Thunder Run (18 page)

Barry was concerned about the poor quality of the intelligence he had received. He had been ordered into downtown Baghdad with no clear sense of what he was up against. Except for the few details he had picked up from Rogue's thunder run two days earlier, he was winging it. He was in the commander's hatch of his tank—nicknamed
Conquer This
—and holding what was almost certainly the most strategic traffic circle in all of Baghdad at that moment. Yet he had no idea where the enemy was, or what weapons they carried. His battalion commander, deCamp, had described the mission as attacking the Iraqi equivalent of the capital mall in Washington, D.C. Barry was now inside Baghdad's version of the national mall, an unfamiliar and unsettling place. He didn't know what it would take to hold his ground. “It could be a breeze, it could be friggin' hard, it could be something in between,” Barry had told his crews the night before.

Cyclone Company had been at the circle for just five minutes when a white car streaked across the bridge, bearing down on the traffic circle. Barry could see three men inside. One of them was pointing a machine gun out a window. Barry gave the order to fire. Three tanks opened up, including Barry's own Abrams. The sedan caught fire and crashed. Two men climbed out and both went down, killed instantly by coax. Thirty seconds later, a white Jeep Cherokee sped down the bridge span. Coax and .50-caliber rounds shattered the windshield. The Cherokee exploded. The fireball was huge—so big that Barry was certain the vehicle had been loaded with explosives. He knew the difference between a burning car and the detonation of explosives. This was a suicide car.

And they kept coming—sedans, pickups, a Chevy Caprice, three cars in the first ten minutes, six more right after that. The tanks destroyed them all. It was incomprehensible. Barry kept thinking:
What the hell is wrong with
these people?
They were trying to ram cars into tanks. It was futile—absolutely senseless. It was like they
wanted
to die, and as spectacularly as possible. Barry hated slaughtering them. And that's what it was—slaughter. They were the enemy—at least the ones he could see—but it gave Barry no pleasure to kill them. It got worse when smoke from burning vehicles made it difficult to see through the thermals and determine whether the people in the vehicles were armed.

Some of the gunners were distressed by the carnage. They tried to follow the rules of engagement for dealing with oncoming vehicles: first fire into the roadway, then into the engine block, and then, if the car kept coming, into the windshield to kill the driver. The gunners hoped the cars would stop and turn around after the first shots into the roadway. But they kept coming, and the gunners kept killing them.

One car, an old Caprice, surprised everyone by speeding toward the circle from the west, down the same roadway the company had used to reach the circle. A tank gunner, Sergeant Derrick January, fired warning shots. The Caprice kept coming. January fired at least a hundred rounds of coax through the windshield. The Caprice kept coming. Finally January stopped the vehicle with a HEAT round. A middle-aged man in civilian clothes crawled from the wreckage, raising a white towel. His face was burned and blackened and his legs were bloodied, but he was alive. No weapon was visible. The man jabbered in broken English while Sergeant Luther Robinson, a medic, treated his wounds. Nobody could figure out why he had decided to challenge the tanks. Robinson shrugged and said in his North Carolina drawl, “That's the luckiest man I've seen in Iraq yet.”

The cars kept coming. After one vehicle was hit and burst into flames on the bridge, the passenger door opened and a man with a pistol stepped out. The gunner on Barry's tank, Sergeant Arnoldo Spangaro, obeyed Barry's order to fire at the man's feet. Then the man starting running toward the tank, aiming his pistol.

“Shoot him!” Barry ordered.

Spangaro hesitated. It didn't feel right. Spangaro was a family man, with an eight-year-old stepson and a four-year-old daughter back home. He wasn't the kind of man who enjoyed killing people, even people with guns in their hands.

“Shoot him!” Barry yelled again. Spangaro opened up with coax, blowing the man apart. The gunner turned to his captain. “That didn't feel too good,” he said.

Afterward, Specialist Jarrid Lott, a tank driver, saw one of the tank commanders taking photographs of mutilated bodies in the vehicles. He was appalled. He asked the commander why he wanted to capture such horrible images. The man had his reasons. “If my son says he wants to join the army,” he told Lott, “I'll show him this and tell him: ‘
This
is what the army does.'”

