Thunder Run (23 page)

Still on the ground, Wesley spoke into the phone. “Sir, we just got hammered.”

“What?”

“Sir, the TOC just got hit.”

Wesley heard Perkins shout to someone near him: “The TOC just got hit!”

Wesley couldn't see the TOC anymore. It seemed to have evaporated behind a curtain of smoke. He couldn't see his Humvee. He saw only a wall of flames. It was 10:24 a.m., just over four hours into the mission.

“Sir,” he said wearily. “I'll have to call you back. It doesn't look good.”

ELEVEN

GOING AMBER

T
he man in charge of putting the tactical operations center together and tearing it down was Captain William Glaser, the headquarters company commander. Glaser was thirty-three, a genial veteran from Tennessee, a state high school pole vault champion who had been recruited to West Point by the track and field team. Shortly after 10 a.m. on April 7, Glaser was sitting next to the battle board, with its magnetic icons depicting the tank battalions in downtown Baghdad. The icons showed a tight ring of American armor strung like a noose around Saddam's palace and government complex along the Tigris. Like everyone else inside the TOC, Glaser was in a buoyant mood. Some of the guys were high-fiving, celebrating the brigade's remarkable armored thrust into the capital.

Amid the tumult, one of the air force officers was busy arranging CAS—close air support—for the tank battalions inside the city. Glaser heard him shout out: “We have CAS on station!” At that moment, Glaser heard what sounded like the roar of an airplane, very low, just above the tree line. He thought: “Damn, that's
fast.
”

Then he was tumbling across the TOC, blown from his chair by a tremendous blast of hot dirt and sand that collapsed the canvas roof and buckled the flimsy canvas walls. Computers and radios crashed to the ground, their cables snapping. The battle map was buried under debris. The light supports toppled and everything went black. Acrid smoke seemed to rise up from the ground and smother the dull light of morning.

A surface-to-surface missile—most likely an ANABIL-100 or a FROG-7—had just ripped into the courtyard, detonating next to a line of parked Humvees. Glaser struggled to his feet and saw that the entire walled compound had been swallowed by a fireball. The Humvees belonging to the brigade's top officers, parked in a neat row along the north side of the courtyard, were burning out of control. So were the signal vehicles parked along the southern wall. Men were writhing in the gravel, their skin and uniforms seared and smoking. Bundles of red plastic rice sacks, used to store fertilizer or agricultural products, had exploded and were now scattered across the courtyard, draping everything with a coat of melting red plastic.

Inside one of the Humvees, Specialist George Mitchell had been sitting behind the wheel, drinking coffee. Mitchell was the driver for the brigade's operations officer and a veteran of the first Gulf War. A father of three, he was thirty-five, much older than most specialists because he had spent time in the Army Reserves and had reenlisted after September 11 to, as he put it, “finish this thing off.” Mitchell was a neat freak. His bunk area back in Kuwait was a model of crisp army perfection. On his bedside table was a photo of his grandparents and another of his wife and children. In the middle was a small American flag. Captain Glaser had been so impressed that he e-mailed a photo of Mitchell's bunk area to the Family Readiness Group Web site back at Fort Stewart.

Earlier that morning, Mitchell had managed to get a quick satellite telephone call through to his wife, Brenda, in the United States to assure her that he was fine. Now he was dead, killed instantly by a direct hit from the missile, his coffee thermos still in his lap and his dog tags around his neck.

The two embedded journalists, the Spanish reporter Julio Anguita Parrado and the German journalist Christian Liebig, had been standing next to Mitchell's Humvee. They were setting up their satellite phones to report to their home offices in Europe that the brigade's combat teams had seized Saddam's palace and government complex. They had decided against riding into the city on the thunder run, for it seemed too risky, and now they had their story. They had just grabbed their phones when the missile detonated next to the Humvee, digging out a ten-foot-deep crater. Both young men were incinerated in an instant, their bodies reduced to gray ash in the gravel.

Standing next to Perkins's command Humvee—he had left the soft-skinned vehicle behind—was the colonel's driver, Corporal Henry Brown, twenty-two, a devout young man who taught Sunday school back home in Natchez, Mississippi. Brown had married a fellow soldier just before shipping out to Kuwait, and she, too, was serving in Iraq. The fireball from the missile enveloped the Humvee and everything nearby. Brown was horribly burned, but he remained conscious and even managed to joke with the medics—“Hey, get that thing in there”—as they worked furiously to put an IV into his arm. Brown survived long enough to be evacuated, but he died later of his burns on a military hospital ship.

