Thunder Run (32 page)

They made it back to where the medical vehicles had been, but now they couldn't find the medics. It was getting late in the afternoon, and smoke was drifting across the intersection. The convoy was lining up and getting ready to pull out. Agee and Gregory were growing anxious. They still had to find their Humvee and load up, and they feared being left behind.

Gregory spotted one of the big ammunition trucks. There was an empty cargo well on the side, about halfway up, big enough to accommodate a man's body.

“Put him in there—right there!” he said.

They didn't know what else to do. It seemed logical. They gently lay Sergeant Stever across the well and tied him securely with cargo straps.

Agee and Gregory ran back to their Humvee, where Sergeant Phillips was waiting for them. As they climbed aboard, a soldier pushed a prisoner toward them. Gregory realized that the concertina pen had been opened and that the prisoners were being handed over to the teams from 2-7. But now, for some reason, they found themselves stuck with a loose prisoner.

He was a middle-aged man with a beard and a tiny bald spot on the back of his head. He was whimpering and crying and making gestures, cringing at the sounds of the ammunition cooking off. He was naked and his hands were bound by plastic cuffs; someone had tied a shirt around his plump midsection.

They didn't know what to do with him. The column was pulling out now. Agee, looking down from the gunner's turret, felt sorry for the
man. He pointed at him and yelled the only thing he could think of: “Go! Go!”

The prisoner trotted away, disappearing in the smoke. The Humvee pulled away, headed north on Highway 8.

Next to the overpass, Polsgrove and Bailey had finally managed to get their supply trucks and escort vehicles in convoy formation. Polsgrove was struggling with accountability. He thought he had all his men accounted for, but some of them had taken up positions in the trenches with his platoon sergeant. He was counting on the sergeant to get all those men back into the vehicles.

Because he had lost five trucks, Polsgrove now had to find rides for almost a dozen men. The Bradley crews took some of them, and a few more were jammed into the escort Humvees, along with the two men from Coffey's detail whose Humvee had burned to the ground. Polsgrove's own Humvee was filling up with soldiers as the captain noticed a naked prisoner sitting on the highway, his hands bound behind him. He may have been the man abandoned by Agee's group. Polsgrove didn't know what he was supposed to do with him. He thought 2-7 was supposed to take control of all prisoners.

The man was weeping and blubbering, mumbling in English, “I help you! I help you!” Polsgrove didn't want to leave him there on the pavement. He lifted him up and sat him down in the front passenger seat of his Humvee. The man was still crying, the tears soaking his beard. Polsgrove got the impression the prisoner thought he was going to be executed. To shut him up, he tossed an MRE into the man's lap. He quickly realized how foolish that was—the guy's hands were bound.

The order came to move out. Two more support platoon drivers ran up, looking for a ride. Polsgrove motioned for them to jump inside. Now he was overloaded; he had to get rid of the prisoner. From his perch in the turret behind the grenade launcher, Polsgrove yelled over to some of the other Humvees. “Can anybody give this guy a ride?” He didn't want to just dump the prisoner. He might have valuable information for American interrogators.

Nobody wanted to get stuck hauling a prisoner. Polsgrove's own Humvee now had seven soldiers in a vehicle designed to carry five at the most. Polsgrove had to make a snap decision. He ordered his men to jettison the prisoner. They left him there on the roadway and rolled north toward Objective Larry.

FIFTEEN

MOE, LARRY

A
merican combat commanders are trained to develop a decision support matrix, an analytical breakdown of alternatives based on a rapidly unfolding chain of circumstances. For David Perkins, the matrix was telling him: cut your losses, retreat, come back another day. Perkins was still in the parade grounds late in the morning, under the crossed sabers, standing beside his command vehicle with deCamp and Schwartz. The time had come for Perkins to make the call on spending the night in the city, and the logical move was to pull back and regroup. His brigade command center had burned. He had just spent his reserve force, leaving the rebuilt TOC vulnerable to another attack. His resupply convoy for the combat teams on Highway 8 had been ambushed, and now five of his fuel and ammunition trucks were burning on the highway. The surviving trucks were preparing to move up the highway, with no guarantee that they wouldn't be ambushed again. His combat team at the crucial spaghetti interchange—the force Perkins was counting on to protect his exposed rear—was running low on ammunition and fuel.

