Fedayeen militiamen. There were no American POWs, of course, but Jaff did not raise the issue with Sahaf; the man carried a pistol, and Jaff had heard rumors that Sahaf had taken shots at underlings. Jaff merely reported to one of Sahaf's aides that he had been unable to locate the American prisoners.

As Sahaf described for the international media an overwhelming Iraqi victory over the American infidels, Jaff glanced around the conference center. He caught the eye of one of his fellow Iraqi minders. The man was snickering, covering his mouth with his hand, trying with all his might to keep from laughing out loud.

NINE

THE PARTY IS ABOVE ALL

T
alal Ahmed al-Doori was up early on the morning of April 7, driving through the narrow streets of the Al Mamoun neighborhood in downtown Baghdad. He had heard rumors that American tanks were approaching the city, and he wanted to make sure his assigned sector was secure. Doori was a Baath Party militia leader, responsible for a tight swath of his neighborhood at the western edge of Highway 8 where it split at the airport and Qadisiya interchanges, or what soldiers from the Second Brigade called the spaghetti junction. In more normal times, Doori's job was rather straightforward. He was to make sure no one challenged or undermined the regime of Saddam Hussein. A hulking man of thirty-two, with a weight lifter's physique and powerful hands, Doori was an intimidating enforcer with a black goatee and a massive shaved head. He was a well-known figure in the neighborhood, the son of a popular soccer coach. He had also worked as a bodyguard for Saddam's son Uday, and he had a certain reputation as a man who was not to be trifled with. He kept his neighborhood under control.

But now, driving through the streets with the sounds of explosions echoing in the distance, Doori felt somehow inadequate. With Baghdad under siege by American forces, his responsibilities had changed. They had become both broader and less precisely defined. He wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to be doing. The previous week, for instance, the Baath Party had issued orders to arrest anyone with a Thuraya satellite phone, for fear that spies would relay global positioning system coordinates to American warplanes. But many senior Baath Party officials had Thuraya phones. Doori wasn't about to confront them. He ignored the order.

There was also the matter of bunkers. Doori was responsible for five bunkers, all of them manned by Baath Party militiamen from his neighborhood. But some of the militiamen had disappeared, and the bunkers were lightly manned. They were supposed to form the core of the neighborhood's limited defenses. Doori had not been supplied with heavy weapons; he and his men had RPGs and AK-47s, but no recoilless rifles or armored vehicles. The Republican Guards had heavy weapons, but Doori had not seen many Guards in his neighborhood since April 5, when the Americans had sent tanks up the airport highway on Al Mamoun's southern rim. Doori had not heard from his immediate superior, a deputy defense minister, since that day. He had heard rumors that the minister had fled with his family to his ancestral village north of Baghdad. Doori had heard, too, that a senior Republican Guard commander had issued orders for troops to take their weapons and go home to await further orders. Things were falling apart.

Driving through the streets, armed only with an AK-47, Doori began to wonder why he had even bothered to venture out. If the Republican Guards weren't capable of protecting his neighborhood, what could he possibly achieve on his own? He had once considered the Guards elite and invincible, but not since April 5. That afternoon, he had been summoned to the airport highway to help shore up Iraqi defenses. But the fight was over, and all Doori could do was help remove Republican Guard corpses from a bus that had been incinerated by an American tank round. He counted twenty-seven bodies. They were burned beyond recognition. They didn't look like human beings. They looked like something you'd clean out of a fireplace.

Doori drove on. The neighborhood was emptying out. Many residents had fled after the highway battle on the fifth, and more were packing up now. He had received no orders to stop anyone from leaving. In fact, he had received no orders at all. He steered the car down a street that dropped down to a dark tunnel beneath a highway overpass. As the tunnel came into view, Doori saw something blocking the road. He looked closer and realized it was a tank—an American tank. He hit the brakes and skidded. He heard the squeal of brakes from the car behind him and felt the jolt of the car skidding into the back of his vehicle. Doori saw the tank's turret swivel slowly toward him. He threw the gearshift into reverse, slammed the other car out of the way, and swung his own car in a sharp U-turn. He sped away, anticipating a sudden blast from the tank. There was nothing. He escaped. He was several blocks away when he decided that a few militiamen in bunkers could not possibly protect Al Mamoun from American tanks. He drove home to wait out the war.

