Thunder Run (25 page)

Over the radio net came more distressing news. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Twitty, the commander of Task Force 3-15, the China battalion, was under siege on Highway 8. Twitty had set up his three companies on the three main interchanges leading north into the city center, code-named Objectives Moe, Larry, and Curly. Twitty had expected some resistance at all three objectives, but what he encountered was full-scale, close-quarters, balls-out firefights. His men were being pounded—by RPGs, small arms, mortars, technicals, suicide vehicles, armored troop carriers, and antiaircraft artillery. Gunmen were firing from rooftops, mosques, and primary schools. They were being delivered to the battle by buses and taxis and police cars.

Twitty had anticipated that the Rogue and Tusker battalions, backed by the early morning artillery and mortar barrages, would have cleared out most of the Iraqi positions at the interchanges. But it seemed to him now that the thunder run had somehow jarred the enemy awake. The Iraqis were fighting like madmen—they were fanatical. Twitty had never seen anything so intense—not in the first Gulf War, and not during all the firefights his men had endured in southern Iraq. His own gunner had just killed a suicide driver who had tried to ram his Bradley—in a taxicab.

Perkins sensed the urgency in Twitty's voice. He knew the man very well; he had worked closely with Twitty for months. He knew Twitty was not a man to panic. Nor was he a man given to soft-pedaling a situation. Twitty delivered situation reports straight up, unvarnished, no bullshit. So when he told Perkins that things were bad on Highway 8, Perkins knew the situation was growing desperate.

“Sir, there is one hell of a fight here,” Twitty told Perkins. Twitty was in the hatch of his Bradley, on the cloverleaf at Objective Larry, two and a half kilometers south of Moe and three and a half kilometers north of Curly. “I'll be honest with you. I don't know how long I can hold it here. I can't at this time confirm that I can keep Route Eight open.”

Then Twitty told Perkins something that changed the dynamics of the entire mission—a mission that, even with the devastating hit on the TOC, had moved with surprising speed and success. Twitty reported that his company at Moe, at the huge spaghetti interchange that controlled access into the city center, was amber on ammunition. In the military's color-coded supply ratings system, amber meant that ammunition supplies were approaching dangerously low levels. Worse, Twitty said, the company was perhaps an hour or two away from going black, the level at which it would be unable to sustain the fight.

Now, for the first time that morning, Perkins began to fear that he would not be able to keep his two tank battalions in the city overnight. If the Iraqis punched through the company at Moe, they would be able to pour in Perkins's back door and attack the tank battalions from the rear. The tanks had already been shut down to conserve fuel, but if the company at Moe were overrun, they would be cut off from fuel and ammunition. Perkins briefly considered sending one of his tank battalions to reinforce the company at Moe and to try to keep the highway open between Moe and the city center.

But then Twitty told Perkins about Objective Curly, the interchange three and a half kilometers north of the brigade operations center. Twitty's men at Curly had no tanks—and they were absorbing a tremendous barrage of fire.

“I don't know how long they can hold it there,” Twitty said. “I've got to get reinforcements.”

“If you need it, you've got it,” Perkins said. He had promised Twitty the day before that he would send any help he requested.

“I need it. I can't hold it any longer,” Twitty said.

“Whatever you need, you'll get it,” Perkins promised.

Perkins had spoken earlier with General Blount about sending a battalion from the division's First Brigade at the airport to reinforce positions on Highway 8. Now the battalion was launched down Highway 1, south of the airport. It would turn east to secure the Second Brigade's TOC at the intersection of Highways 1 and 8, then send a company north to reinforce the interchange at Curly. That would allow Twitty's beleaguered company at Curly to pull out and head north up Highway 8 to reinforce the company at the spaghetti interchange while also securing the mile-long roadway into the city center.

At the same time, Perkins passed Twitty's request for immediate reinforcements to Eric Wesley at the newly formed TOC. Twitty wanted one of two platoons from China battalion that had been left behind to protect the TOC. Wesley had listened over the reconstituted radio net to Twitty's increasingly desperate situation along Highway 8. He knew that securing the highway was crucial to getting fuel and ammunition to the tank battalions inside the city. Wesley told Twitty to take both platoons. That would leave the new TOC virtually undefended, but Wesley thought Twitty needed them more than he did. Wesley would have to send men from the TOC itself to secure the perimeter, armed only with M-16s. Soon the two platoons were pulling out. Wesley didn't tell anyone, but the thought of what he had just done scared him to death.