Rationally, Perkins knew the prudent move was to pull out of the city. That was the safe call. But instinctively, he felt compelled to hold his ground. His men had fought furiously to break through to the palace complex. Two of his men had died trying to bring up fuel and ammunition. It seemed somehow obscene to ask his men to fight their way back out now and to surrender terrain infused with surpassing psychological and strategic value.

And Perkins had risked his own personal capital—his very integrity as a combat commander—persuading General Blount and General Austin to press his case with V Corps and the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Blount and Austin believed in Perkins, and they had put their own credibility on the line while attempting to persuade their superiors to let the commander on the ground make the call. Now Blount came back to Perkins over the radio from the airport with the decision from the higher command:
the brass had put the most crucial decision of the war in the hands of a forty-four-year-old bird colonel who had never been in combat prior to the invasion. “It's your call, Dave,” Blount said.

For all the setbacks his commanders and soldiers had endured that morning, Perkins had confidence in them—in their training, their professionalism, their determination to complete the mission. He trusted them to hold Highway 8 and to get the fuel and ammunition into the palace complex, even at the risk of more casualties. Both deCamp and Schwartz wanted to stay, and Perkins trusted their judgment. Like Perkins, they wanted to make a bold statement—to their own men, to the higher command, to the world at large, and especially to Sahaf, the information minister. Perkins thought about Sahaf's rants, and how a retreat now would only validate his outrageous propaganda. It would undermine in the eyes of the world the brigade's singular achievement, which had put American soldiers inside Saddam's two main palaces and American boots on Saddam's personal reviewing stand.

Perkins stood under the sabers, map in hand, flanked by his two tank battalion commanders. The air was heavy with smoke and swirling sand and grit. Black plumes of oily smoke rose from burning vehicles and bunkers. The big guns on Rogue's tanks and Bradleys were pounding Iraqis still dug into the park, the concussions rocking the reviewing stand. Perkins turned to deCamp and Schwartz. “We're staying,” he said.

It was the suicide vehicles that worried Dan Hubbard. They were relentless. They kept speeding north up Highway 8, swerving past the barricades the combat engineers had erected just south of the interchange at Objective Larry, trying to ram Hubbard's tanks and Bradleys. Hubbard could understand the enemy's desire to breach the perimeter, but he couldn't comprehend the repeated, futile forays—each one ending in an eruption of flames and flying metal as one vehicle after another was destroyed by high-explosive rounds. The hulks of at least twenty cars and trucks and motorcycles were still smoking on the highway. The drivers were fanatics—they were burned alive. Hubbard chalked it up to some sort of Islamic desire to die a spectacular death.

Hubbard was a captain, the commander of the combat team at Larry, where Lieutenant Colonel Twitty had set up his task force command post.
He was thirty-four, with prematurely steel gray hair—a stocky, green-eyed, snuff-dipping Tennessean with a soft drawl. He had spent the morning at Larry under constant fire from all directions. His tank, which he had situated on the east-west overpass, had been hit five times by RPGs. He had counted at least a hundred RPGs exploding across the interchange that morning. RPG teams were launching grenades from buildings to the east. From the west, gunmen in civilian clothes were emerging from palm groves and opening fire. To the southeast, across a set of railroad tracks, Republican Guards in uniform were attacking through another grove of date palms. And to the southwest was a dense urban area that worried Hubbard because it seemed to be an ammunition supply depot.

At one point, shortly after Hubbard's team had set up on the interchange just after first light, he actually had to fight off enemy dismounts who were trying to close in on his tank on foot from the west. He had never expected them to get so close. Hubbard opened up with his .50-caliber machine gun while his gunner worked the coax, but the dismounts kept coming. Finally his loader had to toss grenades from the hatch to drive them back.