Even after vehicles stopped speeding over the bridge, Cyclone Company was still taking small-arms fire. Barry realized that gunmen were creeping across the bridge along a pair of narrow catwalks below the elevated roadway. The gunners managed to kill some of them, and the rest fled back across the river. After that, things settled down. For the moment, the Fourteenth of July Bridge and traffic circle were secure. For the first time, Barry allowed himself to believe that the war in Iraq was coming to a close—if not that day, then very soon.

Inside Lightning 28, Mark Jewell was still trying to get the Bradley's main gun to work. Jewell was a feisty character, full of energy and good cheer. He was thirty-nine, short and solidly built, his light brown hair clipped into a tight marine crew cut. He had been a marine for fifteen years, commissioned right out of school after graduating from the University of Louisville. Jewell had a wife and three children back in the States, and they were constantly on his mind. He had used a reporter's cell phone to call a friend in the States and have him send a bouquet of flowers to his wife for their wedding anniversary that week.

Now Jewell was struggling with the ammunition feed on the main gun. At one point, the gun accidentally went off, firing a round harmlessly into the tree line. It scared the hell out of Steve Barry, who got on the radio and asked Jewell, “Two Eight, what the hell?” Jewell explained and apologized, and went back to work on the gun.

Jewell wasn't an armor officer. In fact, he had never commanded a Bradley until two weeks earlier. He had received an hour-long training session in Kuwait from Tom Slago, the Bradley commander from the Tusker battalion, but after that he had to learn from on-the-job training during the march up through the desert. He knew enough to realize that he needed a special wrench to crank the ammunition feed chains to clear the jammed main gun. He radioed one of the Cyclone crews and asked to borrow the tool.

Jewell's Bradley was still buttoned up when the crew heard someone pounding on the rear hatch. Parks swung it open. And there in the morning haze, wrench in hand, wearing a decidedly non–military issue helmet and flak vest, stood Geoff Mohan of the
Los Angeles Times
. Mohan was Cyclone's embedded reporter. He had volunteered to deliver the wrench because he desperately needed to get outside in order to crank up his satellite phone and transmit updates to his story in time to meet his paper's final deadline. It was well before midnight in Los Angeles, still time for Mohan to make the April 7 editions. It was a fortuitous arrangement for everyone involved. Mohan got his story, and Jewell got his wrench.

Outside Lightning 28, Lieutenant Hanks noticed an RPG launcher in a grassy expanse of date palms and eucalyptus trees a few steps beyond the Bradley. He walked over and saw a series of bunkers covered by corrugated metal and camouflaged with palm fronds. Jewell yelled at Hanks to stop and wait for help. He didn't want him probing the bunkers alone. He summoned Parks, who volunteered to be, as he called it, a tunnel rat.

Parks took Jewell's 9mm pistol and a flashlight. With Hanks and Corporal Havens covering him, Parks crawled into one of the bunkers. Around a bend in the tunnel, his flashlight lit up the terrified faces of several Iraqi soldiers huddled in the dark, their arms upraised, begging not to be shot. Jewell heard Parks scream, “You
hajji
motherfuckers! Get out of the hole!” Soldiers called all Iraqis, civilian or military,
hajjis—
for
hajj
, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. It was not a complimentary term. Parks emerged from the bunker, his fatigues caked with dirt and his pistol trained on a column of Iraqis in filthy green uniforms. The scarlet insignia on some of the men's epaulets identified them as Special Republican Guards.

Several Cyclone tankers ran over and searched the other bunkers, yanking out more Iraqis, some in dirt-encrusted civilian clothes—eighteen in all. The prisoners got down on their bellies. The tankers hog-tied them with plastic handcuffs and rifled through their pockets, tossing aside cigarettes and wallets. Staff Sergeant Anthony J. Smith, a silver-haired tank commander, screamed at them, “Republican Guard? Yes?” One of the men nodded. In English, he mumbled, “Thank you! Thank you!” Smith grinned at him. “This is a good thing for you. You're going to live,” he told him.

A prisoner who had not yet been handcuffed lay on his belly and held out a tiny Koran. Smith motioned for him to flip through the pages to show it wasn't booby-trapped. Then Smith gingerly took the book, inspected it, sealed it in a plastic bag, and gave it back to the prisoner. Still on his belly, the man mumbled his appreciation for this small act of kindness in a war zone.