TWELVE

CURLY

E
ven before he reached the highway interchange known as Objective Curly earlier that morning, Captain Harry “Zan” Hornbuckle knew he had problems. Lieutenant Colonel Twitty, the China battalion commander, came over the net and warned Hornbuckle about enemy gunmen dug into the cloverleaf, where the four-lane Ad Dawrah Highway rose up and over Highway 8. The Iraqi fighters had survived the thunder run by Rogue and Tusker earlier that morning—or perhaps they had moved up afterward from the dense neighborhoods flanking the highway. Twitty wasn't sure. All he knew was that there was still a lot of enemy firepower left at Curly.

Twitty had just sped through the interchange in the commander's hatch of a Bradley, under fire, on his way to set up his battalion command post at Objective Larry three and a half kilometers up the highway. Hornbuckle was somewhere behind him on Highway 8, bearing down on Curly with a combat team that had been ordered to seize and hold the interchange. Twitty tried to warn the captain. “Zan, you've got trenches on your right!” Twitty paused, trying to think of the best way to stress the severity of the threat. “They know we're coming,” he said finally.

Hornbuckle felt challenged by the mission he had been given. Unlike the captains in charge of the interchanges north of him at Objectives Larry and Moe, Hornbuckle did not have a full combat company. The two northern interchanges were considered more dangerous than Curly, which was only six kilometers north of the brigade tactical operations center. Two platoons from the company now assigned to Hornbuckle had been left behind to provide security for the vulnerable brigade TOC. That left Hornbuckle with just the battalion's headquarters section, plus a mechanized infantry platoon and a mortar team. He had only eighty soldiers—and no tanks. He had just five Bradleys, a couple of armored Humvees with .50-caliber machine guns, some scout and mortar vehicles, and an armored personnel carrier loaded with engineers.

It was an unwieldy combat team, and an unfamiliar one. Hornbuckle had not previously worked closely with most of the men assigned to him. He wasn't the company commander he was the assistant battalion S-3, from the planning and operations shop. The CO was Captain Ronny Johnson, who was back with the two platoons at the brigade TOC. Worse, Hornbuckle had been given just six hours to assemble his men and pull together a battle plan with an unfamiliar team thrown together at the last minute—what the brigade planners called a company minus, or Team Zan. He felt rushed and undermanned, but he was determined to make the best of the situation. Lieutenant Colonel Twitty regarded Hornbuckle as a capable and resolute officer. He was twenty-nine, a soft-spoken southerner who had grown up in a small town in Georgia. He didn't come from a military family; his father was a mechanic and his mother was a music teacher. After graduating from high school, Hornbuckle enrolled at the Citadel, a military school in South Carolina, earning his commission in 1996. He was married to his high school girlfriend and had a young son at home. He had never before been in combat.

Hornbuckle's column of vehicles reached Curly early in the morning, not long after Tusker and Rogue had blasted through the interchange. Smoke was still wafting up from vehicles that had been lit up by the tank battalions. Visibility was terrible; a blustery sandstorm had kicked up swirls of dirt and sand that gave everything a dull tan patina. Hornbuckle saw that there were clear fields of fire in all directions, except for a long support wall that ran beneath the curving access ramps to the right of the main highway and blocked the view to the east. On both sides of the divided roadway were stretches of flat, sandy ground dotted with weeds and blowing garbage. Beyond the fields were tan stucco homes and multistory apartment buildings. An access road ran parallel to Highway 8 on the east side, leading to dusty streets and tight warrens of alleyways that disappeared into cramped residential neighborhoods.

Hornbuckle rolled up in his Bradley, tense and expectant, trying to get a good read on the trench network Twitty had described. The broad, curving access ramps were cloaked in a yellow haze. He sent four Bradleys up to the overpass, two facing east and two facing west. He wanted to deny the enemy access to the east-west highway, which disappeared into the neighborhoods on either side. Hornbuckle kept his own Bradley in the northbound lanes, just beneath the overpass. He sent his mortar crews south of the overpass, right on the highway, where they began setting up in the northbound lanes.