Across downtown Baghdad that morning, the city's concentric circles of defense were collapsing. The chaos that David Perkins had sought to create was reverberating outward from the government complex. It was like watching an onion being peeled. The elaborate series of roadside bunkers that had been dug and reinforced in the weeks prior to the American invasion were emptying, first in the city center, then outward through the residential districts. Soldiers stripped off their uniforms and fled, some with their weapons, some completely unarmed. The graceful tree-lined roadways of Saddam's palace complex were littered with abandoned green uniforms made of poor-quality wool or cheap polyester and Soviet-surplus AK-47s and RPG launchers tossed into the grass. Some uniforms were the thin, plain fatigues of the regular army; others bore the crimson unit patches of the Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards. Black berets dotted the landscape, still pinned with the red, black, and green metal eagle insignia of the Baath regime. Cement huts where the soldiers had bunked were empty except for tubes of toothpaste and plastic bottles of cheap cologne. There were containers of lentil soup and rice, and stale bread, the soldiers' daily rations. (They received meat twice a week.) Some of the men had left behind diaries and duty rosters and snapshots of lovers and wives and children. Certain units had received orders as early as March 27 to change into civilian clothes in order to confuse the Americans. Other units had received no orders at all, deciding on their own initiative to strip down and slip away.

Many commanders did not have maps or radios. Command and control was sporadic. There was little unit-to-unit communication and few orders from the party or military leadership. Even during peacetime, Saddam's disjointed military apparatus barely communicated. Now radios had been banned for many regular army units on the pretext that American warplanes would hone in on the radio signals. The real reason, officers knew, was that Saddam and the senior leadership feared that military units would coalesce and conspire to overthrow the regime. Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units were issued radios and satellite phones, but only for communication within those units. The Guards did not communicate regularly with the Baath Party militia, which had little contact with the Fedayeen, which had only face-to-face contact with the four thousand to five thousand Arab mercenaries and
jihadis
who had poured across Iraq's borders to join the fight. By the morning of April 7, commanders had been reduced to dispatching soldiers in cars to find out what other units were doing. An officer sent out that morning by Baha Ali Nasr, an air force general, never returned. Nasr found the officer's car later that day, destroyed by an American tank.

The independent military units competed for weapons and supplies. That morning, a regular army captain named Ahmed Sardar was trying to mobilize the thirty men who remained from his original company of eighty when a Republican Guard unit appeared at Sardar's base on Baghdad's southeastern edge and commandeered every last one of his company's working vehicles.

At a warehouse facility in northeast Baghdad, General Omar Abdul Karim, who was in charge of repairing vehicles and equipment, had managed to hold on to most of his unit's supplies. Karim had been told during the last week of March to stand by for orders to deliver vehicles and equipment to units in the city. He waited all day on the seventh, and into the evening, for the orders. They were not issued. The equipment never left the warehouses.

Colonel Raaed Faik was riding with fellow Republican Guard officers on a civilian bus thirty-two kilometers northeast of Baghdad that morning, trying to obey an order to rush to Baghdad to join in the defense of the city. They were to help keep Highway 8 open for a counterattack. Faik was a senior signal officer in the Republican Guard, but he was dressed now in civilian clothes. The chief of staff had radioed an order for his division to fight without uniforms in hopes of mounting an effective guerrilla war against American forces on the streets of Baghdad. But some officers had not received the order, and they were still in their uniforms. They bickered with the plain-clothes officers over how to dress for the battle.

Faik was disgusted. He took pride in being a member of an elite unit, but now they were like women trying to decide what outfits to wear. They were fools led by imbeciles. Their commanders were incompetent. Sometimes they issued several conflicting sets of orders each day. Sometimes they issued no orders at all. That very morning, Faik had overheard the Second Army commander, Fazi al-Lihaiby, cursing into his satellite phone upon learning that one of his brigades had been ordered to disband pending further orders. “Traitors! Cowards!” Lihaiby had screamed.

