Thunder Run (6 page)

Ball got up in the hatch and looked behind him to make sure the rest of the column was following him. He watched the forward tanks flatten the metal of the guardrails, creating a clearly marked U-turn for the rest of the column. He radioed back to check on his platoon and heard Staff Sergeant Stevon Booker's booming voice. Booker was his platoon sergeant. “Hey, I'm right behind you. I'm with you the whole way. I got your back,” Booker said. Ball felt himself relax. It was always good to hear from Booker.

The crews had trained for both the expected and the unexpected. They had been taught to maintain what commanders called orientation, their assigned fields of fire, no matter what happened during a firefight—including wrong turns. In any tactical armored movement, the lead tank scans the twelve o'clock sector, or the front. The next vehicle scans to the right, the next to the left, and so on. The rear vehicle turns its weapons to six o'clock, to cover the rear of the column. This established procedure prevents everyone from firing on the same targets, which wastes ammunition and also inflates reports of enemy strength.

As the Rogue column executed the sharp U-turn, there was a risk of “masking fires,” one vehicle drifting into the gun sights of another if the gunners did not maintain their assigned orientation. The potential for friendly fire was real. But as each tank and Bradley crunched over the guardrails and banked sharply to the left, the gunners held to their orientations and the column re-formed with all sectors covered without overlap.

Behind the lead tanks, Perkins's command vehicle was following the rest of the column after crossing over Ball's freshly created U-turn. The colonel was trying to make mental notes of the overpasses and exit ramps in and around the spaghetti junction. American forces would be coming back into Baghdad at some point, and since Perkins's men were the first Americans inside the city, he might as well mentally plot the way into the city center. But the smoke from burning Iraqi vehicles was obscuring his vision and burning his eyes.

As the vehicle emerged from the smoke, Perkins caught a glimpse of a truck speeding toward them from the opposite direction. It was an open-bed truck with Iraqi troops clinging to the rails in back and firing assault rifles. Then Perkins realized it was cutting toward the armored vehicle in front of him—Major Rick Nussio's M113. Nussio wanted to shoot, but another American tracked vehicle was in his line of fire. He held off. Behind Nussio and Perkins, Major Kevin Dunlop on a trailing vehicle started pumping shotgun rounds into the truck. Then somebody with a .50-caliber joined in. The driver was ripped apart by the heavy rounds and went down. The truck rode the guardrail down, pitched on its side, and slid to a stop. Several Iraqi troops crawled out and ran for cover under an overpass, but one soldier started sprinting toward Perkins's carrier, firing an assault rifle.

The man in charge of defending Perkins's command carrier was Captain John Ives, a steady, unflappable officer. He was behind a .50-caliber and swung it toward the advancing soldier. He pressed the butterfly triggers. Nothing. He looked down. He was out of ammunition. The soldier kept coming. Ives glanced around in desperation and spotted the empty metal ammo box. He grabbed it, wound up—and flung it toward the Iraqi. The box tumbled into the dirt. The soldier got closer. In Perkins's command hatch, there were no mounted weapons. He was the brigade commander, responsible for four thousand men. He wasn't supposed to be firing weapons. He was supposed to be commanding and controlling the battle. All he had was a 9mm Beretta strapped to his leg. He hadn't fired it the entire war. He thought:
Nobody is engaging this guy!
He pulled out the pistol, locked his wrist, and took aim. He squeezed off several rounds. The soldier went down hard. The carrier plowed on and left him there in the dirt. Perkins looked at the pistol. At that moment he had a sobering thought:
If the brigade commander is taking out enemy with his nine millimeter, we're in serious trouble.

Roger Gruneisen, hauling Staff Sergeant Diaz and the other crewmen from the crippled tank, had fallen behind during the confusion of loading up his tank at the fire scene and waiting for Hernandez to blow Charlie One Two. Now they were chugging up Highway 8 on Gruneisen's Charlie One One—
Creeping Death
—searching for the rest of the column. They were overloaded. Gear and weapons and sensitive items were piled on the turret and deck. They had five men instead of the usual four. Hernandez was up on the blowout panel, on top of the tank, trying to hold on and still fire his machine gun. It was a perilous position; snipers and RPG teams were still getting off shots, and any sudden lurch by the tank would send Hernandez flying onto the roadway. But Hernandez was focused on the west-side bunker that had given them so much trouble on the ground. He despised that bunker. He was going to take it out.

