Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  The tank fire was behaving strangely now. When Charlie One Two aborted, its fire protection system kicked in automatically, spraying the fire with Halon, a chemical retardant designed to rob flames of oxygen. That doused the fire for a moment, but soon it came back to life. Diaz jumped down to the left side of the tank and yanked the red emergency fire handle, setting off another round of Halon. The fire smoldered.

  While his crew laid down suppressive fire, Diaz got on the back deck and inspected the rear grill. He opened up the rear compartments and saw that all the VEE packs—ventilation filters made of aluminum and filter paper with stiff, accordion-like folds—were on fire. In the lower compartments, the tank’s batteries were melting. Fuel was pouring onto the highway. It was bad, and Diaz knew it. But he also knew an Abrams was nearly invincible, and the only other brigade tank to catch fire in Iraq had been rescued with minimal damage.

  He heard a whooshing sound. An RPG screamed over his head and slammed into the roadway beyond the median in a flash of sparks and flame. Diaz hollered for somebody to toss him his M-4 carbine. He grabbed it and squeezed off several rounds at a bunker on the left side of the highway a few hundred meters to the northwest. He could see muzzle flashes, and he knew the gunmen inside had a clear shot at the tank. They were well concealed in a series of trenches next to a low wall.

  Diaz’s eyes burned and his throat was raw from harsh chemicals released by the flames. He jumped off the back deck and got his first look at the rear engine housing. Something had left a perfect hole the size of a quarter in the shock housing and punctured the right rear fuel cell in the back of the tank, where the protective steel is only about a quarter-inch thick above the Number Six skirt. The projectile went straight through the hull. It was a one-in-a-million shot—probably a recoilless rifle, Diaz thought. The projectile had to have been fired from below to enter at such a low angle. Diaz had seen recoilless rifles in alleyways, firing up at the elevated roadway, but he never imagined a round from one could actually stop an Abrams.

  And yet, if they could extinguish the fire, Diaz thought, they could tow the tank the rest of the way. He grabbed the tank’s handheld fire extinguishers and doused the flames. The fire went out—then erupted again. Diaz didn’t know it, but fuel was pouring onto the tank’s superheated turbine engine, bursting into flames each time the previous fires were snuffed out. Even after tank engines are shut down, they remain hot for a considerable time.

  By now, the delay was affecting the entire mission. It took a minute or two for word of the disabled tank to move up and down the column, but soon the entire battalion was stopped, spread out and exposed. In his tank, Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz was listening on the radio to events unfolding at the cloverleaf, growing more anxious by the moment. This was the last thing he wanted—to lose momentum, to get bogged down in a street fight with dismounts. But he also was determined not to lose an Abrams. It would be humiliating to have to leave it for the Iraqis, who would certainly haul out foreign TV crews to film a destroyed American tank. He was willing to give the crew a reasonable amount of time to get the fire out and have the tank towed.

  Schwartz decided to take advantage of the delay by ordering his crews to reload. They had expended an astonishing amount of ammunition. They had been shooting nonstop since crossing the checkpoint. Some of the .50-caliber barrels were so hot that they were unable to fire, so the crews replaced them with fresh barrels. Schwartz had half the tanks and Bradleys reload and rearm while the other half continued to lay down fire to keep the bunkers and snipers suppressed. The column was much easier to hit while it was stopped.

  Seventy meters behind the burning tank, the brigade commander, Colonel Perkins, was in the open hatch of an M113, an armored personnel carrier. His driver had stopped under the overpass, but Perkins ordered him to move back onto the open highway. He didn’t want to expose them to anyone hiding on the bridge. A Bradley behind him also pulled back to get a better firing angle on the overpass and to cover the brigade commander’s back.

  Like Schwartz, Perkins did not want to leave an Abrams in the hands of the enemy. The tankers had a code: you don’t leave your crew behind, and you don’t abandon your tank. They were like ship captains; they were willing to go down with their ship. So far, the crew of Charlie One Two was doing all the right things, performing the evacuation and recovery drill just as they had been trained. Perkins was willing to give them a little more time.

