Thunder Run (12 page)

Flies were buzzing and the late afternoon light was slanting through cracked windows as Perkins walked to the front of the room. The engineers had connected portable generators to the fluorescent lights and ceiling fans, and now harsh shadows accentuated the worry lines in the soldiers' faces and highlighted the dark streaks of caked dirt along their necks. The fans beat the hot air. There was no PowerPoint presentation, no computer graphics. It was just a commander talking to his subordinates in a battle zone. Perkins spoke without notes, the flat pitch of his New England voice dominating the crowded room.

After a brief introduction, Perkins asked the brigade's intelligence officer to describe the enemy. Thirty-six-year-old Major Charles Watson, a slight, studious officer, stood before a satellite imagery map of Baghdad taped to a wall. Watson had marked the areas on the capital's periphery as amber zones—areas that were secured, or at least somewhat secured. The rest of the city was marked red—hostile—including all the targets assigned to the tank battalions. The entire capital was, in essence, a question mark. Watson acknowledged that no one in the coalition had reliable intelligence on Baghdad. The city was still under the control of Saddam's Special Republican Guards, some the same units that had joined with the Fedayeen and Arab volunteers to battle Rogue battalion the day before. The Guards, once believed to number thirty thousand to sixty thousand men, had been reduced by casualties and desertions to perhaps ten thousand, Watson estimated. He did not believe they had many tanks left, but they did have armored personnel carriers, artillery, antiaircraft guns, mortars, and virtually inexhaustible supplies of RPGs and AK-47 assault rifles.

“Their strength is that they are now so well dispersed,” Watson said. They would almost certainly be dug into bunkers and trenches, on rooftops and on side streets. If significant numbers managed to mass in a single area and coordinate a counterattack, Watson warned, “we are in serious, serious trouble.”

Watson delivered more warnings—familiar by now to the Rogue commanders and to most of the officers who had fought down south, but still worth repeating. Many Republican Guards and ordinary soldiers had thrown off their uniforms and were fighting in civilian clothes, he said, in some cases literally hiding behind civilians but in all instances taking advantage of the confusion caused by civilians wandering in and out of the kill zones. And Iraqi RPG and recoilless rifle teams, Watson said, seemed well aware that the rear grills of the tanks were vulnerable. They knew to let the tanks pass, then hit them from behind.

The biggest unknown, Watson told the group, was the willingness of the enemy to fight and die for Saddam Hussein. Nobody knew. Iraqis—and Syrians and Jordanians and Palestinians, too—had certainly fought and died on Highway 8 the day before. It seemed only logical that they would fight even more tenaciously to hold the capital itself—to keep the palaces and ministries out of American hands.

“They've done an outstanding job of propaganda,” Watson said. “Their people actually believe the regime is defeating the United States.” That, he said, was reason enough for them to stand and fight.

Perkins was glad Watson had mentioned the propaganda war. He wanted his men to understand how important it was not just to take Baghdad, but to
prove
that they had seized control. They would be performing in front of the world. Theirs was a mission of persuasion as well as force. The thunder run the day before had been a tactical success, but the brigade hadn't managed to refute the regime's claims of an Iraqi victory. Perkins wasn't worried about the tactical details of his Baghdad plan. He trusted his commanders to make sure that their crews knew exactly where to go and what to do. They had been pulling it off since the brigade crossed into Iraq more than two weeks earlier. Perkins thought it was more important to explain to his men
why
they were going into Baghdad. For any commander, tactics are the easy part. Soldiers were trained to follow a battle plan. But what they needed in order to fight—to fight with vigor and determination—was motivation and inspiration. It wasn't enough to know their mission. They had to know their purpose.

