Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  In issuing his order to Schwartz, Colonel Perkins had said, “The task is to enter Baghdad for the purpose of displaying combat power, to destroy enemy forces—and to simply show them that we can.” Essentially, what Perkins had ordered up was a thunder run, a lightning armored strike straight into the capital. The American military had been conducting thunder runs since the Vietnam War, where the term had originated. The secure artillery fire bases set up in Vietnam in the mid-1960s had been code-named Thunder I, Thunder II, and so on. The Viet Cong, attempting to disrupt U.S. supply convoys plying the highways between the artillery bases, sent out guerrilla teams at night to cut the roads and set up ambushes. To keep the arteries secure, American commanders dispatched columns of tanks and armored vehicles up and down the roads at dusk. The columns moved at high speeds, blasting away on both sides of the highway to draw enemy fire—what the military calls recon by fire. Soon any rapid dash through hostile territory became known as a thunder run.

  As the Rogue column came under fire on the morning of April 5, Schwartz got a good look at the enemy. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. Some were in uniform. Some wore civilian clothes, or a mix of jeans and green army vests, with machine-gun coils slung bandolierstyle over their shoulders. There were Fedayeen Saddam militiamen in baggy black pajamas and—Schwartz not did realize this until later—Syrian mercenaries brought in by buses from Damascus, their pockets stuffed with Iraqi dinars. Many of the Syrians, along with armed Jordanians and Palestinians, were jihadis, Muslim fundamentalists eager to fight a holy war against infidel invaders.

  There was an armored personnel carrier here and there, but no tanks—and probably nothing capable of destroying a tank or Bradley. But the recoilless rifles could put a serious dent in an armored personnel carrier and were a real threat, especially to the combat engineers firing their M-4 carbines from the exposed hatches of the M113 armored tracks. Schwartz had ordered the engineers to fire at snipers in upper-story windows or on rooftops. The tanks had trouble elevating their gun tubes that high. If any of his guys were going to get killed, he feared, it would be the engineers.

  The Iraqis seemed to have no training, no discipline, no coordinated tactics. It was all point and shoot. A few soldiers would pop up and fire, then stand out in the open to gauge the effects of their shots. The big coax rounds from the tanks and Bradleys sent chunks of their bodies splattering into the roadside.

  Nor did the Iraqis seem to appreciate the lethal and accurate firepower of the tanks and Bradleys. The gunmen fired from bunkers, their muzzle flashes exposing their positions. From hundreds of meters away, nearly out of sight, the tank gunners peered through their optical sights and fixed the red aiming dots and crossed hash lines of their reticles—their targeting systems—on the bunkers. They squeezed red trigger buttons on their cadillacs and the bunkers exploded with a heavy whump and a shudder as the HEAT rounds detonated.

  Few of the Iraqi fighters demonstrated much command of basic combat maneuvers. They would bunch up in the alleyways, firing wildly. The tank loaders would shove an MPAT round into the breech and set the proximity fuse for ten or twelve meters. The gunners would fire into the mass of men and the broad arc of the explosion would send their shattered bodies airborne.

  Gunmen crouched behind walls made of brick or cinder block, apparently unaware that not only the tanks and Bradleys but also the tank commanders’ .50-caliber machine-gun rounds could pound the walls to dust in seconds. The gunners watched the fighters’ bodies explode and disintegrate along with whole sections of the walls. Other fighters hid in thick stands of date palm trees, leaping out to launch RPGs. Some of the tank and Bradley gunners had discovered down south that a tree hit with a fifty-pound shell unleashes a wave of flying wood shards. It was wood shrapnel. The gunners tore into the date palms along Highway 8, shattering the trunks and impaling anyone crouched behind them.

  The tanks and Bradleys had a rhythm now, pounding, pounding, pounding. They were killing people by the dozens, but still the enemy kept coming. By now, gunmen were up on the overpasses, firing straight down on the tank and Bradley hatches. More and more vehicles were appearing. There were little Japanese sedans and bulky 1980s-era Chevrolet Caprices, some of them stuffed with husbands and wives and kids staring wide-eyed at the column as the cars zoomed past in the southbound lanes beyond the median. But other cars and pickups were packed with soldiers in uniform or men in civilian clothes blasting away with AK-47s poking out the windows. There were tan military troop trucks and “technicals”—white Toyota pickups with machine guns or antitank rockets mounted in the beds.