  After Diaz had expended his tank’s handheld extinguishers, the order went out for the other tanks to donate their extinguishers. Crewmen hopped out of the hatches, exposing themselves to fire, and delivered armloads of the red extinguishers. Diaz and his crew sprayed the flames. They smoldered, shot back up, and smoldered again.

  On Lieutenant Gruneisen’s tank, Sergeant Hernandez wanted to fire the main gun into the troublesome bunker, but the lieutenant thought they were too close to Diaz’s crew on the ground—the men were stressed enough without the concussive blast of a 120mm round knocking them off their feet. Hernandez was desperate to help. He had made a pact with Charlie One Two’s gunner, Sergeant Jose Couvertier: they would always watch each other’s backs. Hernandez had taught the fire evacuation drill in Kuwait, so he asked Gruneisen if he could go help. Gruneisen hesitated—their tank would be the tow tank once the fire was out, and he would need help. But after a long pause Gruneisen finally said he could handle the tank alone for the moment.

  Hernandez climbed down onto the highway. He was just now getting his first good look at his surroundings. He had seen nothing but desert on the march up from Kuwait, but now he was suddenly in a dense urban area. He was surprised to see homes and apartment buildings and shops. For the first time, he realized that Iraq—at least this part of it—was a modern twenty-first-century nation, with superhighways and late-model cars and congested suburban sprawl. “Oh shit,” he yelled up to the lieutenant, “we’re in an actual city!” He felt hemmed in, claustrophobic.

  Hernandez climbed up onto Charlie One Two and helped Diaz get the VEE packs out. Because the filter packs were burning so furiously, Diaz thought they could rob the fire of fuel by removing them. Hernandez reached down and grabbed one by its heavy aluminum frame. It burned his hand. He cursed and dropped it. Somebody doused it with water from a five-gallon jug. Hernandez and Diaz reached back down and struggled to lift the packs. They were melted and fused together by the heat. Hernandez pounded them with a hammer, broke them apart, and he and Diaz and others lifted them out.

  With the VEE packs removed, the fire settled down. Lieutenant Gruneisen backed up his tank to the crippled tank so that his crewman could hook up the tow bar. Gruneisen thought they were almost out of the predicament. It wasn’t so bad. Even while towing another tank, his own tank could still fire, so they wouldn’t be out of the fight. But as soon as the tow bar was connected, the fire erupted again.

  While the crew unhooked the tow bar, Hernandez got into the fight. He had left his 9mm pistol on his tank, so he picked up an M-4 rifle someone had left on top of Charlie One Two. He fired at the distant bunker, emptying the clip. He yelled at a sergeant who had just pulled up in an armored personnel carrier to assist with the evacuation: “You got another mag?” The sergeant offered Hernandez an ammunition magazine, but first he demanded Hernandez’s empty magazine—for “accountability.” They were supposed to account for their used magazines and turn them in.

  “I can’t fucking believe you asked me that!” Hernandez screamed. They were in the brigade’s worst firefight of the whole war, an Abrams was on fire, and this guy was worried about turning in a used ammo magazine. But the sergeant insisted. Hernandez had to climb down into the turret, where he’d tossed the empty magazine, and fish it out. He handed it over, slammed in the new magazine, and went back to shooting.

  On top of the burning tank, Diaz was out of fire extinguishers. He had pumped about two dozen of them onto the fire, which was stubbornly refusing to die out for more than a few seconds at a time. Then the order wen
t out for the tank crews to give up their five-gallon water jugs, so the crewmen ran through the firefight again, lugging the heavy jugs toward Charlie One Two.

  Diaz knew they had reached the point of desperation now. If the Halon and the fire extinguishers couldn’t kill the fire, why would water be any more successful? It was getting preposterous now. The battalion’s executive officer, Major Rick Nussio, was up on Diaz’s tank, trying to help. Nussio was the number two man in the whole battalion, behind Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz. Yet here he was, getting his eyebrows burned off while helping to pull out the smoking VEE packs, dumping a five-gallon jug on a raging fuel fire, standing on a burning tank in the middle of a firefight.

