Thunder Run (21 page)

Wolford sent a platoon of infantry to the back of the palace to clear an expanse of sandy ground that led down to the Tigris River. The palace was built on a sharp bend in the river, where the Tigris flowed west toward the spaghetti junction. Access roads on either side led down to a ragged beach, where antiaircraft pits and bunkers had been dug into the sand.

First Lieutenant Jeff McFarland, a tall, rangy West Point graduate, rode in the commander's hatch of a Bradley, making his way down the access road on the east side. He could see the barrels of the antiaircraft guns jutting from the sandy bunkers. Other bunkers contained military trucks and at least one ambulance. All had been abandoned. There were two Russian-made military helicopters on the beach, both also abandoned. Farther down the shoreline were more bunkers, and McFarland could see the helmeted heads of Iraqi soldiers. Behind them were more soldiers, but these men were sprinting away from McFarland, tossing aside their weapons and running up the river road or diving into the thicket of weeds at the water's edge. It seemed ludicrous, but some of them were paddling madly, swimming out into the river toward the opposite bank. Now
that's
desperation, McFarland thought. The river had to be a quarter mile wide, and it was flowing swiftly.

The soldiers in the bunkers opened fire. McFarland had four Bradleys in his platoon, and each one sprayed the bunkers with coax. Instead of staying down, the Iraqis kept popping their heads up—only to have their skulls splattered by the heavy coax roads. It was brutal, but some of the gunners laughed about it. It was a huge joke—a slow-motion Nintendo game, they thought, and not a very challenging one. They wondered if the Iraqis had ever had a single day of training. They seemed so clueless. The bunkers were cleared in less than half an hour.

McFarland was struck by the differences between his men and the Iraqis. He and his soldiers had been through months of training—in the States and in Kuwait. They trained for every conceivable situation, including clearing bunkers on a beach. There was a rigidly prescribed method, and it was ingrained into each man. The soldiers fell instinctively into their roles. They didn't have to think about it. Their movements were choreographed and effortless. The Iraqis, on the other hand, weren't an army—they were an unwieldy collection of individuals, none of them disciplined. They didn't know how to coordinate or maneuver. Each man acted independently of the others. McFarland was just twenty-five, with only three years of service, but he felt that he or any other American infantry lieutenant was better trained than any of the generals directing the Iraqi defenses of the capital.

After the bunkers had been cleared, McFarland ordered his infantrymen out of the Bradleys. They moved forward on foot, methodically searching each bunker, firing M-16 rifles or shotguns down into the dark holes and blowing each one with grenades. They fired into the weeds along the shoreline, hitting some of the swimmers. They dragged soldiers out of the water, some of them badly wounded, and turned them over to the medics for treatment. They gathered up huge piles of weapons and ammunition for the tanks, which lit them up with HEAT rounds. They searched the helicopters, finding leather executive seats and tray tables set with English china and crystal goblets.

At the front of the palace, Wolford finished setting up the perimeter and brought his tank down the access road to check on McFarland's progress. At the corner of the palace, where the road came to a T-intersection and turned right, a wounded Iraqi soldier crawled out onto the roadway. Wolford, in the commander's hatch, never saw him. He was focused on the beachfront. He felt the tank hit something and swung his head to the rear. He saw a man's head and neck, flattened and oozing.

He yelled at his driver, Sergeant Carlos Johnson. “Johnson! Did you see that?”

“No, sir. I didn't”

“Johnson, you didn't see that fucking guy right in the middle of the road?”

“No, sir, I really didn't.”

Wolford felt ill. He didn't blame Johnson. It was just one of those things that happen in combat. There was nothing he could do for the poor bastard now. He continued rolling down to the beach to watch the infantrymen finish off the bunkers.

After the waterfront had been cleared, Wolford brought McFarland's platoon back up to clear the palace itself. They had not taken a single round from inside the huge structure. It was probably deserted, but Wolford wanted it carefully searched and secured nonetheless. The palace had been designated as the operations center for the Tusker battalion and, much later, as the postwar headquarters for an American-led occupation authority.

