Thunder Run (15 page)

Specialist Alfred Hassan, a sapper everybody called Bear, walked slowly onto the highway, tiptoeing between the mines. He carefully draped a length of strap around the first mine. He could see that all the mines were Italian-made antitank mines, powerful enough to flip over a seventy-ton tank. They were about ten inches in diameter and five inches high, roughly the size and shape of a birthday cake. Hassan tied the strap into a slip knot, cinched it tightly around the mine, and slowly made his way back to the rest of the engineer team, careful to avoid getting his feet tangled up in the strap leading back to safety. Now
that
would truly be embarrassing, and probably fatal, he thought—to trip over the strap and set off an antitank mine. Hassan made it back to the vehicles, where the rest of the team was lying flat on the highway, staying low for protection in the event of a blast wave. Hassan got down, too. Somebody whispered the countdown . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . and Oslin yanked on the end of the strap. The mine slid across the highway. The men braced for an explosion. There was nothing. The mine came to a rest, still intact.

The sappers repeated the lasso process for seven more mines. Each attempt produced the same result—no explosion. The squad leaders talked it over. They didn't have time to lasso all four hundred mines. That would take all night. They decided to take a chance and assume that none of the mines had trip wires or antihandling devices. They would remove them by hand, checking each one by using a quicker but much more dangerous method—the two-finger sweep, checking for wires or sensors by running two fingers around each mine. If anybody got hurt, the medics would treat the casualties and evacuate them. The company commander would then decide whether to abort the mission or press on. Nobody talked about casualties. Nobody even thought about getting hurt; they had faith in their training. In fact, faith was the fulcrum of their training—faith that if they performed exactly the way they had been trained, nothing bad could possibly happen.

Just four men would go out and remove the mines, checking each one and then lifting it and setting it carefully on the shoulder of the highway. The squad leaders didn't want to risk losing more men if a mine went off. Two more men would follow behind, isolating the cleared areas by creating small berms from trash and debris scattered along the roadside. Two of the squad leaders, Guzman and Staff Sergeant Matthew Oliver, would scan the perimeter through night-vision goggles, providing security. Other engineers would haul out orange traffic cones to mark the cleared roadway for the armored convoy.

Oslin would be clearing the mines. He unshouldered his rifle and removed his fatigue jacket. He didn't want anything flopping down on the mines while he was crouching down to clear them. None of the sappers wore protective gear; it just got in the way and made it difficult to move freely. Oslin took a deep breath, adjusted his kneepads, and walked out to the first row of mines. He got down on his knees and went at it. He carefully cleared the dirt from each mine, slowly running two fingers around the sides and top, ready to stop abruptly if he felt a wire or antihandling device. He tried not to think about what
he
would have done if he had set up the minefield, because he would have drilled holes in the asphalt beneath the mines and booby-trapped them to explode if anyone tried to lift them. But he couldn't
not
think of all that, and it haunted him. He kept thinking about his wife, and he ran through his life insurance policy in his head and thought:
Well, at least she'll be taken care of if I don't come home.
He had those thoughts for mine after mine, dozens of them, as he cleared each one and picked it up and carefully set it down on the other side of a concrete divider on the east shoulder of the highway.

The other sappers worked the field the same way, sweeping, clearing, lifting, walking, setting the mines down. It was a cool desert night, but they were sweating under their T-shirts. All of the mines were covered with dirt, and a few were topped with human excrement. Apparently, at least a few of the Iraqis were not in such a hurry that they couldn't stop and defecate. Nobody knew what to make of it, but they took it as an insult—just a filthy insult, as if they didn't have enough to worry about already.

The sappers worked steadily, silently, row after row. Oslin looked up at one point and felt a sudden stab of fear. He couldn't see the security vehicles. The highway had bent to the right, and now he was out of sight. He could see the dark outlines of burned-out Iraqi vehicles destroyed during Rogue's thunder run. He was worried about someone taking a shot at him. He could see faint streaks of light in buildings in the distance, and the wind was blowing trash all over the highway. At one point Oslin was startled by a loud crashing sound—the wind had torn a section of sheet metal from a roof, and it clanged across the field. Somewhere in the distance, a metal garage door was banging in the wind.

