Thunder Run (2 page)

Diaz respected the lieutenant too much to try to bullshit him. Gruneisen was a platoon leader who trusted his men and let them do their jobs. He was the kind of man that Diaz, a Latino from the Bronx, probably never would have known if he hadn't joined the military. Gruneisen was a white southerner, a pale young twenty-four-year-old, with a shaved head and a soft Kentucky twang. He was a West Point man, focused and resolute, commissioned less than two years earlier.

Diaz, twenty-seven, had already put in eight years and was thinking about becoming an army lifer. He had drifted aimlessly after graduating from John F. Kennedy High in the Bronx, working odd jobs in Puerto Rico before wandering into an army recruiting station one day. The recruiter showed him videos of various military MOSs, or specialties—medic, personnel, supply. Then he put on the tanker video. Diaz saw the thermal sights and the computerized targeting system and all the other high-tech turret gadgets. He watched a tank pulverize targets, spitting out awesome bursts of orange fire from the main gun tube. He thought it would be cool to blow things up. He signed up to be a tanker.

Diaz had a deep affection for his current Abrams, which he had trained on and fought in for the previous six months. He and his gunner, Sergeant Jose Couvertier, had nicknamed it
Cojone Eh?
The phrase had no literal English translation. Essentially, it meant “Yeah, right”—a skeptic's challenge. All the tankers had spray-painted their main cannons with leering names that suggested a particularly aggressive and retributive brand of patriotism:
Apocalypse
and
Crusader,
Courtesy of the Red White and Blue
and
Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War
. Charlie One Two's nickname just happened to be more esoteric than most.

Standing next to Diaz on Highway 8, Gruneisen did not seriously consider aborting his platoon's mission. They were only going seventeen kilometers from their staging area south of the city, a straight shot north up Highway 8 and then west on 8 where the highway curved toward the international airport. There, the battalion would link up with the division's First Brigade, which had seized the airport the day before, rechristening Saddam International as Baghdad International.

This was an armored reconnaissance mission. Armor recon was just what it sounded like: the battalion was to smash through Baghdad's defenses, drawing fire and shooting back in order to probe the Iraqis' defenses and tactics—to determine, violently, how Saddam Hussein intended to defend his capital. It was recon by fire.

Gruneisen was surprised by Highway 8. It was a modern, divided superhighway, nothing like the rutted roads and sandy tracks the battalion had plowed through down south. It looked like an American interstate highway. From what he could see, it hadn't been badly damaged by coalition air strikes. It was two lanes wide in some places, three in others. The lieutenant thought his ailing tanks could last seventeen kilometers on that smooth, flat surface.

He turned to Diaz. “Let's give it a shot,” he said, as if there were any alternative.

Within minutes, the order came to mount up and move out. The column lurched to life. Foul black smoke erupted from the Bradley engines. The tank tracks tore neat little grooves in the asphalt, clanking and grinding, and the roadway was milky white with blowing dust. The lead tank chugged past the final American checkpoint and a voice came over the radio net: “You are now entering Indian Country.”

Diaz gave his driver the order to pull forward, with Gruneisen on his wing. Already, they could hear the soft pop of small-arms fire up ahead. They had been in combat for the previous sixteen days, off and on, but still they felt that tight, queasy spasm in their bellies that always rose up, urgent and bitter, just before a fight. It passed quickly, and Gruneisen fell easily into the order of march. The final checkpoint was fading into the yellow dust behind them when the driver radioed the lieutenant that the oil filter warning light had suddenly started flashing.

At the head of the column, First Lieutenant Robert Ball scanned the roadway, left to right, right to left, searching for threats. As the commander of the lead tank, he felt as though he were perched on a slow seventy-ton target, especially standing up in the cupola, his head and shoulders exposed. He wore a CVC—a combat vehicle crew helmet—made of bullet-resistant Kevlar and a small tanker's flak vest, but he knew a single well-placed round from an assault rifle, so useless against a tank, was more than enough to kill him in an instant.