The infantrymen were in awe as they went from room to room inside the darkened palace. They had never even seen a photograph of the place. Few Iraqis had ever seen it, either; the palace had been sealed off as part of a restricted government zone reserved for top-ranking Baath Party and Republican Guard officials. It took fifteen minutes to walk from one end to the other, down marble hallways and through archways of polished stone. The infantrymen were like tourists, staring up at chandeliers and poking their heads into the marble-tiled bathrooms. There was a wrapped bar of scented Lux soap at every sink, and a fresh box of pink tissues next to each gleaming brass faucet. The toilets and sinks had not been used in a while. There was no electricity or running water.

The entire palace and grounds had been evacuated. The beds in the upstairs bedroom were made up, and blotters and telephones were neatly arranged on the desks in the offices downstairs. There were rotting eggs and vegetables in the stainless steel refrigerators in the various kitchens, and china and silverware in the cupboards. Each main hallway opened into a rotunda, the vaulted ceilings decorated in brilliant mosaic tiles. Doors leading into the high-ceilinged offices and drawing rooms were made of polished wood with inlaid mahogany. There were chandeliers in every room, small ones in the offices and massive fixtures and gilded mirrors in the grand ballrooms. In the main rotunda was a scale model of the palace, across from a huge mural depicting Saddam himself handing a brick to workers during palace construction.

It was a massive facility. Later, Lieutenant Colonel deCamp had his men count the palace rooms. He kept the tally on index cards tucked into his pocket: 142 offices, sixty-four bathrooms, twenty-two kitchens, nineteen meeting rooms, a movie theater, five ballrooms, and one “monster ballroom.” The soldiers figured the palace was a good four football fields long.

After McFarland's men had finished clearing the building, everyone else in the company wanted to have a look. Wolford gave them ten minutes each for a quick tour, a handful of men at a time. They rushed through the halls, snapping photographs and posing under paintings and murals of a smiling, benevolent Saddam. It was only later, when the soldiers had more time to poke around, that they realized that some of what had seemed elegant and classic was actually fraudulent and almost vulgar. A few of the larger chandeliers were made of crystal, but most were made of ordinary glass and many were plastic. Some of the gilded furniture was made not of hardwood but cheap pine painted gold. The marble was expensive, but it was crudely cut and lumpish. The four massive Saddam heads on the roof, it turned out, were plated with bronze that was barely a quarter inch thick. The Republican Palace wasn't exactly Versailles. It was more like Las Vegas, with touches of Graceland.

Out back, the infantrymen found a garish swimming pool and ornate patio area decorated with brightly colored tiles. There was a recreation area with Ping-Pong tables, tennis courts, and exercise bicycles. Down a slope toward the shoreline was a ragged animal pen containing five feeble lions, a malnourished leopard, and an emaciated bear—apparently Saddam's private zoo. Later, some of the scouts dragged a sheep into the pen and watched the lions and leopard struggle weakly with the terrified animal before finally killing it and feasting on the bloody carcass.

Wolford set up a command post in the front driveway and arranged his tanks in a defensive perimeter. The battalion mortar teams set up on the lawn. There had been no enemy contact since the Special Republican Guard soldiers dug into a thick stand of trees across the main road had been killed or driven off shortly after the company's arrival. Wolford could hear explosions in the distance, but the immediate palace complex was quiet. Soldiers sat and smoked cigarettes or posed for photographs in front of the tanks, with the palace as a backdrop.

Wolford turned to his first sergeant and said, “You know, if this is all there is, I think this war is over in a couple of days. I really think this is it.” But after considering the situation for a few more minutes, Wolford had second thoughts. It just didn't seem possible that the Iraqis would surrender the entire palace complex so easily. He was worried about the gap between his battalion and Rogue. He feared the Iraqis would counterattack through the eastern edge of the gap, or down the river road behind the palace, to his rear. He told his tankers to stay alert. This thing wasn't over yet.