Behind Oslin and the other sappers, in the lead troop carrier at the southern edge of the minefield, Sergeant Tony Raskin was scanning both sides of the highway with his night-vision goggles. His .50-caliber machine gun was primed to fire. He was under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon, but he intended to open up with the .50-caliber if anybody took a shot at his guys crouching and moving at the far end of the minefield. Raskin had spotted three or four people walking around about three hundred meters off the west side of the highway. He couldn't tell whether they were civilians or soldiers, or whether they had weapons. But they made him nervous, and he kept the goggles on them. From time to time, the squad leaders would walk back and give him progress reports to radio back to the platoon leader in the medevac track, First Sergeant Dale Vanormer. The operation was moving briskly, but not as fast as Raskin liked. He wanted to get it done and get out of there.

Ahead of Raskin, Sergeant Deming and Staff Sergeant Christopher Turner were shuffling up the side of the highway, hauling stacks of orange traffic cones. They had their M-16s slung across their backs and their night-vision goggles strapped to their heads, struggling with armloads of cones. In the dark, they looked like eerie fluorescent orange shapes scooting up the highway, shedding bits of orange every fifteen meters as they dropped cones to mark the cleared lanes. Running back and forth to collect cones and drop them off, Deming and Turner had to pass a section of highway that was exposed to an alleyway off to the right. They heard noises from that direction but they couldn't see anything, even with their goggles. They were winded and anxious, and worried about having to stop, drop the cones, and shoulder their weapons if someone took a shot at them. They kept thinking that if somebody got hurt way up there, it would take a while for the medics to run all the way up the highway in the dark. A man could bleed to death before anyone arrived to treat him. They were relieved, and more than a little surprised, when they finished setting up the cones without a shot being fired.

After a little less than two hours, all 444 mines had been cleared, lifted, and moved to the shoulder. The sappers and the squad leaders hustled back down the highway, and everybody performed accountability, counting off in the dark. They felt enormous relief and a sense of pride. They had just pulled off a hell of a thing, clearing a massive minefield in a combat zone, in the dark, with no protective equipment. Deming kept thinking,
Damn,
how many guys can say they pulled off a sneaky covert sapper breach in the middle of
the night—not in training, but for real, against real live bad guys?
They were all exhausted and drained, but they felt somehow elated and giddy, and each man could tell by the look in the other guys' eyes that they felt it, too.

They got back to the vehicles and unloaded a directional panel, a stretch of canvas marked with a huge white arrow. The armor crews had been instructed to follow the arrow and the cones through the cleared lanes. The engineers set up the panel, tied it down with parachute cord, braced it with dirt, and made sure the arrow was pointing away from the mines. Then everybody loaded back up and the vehicles pulled away, the Bradleys staying behind to cover their retreat back south to the brigade command center. The sun was coming up over the desert. It was 5:40 a.m.

The engineers had been riding south for just a few minutes when they heard a series of explosions. The Bradleys had opened up with their coax and Twenty-five Mike Mike. A week would pass before the engineers learned that, while they had been creeping through the minefield that night, they were being watched by Iraqi soldiers manning two technicals, an antiaircraft gun, and a recoilless rifle. The Bradleys destroyed them all. The engineers knew nothing of this now as they encountered the lead Rogue tanks of the armored column, rolling north at dawn on Highway 8 toward the freshly cleared minefield, bound for the palace complex of Saddam Hussein. The thunder run was on.

SEVEN

THE PALACE GATES

B
efore taking off on any mission, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Gantt always reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of Bazooka bubblegum to hand to Dave Perkins. It was a little ritual they had developed during the firefights down south, a sort of prebattle talisman—the passing of the lucky gum. They had done it before the thunder run on April 5, and now, just before dawn on April 7, Gantt reached for his gum.