  It occurred to the battalion’s S-3, the operations officer, Major Michael Donovan, that the battalion was winging it. They certainly had not trained for urban warfare—much less for this battle, which involved urban areas at the highway’s margins, but also stretches of wide-open cross-country highway. It was like fighting on the New Jersey Turnpike. Donovan, thirty-eight, a slender, sharp-featured man, was the son of a Vietnam veteran, a Citadel graduate, and a student of military history. It dawned on him now that Rogue battalion was rewriting the army’s armor doctrine on the fly. He himself was certainly rewriting the role of an operations officer. His job was planning and organization. But now he was in the commander’s hatch of an Abrams—and firing an M-4 carbine at men in ditches on the side of a superhighway. He thought: Holy shit, I’m the S-3 and I’m shooting dudes with a rifle!

  This was nothing like Donovan had experienced in Operation Desert Storm in southern Iraq a decade earlier. Back then, his tank never got closer than two kilometers to an Iraqi tank. That was a standoff war, distant, removed, impersonal. This war, Schwartz had warned him the night before, would be unique: “This isn’t going to be anything like Desert Storm.” Now, on Highway 8, Donovan could see the faces of Iraqi fighters. His father had told him stories of Viet Cong guerrillas smiling as they fired. Now he was seeing young Iraqi faces, and their dominant emotion was fear. They looked terrified. Donovan spotted several armed soldiers in a bunker, just beyond the guardrail. They were huddled and afraid. He didn’t want to kill them, but he had to. They were the enemy. He opened up with the M-4 and watched them topple.

  More carloads of civilians were beginning to appear, complicating what the tankers called target acquisition. Donovan was worried about civilian casualties—what the military, in its wonderfully clinical articulation, referred to as collateral damage. The civilians were getting into the middle of the fight. The crews were under strict orders to identify targets as military before firing. They were supposed to fire warning shots, then shoot into engine blocks if a vehicle continued to approach. Some cars screeched to a halt. Others kept coming, and the gunners and tank commanders ripped into them. Some vehicles exploded. Others smashed into guardrails, their windshields streaked with blood. The crews could see soldiers or armed men in civilian clothes in some of the smoking hulks. In others, they weren’t sure. Deep down, they knew they were inadvertently killing civilians who had been caught up in the fight. They just didn’t know how many. They knew only that any vehicle that kept coming at the column was violently eliminated.

  At one point, a white minivan sped alongside Donovan’s tank. The driver, a middle-aged man in civilian clothes, made eye contact and gave Donovan a manic “don’t shoot” gesture. Donovan motioned for him to get out of the way. As the van pulled away, Donovan saw that three uniformed soldiers with guns were lying in the rear bed. He radioed ahead to the front of the column. Minutes later, he watched one of the gunners with the fire support team pulverize the minivan as it tried to escape down an exit ramp.

  At the next interchange, Donovan spotted a technical—a red Nissan pickup with a Soviet-made heavy machine gun mounted in the truck bed. A young man was firing the gun at the column, his black hair blowing wildly, as the Nissan sped across an overpass. Donovan screamed, “Oh, shit!” and yelled for the loader to open up with his M-240 medium machine gun. Donovan fired his M-4. They missed, and the technical go
t away.

  The technical vehicles worried Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz because the drivers seemed so fearless and reckless. A few seemed determined to ram the column, driving straight toward the massive tanks and Bradleys before the coax rounds shattered their windshields and sent the vehicles careening into the guardrails. Schwartz was worried, too, about antitank weapons. He thought he had spotted a couple of American-made TOW missiles—tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missiles—lethal weapons designed to destroy armored vehicles including American tanks and Bradleys.

  Still, he felt confident. The lead tracks were radioing back to other tracks, giving them “triggers” to prepare to fire on technicals speeding up from the rear flanks. Schwartz’s air liaison officer was in his ear all morning, radioing with updates from the air force pilots circling overhead, tracking technicals and trucks pouring in from the crowded neighborhoods on either side of the highway.