The crew had unbolted the mounted weapons from Charlie One Two—they were held fast by metal pins—and tossed them onto Gruneisen's tank. Hernandez now had an M-240-Charlie, a medium machine gun, from the burning tank. It was a crew-served weapon—the C stood for cyclic—but also capable of being fired by one soldier. It was a wicked weapon, firing the same 7.62mm ammunition as the coax, and with astonishing speed—five hundred rounds a minute. As the tank clanked up the highway, Hernandez, half-laying, half-squatting, shot from the hip. He pumped round after round into the bunker—hundreds of them. As the bunker faded into the distance, nobody stirred inside. Hernandez felt a sense of delayed satisfaction.

Up ahead was the spaghetti junction, shrouded in black smoke. Captain Conroy radioed back to warn Gruneisen about secondary explosions from an Iraqi vehicle burning under one of the overpasses. The lieutenant took secondary explosions seriously. The day before, a Rogue loader had had two fingers blown off by a flying shard from an exploding Iraqi vehicle that had been lit up by the battalion. Gruneisen decided to play it safe; none of his guys was going to die in this godforsaken country if he could help it. He had heard a lot of soldiers debating the real purpose of the war in Iraq—to make sure Saddam didn't use weapons of mass destruction, to kill terrorists responsible for 9/11, to liberate the Iraqi people, to secure Middle East oil supplies. Whatever the purpose, Gruneisen figured it wasn't worth the life of a single one of his men. He wasn't fighting to liberate Iraq. He was fighting to kill the people trying to kill his men. He gave the order: “Button up!” He wanted everybody inside, the hatches locked. He ordered Hernandez to squeeze down inside the loader's hatch beside Diaz. The two men had to hug the hull to avoid the twelve-inch recoil of the thirty-two-foot main cannon—a violent, explosive thrust that could easily break a man's back. One of the first things a tanker learns is to respect the recoil.

Gruneisen was getting irritated now. It had been an awful morning. He had gone into the fight two tanks short. He had taken off with his tank's warning lights flashing—an ominous development at the time but now a mere annoyance given all that had happened since. He had had a tank burn up on him, then had watched it take a HEAT round from an American tank. Now he was overloaded, separated from the column—and practically driving blind. It had been hard enough to see the roadway from up top with all the gear piled on the turret. But now he was “open-protected,” down in the hatch with only a five-inch gap between the hatch lid and the top of the commander's cupola. He couldn't see out his vision blocks or periscope because of all the piled-up gear and weapons. His driver, Peterson, wasn't bothered by the gear because his hatch was down below the main gun. But the smoke from the burning vehicle made it difficult for him to follow the highway. And none of them knew precisely where they were supposed to be going.

As Hernandez scrambled down into the loader's hatch, he saw that Peterson had the tank hugging the right lane, dangerously close to a concrete bridge abutment just up the highway. The gunner, Couvertier, had the main gun tube swung over the right side, pounding bunkers and trenches. Hernandez realized that the tube was heading straight for the abutment. He cried out, “Traverse left! Traverse left!”

Couvertier was wearing his communications helmet and couldn't hear anything except radio calls, especially with the clanking of the tracks and the incessant explosions from both friendly and enemy fire. He kept scanning the right side of the highway for targets. The abutment rushed toward them. Hernandez squeezed down into the loader's hatch and slammed the hatch cover shut, still screaming for the gunner to swing left.

The tank was rocked by an explosion. Diaz thought they had been hit by a tank round. Hernandez knew what had happened: the turret had smacked into the abutment. There was a shower of sparks and a rush of gray smoke. Suddenly, the entire turret was spinning wildly. The four men inside were pressed against the turret walls, paralyzed, pasted in place by centrifugal force. Diaz had the same helpless, out-of-body sensation he had felt as a kid on the gravity ride at the carnival. They kept spinning, spinning. Gruneisen was still clutching the elevation handle for the .50-caliber machine gun. It had snapped off at impact. He rode the turret around and around, his hand in the air. Loose pieces of equipment were flying around with them. They spun and spun, fifteen spins, twenty spins. They couldn't move. They felt sick. Finally, the turret slowed and stopped. The gun tube hung over the front deck, ripped from its mount.