Ball had been selected to lead the column not because he had a particularly refined sense of direction but because his tank had a plow. The battalion was expecting obstacles in the highway. Like any motorist, Ball had been lost a time or two while driving in the States. Even so, he thought of himself as pretty good with a map, and he had carefully studied his 1:100,000 military map of Baghdad and Highway 8. He could see how the highway bent west toward the airport, cutting a slice through southwest Baghdad. But the map had no civilian markings—no exit numbers, no neighborhoods. Ball was concerned about missing his exit to the airport at what everybody called the spaghetti junction, a maze of twisting overpasses and on-ramps on the cusp of downtown Baghdad. He found himself longing for a simple AAA tourist map.

Ball, twenty-five, had never been in combat prior to the firefights in the southern Iraqi desert. He was a slender, soft-spoken North Carolinian with a girlfriend back home and a twin brother in the service. He had spent two years in the North Carolina Army Reserves before entering West Point and earning a commission in 2001. He had been promoted to first lieutenant just four months earlier, and now he was a platoon leader in the same company that Rick Schwartz had commanded in the first Gulf War.

Ball had killed a man for the first time a few days earlier. In fact, he and his crew had killed quite a few enemy fighters down south, and he found it an unnerving experience. He couldn't remember them all, but for certain ones he recalled the most curious details—the stunned look on the dying man's face, the smell, the hazy air, the intense emotional attachment to the intricate ballet of combat. He felt an abiding sense of regret, which he had anticipated. He had met with a chaplain in Kuwait several times, seeking reassurance. The chaplain had told him that killing the enemy was part of a just cause; it would actually save lives in the long run and improve the prospects of thousands of Iraqis. The little sessions with the chaplain had put Ball at ease, and now he was primed for the fight.

Ball's map was clipped to the top of the commander's hatch, next to his .50-caliber machine gun, as he led the column up the highway. It was an unremarkable stretch of roadway. In the early morning light, everything was bathed in a monochrome grayish tan—the overpasses, the access roads, the squat houses and multistory apartment buildings set far off the highway. On either side were open stretches of packed dirt and dust-choked weeds, providing clear fields of fire.

Ball had been rolling only a few minutes when his gunner, Sergeant Geary LaRocque, spotted the first targets of the morning. A dozen Iraqi soldiers in green uniforms were leaning against a building, chatting, drinking tea, their weapons propped against a wall. They were only a few hundred meters away, but they seemed oblivious to the grinding and clanking of the approaching armored column.

“Sir, can I shoot at these guys?” LaRocque asked.

The rules of engagement said anyone in a military uniform or brandishing a weapon was a legitimate target. They didn't say anything about announcing yourself before firing.

“Uh, yeah, they're enemy,” Ball replied.

In southern Iraq, the men Ball's crew had killed were murky green figures targeted at great distances by the tank's thermal imagery system. Their body heat gave them away, creating eerie human shapes on the thermals. But now these soldiers highlighted against the dark building along Highway 8 were in living color. Through the tank's magnified sights, Ball could see their eyes, their mustaches, their steaming cups of tea.

LaRocque mowed them down methodically, left to right. As each man fell, Ball could see a puzzled expression cross the face of the next man before he, too, pitched violently to the ground in a pink spray. The last man managed to flee around the corner of the building. But then, inexplicably, he ran back into the open. The gunner dropped him.

The clattering of the tank's coax, its rapid-fire medium machine gun, seemed to awaken Iraqi soldiers posted up and down the highway. Gunfire erupted from both sides—AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, followed minutes later by recoilless rifles and air defense artillery in direct fire mode.

Ball was surprised by the sudden intensity of fire. He was accustomed to the way the Iraqis had fought down south, which was mostly pop up, shoot, run, and hide. But now, on Highway 8, they were standing their ground—and the column had only traveled about a mile beyond the final checkpoint. Ball could now see that the Iraqis had built an elaborate network of trenches and bunkers on both sides of the highway. He saw bright white muzzle flashes, little sparks of light all the way up the shoulders of the highway. From alleyways and rooftops, men with RPGs were launching grenades toward the column, flaming red balls of light trailed by spirals of gray smoke.

The first main tank round of the mission was fired by Sergeant Jeffrey Ellis, an easygoing Alabamian who was the gunner on the third tank in the column. Ball had radioed back to Ellis that a group of armed men had just fired an RPG and then ducked into a tiny cinder-block hut on the right side of the highway. He wanted them taken out. Sergeant First Class Ronald Gaines, the tank commander, radioed the company commander, Captain Andy Hilmes, and said, “We've got some guys running into a little building. Request permission to fire the main gun.” Hilmes responded, “Roger, fire main gun.”

