Thunder Run (8 page)

Gaines called it up on the company net, to Captain Hilmes, the company commander. He said, very calmly, “Red Three is dead.”

Monitoring the net in his armored personnel carrier, Major Nussio heard Hilmes report a TC KIA, a tank commander killed in action. It had to be bad, Nussio thought, for them to come right out and say a TC was dead. Usually they couched it, saying only that they had a man down. Nussio went through a process of elimination, trying to figure out who it was. Then Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz, the battalion commander, came on the net and asked for a name. “Alpha One Three,” Hilmes said. He paused and added, “Sergeant Booker.”

Men in combat feed off information. It sustains them. They want to know—they
need
to know—what is happening beyond their own intensely personal fields of fire. They crave any scrap of information that might somehow bring the broad sweep of the battle into focus. On this day, on this highway, the information flowing from the radio net had been relentlessly upbeat, a steady beat of kill reports: a bunker destroyed, dismounts down, a technical absolutely wasted. Some of the tankers felt the same giddy rush as the day before, when they had lit up the Medina Division on the Turkey Shoot.

The battalion—in fact, the whole brigade—had not lost a single man to enemy fire on the march up from Kuwait. Now, on the platoon net and then on the company net, came the first word of a KIA. Booker was down. Everybody knew Booker. He was larger than life, and it did not seem possible that such a man could be gone, and so swiftly. The information dropped on the crews like a hammer blow. The radio net fell silent.

Inside Alpha One Three, Gilliam and Gibbons considered trying buddy aid—the basic emergency first aid taught to all tankers: keep air passages open, apply pressure and elevation for bleeding. But it was hopeless. Booker didn't seem to be breathing. The bleeding was massive. Over the radio, Gibbons told Gaines, “He's dead.” Gaines ordered Gibbons to prep the tank for a three-man crew. He was now the tank commander.

Gibbons knew he had to take control of the situation. They had trained for this day—trained for the sudden death of any crewman. They were still rolling. He had to reconfigure the tank so that he could get in the commander's hatch and still fire the main gun and coax with the override joystick. That was going to be difficult with Sergeant Booker still there in the turret. Gibbons would have to work around him because there would be no medevac until they reached the airport. He was trying to focus, trying to set aside the grief and shock he felt for his tank commander, a man he idolized—to put those feelings in a reservoir inside him and hold it for later. He knew he had to concentrate on getting the rest of the crew to the airport alive. Gaines was talking him through it over the radio, telling him to stay calm and let his training take over.

Hilmes called Gaines and asked if he was certain Booker was dead. “Does he have a pulse?” he asked. Hilmes did not doubt the crew's competence. He had always been impressed with the crisp, accurate reports delivered by Gaines's platoon, but it was his job to make sure they were absolutely certain about something as serious as a KIA.

As Gaines got back on the radio with Booker's crew, Gibbons heard Booker struggling to breathe. He was gurgling and wheezing. Gibbons told Gaines, “He's trying to breathe!” He requested a medevac.

Further back in the column, medical Specialists Joe Hill and Shaun Holland were in a medical track, a specially outfitted M113. Over the net, Gaines told them Booker was still breathing and ordered them to speed to the front of the column. Hill thought it was like the Red Sea parting, the way the tanks and Bradleys and tracks gracefully swung to the side to let the medical track push past them. They drove crazily, spinning and heaving. They found Alpha One Three, jerked to a stop, and dropped the rear ramp. Hill and Holland sprinted for the hatch, where Gibbons and Gilliam were struggling to lift Booker out of the narrow hatch. They heard automatic rifle rounds pinging off the tank hull.

The column was still stopped to deal with Booker when an RPG ripped into the front of a Bradley in Captain Burris's company. It hit just above the driver's hatch and exploded, blowing off the hatch. The impact stunned the driver, Private First Class Sean Sunday. His skin burning, he leaped out of the driver's hole and slammed awkwardly into the roadway, breaking his leg. He was in the middle of the road, exposed to enemy fire. Staff Sergeant Jeffery Empson jumped out of the trailing Bradley and dragged Sunday off the highway. He got him into the rear hull of the stricken Bradley and ordered one of the infantrymen—a soldier Empson knew had trained as a driver—to take over for Sunday in the driver's hole.

