Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  Further back in the column, medical Specialists Joe Hill and Shaun Holland were in a medical track, a specially outfitted M113. Over the net, Gaines told them Booker was still breathing and ordered them to speed to the front of the column. Hill thought it was like the Red Sea parting, the way the tanks and Bradleys and tracks gracefully swung to the side to let the medical track push past them. They drove crazily, spinning and heaving. They found Alpha One Three, jerked to a stop, and dropped the rear ramp. Hill and Holland sprinted for the hatch, where Gibbons and Gilliam were struggling to lift Booker out of the narrow hatch. They heard automatic rifle rounds pinging off the tank hull.

  The column was still stopped to deal with Booker when an RPG ripped into the front of a Bradley in Captain Burris’s company. It hit just above the driver’s hatch and exploded, blowing off the hatch. The impact stunned the driver, Private First Class Sean Sunday. His skin burning, he leaped out of the driver’s hole and slammed awkwardly into the roadway, breaking his leg. He was in the middle of the road, exposed to enemy fire. Staff Sergeant Jeffery Empson jumped out of the trailing Bradley and dragged Sunday off the highway. He got him into the rear hull of the stricken Bradley and ordered one of the infantrymen—a soldier Empson knew had trained as a driver—to take over for Sunday in the driver’s hole.

  Now Schwartz had two medevacs to deal with. His entire column was halted and stretched along the airport highway. They were only a couple kilometers from the airport, but they were being hammered by the most intense barrage they had received all morning. They had also entered the most perilous stretch of terrain on the seventeen-kilometer journey, with trees and foliage obscuring the fields of fire along the median strip and on either side of the highway. Schwartz was desperate to get moving, and he pressed his commanders. The Bradley crews responded. They managed to get the damaged Bradley started again while Sunday was being stabilized. In a matter of minutes, the Bradley was back in the column and ready to haul Sunday to the airport for a medevac.

  On his command track, Colonel Perkins had lost radio contact with Lieutenant Colonel Schwartz. He was concerned about the column’s getting trapped and surrounded on the highway. He had his driver pull up behind Booker’s tank, where the medical vehicle had just arrived. He was impressed that the driver of the medical vehicle had positioned the track in the line of fire to protect the medics and crewmen trying to evacuate Booker. A couple of medics were on top of the vehicle, firing M-16s.

  Because of all the buildings along the airport highway, Perkins also had lost radio contact with the brigade command post south of the city. He radioed directly to the division command center at the airport and delivered a situation report to his superiors. He was confronted with a question he had not anticipated: “Do you want to turn back?” Perkins was stopped on the highway, under fire, and in danger of having sections of his column picked off and isolated. But he had no intention of turning around. He considered the thunder run the opening salvo in the battle for Baghdad. To turn back now would not only undermine the brigade’s morale but, more important, provide the Iraqi regime with a psychological and strategic victory. He radioed back and told the division that he was moving forward.

  On Alpha One Three, Gibbons had found the shoulder strap on Booker’s Nomex jumpsuit and was yanking on it, trying to hand Booker off to medics Hill and Holland, who had scrambled up onto the main deck. Gilliam was trying to help, but he had climbed out of the turret without his helmet. Even in this situation, under fire and trying to get treatment for his mortally wounded sergeant, Gibbons surprised himself by noticing such a thing. He told Gilliam to go back down and get his helmet.

  Holland asked for Booker’s condition. “Half his face is gone and his stomach is hit, too,” Gibbons said. Hill took a look and recoiled. It was awful. The medics got Booker out of the turret and onto a litter inside the medical track. They took off again, speeding for the airport, where the first sergeant had radioed ahead for a medevac helicopter. Booker was barely breathing. He had suffered massive wounds. Hill tried to take his pulse but most of Booker’s right thumb and wrist was gone. The pulse on his left wrist was faint. Hill and Holland tried and failed to get an air tube down Booker’s throat. They cut into his throat and inserted a tube, but it wasn’t helping. Booker’s lungs were full of blood.

  A call came over the radio. The physician’s assistant, Captain Mike Dyches, was coming up in his medical track. He would take over. Hill was relieved. Captain Dyches was high speed—he knew his stuff. If anybody could save Booker, the medics thought, it was Dyches. They stopped their track and the physician’s assistant’s track pulled alongside. Hill and Holland wanted to move Booker into Dyches’s track, but when they lowered the ramp gunfire erupted from all directions. Forget that, Hill thought. Dyches and a medical sergeant dove into the back of Hill’s track. The hatch slammed shut and they took off again for the airport. There wasn’t much even Dyches could do for poor Booker. He tried, but Booker was in terrible shape. Finally Dyches got on the radio and said they could slow down now because Sergeant Booker was gone. The medics got the body bag out. Dyches didn’t know what else to do, so he covered Booker’s face and held his hand all the way in to the airport.

  As soon as Gibbons and Gilliam had reconfigured Alpha One Three for a three-man crew, the driver, Private First Class Aaron Hofer, got the tank going again. Gilliam was numb and in shock, but he got back up on the loader’s M-240 machine gun and prepared to get back to killing dismounts. That’s what he would do, for the crew and for Sergeant Booker. Gilliam was up next to Gibbons, this time with his helmet on. First Sergeant Robert Hay, who had pulled up his track to lay down protective fire for Alpha One Three with his .50-caliber, saw Gibbons in the commander’s hatch, trying to compose himself and take charge. Hay felt a little burst of pride. Gibbons was just a kid, but he was performing like a pro. Hay caught Gibbons’s eye and gave him a thumbs up. Gibbons tried to look focused and decisive, but he still managed to nod and return the thumbs-up.