Across the courtyard from the Humvees, next to a low cement wall, stood Private First Class Anthony Miller, one of the brigade's mechanics. Miller was just a kid; he had turned nineteen in September. He had joined the army to help support his mother. He had been walking across the courtyard when the missile hit. Something—a piece of shrapnel or a shard of metal from one of the Humvees or a piece of flying equipment—tore into Miller. He was slammed into the wall, mutilating his body and killing him on the spot.

Eric Wesley was a few feet from Miller, flat on the ground, still holding the satellite phone. He got up and tried to clear his head. Soldiers were already running over to comfort the wounded and attend to the dead. Some of them grabbed fire extinguishers and bottles of water from parked vehicles and were trying, futilely, to put out the roaring fire. Wesley decided right away to try to triage the casualties until the medics arrived—and also triage the communications vehicles in an effort to determine which equipment could be salvaged and reused. He made sure the wounded were treated, gathered up, and moved to the forward surgical team, which, fortunately, had been set up just across the highway, only a few hundred meters away. Wesley arranged for intact vehicles to be moved away from the flames and for all working communications equipment to be retrieved to help fashion a new, makeshift TOC.

In the row of Humvees, next to a flaming ten-foot-deep crater left by the missile, Wesley's Humvee had incinerated. He had lost his helmet, his flak vest, all his personal gear—and the Humvee's radio. Later that day, Wesley sifted through the smoking debris and fished out a small pocket Bible his father-in-law had given to him. He found it under the only piece of the Humvee that still existed—the charred engine block. The book was singed around the edges, but its pages were intact. It was the only item Wesley owned that survived the explosion, and he considered it a special blessing at a terrible moment.

Near the Humvee, sitting upright on the ground, was Sergeant Major Alexander Gongora. Several soldiers were trying to comfort him. Wesley could see that Gongora was badly burned and in shock. Glaser saw him, too, but he couldn't tell who it was. Gongora's face had been disfigured by the burns. Gongora was the operations sergeant major, and Glaser had known him for a year. But Glaser didn't recognize him, and this moment of confusion at a time of crisis troubled him for a long while afterward.

Wesley came up to Glaser. He wanted his help in organizing the rescue and recovery operation. Wesley was the senior officer at the TOC and Glaser was the commander of the brigade's headquarters company. The two men had a quick, urgent conversation. Glaser was struck by how calm and focused Wesley seemed, even amid the flames and smoke and the cries of the wounded. Wesley told Glaser to take charge of treating and evacuating the wounded. Wesley would handle the recovery of communications vehicles and equipment and the cobbling together of a new TOC, which he intended to set up in a clearing about three hundred meters to the south. Wesley had no radio communications with the men who worked in the TOC, so as he ran into each of them amid the tumult of the rescue effort, he issued the same clear, simple instructions. He told them they had four primary missions: triage and evacuate the wounded, recover serviceable equipment, set up the new command post, and reestablish perimeter security.

It was essential to get the TOC up and running again as quickly as possible. The tank battalions—not to mention the brigade commander—were now operating nearly blind inside the city. Without the TOC, they were cut off from direct communications for command and control, close air support, spot intelligence, artillery, mortars—all the so-called combat multipliers that support men in battle. At the palace complex downtown, Perkins had as a matter of procedure established a TAC, a tactical command post, which consisted of his command personnel carrier and several other armored vehicles loaded with communications equipment. Now Perkins huddled with Kenneth Gantt, the artillery commander, and with the brigade's air liaison officer. He told them: “We're going to take over the whole fight. We're going to control the whole fight right here from the TAC.” Perkins's small TAC now had to serve as an emergency TOC, coordinating the combat multipliers under duress until Wesley could build a new TOC using equipment salvaged from the fires that were still raging.