  The company commander, Captain Conroy, was worried that the situation was getting out of control. When he gave the order for water jugs, for instance, he had not meant for the crews to remain on the ground after delivering the water. He had to order them to get back inside the tanks for cover. Conroy’s tank was in front of the burning tank, providing cover fire while giving Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz a blow-by-blow account over the radio. Schwartz was under pressure from Colonel Perkins to resolve the situation, and that pressure was bearing down now on Conroy. He was a smooth-faced twenty-nine-year-old veteran from upstate New York, an energetic and enthusiastic commander. Despite the pressure, he played for time. He knew they couldn’t keep the column waiting much longer, but he wanted to give the crew every opportunity to save the tank.

  But Conroy was getting conflicting reports from Lieutenant Gruneisen. First the fire was out. Then it was back. Then it was out again. At one point, Conroy had just told Rogue Six—Schwartz—that the fire had been extinguished and they were hooking up the tow bar. Then Gruneisen radioed and told Conroy, “It’s on fire again.”

  “What do you mean it’s on fire? I thought you were putting it out!”

  “I know,” Gruneisen said, “but it caught back on fire.”

  Conroy felt a little ridiculous, updating Schwartz with a situation report that reversed itself every other minute. Gruneisen was getting frustrated, too. He felt the captain was sharpshooting him, trying to instruct him on how to fight a tank fire even though he was following the drill to the letter. Hell, his man Hernandez had taught the fire evacuation course.

  Colonel Perkins was growing impatient. Not only was the entire column stopped and exposed, but the time lag in radio reports was also confusing everybody. It was one of the hazards of combat—radio updates often were outdated at the moment they were issued. From the hatch of his armored personnel carrier stopped on the highway, Perkins was in a position to see the flames. Yet he kept getting radio reports from Captain Conroy, relayed to him by Major Nussio, that the tank fire had been put out. Yet he could plainly see that Charlie One Two was still on fire.

  Then the first suicide vehicle appeared. Conroy saw it, a blue truck hurtling down the on-ramp in front of him. He ordered a machine-gun round fired into the engine block as a warning. The round tore into the truck and the vehicle screeched to a halt. The driver, a man in civilian clothes, stumbled out and put his hands up. Behind him, gunmen in one of the bunkers opened fire. Conroy motioned wildly at the driver to get down. The tanks couldn’t fire on the bunker without hitting him.

  The man dropped down on his belly and one of the tanks fired a main gun round into the bunker. It exploded. Five soldiers emerged from the wreckage, running at the tanks, firing assault rifles. A burst of coax splattered them across the roadway.

  Now a white pickup was roaring across the bridge and heading for the on-ramp. At the foot of the ramp, Conroy ordered his gunner to traverse and fire. The gunner yelled that the hydraulic power had suddenly gone out. He was trying to traverse the main gun with a manual crank. Conroy picked up his M-4 carbine just in case, then radioed a Bradley next to him. “Hey, there’s a suicide truck coming down.”

  The Bradley commander picked it up right away. The truck turned sharply and picked up speed, racing down the ramp. Conroy could see three men inside—one in uniform, one in civilian clothes, and squeezed between them a young man wearing a white headband with black Arabic script. They weren’t slowing down. They were aiming for Conroy’s tank. The Bradley opened up. From his hatch, Gruneisen pumped away with the .50-caliber. Everybody was unloading—coax, 25mm guns. They couldn’t stop it. They kept firing. Finally the pickup shuddered, bounced crazily down the ramp, and slammed into a guardrail a few meters from Conroy’s tank.

  Conroy could see something piled in the pickup bed. He was afraid it was explosives, so he screamed into the radio net for everyone to hold their fire. Then he saw the young man in the headband moving. The other tank crews saw him, too, and everyone thought the same thing: he might be reaching for a remote device to trigger a truck bomb. Conroy gave the order to fire. Rounds slammed into the pickup. It caught fire, and the man in the headband was burned alive.

