Thunder Run (39 page)

“Listen to me!” he screamed. “Left! Left! Left!”

“I'm right there, sir,” the gunner said.

He still wasn't hitting the bunkers. “No, I said left! Left!”

Someone was firing into the bunkers, but it wasn't Wolford's tank. The captain looked over and saw Private First Class Synquoiry Smith, the loader on Sergeant Gibson's tank. Smith was firing his M-240 machine gun into the bunkers.

Wolford yelled at Smith. He didn't bother with the radio. Smith was close enough to hear him. “Keep firing! Stay on those bunkers! Stay on 'em!”

Gibson heard Wolford yell something and saw him pointing wildly. He assumed the captain wanted more fire directed at the bunkers, but Smith was already right on them. He was pounding away so hard on the M-240, in fact, that he fired off all his ammunition. Smith dropped down into the turret, grabbed more rounds, and popped back up to reload. Gibson heard Smith yelp and shout, “Sergeant Gibson, I'm hit!”

A bullet had ricocheted off the M-240 gun mount and sliced into Smith's upper arm. He dropped straight down into the turret. “Smitty!” Gibson screamed. He went down after him and saw that his face was smeared with blood. He wiped at it, trying to locate the wound.

“It's not my face—it's my arm,” Smith said. He spoke calmly, as if he were giving someone traffic directions.

Gibson found the bright red wound in Smith's arm and grabbed the first-aid kit. He applied a pressure dressing, squeezing Smith's arm with his left hand while he reached up and fired the .50-caliber machine gun with his right hand, using the elevation handle. They were still taking fire from the bunkers.

As Gibson fired, Smith broke free from his grasp. He climbed back into the loader's hatch with a 9mm pistol in his hand and started pumping rounds toward the bunkers. He was cursing and screaming. He emptied the clip, then dropped back down to reload. The tank rocked and he lost his grip on the gun. It tumbled to the turret floor. Before Smith could retrieve it, the gun was crushed as Gibson traversed the turret. Smith cursed again.

To Gibson's left, Wolford had given up trying to get his gunner to locate the bunkers. He hit the override switch, giving himself control of the main gun and the coax. He laced the bunkers with coax, backed by Gibson's spray from his .50-caliber. The return fire from the bunkers eased long enough for Wolford to fire an MPAT round into each of the bunkers, effectively destroying them.

Gibson stopped firing and got on the radio to tell Middleton that Smith had been hit. “I got to get him back to the palace,” he said. Middleton radioed Wolford and said, “Red Two Lima has been hit.”

“Dammit, holy shit!” Wolford yelled. They were getting pounded. He had taken two casualties. He had already lost two tanks to medevac Cornell, and now he was losing Gibson's tank as it pulled away through the arch to medevac Smith. The company had still not managed to mount an effective volume of fire. Even after the tanks had pounded buildings and bunkers with main gun rounds, and had expended thousands of rounds of .50-caliber and coax, the Iraqis were still returning effective fire. If anything, their rate of fire was intensifying as more reinforcements poured across the bridge. And Wolford's crews were running low on ammunition; they had been fighting since 3:30 a.m. Lustig's tank alone had fired eight thousand rounds of M-240 and coax ammunition, and nine hundred rounds of .50-caliber.

They were taking more and more enemy mortars now. Wolford had already called in seven mortar missions of his own from the crews on the palace lawn. The rounds had slammed down north of the intersection, in the grassy areas of both parks, where the bunkers were concentrated. Wolford couldn't tell how much damage the mortars had done, but it was obvious that they had not significantly reduced the rate of fire from the bunkers.

Wolford realized that the situation was getting out of control. If he stayed much longer, he was going to take more casualties—probably KIAs. He decided to pull out. He would call in mortars and artillery and close air support to pound the bunkers and take down the buildings. He radioed Lieutenant Colonel deCamp and told him that the situation was untenable. He could no longer hold the intersection.

DeCamp didn't try to second-guess him. He trusted Wolford's judgment. He told him to withdraw.

Wolford gave the order over the company net. He wanted the crews to retreat in an orderly fashion. Retreats can be dangerous and chaotic; sometimes the worst casualties come when units are desperately trying to withdraw from a fight. Wolford told Redmon's platoon to go first, because it was down to two tanks, followed by McFarland's infantry platoon and then Middleton's platoon.