“Everybody okay?” Gruneisen asked. He was dizzy. He flipped a switch to cut the turret power. Diaz was pressed against the radio, stunned. Hernandez was crumpled against the turret wall, woozy and disoriented. The lieutenant looked at Couvertier. Blood was gushing from his face. His whole uniform was soaked in blood. Gruneisen looked again. It wasn't blood—it was a greenish fluid. Then he realized: it was hydraulic fluid. The turret's hydraulics system had exploded. Something had smacked into Couvertier's face, breaking his nose and splattering him with blood, but otherwise he was fine. Everyone checked themselves for blood or wounds. They were bruised and disoriented. In the few seconds it took to regain their senses, they realized they were, remarkably, just fine.

In the driver's hole, Peterson still didn't know what had happened. When the gun tube plowed into the abutment, the tank had rocked and shuddered, but somehow it had kept rolling. Peterson saw the turret spinning madly over his head and brought the tank to a hard stop. He wasn't sure the crew in the turret was still alive.

The voice of First Sergeant Jose Mercado came over the radio. He was in the personnel carrier behind them. “What the hell happened? You guys all right?”

Gruneisen radioed back groggily, “Yeah, yeah, we're okay.”

Gruneisen popped the commander's hatch and looked out. The pile of gear was gone. The impact had sent it flying. It was scattered all over the highway behind them—personal gear, radios, radio code boxes, manuals, rucksacks. He was preparing to climb out and retrieve it when he saw soldiers from the first sergeant's track scramble out and scoop up what they could. They grabbed the sensitive items—the radio and code boxes—but they left the rucksacks. Diaz and Hernandez lost their clothes, their shower kits, letters from home, their CDs and CD players—everything.

Diaz was in a state of disbelief. It was like watching a series of silly mishaps happen to someone in a movie. It was hard to believe that all this was really happening to them. First his tank burned up. Then they crashed into a bridge abutment and took a carnival ride. Now he had lost all his gear—and the crew had no idea which way to go. He was a forlorn figure down there in the turret, a dirty, weary, distressed tank commander without a tank.

Gruneisen had Peterson get the tank rolling again. They had fallen farther behind, and now they had no main gun. The gun tube was useless, which meant that the coax—which was “slaved” to the main gun—was out of commission, too. Gruneisen knew they were at the spaghetti junction, where they was supposed to take a ramp to the airport highway. What he didn't know is that at this very spot, Ball and the rest of the column had followed a ramp to the improvised U-turn and were now rolling westward on the airport highway. Gruneisen looked ahead, hoping to see the tail of the column. There was nothing.

He radioed Captain Conroy, “Where's the turn?”

Conroy told the lieutenant that he had seen a burning motorcycle and a statue of Iraqi soldiers near the off-ramp he had taken to the U-turn. Gruneisen managed to find the proper off-ramp and was headed now toward the smashed guardrails that marked the U-turn. He couldn't see anything that looked like a motorcycle or a statue. The tank rolled past the U-turn and headed northeast—toward Saddam Hussein's palace complex in central Baghdad. A voice came over the radio: “Hey One One—where'd you go?”

Gruneisen checked his grids and realized he had gone too far. They had to turn around right away. But there were bunkers and snipers on this roadway, too, and now the tank was under fire. Hernandez was back up on the M-240, spraying over the left side. Diaz was ripping open ammunition boxes and tossing belts of ammo up to Hernandez. Gruneisen was struggling with the .50-caliber. He couldn't elevate properly because the elevation handle had snapped off. He wasn't really hitting anybody, but at least he was able to keep the enemy fire suppressed while he figured out how to get back on the proper highway.

Suddenly they were rolling into a traffic circle—Qahtain Square in the Yarmouk section of Baghdad. Gruneisen radioed the captain: “Did you go through a traffic circle?”

“Negative.”

Iraqi military trucks were parked along the square. Soldiers were milling around. It was a staging area for attacks on the column. The tank rumbled into the square. The Iraqi soldiers stared up at the big tan machine, shocked to see an M1A1 Abrams barreling down on them. The tank crew stared, too. They had never expected to confront the enemy in such a personal way—literally face-to-face. There was a brief, suspended moment.