He had just climbed aboard Perkins's command vehicle, an armored personnel carrier equipped with so many communications antennae that it looked like it was carrying a load of heavily armed fishermen with their poles swaying in the back. Perkins would direct the day's fight from the commander's hatch, talking on various radio nets with the division commander, General Blount; the two tank battalion commanders, Rick Schwartz and Flip deCamp; and executive officer Eric Wesley at the tactical operations center at the intersection of Highways 1 and 8, where the armored column was lined up now, ready to launch on this still, foggy morning south of Baghdad.

Gantt was an artilleryman, the commander of the Battle Kings, the First Battalion, Ninth Field Artillery Regiment. He rode in the carrier's hatch at Perkins's right elbow, working the battalion and brigade fire nets to control all “indirect fires”—all artillery and rockets. Gantt, forty-two, was a tall, long-limbed man with a worldly air. He had a master's degree in Near Eastern studies from Princeton, and he spoke Arabic and Hebrew. He had served a stint as a United Nations military observer in the Middle East, and another stint as a Middle East political-military analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. With his knowledge of the region, as well as his expertise in artillery, Gantt was a valuable asset to Perkins, who kept him at his side during battles.

Gantt's big guns were set up now in a farm field just south of the operations center, the long tan tubes of the Paladin howitzers upraised and pointed north through the mist and fog. The Paladin was a 155mm howitzer that had been brought into service after Operation Desert Storm, and the Iraqi war was its first real combat test. Gantt loved the new guns. The Paladins were mounted on tracks and capable of speeds of up to fifty-six kilometers an hour—not quite as fast as the tanks and Bradleys, but impressive for self-propelled artillery. They looked like bulky tanks, but with oversized cannons capable of flinging a ninety-five-pound projectile twenty-four kilometers. They could fire accurately on the move and were designed to “shoot and scoot”—to fire off a series, then speed away to escape counterbattery fire. On this particular morning, a dozen Paladins were lined up across a farmer's field at a place designated Objective Trista, where they were primed and ready. It was Gantt's responsibility to make sure the Paladins laid down accurate fire at several interchanges along Highway 8 precisely ten minutes before the armored column arrived at each overpass. It was a complex, delicate mission requiring exquisite timing and coordination. It was the first time during the war that the brigade had attempted to combine artillery with a fast-moving armored raid.

Gantt had survived the thunder run two days earlier. He had cringed every time the command carrier rolled under an overpass, where Republican Guards and Fedayeen had launched RPGs and fired AK-47s straight down toward the roadway. The Rogue battalion had been fortunate to lose just one man that day. For this thunder run, Perkins wanted those overpasses cleared—but without destroying them or blocking Highway 8 with rubble from the impact of heavy artillery. Gantt and Perkins decided to drop HEPD on the overpasses—high-explosive point-detonating rounds. Their fuses were timed to explode ten to fifteen meters above ground, spraying hot shrapnel straight down. HEPD was like a little neutron bomb. It killed people but left infrastructure intact. The shells would eviscerate any human being within roughly 150 meters of the airburst but spare the overpasses and the highway any serious structural damage. Gantt was confident his crews could pull it off. The Paladins had performed well just the night before, when Stephen Twitty's China battalion was harassed by mortar fire. They had swiftly and efficiently destroyed every last mortar position.

But just before the armored column pulled out, Gantt got another order, for prep fire. The spy drones and the scouts had detected Iraqi mortars and antiaircraft guns a little more than one and a half kilometers north on Highway 8. Gantt would have to eliminate them to clear the way for the column. He ordered a series of strikes from a battalion of multiple rocket launchers posted near the intersections of Highways 1 and 8. The rockets were highly efficient killers; they could destroy everything inside a square kilometer grid in fifteen seconds. Twenty-four rockets screamed from their launchers and exploded in the distance. Minutes later, the forward observers reported back: targets destroyed.