Just after Hubbard's tank was smacked by an exploding RPG for the fourth time, he heard one of the tank commanders on the northern ramp scream for help over the radio. Something had exploded on his bustle racks, and gear and ammunition stored on them were burning and popping.

“I been hit! I been hit!” the commander screamed.

Hubbard could hear panic in the man's voice. He radioed the commander's platoon leader, who was in the next tank, and told him to try to put out the fire. But the ammunition in the bustle racks began to explode and the platoon leader yelled, “I can't! His rounds are cooking off !”

Hubbard told him to back off. “Let it burn!” he said. He knew the Abrams was designed to withstand explosions from its ammunition.

The commander of the stricken tank was still panicking. He radioed and said, “I'm on fire!”

Hubbard dropped down on the commander's radio net and tried to speak calmly to him. “Hey, you're doing all right,” he told him. “Just continue fighting these guys. Don't worry about the fire—it's not going to hurt you. It's the way the tank's designed.”

The commander recovered his composure as the fire of the bustle racks smoldered and eventually burned itself out. He lost personal gear
and ammunition, but his tank got back into the fight. It was the second tank to burn after being hit by an RPG. Two of Hubbard's Bradleys were also hit. They suffered structural damage, but both stayed in the fight with the RPG projectiles still embedded in their armored plates.

As the firefight intensified, Hubbard climbed down off his tank several times and made his way to the perimeter. He had sent thirty infantrymen from the Bradleys to dig in along the perimeter next to the on-ramps, and now they were absorbing a barrage of small-arms fire. Hubbard had been a marine machine gunner in the Gulf War, a ground pounder, and he had drawn great inspiration from commanders who joined their men on the lines. Now he had sent his own men into harm's way, and he felt an obligation to expose himself to the same risk. He wasn't a West Point guy. He was an ROTC officer, from East Tennessee State University, and in many ways still an enlisted man at heart. He thought it was a chickenshit move to stay safely buttoned up in a tank while his infantrymen were putting their lives on the line. So he moved from man to man along the perimeter, slapping backs, telling each one he was doing a hell of a job, that he was an American hero. The little forays also gave Hubbard a chance to speak face-to-face with his platoon leaders and platoon sergeants. That was more satisfying, and more productive, than trying to communicate by radio.

Despite the intensity of fire, Hubbard was confident he could hold the interchange. He had eight tanks, versus four tanks at Moe and none at Curly. He had fought the first part of the battle with just six tanks because one had been dispatched to help rescue the burning tank from Rogue's thunder run at dawn and another had been sent later as backup. But now all eight tanks were firing, and they were killing people with a stunning efficiency, hour after hour, like an assembly line. And the artillery was just as destructive, collapsing roofs and walls onto enemy fighters and pulverizing the flimsy sandbagged bunkers. Hubbard had called in nine artillery and mortar missions, seven of them danger close, or within a few hundred meters of his own men. He could feel the concussions and hear the whiz of flying shrapnel, even inside his tank. He had to temporarily move his infantrymen off the perimeter to protect them from short rounds.

Hubbard was concerned about how some of his young enlisted men were reacting to the brutality required to destroy the suicide vehicles. Some of the passengers in the exploding cars had somehow survived the tank
blasts and climbed out of the flaming wreckage. They had reached down and grabbed AK-47s from the arms caches that had been stored in holes dug into the highway shoulder. They had opened fire, and the tank gunners had torn them apart with coax. By the end of the day, more than forty vehicles would be incinerated. It was such an awful waste of human life.