The retreat went smoothly until only Wolford, Middleton, and Lustig were left in the middle of the intersection. As Wolford prepared to move out, an RPG exploded near the front of his tank. He saw an RPG team in the park, moving toward him. With his .50-caliber still jammed, he had to move his tank back so that his gunner could fire toward the park.

“Back up! Back up!” he yelled to his driver.

The driver backed straight into Lustig's tank with a heavy jolt. The two tanks locked tracks.

“Shit!” Wolford shouted. He asked his gunner what he thought; the gunner was quite knowledgeable about the M1A1 Abrams. He wasn't sure. “I don't know if we're going to get off of here without popping track,” Wolford said. The gunner said he didn't think so, either.

Wolford asked Lustig what he could see. “I can see the whole bottom of your tank,” Lustig told him. “You have to pull off.”

They were taking heavy fire now. Every Iraqi soldier at the intersection seemed to be focusing on them, especially from the bunkers in the park. Middleton pulled his tank in front of Wolford and Lustig, directly in the line of fire from the park, and opened up on the bunkers.

Wolford ordered his driver to pull away from Lustig's tank. The tank lurched and groaned. There was a sharp noise as the number one and number two steel skirts on the front of Lustig's tanks were torn off. Now Lustig was not only fighting with a locked-up turret, but he had also lost much of the ballistic armor on the front of his tank. He rolled out of the intersection and through the arch, his gun tube locked and firing over the left side. Middleton and Wolford followed, their main guns booming, racing back toward the palace and safety.

For the first time, after nearly three weeks of fighting, a combat team from the Spartan Brigade had been forced to retreat under fire.

Back at the Republican Palace, Flip deCamp and his executive officer, Kent Rideout, were still trying to persuade the Rogue battalion to move east and secure the Jumhuriya Bridge and the five bridges directly to the north, at the edge of the Rogue sector. Based on the brigade boundary line, deCamp contacted Rogue to request that they push all the way to the bridges to seal them. Soldiers and vehicles were pouring across the bridges now, infiltrating Rogue's sector as well as Tusker's. Rick Nussio, the Rogue executive officer, understood the predicament, but he had his own battles to deal with. Again, he told deCamp and Rideout that he couldn't spare anyone to push to the bridges. To do so would create even worse gaps and vulnerabilities at the margins of his sector. He would keep his forces where they were in Rogue's sector, three or four blocks west of the bridges.

Meanwhile, Rideout's request to block the bridges by blowing them up had been denied. A central tenet of American military strategy was to leave intact as much infrastructure as possible in order to support the eventual postwar—and presumably pro-American—Iraqi government. If the bridges were to be shut down, they would have to be blocked with tanks and infantry, not by blowing them up.

DeCamp now had a seven-kilometer stretch of hostile territory to secure. He decided to pull forces from his other two companies and send them north and east to block the bridges. That required a difficult and complex shuffling and reallocation of platoons and sections within his task force. He did it on the fly, working the radio to hand off platoons and sections from one company to another—what he later called a task organization shell game.

He pulled Captain Steve Barry and most of his Cyclone Company off the Fourteenth of July Bridge and traffic circle and sent them to secure the first two bridges north of the Jumhuriya. He replaced Barry with an engineer company, leaving behind one of Barry's tank platoons for protection. Later, deCamp had Captain Chris Carter from Attack Company take a tank platoon and an infantry platoon from the Sujud Palace to secure the two bridges above Barry. Those moves, deCamp hoped, would take some of the pressure off Wolford's company at the Jumhuriya intersection. He intended to send Assassin Company back into the intersection after pounding the intersection with artillery and close air support.

At the Republican Palace, Wolford's tanks and Bradleys pulled in for more ammunition. DeCamp came over to have a look and to get a first-hand feel for the fight from some of the crews. The vehicles had taken a thumping, but they were still in fighting condition—even Lustig's battered tank, with its missing skirts and locked-up turret. Lieutenant Redmon was surprised at how generous the support platoon guys were with their ammunition supplies. Normally, they restricted the tank crews to prescribed amounts of ammunition. But now they were dumping boxes of ammunition onto the tanks, telling Redmon, “What else you need?” and “Take all you need—we got plenty!” They had all been listening over the net to the battle at the intersection.

