Thunder Run (44 page)

The next day, April 10, Staff Sergeant Tom Slago, whose Bradley
Nocturnal
had been damaged twice in RPG attacks the previous week, was on duty on the west bank of the Tigris River, next to one of the northern bridges. His gunner, Specialist Gary Techur, was scanning through his sights across the river, where he could see people waving and celebrating on the balconies of their homes. The platoon commander motioned for Slago to move his Bradley toward an alley. Slago had his driver pull to the edge of the alley, where Techur could scan the buildings and Slago could keep an eye on a crowd of civilians gathering at the far end. Slago was watching the crowd when he noticed a white cloud of smoke. He was wondering what it was when something exploded against the Bradley and slammed him down to the floor of the turret. He yelled up at Techur, “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” and heard the other tanks and Bradleys open up. Then he realized that his face was burning and his eyes were swelling shut. Suddenly a sergeant from another vehicle was grabbing at him and yanking him up and out of the turret. He laid Slago down on the sidewalk, saying something to him in a low voice. Slago asked the sergeant to pat him down and check for wounds. The soldier looked at him and said, “I don't see no blood.”

Slago heard a medical vehicle drive up and the sounds of the medics yelling something. The sergeant yelled back at them, “He's got really bad burns to his face—and shrapnel wounds to his stomach!” Someone lifted Slago and put him in the back of the medical vehicle. Slago lay there, afraid to touch his own belly because he feared that his intestines would spill out into his hands. He began to weep, not for his injuries, but because at that moment he believed he had let his family and his buddies down, and he worried about what they would think of him. Later, at the trauma center, he thought the medics had left him out in the hot sun. His face was burning and he screamed, “Kill the pain!” and then, “Roman Catholic—A positive!” A voice asked if he wanted morphine. “Oh, yeah,” he heard himself reply. He felt a warm flow wash over him and the pain was gone.

Later that summer, Slago's face healed and his eyebrows and eyelashes grew back. The shrapnel to his belly had gone straight through him, a clean wound, and the scars soon healed. Slago felt blessed to be alive. When he returned to duty, he checked the ammo ready box on the Bradley, where he had stashed the Bible his wife's parents had sent him. It was still there, intact, with only the gold-leaf trim on the pages burned away.

Two more wounded men from the Tusker battalion also recovered—Private First Class Synquoiry Smith, the gunner wounded in the arm at the Jumhuriya Bridge intersection, and Sergeant First Class Phillip Cornell, the tank commander shot through the chest. As Cornell was being medevaced, he happened to look across at the next stretcher and saw the young Iraqi fighter in the red flannel shirt and work boots he had seen lying wounded on the palace roadway before the fight at the intersection. Even in his pain and confusion, this struck Cornell as an absurd coincidence. He thought about it for a long time, even as he was recuperating back home and joking about his wife treating him like a houseplant, dusting him off every few hours and turning him toward the sun. Cornell returned to duty at Fort Stewart later that year. A chunk of flesh was missing from his arm. Rough scars snaked across his chest and abdomen, and a piece of shrapnel the size of his pinkie was still lodged in his shoulder blade.

Beneath the crossed sabers on the military parade grounds, the Charlie Company crews from Rogue who had lost Charlie One Two to the tank fire on the fifth had survived the thunder run on the seventh while fighting from inside replacement tanks. Staff Sergeant Jason Diaz, the tank commander on Charlie One Two, served on the seventh as the gunner for Lieutenant Roger Gruneisen on a tank commanded by the lieutenant. Gruneisen's own tank, Charlie One One—
Creeping Death
—was still being repaired following the crash into the bridge abutment on Highway 8 on the fifth. Afterward, Sergeant Carlos Hernandez, the gunner on Charlie One One, had told the tank manufacturer's repair representative that the tank's gun tube had been bent. The rep insisted that an Abrams gun tube could not possibly be bent—until he got a good look at Charlie One One. The tank was later repaired and returned to service. Much later, Charlie One Two was recovered just north of Objective Curly and towed to Kuwait to be cannibalized for spare parts.