Perkins began: “We have set the conditions to create the collapse of the Iraqi regime. Now we're transitioning from a tactical battle to a psychological and informational battle. This is the last big battle tomorrow, gentlemen. They said it would take five divisions to win this war, but there's no question now that we can really do it ourselves tomorrow. We've got to seal the deal
now.
”

The Medina Division was gone, he said. So was the Hammurabi Division, another Special Republican Guard unit that had been eviscerated that week by coalition aircraft and American tanks. Baghdad was surrounded. All that held Saddam's regime together was concentrated now in that narrow stretch of palaces and ministries and monuments along the Tigris. “We get all that out of there, it's all political maneuvering from here on out,” Perkins said.

The way to convince the world that the regime was falling was to put American tanks and Bradleys in the palace complex overnight, he went on. That was the ultimate goal—to go beyond a thunder run and hold the palace complex for the entire night. And the only way to spend the night in the city was to keep Highway 8 open for fuel and ammunition. Perkins himself would make the call on spending the night at Hour Four—four hours after the launch of the mission at 6 a.m. It all depended on the lines of communications up and down Highway 8. The China battalion absolutely had to keep the LOC open. “That's our lifeline,” Perkins told them.

He repeated his order from the first thunder run: go in fast and hard, and don't stop. He reminded his company commanders that they would not stop this time to deal with a downed vehicle. He looked at the tank battalion commanders, Flip deCamp and Rick Schwartz, and said, “Flip, I want you to stay on his ass.”

There was a brief discussion of the importance of avoiding friendly fire. Marines, who were fighting their way into Baghdad's southeastern districts, had been advised that the Spartan Brigade would be operating on the west bank of the Tigris, across the river from the marines' assigned zone. The air force had been notified that, along the length of Highway 8, the brigade would not venture beyond the roadway and the main interchanges. Thus “deconflicting” close air support targets on either side of the highway would be quick and straightforward. And, finally, Special Forces A Teams would be driving up Highway 8 to collect intelligence on enemy forces, political maneuvering, and any evidence of chemical or biological weapons. They would be driving two Toyota pickups—dangerously similar to Iraqi technical vehicles—distinguished by fluorescent orange VS-17 panels draped over the hood and roof. Perkins gestured toward several men wearing jeans, boots, and baseball caps at the rear of the room. “Their vehicle is right outside,” he said. “Go take a good look at it.”

Perkins mentioned Sahaf, the information minister. He had to admit it—he was becoming obsessed with that cocky little functionary in his military costume and beret. Perkins didn't want to spin his own lies and propaganda. He just wanted the truth to get out. “So we're going to the back of the room where they give the news conferences and ask a couple of questions—and ask for validation for parking for a hundred tanks,” he said.

Up to this point, the officers and NCOs had worn their battle faces—tight, tense looks of concentration. But now a rumble of laughter rolled through the room, a little exaggerated, but a welcome break in the tension. A minute later, a major piped up and asked Perkins, “Will there be water in the palace swimming pools? We could all use a good bath.” Perkins gave a dry, short laugh.

But the light mood passed swiftly, and soon the men bent back over their orders and their briefing books. They all believed that taking Baghdad was their ticket home. Once Baghdad fell, the war would be over. Their job would be done. There had been virtually no talk of postwar reconstruction and nation-building. The division had been given no guidance for the postcombat phase, no orders for what to do with Baghdad once it was in American hands. Their focus was on the next day's mission. They knew people were going to die—a lot of Iraqis and, almost certainly, a few Americans, perhaps someone hunched over a folding chair in that cramped little room under the lazy spinning fans.

“This is not going to be an easy mission,” Perkins said. To seize a city of 5 million people defended by thousands of troops, they were sending in about 970 combat soldiers in sixty tanks and twenty-eight Bradleys, plus a few armored personnel carriers. They were sending just thirty Bradleys, fourteen tanks, and a few hundred soldiers to hold ten kilometers of Highway 8. Perkins looked around the room. Outside, the bright spring sun was setting, and the low buzz of mosquitoes stirred the air. “Tomorrow is our last big fight. Good luck, gentlemen.” Everyone shouted out, “Hoo-ah!,” the military's all-purpose acknowledgment, and the officers and NCOs filed out to brief their units camped in the surrounding fields.