Now Schwartz had two medevacs to deal with. His entire column was halted and stretched along the airport highway. They were only a couple kilometers from the airport, but they were being hammered by the most intense barrage they had received all morning. They had also entered the most perilous stretch of terrain on the seventeen-kilometer journey, with trees and foliage obscuring the fields of fire along the median strip and on either side of the highway. Schwartz was desperate to get moving, and he pressed his commanders. The Bradley crews responded. They managed to get the damaged Bradley started again while Sunday was being stabilized. In a matter of minutes, the Bradley was back in the column and ready to haul Sunday to the airport for a medevac.

On his command track, Colonel Perkins had lost radio contact with Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz. He was concerned about the column's getting trapped and surrounded on the highway. He had his driver pull up behind Booker's tank, where the medical vehicle had just arrived. He was impressed that the driver of the medical vehicle had positioned the track in the line of fire to protect the medics and crewmen trying to evacuate Booker. A couple of medics were on top of the vehicle, firing M-16s.

Because of all the buildings along the airport highway, Perkins also had lost radio contact with the brigade command post south of the city. He radioed directly to the division command center at the airport and delivered a situation report to his superiors. He was confronted with a question he had not anticipated: “Do you want to turn back?” Perkins was stopped on the highway, under fire, and in danger of having sections of his column picked off and isolated. But he had no intention of turning around. He considered the thunder run the opening salvo in the battle for Baghdad. To turn back now would not only undermine the brigade's morale but, more important, provide the Iraqi regime with a psychological and strategic victory. He radioed back and told the division that he was moving forward.

On Alpha One Three, Gibbons had found the shoulder strap on Booker's Nomex jumpsuit and was yanking on it, trying to hand Booker off to medics Hill and Holland, who had scrambled up onto the main deck. Gilliam was trying to help, but he had climbed out of the turret without his helmet. Even in this situation, under fire and trying to get treatment for his mortally wounded sergeant, Gibbons surprised himself by noticing such a thing. He told Gilliam to go back down and get his helmet.

Holland asked for Booker's condition. “Half his face is gone and his stomach is hit, too,” Gibbons said. Hill took a look and recoiled. It was awful. The medics got Booker out of the turret and onto a litter inside the medical track. They took off again, speeding for the airport, where the first sergeant had radioed ahead for a medevac helicopter. Booker was barely breathing. He had suffered massive wounds. Hill tried to take his pulse but most of Booker's right thumb and wrist was gone. The pulse on his left wrist was faint. Hill and Holland tried and failed to get an air tube down Booker's throat. They cut into his throat and inserted a tube, but it wasn't helping. Booker's lungs were full of blood.

A call came over the radio. The physician's assistant, Captain Mike Dyches, was coming up in his medical track. He would take over. Hill was relieved. Captain Dyches was high speed—he knew his stuff. If anybody could save Booker, the medics thought, it was Dyches. They stopped their track and the physician's assistant's track pulled alongside. Hill and Holland wanted to move Booker into Dyches's track, but when they lowered the ramp gunfire erupted from all directions.
Forget that,
Hill thought. Dyches and a medical sergeant dove into the back of Hill's track. The hatch slammed shut and they took off again for the airport. There wasn't much even Dyches could do for poor Booker. He tried, but Booker was in terrible shape. Finally Dyches got on the radio and said they could slow down now because Sergeant Booker was gone. The medics got the body bag out. Dyches didn't know what else to do, so he covered Booker's face and held his hand all the way in to the airport.

As soon as Gibbons and Gilliam had reconfigured Alpha One Three for a three-man crew, the driver, Private First Class Aaron Hofer, got the tank going again. Gilliam was numb and in shock, but he got back up on the loader's M-240 machine gun and prepared to get back to killing dismounts. That's what he would do, for the crew and for Sergeant Booker. Gilliam was up next to Gibbons, this time with his helmet on. First Sergeant Robert Hay, who had pulled up his track to lay down protective fire for Alpha One Three with his .50-caliber, saw Gibbons in the commander's hatch, trying to compose himself and take charge. Hay felt a little burst of pride. Gibbons was just a kid, but he was performing like a pro. Hay caught Gibbons's eye and gave him a thumbs up. Gibbons tried to look focused and decisive, but he still managed to nod and return the thumbs-up.

