Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  “No, seriously, something hit me in the head,” he told Conroy. He removed his helmet. There, lodged into the Kevlar shell, was a bullet. England’s gunner checked him out to make sure he hadn’t been hit. There was no blood. England’s head hurt, but he was fine.

  “You all right?” Conroy’s voice asked.

  “I guess.”

  “Keep moving,” Conroy told him.

  After listening to the exchange, Gruneisen decided to close up shop. They were back in the column now, and the battalion had plenty of firepower without his tank. He didn’t want to risk the life of a single crewman by trying to defend a crippled tank with just one jammed machine gun. His depleted two-tank platoon had had one tank burn up and the other practically shot out from under them. They were lucky to be alive.

  The lieutenant gave the order: “Shut the house. Button up.” Creeping Death was out of the fight.

  FOUR

  PUPPY LOVE

  The rocket-propelled grenades exploding against the steel hulls of the tanks and Bradleys on the airport highway produced a terrifying metallic racket, as though somebody were swinging a heavy shovel against a metal garage door. To the crewmen inside, it sounded as though the hulls were cracking. But for all the earsplitting explosions, the hulls suffered only a few nasty dents and abrasions. It was the gear stored in the external bustle racks that took the brunt of the damage. The tankers’ rucksacks and duffel bags were like shock absorbers, muffling and swallowing the explosions, and in some cases bursting into flames. Several tanks appeared to be on fire, but actually it was just the tankers’ personal gear going down in flames. It was wrenching enough for the tankers to risk their lives on this thunder run into Baghdad. Watching their underwear and CD players and letters from home go up in smoke seemed like a gratuitous insult.

  At least four RPGs had slammed into the third tank in the Rogue column, an Abrams commanded by Sergeant First Class Ronald Gaines, a short, wiry, sunburned NCO from Ohio. Each grenade had rocked the big tank before bouncing off and exploding in the dirt along Highway 8. Gaines had followed Lieutenant Ball’s lead tank through the spaghetti junction to the U-turn and now was rolling west toward the airport. After the storm of RPGs on Highway 8, it seemed to Gaines that the fighting had suddenly tapered off. The gunshots and explosions had nearly ceased. He began to think that they had survived the worst of it—that they were nearly home free, that the enemy had cut and run. Then he realized that he had somehow jostled the switch on his communications helmet that cuts off all outside noise. The fight was still very much in progress—he just couldn’t hear it. He flipped the switch, and the thump of the battle resumed, louder than ever.

  Somewhere just west of the spaghetti junction, Gaines heard a tremendous whump on the right side of the tank. The crew in the tank behind him saw an orange fireball erupt, and then a spray of gray smoke. An RPG had bounced off the tank’s external smoke grenade storage box, then ripped into the smoke grenade launcher. The whole side of the tank was on fire. Gaines had already endured the desperate thirty-minute attempt to put out the fire on Charlie One Two; he wasn’t going to take a half hour to snuff out the flames on his tank. He grabbed a handheld fire extinguisher from inside the turret, leaned out of the commander’s hatch, and sprayed the flames with a burst of white foam. To his amazement, the fire sputtered and died. The smoke grenades and some of the gear in the bustle racks had burned, but there was no damage to the tank itself. Gaines noticed that the nose cone from the RPG was still embedded in the launcher, and this detail struck him as both curious and noteworthy—a war story to tuck away for later.

  There was another curiosity up there on the bustle rack. Somewhere in the scorched rack was the crew’s lucky stuffed dog—actually, Staff Sergeant Joe Bell’s lucky dog, Puppy Love. It was one of those squeeze toys that played a song. Bell’s wife had mailed it to him in Kuwait for Valentine’s Day from back home in Knoxville, Tennessee. The couple owned Yorkshire terriers, and this toy dog was a Yorkie. It played the tune “Puppy Love.” Bell, the tank’s ammo loader, had perched the toy on the bustle racks, figuring that if the dog survived, they would survive, too.