That evening, some of the officers and men squeezed into a darkened room behind the cinder-block room where Perkins had delivered the battle brief. Inside, the brigade chaplain, Father Patrick Ratigan, was setting up his portable altar. Ratigan was a major, an ordained Catholic priest, a stout man with graying hair and solemn eyes. He was wearing an officer's uniform with a major's gold leaf sewn into one collar and a dark chaplain's cross stitched into the other. He unfolded a little camouflaged communion kit on top of an old table he had found in the room. He withdrew a small Bible with an olive drab cover—he had not been issued one of the new, desert tan Bibles—and lit several candles. Father Ratigan was now ready for the sacrament of confession, for the granting of general absolution upon danger of death. It was something he always did for Catholics on the eve of battle.

In the glow of the candles, the priest spoke of courage and faith as the soldiers lined up before a bullet-pocked wall to receive communion. The men bowed their heads and prayed. “Help us overcome war and hardship,” Father Ratigan said. “May Almighty God bless you all.”

The priest was still conducting the service when an officer burst into the room. “We've got full enemy contact to the south! Everybody's gotta get in full battle rattle!” he yelled. The crunch of mortars sounded in the distance, and then the low drumming of small-arms fire. Everyone bolted from the room, only to have the sounds of fighting suddenly fade away. One of the brigade's units on the far perimeter had absorbed a brief hit-and-run attack, and a nearby convoy returning from a firefight to the south had also been attacked with mortars. One of the battalions had lit up a couple of enemy vehicles, and the ammunition inside them cooked off with a steady
pop pop pop.
It went on that way for the rest of the night—a series of probes and feints by an unseen enemy, firing and moving in the dark. Patrols were dispatched to seek out the enemy while the rest of the officers and men of the Spartan Brigade prepared for the biggest battle of their lives.

Sometime after midnight, Perkins set up his cot in a tiny space behind the room where Father Ratigan had conducted the service. At that moment, he was alone, and it was a startling sensation. A commander in combat is almost never alone; he is constantly besieged by staff officers with updates or by subordinate commanders seeking guidance. Perkins had already conducted a final, top-level review of the mission with Wesley, Schwartz, and deCamp. He outlined which decisions were theirs to make and which were his. He had heard horror stories about command helicopters stacked up in the air over battlefields in Vietnam, jammed with top commanders micromanaging platoons on the ground. He wanted his commanders to know that he would let them make the decisions they needed to make.

Perkins also had identified several key decisions he knew
he
would have to make the next day: whether to spend the night in Baghdad; how to reposition units on the ground as the battle evolved; how to best use artillery and close air support; how to resupply his tank battalions; and when to send the fuel and ammunition convoys up Highway 8. Perkins bore ultimate responsibility for more than four thousand soldiers. He was taking almost a thousand of them into the most heavily defended city in the world. He knew American soldiers would die the next day. It sounded callous, but he told his commanders that the mission's main goal was
not
to avoid getting anyone killed. It was to force the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. He could not—and they could not—get distracted by the death of one man or several men. The soldiers and the medics had been trained to treat and evacuate casualties, and the brigade had worked hard to have the forward surgical teams in place. When the battalions began to take casualties the next day, it would be Perkins's responsibility to press forward based on the course of action that best served the mission in the long run, not what seemed right for an isolated situation at a particular instant. The execution had to be hard, fast, and violent. The greater the speed, the greater the violence, the fewer lives that would be lost.

Inside the little room, Perkins took advantage of the solitary moment to pray, and to complete the sacrament interrupted by the mortar attack. He took out his small army-issue Bible and turned to Isaiah 6:8. The brigade's motto, “Send Me,” was taken from the verse. Members of the brigade often punctuated their salutes by shouting, “Send me!” Perkins read the verse:
I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go
for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me
. He opened an
Our Daily Bread
devotional from his wife and turned to the daily passage for April 7. On the same page was the passage for April 8. It was from Philippians 4:13:
I can
do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
He thought the verse fit his situation, and in it he found strength.