The Charlie Company crews fought battles downtown near the Baghdad train station and the national museum throughout the day on the seventh. On the eighth, their tanks were attacked by half a dozen suicide vehicles. The tank commanded by Gruneisen was actually rammed by one car, rocking the Abrams but causing no serious damage. Gruneisen's platoon destroyed at least two suicide cars that day. The lieutenant never found out who or what had been inside the vehicles, but he didn't care. He figured that if a driver kept charging a tank after taking warning shots to the pavement and through the grille, he was either an imbecile or intent on suicide. Either way, Gruneisen had no regrets about what he had done.

Private First Class Don Schafer and Private First Class Chris Shipley, the Charlie Company tank crewmen who had been wounded after transferring to an armored personnel carrier during the thunder run on April 5, were shipped to a U.S. Navy hospital in Spain and later to the States. The last thing Shipley remembered after an AK-47 round tore through his right eye was vomiting up blood. He did not know that Schafer had been wounded in the same incident until he awoke in his hospital bed in Spain and saw Schafer in the same ward, his arm wrapped with a huge bandage.

Later, Shipley had reconstructive surgery on his face and a prosthesis was created to replace his ruined right eye. His left arm healed reasonably well, but he did not have his previous range of movement. He turned twenty that autumn. He made plans to go back home to Arizona after his medical treatment was exhausted. He planned to leave the army. He wanted to go to a technical school and earn a computer science degree.

At the hospital in Spain, Schafer developed a bacterial infection, slowing his recovery. Back in the States, doctors pieced his upper right arm back together after drilling metal pins into his elbow and shoulder and connecting a reinforcing bar to help the bones regrow. Schafer could no longer lift his arm above his head or behind his back, and the doctors told him he probably never would. Schafer planned to get out of the army and go home to Baltimore to take criminal justice classes at a junior college. He intended to transfer to Florida State University. He had always wanted to be a police officer, but now that seemed unlikely, given his arm problems and the fact that he couldn't run very far without gasping for breath. He thought he might try something in the police field, perhaps forensics. He was ready to leave the army. It seemed to him that the military medical people, at least, didn't want much to do with him once they had him all patched up.

Between the train station and the Special Republican Guards headquarters in downtown Baghdad, Captain Jason Conroy's company from Rogue fought a series of running street battles on the eighth with bands of Special Republican Guards, Fedayeen, and Syrians. RPG teams were on the rooftops, firing down on the tanks and Bradleys. Suicide vehicles attacked from the flanks, and on some streets antiaircraft guns were shooting in direct-fire mode. There were more antiaircraft guns on the roof of the train station. In front of the station was a series of bunkers infested with gunmen. The company killed dozens of soldiers and militiamen throughout the morning and afternoon, but more emerged from side streets and alleyways. On one street, the fighters used a long pole with a hook on the end—it reminded Conroy of the poles used in vaudeville to yank a struggling performer off the stage—to drag in their wounded and dead, and their weapons, too.

It took most of the day to secure the area, but the sniping and harassment from the enemy went on sporadically for another six days. Despite the intensity of the fighting in the city, Rogue did not lose another man. The loss of Staff Sergeant Stevon Booker on the fifth still weighed heavily on everyone, even months later, when U.S. Marines in south-central Iraq captured an Iraqi fighter and recovered an M-4 rifle. An investigation revealed that it was the M-4 Booker that had been firing when he was killed. The discovery didn't bring Booker back, but it seemed to bring a certain closure to his passing.

Talal Ahmed al-Doori, the Baath Party militia leader in downtown Baghdad, drove home during the thunder run on April 7 and later found a job driving a taxi. Colonel Raaed Faik, the Republican Guard officer who got off the bus to Baghdad on April 7, went home to his family in the Yarmouk district. Brigadier Baha Ali Nasr, the air force officer, stayed in his downtown office until April 9 and then went home. General Omar Adul Karim, the warehouse commander, drove home in his uniform on April 9, stubbornly ignoring the jeers of defecting soldiers, who yelled at him, “Take off your uniform! It's over!” And Nabeel al-Qaisy, the reluctant Baath Party militiaman on duty in the Baghdad bunker, walked home on April 7. Later he sold his AK-47, quit the party, and resumed his job as a fine arts teacher.