The Iraqis had been living in filth. The bunkers were dark and strewn with trash and rotting food and flimsy bedding. There were piles of uniforms, berets, and helmets, all of it abandoned by soldiers who had fled. The soldiers had been subsisting on moldy bread and dried dates, but they were well armed nonetheless. The bunkers contained dozens of AK-47s, seven RPG launchers, sixty rockets, forty grenades, and five thousand rounds of ammunition.

Parks stared at the weapons. “They could have easily killed us all,” he said. “They could've hit us before we even knew where they were.” He seemed more mystified than relieved.

A mile to the west, Colonel Perkins had arrived at the gates of Saddam's modern concrete palace across from the Baath Party headquarters on the Kindi Highway—what the brigade called the New Palace to distinguish it from the older and larger Republican Palace two and a half kilometers to the east. The formal name of the structure was the Sujud Palace, a squat, blocky edifice of pale tan concrete built in 1990 for Saddam's first wife. Part of the ornate entry vestibule, built of pink marble and cascading stalactite molding, had been collapsed by a direct hit during the U.S. Air Force bombing campaign the previous week. The palace was deserted when Perkins, in the hatch of his M113 command armored personnel carrier, arrived on the Kindi Highway in the middle of the armored column.

Perkins had just survived a close call on the highway after the column had come down the ramp off the spaghetti junction. A white Toyota pickup had sped toward Perkins's carrier from the rear, its headlights burning in the early morning haze. Captain Shannon Hume, a Bradley commander from the Tusker battalion, spotted the vehicle and ordered his gunner to fire a warning burst of coax. The pickup plowed ahead, closing to within 150 meters of the command carrier, even after a second round of coax was fired into the pavement. Hume ordered his gunner to fire armor-piercing rounds from the 25mm main gun directly into the pickup. The first round slammed into the engine block. The second tore through the windshield, killing the driver, and the third struck the cab and ignited an explosion that lifted the pickup off the highway. A series of secondary explosions convinced Hume that the truck had been a suicide vehicle packed with explosives.

Attack Company, attached to Tusker and Task Force 4-64 from another battalion, searched and secured the palace and grounds. Perkins set up his TAC—his tactical command post—at the top of a palace ramp that led to a covered walkway and the partially collapsed vestibule. The TAC was Perkins's mobile command post, a set of armored communications vehicles parked back to back to form the brigade's battlefield headquarters. From here, Perkins could direct the fight, talking by radio and satellite phone to General Blount at the airport and Lieutenant Colonel Wesley at the brigade operations center eighteen kilometers to the south.

From his perch at the top of the ramp, past the blooming red and pink roses in the palace's manicured gardens, Perkins could see the hazy outlines of Saddam's entire downtown government complex—from the Republican Guard headquarters to the west and Zawra Park to the north. To the east, obscured by haze and smog, lay the Fourteenth of July Bridge and, beyond it, the Republican Palace. Downtown Baghdad seemed to be on fire. Columns of black smoke swirled on the horizon, fed by oil fires set in ditches by Iraqi forces to obscure targets from American warplanes, and by flaming Iraqi vehicles and bunkers destroyed by tanks and Bradleys. Perkins believed he had accomplished his first goal—to create chaos, to disrupt Iraqi defenses with the speed and violence of the armored thrust. He had managed to cut through the concentric layers of defense, and now his tanks and Bradleys were behind the enemy. The second goal was now attainable—to fight from the inside out, to establish a foothold in the center of the capital and push outward and collapse the regime from within.

The Rogue commander, Rick Schwartz, had seized and secured the Rashid Hotel, the convention center, the parade grounds, the tomb of the unknown soldier, the amusement park in Zawra Park, and the adjacent zoo, where some of the Rogue crews later fed hogs to the neglected and emaciated lions. Rogue was also preparing to seize the Ministry of Information, where Schwartz hoped to encounter Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, the troublesome information minister. DeCamp's men were in the process of taking control of the entire palace complex, from the Sujud Palace east through the Fourteenth of July Circle past the bend in the Tigris River and then north to a small stone archway on a palace roadway that led to the broad Jumhuriya Bridge. DeCamp told Perkins he was prepared to spend the night, assuming he could get his battalion's fuel and ammunition safely up Highway 8.