Everybody was still moving in and getting situated when a barrage of RPG and small-arms fire erupted from all directions. Gunmen were firing from trenches and bunkers on both sides of the highway, and from alleyways and windows and rooftops in the neighborhoods. It was a complete circle of fire. The rounds were pinging off the Bradleys on the overpass as they opened up with their 25mm cannons and coax. The .50-caliber gunners on the Humvees worked the butterfly triggers, trying to suppress gunmen hidden in the trenches and bunkers. As RPGs exploded across the interchange, Hornbuckle managed to get all his vehicles set up in a tight circle, with 360-degree fields of fire.

He had just positioned his own Bradley in the northbound lanes when the first suicide vehicle sped toward him. It was a pickup truck, bearing down on him from the north. Hornbuckle picked it up on his sight and hit it with several rounds from the 25mm cannon. The car exploded, followed by a much bigger explosion as ammunition stored inside cooked off. Minutes later, a technical with a machine gun mounted on the back suddenly appeared on the exit ramp. Hornbuckle couldn't figure out how it had penetrated the perimeter. The vehicle sped to within two hundred meters of his Bradley before everybody opened up on it—a grenade launcher, a .50-caliber machine gun, coax from a nearby Bradley, the main cannon from the captain's Bradley. The vehicle crumpled and burned.

The enemy tactics puzzled Hornbuckle. It was like they had no tactics at all. They kept sending in suicide vehicles to be destroyed—at least a dozen of them in the first couple of hours. And instead of concentrating their fire, the gunmen shot off bursts haphazardly, almost casually. Hornbuckle figured there were several hundred of them scattered around the interchange, supplied by caches of weapons and ammunition they had prepositioned in tiny caverns dug into the rubble beneath the on-ramps.

If they managed to coordinate and attack all at once, Hornbuckle thought, they might be able to overwhelm his undermanned combat team just by force of sheer numbers. But they fired from one direction for a while, then shut down and let other gunmen open fire from another direction. Hornbuckle was able to get the Bradley crews to swing from side to side, concentrating their weapons on the sector that happened to be mounting the biggest challenge at the moment. But he wasn't sure how long his guys could keep it up, or whether the enemy would shift tactics. For the moment, the gunmen in the distance seemed to be content with what Hornbuckle considered Somali tactics—move, harass, circle, and close. He knew he had to expand his perimeter, to push them back and keep them off balance before they closed in. He was badly outnumbered.

The rate of enemy fire was escalating when the man Hornbuckle had personally selected as his team first sergeant, Sergeant First Class Vincent Phillips, ran up to the captain's Bradley. Phillips was a savvy thirty-seven-year-old veteran, eight years older than Hornbuckle, and a man the captain trusted. Phillips looked like an NCO from a recruiting poster—square head, blocky torso, flattop haircut. He was one of those guys who loved action; he planned to get out of the service in another year or so to take a job as a cop.

Phillips had just arrived at Curly in an armored Humvee, pulling up near the wall that blocked the view to the east side of the highway. He got close enough to see that there was actually a series of support walls under the on-ramp, each one separated by narrow gaps. The walls provided ideal cover for RPG teams, which were almost certainly dug into the trenches Twitty had described. Phillips asked Hornbuckle for permission to start clearing beneath the on-ramp.

“Sir, we've got to get some guys down in there,” he said. “I don't know what's down in there, but we've got to clear it before it gets hostile.”

The captain quickly agreed. “Roger—you really need to go do that,” he said.

Phillips ran back to the Humvee and grabbed the driver, Private First Class Adam Gregory. They would be a two-man clearing team.

Gregory was a tall kid, just twenty, with unruly short brown hair, prominent ears, a wispy mustache, and a flat California accent. He had been busted in rank back at Fort Stewart for failing to undergo the required tear-gas test. Everybody was required to enter a closed chamber as it filled with tear gas. Soldiers were to take off their gas masks for a few seconds, then put them back on. The idea was to test the masks and build soldiers' confidence in them. But Gregory had left without permission that day to visit his girlfriend, who he had just learned was pregnant. He missed physical training the next morning, too, and the NCOs got a key to his room and found him hiding in the closet. His commander, Captain Anthony Butler, had busted him and had also telephoned Gregory's father to tell him what had happened. Gregory had been humiliated, but he had resolved afterward to transform himself into the perfect combat soldier. He had come to realize that shaping up would help him survive combat and get him back home, where his girlfriend was expecting twins the very next month. And now, two weeks into the war, both Sergeant First Class Phillips and Captain Butler had been impressed with Gregory's newly honed dedication and professionalism.