The battery in Wesley's satellite phone had gone dead, so he ordered one of his officers to follow him around the compound in a Humvee with a working radio. He managed to reach Perkins to keep him updated on the chaotic situation around the TOC. Perkins had assumed at first that the TOC had merely been hit by mortar rounds; the area had been receiving mortar fire off and on for the previous two days. But when Wesley finally called Perkins back and told him that the compound had taken a devastating hit from an Iraqi missile, Perkins thought:
Holy shit, I never anticipated anything this big.
A mission that had played out nearly perfectly for the first four hours was now in danger of unraveling. Perkins would now not only have to command and control the fight on the ground, but also coordinate all the air support, artillery, and communications.

Wesley told Perkins that the brigade had taken KIAs at the TOC. “Do you need to know who we lost?” he asked. Perkins paused. He hesitated to put these sort of personal losses out over the air. The radio net was still functioning, and now it fell silent. The entire brigade was listening in. “Yeah,” Perkins said finally. “Go ahead and tell me.”

Wesley listed the names: Corporal Mitchell, Specialist Miller, the two embedded reporters. Perkins asked who had been evacuated. Wesley mentioned Perkins's driver, Corporal Brown. He tried to describe the extent of Brown's burns. Wesley and Perkins had often discussed the need to remain in control of their emotions in times of crisis, to focus on the mission at hand no matter how callous it might seem. They were doing that now, and their voices were direct and clinical over the net. It had to be that way. When Wesley had finished, Perkins said flatly, “Roger,” and signed off.

Inside the compound, Glaser could feel the heat of the flaming vehicles on his face. He ran over to a group of soldiers to order them to set up a casualty collection point—a protected area where the combat lifesavers could perform buddy aid while the wounded waited to be medevaced. He was surprised to see that a collection point had already been set up inside a concrete vehicle bay. The enlisted men had not waited for an officer to tell them what to do, and it seemed to Glaser that the initial rescue and recovery operation had sprung up instantly and was now running on its own. With the collection point established, he went in search of his first sergeant to check on the ambulance exchange point and to send soldiers with stretchers back to carry the wounded out to the ambulances.

Glaser tried to run out the front gate, but he ran into a wall of flames. He had to make his way to the rear of the compound, where a gate led past the burning signal vehicles to the two-story building where Perkins had delivered the mission operation order the night before. Normally, the white sand and the light tan buildings reflected the brilliant desert sunlight, and everybody wore sunglasses to see through the glare. But now the dark smoke and haze obscured everything, and Glaser struggled to find his way to the front entryway and the first sergeant's post.

As he jogged through the smoke, Glaser ran across one of his favorite soldiers, a thirty-two-year-old private first class named Conrad Camp, a gung ho soldier who had signed up right after September 11. Camp was only a private, but he was considered a wise old head, and younger men looked to him for guidance. But now Camp was acting like a lunatic. He was stumbling around bare-chested, wearing only one boot. His chest and back were smeared with blood. A young woman—a sergeant whom Glaser recognized as one of the military intelligence specialists—was pulling on Camp's arm, trying to persuade him to go to a casualty collection point. Camp would have nothing to do with her.

The woman shouted at Glaser, “I'm trying to get him to a medic. He just won't listen to me!”

Camp had been peppered with shrapnel. It was obvious to Glaser that the missile blast had disoriented him. “Camp!” he yelled. “Camp! Where you going?”

“Sir, I'm going to pull security!” Camp said. He didn't have a weapon, and the TOC had a permanent security perimeter that was manned twenty-four hours a day.

Glaser stopped Camp and made him look at him. “Camp, do you know who I am?” he asked.

Camp stared hard at his commander, as though he had just asked an impossibly stupid question. “Yeah, you're the CO,” he said casually.

“Good,” Glaser said. “Now this is your commander ordering you to go with this young lady and do what she says. Do you understand me?”

“Okay, yeah, I knew that,” Camp said, and the sergeant led him away to be treated. Camp returned to duty two days later, but only after his wife had been told, mistakenly, that he had suffered serious shrapnel wounds to the spine and was being evacuated for surgery in the United States.

Glaser moved on, still searching for the first sergeant. Outside the front entrance, he could see a mushroom cloud of black smoke twisting into the hazy morning sky, drifting past the thick stand of date palms behind the compound. Most of the Humvees parked outside the compound had been shielded from the blast wave by a four-meter-high brick wall, but they were splattered with debris and with flaming bits of the red plastic bags. Scraps of the plastic hung like used-car-lot flags from defunct telephone lines stretched above the compound.