Through his magnified sight, Ellis could see men piling into the hut. There were perhaps two dozen of them. The main gun was in battle-carry mode, meaning it was preloaded, in this case with an MPAT round, a multipurpose antitank projectile. It was a new piece of ammunition that had not been used in combat before the Iraqi war. Ellis thought it was just as effective as a HEAT round and a little more versatile. When set to ground mode (it could also be used against helicopters), the MPAT was designed to penetrate a target and explode inside. Ellis traversed the gun tube, got a laser reading of 610 meters, and put the targeting reticle's tiny red crosshatches on the hut. He squeezed the trigger on the gunner's power control handles, which all the gunners called cadillacs, for the original manufacturer, Cadillac Gage. “On the way!” he announced. The MPAT round reduced the hut to dust, unleashing a cloud of gray smoke twice the size of the structure. Even before the crews in the tanks behind him announced over the radio that nothing was moving inside, Ellis knew he had killed them all. Over the net came calls of congratulations: “Great shot! . . . Good shot! . . . Hell of a shot!”

Suddenly trucks and pickups and taxis were speeding toward the overpasses from access roads, dropping off gunmen. They stood at the roadside, completely exposed, and fired AK-47s from the hip. Ball opened up with his .50-caliber machine gun and the gunner unleashed the coax, tearing into the gunmen and sending them tumbling into the dirt. The tank gunners started lighting up the vehicles in fiery red explosions from HEAT rounds, and more HEAT and MPAT rounds tore into the roadside bunkers. The battle was on.

In the command tank a short distance behind Ball, the battalion commander, Rick Schwartz, was determined to keep the column moving. The last thing Schwartz wanted was to get pinned down or be drawn into an extended firefight. The night before, he had instructed his officers and NCOs to keep the convoy moving at fifteen kilometers per hour, with strictly enforced fifty-meter intervals between the vehicles. The drivers were under orders to keep a steady pace; moving faster or slower would break the column and permit enemy vehicles to slice in and attack the tanks in their vulnerable rear exhaust grills. The track commanders and gunners had their own orders: the lead gunners were to try to kill everything they saw, then pass the targets back to the trailing tracks. Schwartz wanted his men talking to one another, describing exactly what they were shooting at and what still needed killing.

Schwartz was still trying to determine exactly what he was up against. The brigade's S-2 shop, the intelligence guys, had not been able to tell him much. In fact, when Schwartz had asked for specifics about enemy strength and positions the night before, he got a vague, long-winded answer. Finally Schwartz said, “So you don't know shit about the enemy in the city, do you?” The intelligence officer told him, “No, nothing really.”

Nor were the intelligence officers entirely certain how badly coalition air strikes had degraded Saddam Hussein's forces, what weapons the Iraqis had, or how determined they were to stand and fight. The brigade's scouts, who normally went out ahead to conduct enemy surveillance, had not ventured north. It was too dangerous. And if any Special Forces teams had been into the city, Schwartz certainly didn't know what, if anything, they had discovered. He was on his own.

Schwartz did have satellite imagery providing a black-and-white photographic bird's-eye view of Baghdad. But the imagery was several days old, perhaps a week old or more. Even if it had been shot that morning, it would not have told Schwartz where the enemy was dug in. Satellite imagery could not pick up camouflaged bunkers or RPG teams hiding in alleyways and second-story windows. The division had tried to order up a pass by a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle—a spy drone—for real-time battlefield photos, but for various bureaucratic and technical reasons it never happened.

To the best of Schwartz's knowledge, Highway 8 was not blocked by any concerted Iraqi attempt at barricades. The Iraqis certainly had not blown the bridges and overpasses leading into the capital, although American military planners had expected them to try. Based on the most recent satellite imagery, and on reports from American pilots who had flown over the city, the highway was clear and relatively unscathed by coalition air strikes. There was no safer or faster surface for tanks than good old highway asphalt—in this case, asphalt helpfully marked with wide traffic lanes and highway signs in Arabic and English. By all indications, the Iraqis had left the back door to the capital wide open. It was like leaving Interstate 95 and the Capital Beltway open for an enemy tank invasion of Washington, D.C.