TEN

GOD WILL BURN THEIR BODIES IN HELL

C
aptain Jason Conroy had finally set up a secure perimeter around Saddam Hussein's parade grounds and the tomb of the unknown soldier by mid-morning on April 7. He was beginning to believe that things in his little world—his company's stretch of flat terrain between the VIP reviewing stand and the concrete tomb—were very much under control. He eyed the equestrian statue of Saddam and thought about how satisfying it would feel to put a tank round through it.

And then the mortars hit. They kept coming, one after the other, slamming down all around Conroy's positions. One round landed between two of the engineers' armored personnel carriers, exploding with a metallic rattle that peppered the vehicles with shrapnel and shook up the crews. Conroy was amazed that no one was hurt. Then another round splattered shrapnel within twenty meters of one of his tanks. Conroy had to reposition several tanks to move them out of the line of fire. He felt a rising sense of frustration and anger. Mortars always pissed him off—they were light and mobile, and it was hard to return fire. And in this case, Conroy didn't know
where
to return fire. The mortar rounds seemed to be falling out of the sky. People were asking one another over the radio net: “Where the hell are they coming from?”

As the morning wore on, the mortars began to slam down closer to the battalion command post. It had been set up hastily, and under fire, by backing up four command and medical tracks into a tight little circle a short distance from the tomb of the unknown soldier. The vehicles had been positioned around a concrete pavilion with a corrugated metal roof—what turned out to be a public toilet. The stench was overpowering, but the concrete walls afforded some protection from shrapnel.

Now, with the mortars inching closer, the command and control center for the entire Rogue battalion was under threat. It was a crowded place. Wounded American soldiers were being treated inside, and four or five enemy prisoners were under guard. Outside, the bodies of dead civilians had been collected for burial. Normally, the brigade's counterbattery radar would pinpoint the location of enemy mortars and relay grid coordinates for artillery or aircraft to run counterfire on them. But on this morning, the radar was not functioning properly. The Rogue battalion was on its own. Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz arrived on his tank and made it clear to everyone that he wanted somebody to figure out another way to locate the mortars—and quickly. Already, three or four men had been wounded by mortar shrapnel, including a medic and Captain David Hibner, the engineer company commander.

Inside one of the personnel carriers that formed the command center was Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Brown, a U.S. Marine assigned to the battalion to help coordinate close air support. He had ridden up Highway 8 that morning in the carrier commanded by Major Rick Nussio, the battalion executive officer. Brown was thirty-three, a father of two young boys. He had joined the marines fifteen years earlier to avoid working on a car plant assembly line like everyone else in his hometown of Detroit. Brown was a jack-of-all-trades, a graduate of several Marine Corps specialty training schools. One of his skills happened to be crater analysis—the esoteric art of poking through mortar or artillery craters to determine the type and location of enemy fire. In fact, Brown had taken a refresher course in crater analysis aboard the ship that had brought his unit to Kuwait.

Now a round whistled down and smacked into the wall of the toilet, exploding with a loud crack and scattering everybody inside the command center. That was it for Brown. He was starting to get angry now. He had survived the thunder run into the city that morning, killing two Iraqi soldiers with his M-16, and was in no mood to take mortar fire. He decided he was going to personally find out where the hell the rounds were coming from.

With only his helmet and flak vest for protection, and with mortars still raining down, Brown hustled out to inspect the fresh craters outside the toilet walls. The first thing he noticed was how small they were, about twelve to fourteen inches in diameter, no bigger than a pizza pan. He figured the mortars couldn't be any bigger than 60mm—but they still packed enough punch to disrupt Rogue's operations and they were quite capable of blowing a man in half. Another round exploded nearby, and Brown checked that crater, too. From the angle of impact, Brown figured the mortars were being launched from the northwest, about the ten o'clock position as he stood facing north. He went back inside to find Major Rick Nussio, who had a good set of satellite imagery maps. He wanted to see what was to the northwest.