*    *    *

At the Ministry of Justice complex, two blocks west of the Tigris River bridge defended by Captain Steve Barry's Cyclone Company, an infantry patrol moved in just after dawn on April 9 to investigate scraping noises coming from the high-rise building that housed the ministry offices. As the infantrymen approached the main entry vestibule, they raised their rifles at the sound of footsteps. And there, emerging from the shadows, were two smiling Iraqi boys hauling plastic buckets brimming with stolen desk blotters, staplers, pens, and paper clips. The infantrymen shooed the boys away and entered the stairwells, only to discover that the entire building was infested with looters. Young men and boys were thundering down the stairs lugging computers and printers and telephones. One stairwell was blocked by a huge sofa that two bearded men had tried to force down the narrow passageway. In the offices upstairs, looters had stomped framed photos of Saddam Hussein and emptied out file cabinets. Thousands of files and papers from the ministry were floating down from the windows, landing in the courtyard below like a blanket of snow. One burly man had managed to drag a huge air-conditioning unit all the way to the ground floor, where he asked two young infantrymen—in English—for assistance. The soldiers laughed at him, but they had to admire his initiative.

The patrol leader radioed back for guidance. No one had ever briefed the infantrymen on what do about looters. The local commanders passed the query up the chain of command. They, too, were not quite certain how to respond. For months, their focus had been on defeating the Iraqi military and toppling Saddam Hussein's regime with a combination of speed and shock and firepower. There had been virtually no discussion of what do
after
Baghdad had fallen. Word came back from the higher command: secure the perimeter, disarm anyone with a weapon, but don't shoot at the looters. For the rest of the day, the men from Cyclone Company held their perimeter and watched the mobs systematically loot the Ministry of Justice and then move on to other government buildings in the downtown complex.

A mile to the south, at the Republican Palace, Captain Phil Wolford made his way up the palace roadway on the afternoon of the eighth to have a look at the battlefield in the calm light of day. At the small arch where the gunmen in the road had surprised Sergeant First Class Lustig with two quick RPG blasts into his tank, Wolford got his first close look at the fighters who had charged the palace in the middle of the night. If they hadn't been carrying weapons and ammunition belts, he would have thought they were college students. Most were dressed in jeans and sneakers and very stylish sport shirts. Many of them had backpacks. One of the corpses was wearing sunglasses, which struck Wolford as bizarre since they had attacked on the darkest night he had seen in Iraq. He could not understand what had possessed them to stroll down the palace road in the middle of the night to fight an American tank company. At one point that day, he counted the bodies on that section of the roadway and in the tree line. The total came to sixteen and a half.

At the intersection near the Jumhuriya Bridge, Wolford discovered an elaborate bunker at the southwest corner. It was made from a metal cargo container that had been buried underground. It was equipped with a thick wooden door, and inside were a desk, a nonworking military field phone, and piles of supplies—an entire command post.

Two weeks after the battle for the bridge, Wolford was on patrol when he noticed several Iraqi ambulances parked at the far northern end of the two city parks near the intersection. A group of men wearing surgeons' masks were extracting corpses from a series of bunkers. The men were from the city coroner's office. They had been summoned by residents complaining of an overpowering stench from the park. They recovered fifty-four bodies.

Afterward, Assassin Company spent several weeks manning a checkpoint in the ruins of the intersection, controlling access through the arch, which came to be known as Assassin's Gate. The arch was a flashpoint for trouble. One day Wolford's men had to put down a near-riot after a mob of former Iraqi soldiers demanding back pay rushed the checkpoint. Another day, an elderly woman approached the Americans while clutching a live Iraqi army hand grenade. After she pulled the pin, an Assassin Company sergeant managed to wrap both hands around the woman's hand and the grenade's spoon, or handle, then flung it over a wall just before it exploded. Later, an Iraqi man with a knife and another with a shard of broken glass attacked the men from Assassin, who wrestled the attackers to the ground and disarmed them.

Captain Ed Ballanco, who had led Tusker's resupply convoy up Highway 8 on the seventh, also went out to the palace roadway on the eighth. He saw one dead fighter who was probably eighteen years old, but he looked sixteen. He felt no pity; he was glad the kid was dead. Later, Ballanco took stock of the ammunition Assassin Company had fired on the eighth. At the battle in the intersection alone, the company fired twenty-four thousand rounds of coax, ten thousand rounds of .50-caliber machine-gun ammunition, and sixty-four main gun rounds. During its two days at the palace, it had fired seventy thousand rounds of coax and M-240 machine-gun ammunition. Some tank companies didn't fire off that many machine-gun rounds in a year of training.