  This was the fifth RPG to slam into the tank that morning, and now Bell feared the crew’s luck was running out. The enemy fire was relentless. His crew had destroyed so many bunkers with main gun rounds that they were now completely out of HEAT and MPAT—the rounds best suited for collapsing bunkers and killing everyone inside. Their coax was jamming, too. In fact, the coax guns on Lieutenant Ball’s tank and on Staff Sergeant Stevon Booker’s tank were jamming, too. After considerable radio discussion, the crews realized that the problem wasn’t the coax guns. It was the men operating them. It finally dawned on them that the brass trays—the metal hoppers that collected spent coax shells—were overflowing. Until they were emptied, the backup of shells would continue to jam the coax guns. The crews had never encountered the problem because they had never fired enough rounds to fill the hopper—not in training exercises, not during battles in the southern Iraqi desert, and not even on the Turkey Shoot against the Medina Division the day before. They dumped the trays on the turret floors, and the coax guns resumed firing with no further problems.

  Just ahead of Sergeant Gaines’s tank, on a tank designated Alpha One Three and nicknamed Another Episode, Staff Sergeant Booker was having .50-caliber problems that were not so easily resolved. The big machine gun kept jamming. Finally, it quit altogether, leaving Booker with a dilemma. Normally, he could have fired the .50-caliber with a remote trigger on the elevation handle even while protected inside the hatch. But now, with the gun malfunctioning, the tank would have one less weapon firing if Booker stayed down in the hatch. He decided instead to stay up top with his M-4 carbine. It meant he was exposed to enemy fire, but Booker wanted to keep dismounts away from his tank and Gaines’s tank in front of him. He gave up on the .50-caliber. When the column stopped on Highway 8 to deal with the burning tank, Booker gave all his .50-caliber ammunition to another crew, trading it for M-240 and M-4 rounds.

  Booker was a legendary figure in the battalion, and one of its most popular NCOs. He was a big, loud, demonstrative army lifer who loved being in the middle of things. He was the master of the outrageous wisecrack and the profane putdown, the kind of guy who could get even the officers laughing out loud, despite themselves. Booker’s men were fond of him, though he drove them hard. They joked that you always heard Booker before you saw him. His booming voice was the first thing they heard every morning and the last thing they heard when they sacked out at night. None of them had been surprised to see Sergeant Booker up and exposed, pumping his .50-caliber, looking like he was enjoying himself.

  At one point, Lieutenant Ball was stopped under an overpass and had his driver back up to a safer position. The driver didn’t see Sergeant Booker’s tank approaching, and the two tanks collided so hard that Booker’s tank actually rode up the rear of Ball’s tank. Ball said, “Oh, shit, I think I just hurt Three”—Booker. He got on the radio: “Sergeant Booker—you okay?” There was a long delay. Ball’s gunner, Sergeant Jeffrey Ellis, braced for an outburst from Booker. He knew Booker better than just about anybody in the unit. They had roomed together back at Fort Stewart. Booker could get prickly if things went wrong. Finally, Booker’s voice came over the net. He sounded calm. “I’m good, sir. Don’t worry about me. I’m with you,” he said.

  Ellis realized that his former roommate, the man he called Book, was in the zone, that state of intense concentration brought on by sustained combat. Booker was a rabid Pittsburgh Steelers fan, and he tended to view combat as a higher form of athletics. Like an athlete, he got himself keyed up for game day. The thunder run was game day for the tankers. Booker loved action—he embraced it. When the company had received word the night before that they were going into Baghdad, Booker had punched Gaines in the arm and said, “About damn time!” Some of the younger soldiers were anxious and afraid, and Booker had tried to calm them. He reminded them that they would be i
nside Abrams tanks—virtually indestructible machines equipped with the most lethal weapons systems on any armored vehicle in the world. It was the enemy who should be worried, Booker said, not them. And Baghdad, he told them, was their ticket home. Once they took the capital, they were as good as on the plane back home to Fort Stewart.

  That was Booker’s public persona—brash, swaggering, confident. But sometimes he revealed a more reflective side. In his rare quiet moments, he talked about his mother and his girlfriend; he sent money to both back in the States. And early that morning, after grabbing a few minutes of sleep before guard duty, Booker had pulled aside his gunner, Sergeant David Gibbons, and confided that he’d had a nightmare about dying in battle. It disturbed him, he said, burdening his mind with nagging doubts he could not articulate. He told his loader, Private Joseph Gilliam, the same thing. Gilliam and Gibbons weren’t sure if Booker was serious or just having a little fun with one of his elaborate put-ons. With Sergeant Booker, you could never tell.