  Behind Conroy, everyone was furiously pouring water onto the fire inside Charlie One Two, with little success. The burning tank had now consumed nearly thirty minutes of precious time, and the level of fire from both sides of the highway was intensifying. Iraqi military trucks were pouring in from the city, dropping off dismounts.

  Diaz began to resign himself to losing his tank. He hated the thought of it, but he hated even more the thought of losing one of his men in a futile attempt to put out a fuel fire. The fuel had leaked into the turret by now, and the fire was spreading. Everyone decided not to try to tow the tank for fear that the ammunition loaded inside would detonate, threatening the towing tank.

  Diaz had the crew unload the tank, yanking off sensitive items like radios and code boxes and combat manuals. They piled the stuff, along with their rucksacks and weapons, on top of Gruneisen’s tank and inside an armored personnel carrier commanded by the company first sergeant.

  Gruneisen had been pleading with Conroy for just a little more time, and Conroy had been asking Schwartz, who had been asking Perkins. But now Perkins had heard enough. They couldn’t stay exposed any longer. The entire battalion was at risk, not just one tank. It was time to cut their losses. Perkins ordered that the crew prepare to abandon the tank. Charlie One Two would have to be left to fall into enemy hands.

  Diaz heard the order. Despite himself, he agreed with it. It was the right thing to do, given the circumstances. Now, after struggling for so long to save the tank, the crew thought they had to destroy it. They had been trained to destroy any abandoned equipment to keep it from falling into the hands of the enemy. In this case, they certainly didn’t want the Iraqis to recover anything from a late-model Abrams tank. It was decided that Hernandez would try to burn it with thermite grenades—incendiary grenades filled with aluminum powder and metal oxide.

  After the crew had abandoned the tank, Hernandez threw open the ammunition doors to expose the main gun rounds and the ammunition for the coax and .50-caliber machine guns. He cut the fuel lines and turned on the heater. He knew the drill. He had taught the fire evacuation course. He scattered .50-caliber ammunition across the floor of the turret and stuffed a few rounds inside the gun breech. Then he sprayed everything with lubricating oil from the tank’s toolbox.

  The rest of the crew finished loading gear and weapons onto other vehicles. Diaz hauled himself up to the loader’s hatch of Lieutenant Gruneisen’s tank, followed by Diaz’s gunner, Sergeant Couvertier, who took Hernandez’s spot in the gunner’s mount. Private First Class Schafer, Gruneisen’s loader, jumped into the first sergeant’s personnel carrier along with Private First Class Shipley, the driver from the burning tank.

  The order came over the radio to pull out. Colonel Perkins wanted the column back on the move right away. But he didn’t want the tank destroyed; he planned to try to recover it in the next couple of days. He wasn’t aware that the crewmen, following the dictates of their training, believed they were supposed to burn it so that nothing could be recovered by the enemy.

  On top of the stricken tank, Hernandez had on his CVC helmet—his radio he
lmet—but he had no communications. He was on his own now. He was concerned about hustling back to his tank and getting away from the blast before the thermite grenades set off all the ammo and fuel. He was also waving to get the attention of the drivers of two armored personnel carriers behind him, trying to tell them to get out of the way because he was about to blow the tank. Finally, in frustration, he motioned furiously and showed them the thermite grenades.

  Perkins, meanwhile, was getting irritated by the delay. He had ordered the tank abandoned. What was taking so long? He had his driver pull up to the burning tank so he could find out what was holding everybody up. He saw Hernandez up top, clutching a couple of primed thermite grenades.

  “Get off the tank! Now!” Perkins yelled. Hernandez was shocked. No one had ever heard Perkins raise his voice. He was a calm, controlled commander with a dead level demeanor. Now his face was flushed and the veins in his neck were pumping.

  “Leave the tank, get your crew, get off—let’s move on!” Perkins yelled again.

  Hernandez took that as an order to blow the tank. He pulled the pin on the first grenade, lifted his fingers off the spoon—the cocked handle—and flipped it into the breech. He popped the second grenade and dropped into down onto the turret floor. The grenades hissed and smoldered for several seconds, giving Hernandez time to clamber off Charlie One Two and hustle back to his own tank, Creeping Death.