Before heading to the on-ramp, Phillips ordered the Humvee gunner, Specialist Benjamin Agee, to swing his mounted machine gun toward the wall to cover them. Agee was surprised that just the two of them were going in, but he was pleased to be part of an actual combat operation. He had not seen much action on the way up from Kuwait, and had felt a stab of disappointment when he found out the night before that he was being sent to Curly. He had been under the impression that he would be sitting on the highway all day, bored, providing security, waiting for the fuel and ammo vehicles to pass through. The real fight, he had been told, would be at the palaces in the city. He was afraid he wouldn't even get a chance to fire his weapon. He wanted to get a taste of combat before his tour of duty was up. He had a political science degree from American University and planned to seek a job in Washington as a congressional committee staffer. But now, after four years in the army, he still hadn't seen any serious combat.

Agee swung the machine gun around and watched Phillips and Gregory creep down toward the wall. There were dark shadows beneath the ramp, and Gregory couldn't see much because of the cement support walls. The air was dank and stale. There was garbage and construction debris scattered everywhere. Gregory felt exposed, but also gratified that Phillips trusted him enough to include him on a combat mission. He was still trying to redeem himself.

Phillips was on Gregory's right as they made their way to a meter-wide gap in the first support wall. Phillips told Gregory to poke his head around the wall and see what was on the other side. Gregory peered into the shadows and saw a boot next to the wall. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the boot move. Somebody was down in the dirt on the other side of the wall, next to several RPG rounds.

Gregory leaped back and said to Phillips, “RPG team!”

“Prep your grenade,” Phillips told him.

Gregory withdrew a hand grenade from his combat vest and removed the pin. As Phillips covered him, he leaned forward and tossed the grenade through the gap. The explosion reverberated off the cement support walls and the underside of the ramp. Phillips poked his head through the gap. Two shots rang out from the other side of the wall.

From his gun position on the Humvee, Agee saw Phillips duck just as the rounds tore into the wall where Phillips's head had been. It looked to Agee like a scene from an action movie, right down to the little spray of concrete chips from the impact of the bullets. Phillips dropped and rolled. Neither shot had struck him, but his eyes were filled with flying grit and his vision was blurred. He and Gregory stumbled back to the Humvee, covered by Agee, who fired into the opening with the machine gun.

Phillips had no idea how many RPG teams were behind the walls, but he knew it would take more than two soldiers to clear the dark expanse underneath the ramp. He had been joking around earlier that morning, telling everybody that April 7 was his wedding anniversary—“not a good day to die.” Now, as he wiped the grit from his eyes, he was deadly serious. He told Agee to take his machine gun off the Humvee mount and follow him and Gregory. They were going back under the ramp, this time joined by a sniper Phillips had called over.

Agee's M-240 machine gun was a crew-served weapon, meaning it was designed as a two-man gun—the gunner and the loader. But Agee had served in a weapons squad, and he had trained to fire the heavy gun on his own. He felt comfortable with it. He was tall and big-boned, with huge hands and powerful shoulders. He was strong enough to fire the gun from the hip. He slung a belt of ammunition across his back and hauled the big machine gun toward the underbelly of the ramp.

The four-man team moved back to the opening in the wall, Phillips and Gregory in the lead with Agee and the sniper covering them. Their helmet liners were soaked with sweat now, and their heavy flak vests jostled as they crept along, the stiff Kevlar collars digging into their damp necks. They could hear the pounding of the Bradleys up on the overpass and the hiss of RPGs flying somewhere across the highway above them.

Phillips and Gregory stood on either side of the opening. Each man withdrew a grenade, pulled the pin, and flipped the grenade through the opening. All four men followed the sound of the explosion, darting through the narrow passageway. At least six men armed with RPGs and AK-47s were on their bellies in a shallow trench, stunned and bleeding. Gregory opened up with his M-16, killing some of them, and the sniper and Phillips got the rest. Agee came in behind them, the low groan of the M-240 echoing off the support walls. He was shooting from the hip, the big 7.62 rounds tearing into the gunmen's bodies. Even in the dark, with all the smoke and noise, Agee noticed that one of the men had lost both his legs. They were lying next to his torso, like two burned sticks. Agee kept firing.