  Now, on the airport highway, Booker seemed consumed by the fight. He was leaning out of the hatch, firing his M-4 at dismounts crouched behind trees and shrubs along the roadway. Gilliam was up, too, working the loader’s M-240 machine gun. He liked the way Booker allowed him to choose his own targets, unlike some tank commanders who tried to micromanage each shot. And Booker would talk to him, asking how he was doing, what he was hitting, like an assistant football coach working the sidelines. But now Booker yelled at Gilliam to get back down in the hatch. Rounds were pinging off the tank’s armor. They had been fortunate so far, surviving two RPG hits on the right side. They had also withstood a second jarring collision when the driver accidentally backed into another tank, shearing off a bustle rack and losing Gilliam’s rucksack with all his personal gear. But now the rate of enemy fire was intensifying.

  Gilliam didn’t want to leave his tank commander up there alone, and he protested. He was twenty-one, stocky and round-faced, a sweet-voiced young man from Raleigh, North Carolina, who had joined the army to get off the streets and inject some order and discipline into his life. Gilliam was in awe of Booker, who was thirty-four and who had treated Gilliam like a favored younger brother during the two years they had been together. Booker told Gilliam again to get down in the hatch, and Gilliam obeyed. As he climbed down, he heard Booker telling him, “I don’t want to die in this country.” They were just a few kilometers from the airport entrance.

  Down in the loader’s hatch, Gilliam could hear Booker’s M-4 popping steadily. Suddenly Booker leaned down into the turret, sweaty and grinning. He hollered at Gilliam, “I just got four of ’em! I’m a baaad motherfucker!” Gilliam laughed and went back to jamming tank rounds into the breech for the gunner, Gibbons.

  Gibbons was picking up the pace on the main gun, scanning for bunkers on his thermal sights, flicking the laser with his thumb, then sending a HEAT round on its way with a soft squeeze of his fingers against the cadillac triggers. In some strange way, he enjoyed what he was doing. It was fascinating to see the targets come up on the thermals, to watch an enemy soldier’s sweaty face glow light green against the dark green background, to see the hot exhaust from an enemy troop carrier define the milky green rectangular shape of the vehicle. Gibbons and some of the other gunners had talked the night before about the exhilaration they had felt during the Turkey Shoot, when abandoned Iraqi tanks and artillery pieces just sat there, plump and gorgeous, and the searing HEAT rounds popped the tops on the tanks, sending the turrets spinning. It was just a big, expensive video game—and so much easier than in training. They had trained for desert warfare, where the targets were two or three kilometers away. The targets Gibbons was hitting now were just a few hundred meters away, so close that on the magnified scope the dismounts and bunkers seemed to be right next to the tank. Some of the dismounts would stand up right in the open. Gibbons would cut them in half with the coax and he and Booker would shake their heads and mutter, “What the hell are these guys thinking?”

  Gibbons was twenty-two, a tall, gangly young man, more mature than most guys his age. He had been married for three years to a soldier in an army signal outfit. He had known Booker for two years, serving with him in Bosnia. He was impressed with the way Booker networked, the way he seemed to know everybody. Once, in Bosnia, Gibbons ran into a problem with his leave days. The bureaucracy said he had used them all up, but he knew he hadn’t. Booker told him he’d take care of it. He talked to somebody who knew somebody and suddenly the problem was solved and Gibbons got his leave.

  Now Gibbons was working the main gun and the coax, trying to keep the enemy fire off the column, and off Staff Sergeant Booker up top. As he concentrated on his thermal sights, he felt something bump him from behind. Often, Booker’s feet would poke Gibbons in the back as Booker lowered himself into the hatch to reload or shout out orders. An Abrams tank commander stands above and behind the gunner, who fires from the gunner’s seat on the floor of the turret. Gibbons felt the bump and heard Gilliam scream and curse. He glanced back at Gilliam, who had a stricken look.