Things were moving quickly. The column lurched to life, rolling up Highway 8 to the final American checkpoint. Minutes later, the Paladins targeted the first interchange, the thirty-nine-inch projectiles erupting from the tubes in bursts of orange flame and black smoke. The shells whined overhead and detonated in the air above the overpass, two overlapping rounds at each corner of the interchange. Gantt wanted a scattershot effect—overlapping concentric circles of 40 meters' diameter each for a kill zone of perhaps 150 meters. He heard the deep thud of impact. He knew that any human being standing anywhere on or near the overpass at Curly was now flat on the ground, dead or mortally wounded. An exploding 155mm round does ghastly things to people, but these people were en-dangering the lives of his men, and Gantt felt no remorse. He was energized by the mission into Baghdad, eager to prove his battalion's effectiveness in battle, and anxious to finish off things in Baghdad so that he and his men could go home. There was also the matter of propaganda—specifically, Sahaf the information minister. Gantt and Perkins had discussed how satisfying it would be to pull their tanks up to the information ministry and expose Sahaf as a fraud.

Toward the front of the column, Rick Schwartz was up in his cupola, listening to the 155s whistle overhead and then slam down. They were hitting just a kilometer or so ahead of his lead tanks. Schwartz was on the radio to his field artillery officer, who was talking to Gantt's artillerymen back in the farm field. Schwartz was calling out latitudinal grid lines known as northings: “I'm at the seventy-nine, I'm at the eighty. Shoot it!”—telling Gantt and his men precisely when to launch the rounds. Schwartz was pleased by how smoothly the communication was flowing; artillery was treacherous stuff, and if you got careless it could drop right on your head. But even though the brigade had not previously used artillery to cover a speeding armored column, everyone on the combat team had learned to synchronize and communicate during all the firefights down south. Schwartz was able to call in his position and, in less than three minutes, the rounds would crash down right on the mark.

It was a magnificent thing, Schwartz thought—this great humming flow of radios and machinery and weaponry, all flowing north to Baghdad. The mission was playing out as planned. The column had rolled past the cleared minefield without incident, herded into the western lanes by the engineers' orange cones and white directional arrow. Just north of the minefield, the Iraqis had erected a barrier on the highway, stacking up burned-out cars and hunks of concrete and road debris. But the spy drones had picked it up the night before and transmitted the imagery down to the brigade operations center. The information was passed to Schwartz, who had his lead tanks prepare their plows. Lieutenant Bobby Hall's platoon was in the lead again—Captain Andy Hilmes had put him back up front, despite his missed turn two days earlier, telling him, “This is
your
highway.” Hall could see that the Iraqis, for some reason, had left convenient two-meter gaps between the barriers. These obstacles were not as effectively placed as the barriers the Iraqis had erected near the airport two days earlier. Hall's plow tanks were able to wedge between the barriers, get low for leverage, and shove the piles of junk and debris off to the side of the highway.

As the column approached the first big interchanges, at Objective Curly, Schwartz could see that the overpass was clear. The artillery had blown everything off the bridge—soldiers, vehicles, debris. But the airbursts had not disturbed the gunmen hiding in the creases, where the underside of the bridge met the support walls. Their RPG launchers were detected by the gunners as they scanned the creases through their magnified sights. Schwartz gave the order to engage, and the Bradley gunners sent Twenty-five Mike Mike rattling up into the creases. The way the rounds exploded and splattered reminded Schwartz of a paintball game. The gunmen simply disappeared in a black curtain of smoke, and the column rolled on.

Back on the open highway, some of the bunkers that Rogue had hit two days earlier had been reseeded. The awful whoosh of RPGs rose up from both sides of the highway, followed by bursts of automatic weapons fire. Schwartz could see technicals and trucks moving into position on the access roads, and it became clear that the Iraqis had not adjusted their tactics over the past two days. They were still trying to break the order of march, still using RPG crews and recoilless rifles and suicide vehicles to hammer sections of the column in hopes of isolating and killing the crews. It seemed to Schwartz that the rate of fire was not as intense as during the first thunder run. He thought Rogue had broken much of the resistance two days earlier. If Saturday's thunder run was a ten on a ten-point scale in terms of enemy resistance, he figured today's was perhaps a six. He felt confident about blowing through the defenses on the highway and straight into the downtown government complex.