Private First Class Jacob McLaughlin, an infantryman, was assigned to guard prisoners. One of them was a very young man—a boy, really—in a Special Republican Guard uniform. Something had blown his leg apart, and now it hung by a few flaps of gray tissue. The young man was grinning and flashing McLaughlin a thumbs-up sign. Another prisoner had been shot in the face. He was dressed in an Iraqi police uniform and seemed well fed and prosperous. He was in his mid-thirties, slightly paunchy, with wavy black hair. He had been at the wheel of a black Honda Civic that was fired on by the combat team as it sped toward the tanks and Bradleys. His face was burned and his entire cheek was blown off. McLaughlin could see inside the man's head, all the way to the bone. A round had entered behind his ear and exploded out through his cheek, leaving an oozing red cavity. Now the man was sitting cross-legged on the pavement, letting a medic apply gauze strips to his blackened face. He was staring at McLaughlin. McLaughlin waited for the man to look away, but he wouldn't stop staring. McLaughlin wanted to say something, anything, to get the man to turn away. It was a horrible wound, and he couldn't bear to see it. It was McLaughlin who finally looked away.

At one point Hubbard's loader, Private Charles Francis, who had just turned nineteen, suddenly looked up at Hubbard and said, “Damn, we're killing a lot of people here.”

Hubbard nodded and said, “Yeah, that's our job.”

“Yeah, but you act like it doesn't affect you,” Francis said.

Hubbard had to admit that he did not show his emotions in battle. He had learned to put them aside, to deal with them later. He was a religious man, and he did not enjoy killing anyone. But his focus was on getting his men out alive—he had only one soldier wounded that day, which he attributed to God's good grace—and on appearing strong and resolute in front of his men. The killing and the violence were disturbing, but that was a very private thing for Hubbard, and something he would reconcile later. Right now, he was a man with a wife and two children and two dogs, and he was determined to see them again.

The loader in the executive officer's tank, Private Chad Ortz, had never seen a man killed in battle. Ortz saw one of the first suicide vehicles get hammered—he got a good look at it through his binoculars. He saw the car explode, and he saw human beings explode, too. It was a shocking thing, and he asked the executive officer, Lieutenant Mike Martin, “Hey, sir, like, are we doing the right thing?”

Martin told him, “Yeah, it's them or you. They're coming to kill us.”

So the tank kept killing, and after a while Ortz just learned to get used to it. It almost seemed routine, and that would have been disturbing if Ortz had had time to really think about it. He was glad to be busy, holding back the enemy soldiers who were trying to kill him.

Just south of the intersection, next to two south-facing tanks on Highway 8, Lieutenant Colonel Twitty was still in the middle of the fight. His Bradley crew was still firing south down the highway, backing up the two tanks. They had already reloaded once, and ammunition was running short. Twitty was worried about getting the resupply convoy safely up to Larry from Curly—and then north to Captain Wright at Moe, who was in the worst shape on ammunition and fuel among the three combat teams.

Twitty got on the radio to Captain Bailey at Curly and asked for an update on his losses. Bailey was trying to reorganize his supply convoy for the move north, and he still wasn't certain how much fuel and ammunition had been destroyed in the explosions and fires. He told Twitty he thought he still had at least two of the trucks designated for Larry. He thought most of the lost fuel and ammunition had been designated for Moe.

Twitty radioed Captain Hubbard on the overpass and warned him that he might have to give up some of his diminishing ammunition reserves to be sent to Moe. They would have to wait to decide how to reallocate supplies until Bailey arrived with the convoy. Twitty envisioned losing even more fuel and ammunition on the highway between Curly and Larry. It wasn't secure. The convoy had been ambushed on the way to Curly, so it stood to reason that it might also be ambushed on the way to Larry.

Twitty radioed Captain Johnson to make sure Johnson was putting every last one of his Bradleys on the resupply convoy. Johnson assured him that he was positioning Bradleys at the front, middle, and rear of the column. They would lay down a wall of fire.

As the convoy pulled out of Curly, every vehicle in the column was firing—even the fuel and ammunition trucks. The .50-caliber machine gunners opened up on top of the trucks, and from each passenger window the soldiers riding in the front seats pumped away on their automatic rifles. Even the drivers were firing, steering with their left hands and firing on full burst out the window with their right hands. The tracers lit up the dull afternoon sky. It looked as though bright-colored streamers had been hung on both sides of the flat, drab highway.