At deCamp's order, Wolford requested mortars and air support. The battalion's fire support officer at the palace, Captain William Todd Smith, was in direct radio contact with air force officers. A-10 Thunderbolts—squat, ugly tank-killing planes nicknamed Warthogs—were already up in the air over Baghdad. Smith was told that they were “on station” and available. He radioed Wolford and told him, “Phil, I've got you air support for the rest of your life.”

That brightened Wolford's mood. He loved the Warthogs. They were wicked little planes that pulverized bunkers—they just killed everything in sight. Each Warthog was armed with an enormous Avenger 30mm Gatling gun that was twenty-two feet long and weighed two tons. The seven-barrel guns were flying cannons. They fired thirty-nine hundred rounds a minute, either armor-piercing or high-explosive. The armor-piercing rounds contained a slug of depleted uranium so dense that it self-sharpened as it penetrated armor, burrowing and turning steel into hot molten metal that ignited and burned. The Warthogs also carried five-hundred-pound bombs, high-explosive rockets, and Maverick and Sidewinder missiles. Wolford was eager to see what the Warthogs would do to the bunkers and buildings at the Yafa Street intersection.

Earlier that morning, Major Jim Ewald had taken off in his Warthog from Jaber air base in Kuwait. He didn't know what his mission would be; his tasking assignment normally didn't arrive until he was on station, circling in the skies over Iraq. Ewald assumed he would be supporting the Third Infantry Division, which at the moment was the main show in Baghdad. He had flown in support of the Rogue thunder run on the morning of the fifth, hitting Iraqi antiaircraft artillery positions in the so-called Triple A Park just west of Highway 8, and his wingman, Major Don Henry, had made several formation attacks on the fifth, destroying the Triple A vehicles and infantry with eight five-hundred-pound bombs, a couple of Mavericks per pass, high-explosive rockets, and six hundred rounds from the Gatling gun.

The fifth had been a beautiful day, so sunny and clear that everything on the ground was sharp and brilliant. Ewald could see the tan tanks and Bradleys on the highway, the antiaircraft pieces dug into pits, and the sparkling muzzle flashes from the Iraqi roadside bunkers. He could see military trucks bearing down on the armored column, and he radioed warnings that were passed on to Rogue by forward air controllers on the ground. He saw white puffs of antiaircraft fire, like popcorn popping in the sky. He saw bright red secondary explosions and it was beautiful. It sounded strange, but
beautiful
was the word for it.

At thirty-seven, Ewald was a veteran pilot, and he loved flying. He had been an air force pilot for nine years before taking a job as a commercial pilot for United Airlines. That lasted fifteen months before he was laid off. As the military geared up for the Iraqi war, he was called up to the Michigan Air National Guard in January and sent to Kuwait. His call sign was
Chocks.

Now, on the morning of the eighth, the weather was much worse. The skies were blotted by yellow haze and dirty brown smog. The cloud ceiling was below eight thousand feet, and visibility was terrible. Ewald had been on station for about thirty minutes when he and his wingman, also in a Warthog, got the call to support American ground forces at the foot of a bridge. Ewald had to drop down below eight thousand feet to see anything, and on his first pass he could make out the bridge and the shapes of American tanks and Bradleys toward the palace. But he couldn't clearly identify enemy targets, and he held his fire because the forward air controllers were concerned about friendly fire with the armored units so close. He got a good look at men and vehicles near the bridge, and he was certain they were enemy. He needed to make sure; the forward air controllers were also concerned about collateral damage—killing civilians.

Ewald pulled the Warthog back up to prepare for a second pass. This time, he dropped down very low. As he swung down over the bridge a second time, the men and vehicles were gone. Ewald assumed they had been alarmed by his first pass and had run for cover. He and his wingman pulled up and flew in a broad arc west toward the airport to await further instructions from the ground.

Ewald never saw the surface-to-air missile, but his wingman did. He saw it streak in from the left side and punch into Ewald's right engine. The Warthog was jolted by the impact. The aircraft, in the vernacular of pilots, “departed control flight.” Ewald was able to regain control. He wasn't hurt; a Warthog pilot is enclosed in a titanium armor “bathtub” that also protects the cockpit. In his control panel, Ewald could see the reflection of red flames from the missile's detonation.