The capricious and indecisive commands originated at the very top of the chain of command—the supreme commander of the Republican
Thunder Run
Guards, Saddam's son Quasi. During the last week of March, Quasi had issued a new order every day for Faik's armored brigade to reposition its tanks. Each handwritten “order for movement” contradicted the order from the day before. And each time the tanks were removed from their bunkers, a few more were exposed and destroyed by American warplanes. At the same time, another armored brigade was ordered to disable its tanks—based solely on Quasi's irrational paranoia that Kurdish militias based hundreds of kilometers to the north might somehow capture the tanks and use them against the Iraqi regime.

Faik had watched helplessly as discipline evaporated. Even as American tanks were moving up from the south, commanders were granting leaves to soldiers who wanted to go to Baghdad to check on their families. With his brigade decimated by leaves and outright desertions, Faik decided that he, too, would request a brief leave to check on his family. He had a wife, two sons, and a daughter in the middle-class Yarmouk district of west-central Baghdad. He arrived home on a six-hour leave on April 5, finding his family safe but his neighborhood under attack by an American armored column firing along the airport highway. On his way back to rejoin his unit, Faik encountered a group of Fedayeen fighters marching through the streets. They were cheering and celebrating, claiming that they had driven the Americans from the airport. They were displaying charred corpses—American soldiers killed, they claimed, in the battle along the nearby airport highway. Faik got a good look at the remains. He was horrified. They weren't Americans—they were Republican Guard soldiers.

Faik had spent twelve years in the Guards. He knew a Guard uniform when he saw it—even a badly burned one. When he retuned to his unit and told fellow officers what he had witnessed, they called him a liar. They said they had been told that the Fedayeen militiamen were hoisting American corpses on bayonets and that Quasi himself had been presented with the severed heads of American soldiers.

Now, riding on the bus toward Baghdad on the morning of April 7, Faik was convinced he was being sent into the city to be slaughtered. For weeks, the military command had been preparing for a siege of the capital. Faik and other commanders had been told to prepare to fight street by street against American infantry units they expected to parachute in or unload from helicopters. They even named the units—the 101st Airborne Division and the 82nd Airborne Division. Iraqi forces would fight them from bunkers and rooftops and alleyways, taking advantage of the familiar urban terrain. A long siege would produce steady American casualties and the United States would be forced by American public opinion to negotiate a truce. And Iraqi forces would not have to confront tanks, the commanders were told, because the Americans were afraid to expose tanks to street fighting.

But even though spotty intelligence reports were confirming that American tanks were in the city center, Faik and his fellow officers were being dispatched to confront them as if nothing had changed. They were armed with nothing more than AK-47s and RPGs. They were on a civilian bus; their military vehicles had been stolen by officers intent on repainting them in civilian colors for personal use after the war. Faik was secretly relieved when the bus came to a stop, blocked by a crush of civilians and soldiers fleeing Baghdad. The highway was impassable. The officers on the bus decided there was no point in trying to reach the city. Faik agreed. He was thirty-three, a father of three, a blue-eyed man with a sad, jowly face, the owner of a fine home stocked with modern conveniences—a refrigerator-freezer, a color TV, computer games for his children. He wasn't willing to be butchered in Baghdad for a regime that was collapsing all around him. He got off the bus and started walking home.

Brigadier Baha Ali Nasr spent the morning of April 7 in his military office in north-central Baghdad, awaiting orders. Nasr was an air force commander without an air force. On March 24, he and his fellow commanders had received orders to dismantle their planes and bury them. It was a preposterous order, but they obeyed. Iraq's entire fleet of MIG-23s, MIG-25s, and Mirage fighters had been disassembled and buried underground. Now Nasr, a paunchy man of forty-two with a droopy mustache, was at his post in his office as he listened to explosions from the battle in the city center. He had been told to await orders to move to prearranged battle positions in the government complex. He had arrived at work armed only with his standard-issue 9mm pistol, but a supply of weapons had just arrived. Nasr was issued an RPG launcher and several grenades. He was a desk officer. He hadn't fired an RPG since military school two decades earlier. He felt useless. He didn't see the wisdom of heading into the government complex where, it was rumored, Iraqi forces had abandoned the Republican Guard headquarters, the Baath Party headquarters, and the Presidential Security Services building over the weekend. But if the orders came, he decided, he would obey. He was a professional soldier. He sat and waited the rest of the day.