Then Joe Bell's tank took a couple of wicked hits. The tank had survived five RPG hits on the first thunder run, and even Bell's toy dog, Puppy Love, had arrived intact. But now Bell, manning the commander's hatch of the column's lead tank, was wondering just how many more RPGs his shrapnel-pocked Abrams could withstand. He had just passed the scorched remains of Charlie One Two, which didn't exactly build his confidence. He felt a little better after he pumped a few rounds from his .50-caliber into a Soviet-made tracked recovery vehicle—basically, a huge tow truck for tanks—that was parked next to Charlie One Two. He couldn't believe it: it was hooked up to the stricken tank. The Iraqis were actually trying to tow an American tank in the middle of a battle. Bell radioed back and warned Captain Hilmes. Just to make sure the recovery vehicle was destroyed, the captain had his tank gunner put a HEAT round into it.

Bell had just passed Charlie One Two when an RPG screamed toward him. It smashed into the right side of his tank, a tremendous blow. The whole tank rocked sideways, and Bell had to hold on tight. From the trailing tank, Sergeant First Class Ronald Gaines radioed Bell, “You just got hit,” as if Bell hadn't noticed.

A minute later a second RPG streaked in and ripped through the rear of Bell's tank, straight through the hull. Gaines's voice came over the net again: “You just got hit again. You're leaking real bad.”

Lieutenant Ball, the platoon leader, radioed and asked, “Hey, are you guys okay?” Bell's voice came back: “Yeah, we're all okay. We got a small fire going.”

The rear compartment was burning. The automatic fire control system doused the blaze with a spray of Halon, and the crew pulled the emergency lever to fire another round of the flame retardant. The fire went out, but the fuel and hydraulic lines had been ruptured. Fuel and hydraulic fluid were leaking onto the highway. The tank rolled another hundred meters, then aborted, shutting itself down.

Bell wasn't particularly alarmed. He knew the drill. Colonel Perkins and Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz had made it clear that the column was not going to be held up by a disabled tank this time around. This time, recovery vehicles were standing by to push forward and tow any disabled tank back to the brigade operations center. Bell's tank was only three and a half kilometers from the center. The rest of the column kept moving, and over the radio Bell heard a voice telling his crew, “Don't worry. They're coming for you.” It didn't seem so bad. They didn't have hydraulic power, but they could still fire the main gun, the coax, the loader's machine gun, and their automatic rifles.

The rest of the column pulled away. Bell and his crewmen sat there, buttoned up, a lone tank at the side of the highway. Bell felt even more exposed when the rest of the column moved out of radio range and he couldn't raise anybody on the net to find out when the recovery vehicle was coming. It was like to trying to reach an AAA road repair dispatcher from the side of the interstate. He tried to concentrate on security, to keep the crew focused and alert for the enemy. Sergeant David Gibbons, the gunner who had brought his crew home safely after Staff Sergeant Booker was killed two days earlier, was scanning through the gunner's primary sight, checking to make sure no one was creeping up on them.

At one point, Gibbons spotted three Iraqi dismounts poking around. He killed all three with a sudden burst of coax that startled the crew. There was steady gunfire in the distance. The four crewmen sat there for the next thirty minutes, cut off, scanning, sweating, waiting. At last they heard a sharp banging on the front deck. They looked out the vision blocks and saw a man in a uniform. It was a friendly—a young infantryman from the China battalion. He said, “We got you. Come on out.” Within minutes, the tow bar was hooked up and the disabled tank was dragged back to the rear, Bell's Puppy Love still tucked safely into the bustle rack.

Up ahead, inside the commander's hatch of a Bradley from the Tusker battalion, Staff Sergeant Thomas Slago thought the rate of fire was exceptionally intense. He and his crew had survived several fierce firefights down south, but nothing on this scale. He could see muzzle flashes and RPG trails on both sides of the highway. Slago, thirty-five, was an experienced veteran, a stocky, boisterous NCO with a gift for gab. He loved commanding a Bradley; he had named his nine-year-old son Bradley, although his wife had made him abandon the middle name he had selected: Gunner.