At that moment, another marine from Brown's unit rolled up in an armored personnel carrier. Gunnery Sergeant William “Butch” Deas was riding with a military intelligence team and its Arabic-speaking interpreter, delivering a load of captured Iraqi soldiers to the command center. Deas was just the man Brown needed—he was a bona fide expert at crater analysis. In fact, Deas had taught the crater analysis course aboard ship. He was an easygoing, good-humored thirty-eight-year-old, an eighteen-year Marine Corps veteran from Asheville, North Carolina. He had started out as a military meteorologist, gauging wind speed and direction to adjust artillery fire. He seemed to have an instinctive feel for the trajectory of flying projectiles.

Deas was feeling miserable that morning. Two days before, on Rogue's first thunder run, his personnel carrier had been rocked by RPG and machine-gun fire on Highway 8. Deas had been up in the hatch, working his laser range-finder to locate targets for air strikes on Iraqi positions. The impact knocked him down. He was back on his feet and checking on the vehicle's stunned driver when he realized that blood was gushing from his own face. A piece of shrapnel had sliced through his nose and lodged in the back of his sinus cavity. Bright red blood was gushing from the wound. A medic finally got the bleeding stopped, and that night a surgeon used five stitches to close the hole in Deas's nose. He didn't want to risk moving the metal fragment, so now shrapnel the size of a marble was still lodged in Deas's sinus. It looked like a big pimple on his cheek, right beside his nose.

Now Brown called Deas over and asked him to take a look at the craters. Mortars were still whistling overhead as Deas crouched down in the soft dirt. The Iraqi crews were “walking” the rounds in, each one falling a bit closer. Some were hitting on the pavement, virtually worthless for crater analysis, but some were leaving perfectly preserved little craters in the packed dirt. Deas was intrigued by the craters' signatures. The pattern of spikes from flying dirt and debris suggested low-angle rounds—artillery shells. But Deas also found sections of a mortar fin and bits of shell casing from small mortars, probably 60mm. Mortars are typically fired at high angles—seventy or eighty degrees. But these were flying in at low angles, about forty-five degrees, like artillery. It was an unorthodox way to launch a mortar, but it had the advantage of concentrating rounds in a tight area. Deas had never seen mortars fired that way. He figured the Iraqis were either desperate or woefully trained, or both.

Deas talked it over with Brown. Deas told him he was convinced that the mortars were coming at a very low angle from the southwest, at about seven o'clock. He and Brown both knew the maximum range for a 60mm mortar was thirty-eight hundred meters, but Deas estimated the range of these rounds at about two thousand meters, factoring in the reduced distance due to the low angle. Brown took that as gospel. He had absolute faith in Deas's judgment. Deas couldn't offer anything more; his vehicle was pulling out, and he rushed off, leaving Brown to finish the analysis.

A minute later, a mortar round tore into a clump of trees outside the toilet. Brown went out to have a look and saw that the round had left a perfect hole in one of the trees. It was like an exit wound. Brown stood in the crater and looked up through the hole. He pointed his compass through the opening and shot an azimuth through it. He got a reading, then went back inside to plot the azimuth on Major Nussio's 1:25,000 scale map.

Brown ran a back azimuth, based on his readings from the hole in the tree, drawing a straight line using a coordinate scale and a straight edge. The line ended at an Iraqi military compound two kilometers away—a compound that was already programmed into the brigade's computerized target list. It had not yet been hit by coalition warplanes.

An air force officer attached to the battalion pulled out imagery photos taken during recent overflights by unmanned spy planes. Brown studied the imagery and noticed two rows of palm trees along the edge of the compound, just beyond a tall fence encircling the site. He was certain the mortar tubes were hidden in the palms; the Iraqis had put mortars and artillery in palm groves down south. And besides, the mortars could not have been fired from inside the compound because of the low angle and the height of the surrounding fence. He wrote down the map coordinates for the rows of palm trees.