  Gilliam had been gathering up M-240 rounds to get back up top and help Booker suppress enemy fire. He had felt something heavy drop next to him and assumed Booker was coming down for more ammunition. Then he saw Booker’s face. Part of it was gone—the whole cheek and jawbone. Booker’s green Nomex jumpsuit was slick with blood. A heavy-machine-gun round had torn off part of his face. Gilliam let out a stream of curses. He didn’t know why he was cursing. It just happened. He couldn’t stop cursing.

  Gibbons twisted around in the gunner’s seat and saw Booker’s ruined face and the mass of blood. Booker was slumped awkwardly, like someone had folded him over. Oh, God, Gibbons thought, Sergeant Booker is dead. Gibbons was stunned—and it seemed to him that Gilliam was in a state of shock. Booker’s blood was all over Gilliam’s Nomex. Gibbons pawed at Gilliam, checking for wounds. “You okay?” he asked. Gilliam seemed to refocus. “I’m good,” he mumbled, but Gibbons wasn’t so sure.

  Gibbons got on the platoon net and radioed his platoon sergeant, Gaines, in the tank behind him. Gaines heard the call from Alpha One Three, but it was distorted by static. He thought it was Booker calling. Then he thought he heard a panicked voice say, “Three has been hit! Three is down!” Booker’s down? Gaines radioed back, hoping to get a better transmission. He asked Gibbons for a sit rep, a situation report. Gibbons repeated, “Three is down.”

  Gaines called it up on the company net, to Captain Hilmes, the company commander. He said, very calmly, “Red Three is dead.”

  Monitoring the net in his armored personnel carrier, Major Nussio heard Hilmes report a TC KIA, a tank commander killed in action. It had to be bad, Nussio thought, for them to come right out and say a TC was dead. Usually they couched it, saying only that they had a man down. Nussio went through a process of elimination, trying to figure out who it was. Then Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz, the battalion commander, came on the net and asked for a name. “Alpha One Three,” Hilmes said. He paused and added, “Sergeant Booker.”

  Men in combat feed off information. It sustains them. They want to know—they need to know—what is happening beyond their own intensely personal fields of fire. They crave any scrap of information that might somehow bring the broad sweep of the battle into focus. On this day, on this highway, the information flowing from the radio net had been relentlessly upbeat, a steady beat of kill reports: a bunker destroyed, dismounts down, a technical absolutely wasted. Some of the tankers felt the same giddy rush as the day before, when they had lit up the Medina Division on the Turkey Shoot.

  The battalion—in fact, the whole brigade—had not lost a single man to enemy fire on the march up from Kuwait. Now, on the platoon net and then on the company net, came the first word of a KIA. Booker was down. Everybody knew Booker. He was larger than life, and it did not seem possible that such a man could be gone, and so swiftly. The information dropped on the crews like a hammer blow. The radio net fell silent.

  I
nside Alpha One Three, Gilliam and Gibbons considered trying buddy aid—the basic emergency first aid taught to all tankers: keep air passages open, apply pressure and elevation for bleeding. But it was hopeless. Booker didn’t seem to be breathing. The bleeding was massive. Over the radio, Gibbons told Gaines, “He’s dead.” Gaines ordered Gibbons to prep the tank for a three-man crew. He was now the tank commander.

  Gibbons knew he had to take control of the situation. They had trained for this day—trained for the sudden death of any crewman. They were still rolling. He had to reconfigure the tank so that he could get in the commander’s hatch and still fire the main gun and coax with the override joystick. That was going to be difficult with Sergeant Booker still there in the turret. Gibbons would have to work around him because there would be no medevac until they reached the airport. He was trying to focus, trying to set aside the grief and shock he felt for his tank commander, a man he idolized—to put those feelings in a reservoir inside him and hold it for later. He knew he had to concentrate on getting the rest of the crew to the airport alive. Gaines was talking him through it over the radio, telling him to stay calm and let his training take over.

  Hilmes called Gaines and asked if he was certain Booker was dead. “Does he have a pulse?” he asked. Hilmes did not doubt the crew’s competence. He had always been impressed with the crisp, accurate reports delivered by Gaines’s platoon, but it was his job to make sure they were absolutely certain about something as serious as a KIA.

  As Gaines got back on the radio with Booker’s crew, Gibbons heard Booker struggling to breathe. He was gurgling and wheezing. Gibbons told Gaines, “He’s trying to breathe!” He requested a medevac.