  The column was moving steadily. Nobody was stopping or even slowing. The tracks were passing on targets, handing off, just as Schwartz had ordered. Every single vehicle in the column had been blistered by RPGs or recoilless rifle rounds and thousands of rounds of small arms, but everybody was still intact and moving. Some of the RPGs had detonated on the gear and rucksacks stored on the tracks’ external bustle racks, and now the stuff was on fire. Most of the crews just let it burn.

  Schwartz was laying down suppressive fire with his .50-caliber, shouting into his radio microphone. He was repeating himself now, but he wanted his message drummed into his soldiers’ brains: “Pass ’em off . . . pass ’em back . . . keep moving . . . keep the momentum.” The column, still intact, still paced and measured, rumbled up Highway 8. The staff officers back at the brigade operations tent could mark its progress on their computer screens, the column represented by tiny blue icons that inched, slowly, inexorably, north toward Baghdad.

  TWO

  THE RIGHT THING

  As their tank approached the final checkpoint on Highway 8, Lieutenant Gruneisen’s crew was blasting the heavy metal song “Creeping Death” by Metallica on speakers inside the turret. They had nicknamed their Abrams Creeping Death because they all loved the song, which they thought evoked something sinister and lethal. That’s how they felt going in that morning. Even so, the mood was oddly buoyant inside the turret—buoyant, but also focused and determined, with just a whiff of sweaty anxiety. The crewmen always cranked up the music going into a mission to jack them up, to blow away the butterflies and get them in the mood to destroy the enemy.

  It seemed to the crew’s gunner, Sergeant Carlos Hernandez, that they had been killing people for a long time, even though it had been barely two weeks. Hernandez had never been at war before, but he had discovered down south that time slowed down in combat. So many things happened all at once that it was almost as though time had to somehow pause and expand in order to accommodate it all. This enabled Hernandez to recall with utter clarity what it was like to kill a man. After the very first time, outside Najaf, he was pumped up and mournful at the same time. That conflicted feeling stayed with him even after he’d killed a few more people, but after a while he just got numb.

  Other guys in his company had different reactions. Once, also outside Najaf, they were pounding an Iraqi bunker complex with tank cannons when they saw an Iraqi soldier leap up, throw down his weapon in disgust, and stalk off. The man had almost escaped the kill zone when an American mortar crashed down right on top of him, a direct hit. The soldier’s body disintegrated. Everybody laughed—not necessarily at the man’s brutal death but at fate, and how a guy who had decided to just walk away from a fight got nailed anyway.

  Hernandez had thought a lot about death back in Kuwait. He was Catholic—not exactly a churchgoer but enough of a Catholic to be familiar with the phrase, “Thou shalt not kill.” He had sought out the battalion chaplain in Kuwait, for he wanted to make sure he was right with God in case he had to kill somebody. He and the chaplain had three or four good heart-to-heart sessions. Hernandez asked why people went to death row in the real world for murder but got medals in war for killing other human beings. The chaplain told him it boiled down to good and evil, and evil had to be conquered. Hernandez asked how the Iraqis justified killing to their God, their Allah. The chaplain sidestepped the question and told him that Saddam Hussein was evil and had killed thousands of his own people. Ending his regime would save lives. He reassured Hernandez and said, “You’re doing the right thing.”

  Hernandez decided then that he was going to do whatever was necessary to keep his crew alive and to get everybody back home safely, himself included. Twenty-seven years old, he was a family man these days, far removed from the restless, drifting kid he had been after he dropped out of high school in Tampa to work as a carpenter on a construction crew. Joining the army had given him structure, and marrying Kimberly, his high school sweetheart, had settled him down. If he had to kill somebody to get home safely to Kimberly and his little boy, Carlos Anthony, and his daughter, Louise Marie, that’s what he would do.

  As soon as the tank crossed the checkpoint on Highway 8, the crew killed the music. The lieutenant shouted, “Test fire weapons!” and Hernandez fired a few bursts of coax, which relaxed him and reassured him that everything was going to be okay. Then he heard the driver tell Lieutenant Gruneisen that the oil filter light was on. He radioed his buddy in Charlie One Two, Jason Diaz—Hernandez and Diaz and their wives played dominoes together back home at Fort Stewart—and told him, “Man, this doesn’t look too good.”