It was a clean target. It was a clearly defined military compound. There were no civilian structures nearby, and there were no U.S. forces between the command center and the compound. Brown was radioing for approval to bring in an air strike when Schwartz arrived at the command center. He showed Schwartz the compound and palm trees on the satellite maps. “Yeah, go ahead. Go for it,” Schwartz told him. Rounds were still flying overhead. “This is getting tiresome.”

Brown called an immediate request for aircraft and was told that planes were already “on station”—up in the air over Baghdad. Because the mortars were hitting U.S. positions, the request for close air support got top priority. Within five minutes, two American F-18 fighters screamed overhead. Each one launched a pair of two-thousand-pound bombs known as JDAMs—joint direct attack munitions—on the palm trees next to the compound. Everybody inside the toilet building could hear the impact. Minutes later, the artillery unit unleashed a volley that echoed across the parade field.

The mortars ceased.

At the foot of the reviewing stand, Jason Conroy was up in the cupola of his tank, facing the statue of Saddam on horseback. With his perimeter now fairly well secured, he felt it was time to make a statement. The embedded Fox TV crew had arrived at the parade grounds, along with Colonel Perkins and the two battalion commanders, Schwartz and deCamp. Conroy had heard that they were getting ready for some kind of big powwow to determine where the mission was going from here. He thought it was an opportune moment to take down the statue.

He radioed Schwartz. “I got this beautiful statue here,” he said. “Can I blow it up?” Schwartz told him to stand by. He wanted to talk to Perkins, who was busy talking on the radio to division headquarters at the airport.

Perkins had spent the previous half hour trying to persuade General Blount and his assistant division commander for maneuver, Brigadier General Lloyd Austin, that the strategically sound plan was to stay in the city center rather than pull back out. Perkins explained that he had taken a great risk and expended significant combat power to take every single strategic objective the brigade had targeted inside the palace and government complexes. He didn't want to have to fight his way back out. Nor did he want to surrender territory he had just seized. He was convinced that he could collapse the regime from within now that he was literally standing on Saddam's center of power.

The senior commanders at V Corps and, higher up, at U.S. Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, were still envisioning the mission as another thunder run—one of several being planned to slowly chip away at Baghdad's defenses. If any of Perkins's units ended up spending the night, they thought, it would be the companies now setting up at the three main interchanges on Highway 8. V Corps expected Perkins's tank columns to punch to the edge of the city center, then pull out and return to the brigade TOC at the edge of Highway 8 south of the capital.

Inside the international passenger terminal at the Baghdad airport, V Corps had set up its ACP—its assault command post. The day's battle was playing out on military computer screens inside the terminal, where blue icons on digital maps depicted the tank battalions inside the palace complex. The computers were linked to a satellite-transmission system called FBCB2, for Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below. The system was maintained by civilian technicians working for the FBCB2 contractor, Northrop Grumman.

That morning, one of the contractors, Ron Legros, was summoned by a V Corps officer who was staring intently at his computer screen. The officer complained to Legros that the system was malfunctioning. Its icons were showing Second Brigade tanks and Bradleys set up in defensive positions inside the downtown palace complex. That wasn't possible, he said, because he had been told that no American forces would be setting up inside the capital. The officer was tapping on the computer screen, trying to dislodge the blue icons, like someone tapping a stuck speedometer needle.

Legros ran a diagnostic test of the system. It was working perfectly. The officer wasn't convinced. He continued to insist that there were no American tanks inside the city. Legros repeated that the system was in good working order. The officer did not seem inclined to accept the diagnosis, but Legros didn't want to get into a protracted argument. He walked away, leaving the officer still tapping at his screen.

From the airport, General Austin had radioed Perkins about a half hour after Phil Wolford's Assassin Company seized control of the Republican Palace. “Marne Six”—General Blount—“doesn't want to stay,” Austin told Perkins. “The LOCs are too difficult to hold.” Blount was also concerned that the First Marine Division was still south of the city and not yet in position to secure the Second Brigade's eastern flank on the east bank of the Tigris. And Blount wasn't certain he had enough combat power to hold the airport
and
send a quick reaction force to rescue Perkins if he happened to get overrun in the city center.