Alpha One Three's ordeal on the airport highway—the hit on Sergeant Booker, the initial KIA report, the thrall of hope when Booker's breathing resumed, the final crushing diagnosis by the physician's assistant—had all played out over the radio inside Charlie One One. Everybody in Lieutenant Gruneisen's makeshift crew knew Booker. You couldn't help but know Booker if you were in the Rogue battalion. He wouldn't let you
not
know him. It had been a miserable run for the crew, but until that moment no one had died—and now they heard that Sergeant Booker hadn't made it. Inside the turret, protected from the fight, no one spoke for several long minutes.

They were coasting into the stretch run, hatches locked down, listening to the steady beat of small-arms rounds against the hull, the shattering booms of main tank rounds and the thudding of Twenty-five Mike Mike from the Bradleys. The inside of the turret stank of stale sweat and the rotten-egg odor of the expended cannon aft caps. Diaz and Hernandez were smoking cigarettes, just sitting there, dejected and lost in thought. The first sergeant's voice came over the net: “We've got casualties.”

At first, it sounded as though he were talking about Booker and Sunday. But those casualties were from Alpha Company and the Bradley company. This was First Sergeant Jose Mercado—
their
first sergeant, from Charlie Company. Captain Conroy couldn't hear him clearly and asked Mercado to repeat the transmission.

“Casualties,” Mercado said again—in a PC, a personnel carrier.

Goddam,
Gruneisen thought. Their guys—Chris Shipley, Diaz's original driver, and Don Schafer, Gruneisen's original loader—had been transferred to Mercado's PC.

A moment later, Mercado was back on the net: “Shipley and Schafer.” Schafer had been hit in the arm and back, Shipley in the eye and arm. Nobody could believe it. It was like they were some kind of magnet for tragedy—the one-in-a-million shot on Diaz's tank, the raging fire, the wrong turns, the lost gear, and now Shipley and Schafer, who had started the run tucked safely inside tanks, not PCs. Gruneisen felt a sudden stab of anger and regret, and he cursed out loud. He felt helpless; Shipley and Schafer were his guys, and he wasn't there to help them. Inside the turret, he kept muttering,
Damn, damn, damn.

Shipley and Schafer had been standing in the open rear hatch of the first sergeant's personnel carrier, firing on roadside bunkers with their M-4 carbines. Earlier, both men had helped try to put out the tank fire on the highway while also shooting at approaching Iraqis. They had jumped aboard the personnel carrier as the column was pulling away after Charlie One Two had been abandoned. Shipley, who had been the driver on the abandoned tank, had no other ride. But Schafer, the loader on Lieutenant Gruneisen's tank, had been headed back to that tank when he saw that some of the Charlie One Two crewmen had already hopped aboard and filled all the spots. He felt that he had been wrongly usurped, and he was still angry about it as he fired from the personnel carrier. He was a tanker, and he wanted to be with his tank.

Schafer was on the personnel carrier, squeezing off a burst from his M-4, when something smacked him in the back. It felt like the kind of hard slap someone gives you when they try to surprise you and then run away. Then something went through his arm. He cried out, “Ow, my arm! What the hell!” Instinctively, Schafer reached out to steady himself and grabbed Ron Martz, an
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reporter standing next to him. Schafer lifted his arm, and Martz held it. The reporter saw a tiny hole in Schafer's armpit, with crimson blood spurting from the wound. Schafer shouted, “I'm hit!” and he collapsed into Martz's arms. Both men tumbled to the deck.

Schafer saw that Shipley had been hit, too. Shipley was facedown on the deck, bright blood pumping from his face. He looked absently at his hands and saw blood gushing over them and failed to comprehend who was doing this to him or why. It was his last conscious thought, and he remembered nothing beyond that moment. An AK-47 round had torn through Shipley's Kevlar helmet, sliced through his head, and exploded out his right eye. Martz yelled for a medic—the first sergeant's vehicle was the medical track. Shawn Sullivan, a medic who had been firing his own weapon over the right side, bent down to help Shipley.

An AK-47 round had struck Schafer in the back, just off his spine. It had torn into his lung, out his side, and through his upper right arm, shattering the humerus. Schafer was on top of Martz, who had reached across him to hold Shipley's hand. Schafer asked Martz to hold his hand, and Martz squeezed it with his free hand. Sullivan was trying to treat both wounded men, but his medical equipment was trapped beneath a load of gear that had tumbled onto the deck during the firefight.