  Then the crews heard Lieutenant Ball’s radio voice at the head of the column announce “Contact!” The gunmen in the bunkers opened up on them, and the crew got straight into the fight. Up in the turret of Charlie One Two, Diaz started working the .50-caliber, pumping rounds into the bunkers and into technical vehicles trying to race up the on-ramps and onto the overpasses. His gunner was hosing down dismounts—foot soldiers—with the coax, keeping them away from the column. Diaz feared dismounts would try to get close enough to the tank to pitch a grenade down the turret.

  They were approaching the first overpass when Diaz felt a concussion rock the tank. He was wearing his CVC helmet, which muffled even the earsplitting booms of the 120mm main tank cannons, but still he could feel a shock wave washing over the turret. It felt like the concussion from a main gun, and he thought that perhaps Lieutenant Gruneisen in Charlie One One—Creeping Death—had pulled too close to him and fired over his back deck.

  Diaz radioed the lieutenant and asked whether he had fired his main gun.

  “Negative,” Gruneisen said.

  “Can you look at my rear and see if anything’s smoking?”

  The air was black with smoke from burning vehicles and bunkers and the exhaust from the Bradleys. Gruneisen couldn’t see much. Diaz’s tank seemed fine.

  “Keep going,” he told Diaz.

  Moments later, Gruneisen heard his ammo loader, Private First Class Donald Schafer, say, “Sir, something has hit One Two.”

  Gruneisen looked again and saw a trail of gray smoke snaking from the rear grill. Some sort of fluid was dripping underneath the tank.

  Inside Charlie One Two, Private First Class Chris Shipley shouted to Diaz from the driver’s hole, “The fire warning light is on!” And then, “The emergency lights are on!” The whole driver’s control panel was flashing.

  Diaz was reporting the malfunction over the company net just as Gruneisen radioed and told him, “It looks like something hit you in the back, right above the grill!”

  Diaz wanted to keep going and try to hobble all the way to the airport, but then Shipley radioed again from the driver’s hole: “The tank just aborted.”

  The engine shut down. They were slowing to a stop. Diaz didn’t want to stop under the overpass and expose the stricken tank to enemy fire from above. He willed the tank forward, shouting at Shipley to try to keep it moving long enough to clear the overpass. They rolled on and came to a rest just north of the bridge, in t
he far left lane of Highway 8.

  Diaz looked at his rear deck. Orange flames were shooting up out of the grill. He couldn’t believe it. He had never pictured an Abrams tank as helpless, as a victim. The entire brigade had had just one tank disabled by enemy fire in the entire war. Two days earlier, a fire in a tank’s auxiliary power unit, triggered by an RPG hit, had been quickly put out and the tank recovered and repaired. Even under punishing conditions and chronic parts shortages, the brigade had lost only 15 percent of its tanks to repairs at any given time. But now the back of Charlie One Two looked like a little bonfire. Diaz cursed and gave the order for the fire drill—the same drill they had practiced endlessly at Fort Stewart and in the Kuwaiti desert. He tried to sound calm as he hollered, “Evacuate tank!”

  The defining characteristic of combat is chaos. No operation plays out the way it was planned. The purpose of training is to bring order to chaos, to condition men to react in prescribed ways, no matter what the emergency. On Highway 8, the battalion’s training kicked in. Diaz’s crew evacuated the tank and took up fighting positions. Gruneisen pulled his tank forward to protect the stricken tank’s northern flank. The Charlie Company commander, Captain Jason Conroy, moved his tank ahead of Gruneisen’s to provide more combat power, and the trail platoon set up a perimeter of armored vehicles to protect the rear.

  Diaz and his crewmen were now exposed. It was a shock to be down on the smoky highway, out of the protective cocoon of the tank and its thick steel hull. The air smelled of cordite and burning fuel. It stung their nostrils. The crewmen heard rounds pinging off the sides of the tank and realized they were under fire. Gunmen in the crease of the overpass, where the bridge abutment meets the underside of the elevated runway, were firing down on them. Shipley, the driver, had fired so many M-4 carbine rounds that he was out of ammunition. He saw an AK-47 on the roadway, picked it up, and got it to work. He was firing away toward the overpass when one of the tanks traversed and cut down the gunmen in the crease with a burst of coax.