  Alpha One Three’s ordeal on the airport highway—the hit on Sergeant Booker, the initial KIA report, the thrall of hope when Booker’s breathing resumed, the final crushing diagnosis by the physician’s assistant—had all played out over the radio inside Charlie One One. Everybody in Lieutenant Gruneisen’s makeshift crew knew Booker. You couldn’t help but know Booker if you were in the Rogue battalion. He wouldn’t let you not know him. It had been a miserable run for the crew, but until that moment no one had died—and now they heard that Sergeant Booker hadn’t made it. Inside the turret, protected from the fight, no one spoke for several long minutes.

  They were coasting into the stretch run, hatches locked down, listening to the steady beat of small-arms rounds against the hull, the shattering booms of main tank rounds and the thudding of Twenty-five Mike Mike from the Bradleys. The inside of the turret stank of stale sweat and the rotten-egg odor of the expended cannon aft caps. Diaz and Hernandez were smoking cigarettes, just sitting there, dejected and lost in thought. The first sergeant’s voice came over the net: “We’ve got casualties.”

  At first, it sounded as though he were talking about Booker and Sunday. But those casualties were from Alpha Company and the Bradley company. This was First Sergeant Jose Mercado—their first sergeant, from Charlie Company. Captain Conroy couldn’t hear him clearly and asked Mercado to repeat the transmission.

  “Casualties,” Mercado said again—in a PC, a personnel carrier.

  Goddam, Gruneisen thought. Their guys—Chris Shipley, Diaz’s original driver, and Don Schafer, Gruneisen’s original loader—had been transferred to Mercado’s PC.

  A moment later, Mercado was back on the net: “Shipley and Schafer.” Schafer had been hit in the arm and back, Shipley in the eye and arm. Nobody could believe it. It was like they were some kind of magnet for tragedy—the one-in-a-million shot on Diaz’s tank, the raging fire, the wrong turns, the lost gear, and now Shipley and Schafer, who had started the run tucked safely inside tanks, not PCs. Grunei
sen felt a sudden stab of anger and regret, and he cursed out loud. He felt helpless; Shipley and Schafer were his guys, and he wasn’t there to help them. Inside the turret, he kept muttering, Damn, damn, damn.

  Shipley and Schafer had been standing in the open rear hatch of the first sergeant’s personnel carrier, firing on roadside bunkers with their M-4 carbines. Earlier, both men had helped try to put out the tank fire on the highway while also shooting at approaching Iraqis. They had jumped aboard the personnel carrier as the column was pulling away after Charlie One Two had been abandoned. Shipley, who had been the driver on the abandoned tank, had no other ride. But Schafer, the loader on Lieutenant Gruneisen’s tank, had been headed back to that tank when he saw that some of the Charlie One Two crewmen had already hopped aboard and filled all the spots. He felt that he had been wrongly usurped, and he was still angry about it as he fired from the personnel carrier. He was a tanker, and he wanted to be with his tank.

  Schafer was on the personnel carrier, squeezing off a burst from his M-4, when something smacked him in the back. It felt like the kind of hard slap someone gives you when they try to surprise you and then run away. Then something went through his arm. He cried out, “Ow, my arm! What the hell!” Instinctively, Schafer reached out to steady himself and grabbed Ron Martz, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter standing next to him. Schafer lifted his arm, and Martz held it. The reporter saw a tiny hole in Schafer’s armpit, with crimson blood spurting from the wound. Schafer shouted, “I’m hit!” and he collapsed into Martz’s arms. Both men tumbled to the deck.

  Schafer saw that Shipley had been hit, too. Shipley was facedown on the deck, bright blood pumping from his face. He looked absently at his hands and saw blood gushing over them and failed to comprehend who was doing this to him or why. It was his last conscious thought, and he remembered nothing beyond that moment. An AK-47 round had torn through Shipley’s Kevlar helmet, sliced through his head, and exploded out his right eye. Martz yelled for a medic—the first sergeant’s vehicle was the medical track. Shawn Sullivan, a medic who had been firing his own weapon over the right side, bent down to help Shipley.

  An AK-47 round had struck Schafer in the back, just off his spine. It had torn into his lung, out his side, and through his upper right arm, shattering the humerus. Schafer was on top of Martz, who had reached across him to hold Shipley’s hand. Schafer asked Martz to hold his hand, and Martz squeezed it with his free hand. Sullivan was trying to treat both wounded men, but his medical equipment was trapped beneath a load of gear that had tumbled onto the deck during the firefight.

  Schafer was having difficulty breathing. He told Martz he was about to black out.

  “No! No!” Martz yelled. “Keep talking!”

  Martz was no medical expert, but he knew enough to keep an injured person alert to stave off shock. He told Schafer that he was headed back to cold beer and cute nurses and a hot shower. Schafer said, “Sounds good to me,” and he managed a weak smile.

  Sullivan found a pressure dressing for Shipley’s head wound, then found something to bandage Schafer. He yanked Schafer to his feet in order to get his combat vest off and cut off his uniform. Schafer bellowed in pain. Sullivan got a bandage on him, tied it with a strip of cloth torn from Schafer’s uniform, and set him back down.

  Martz squeezed Schafer’s hand again, and he squeezed Shipley’s, too. He felt fairly useless, and he regretted that he had not taken the time back in the States to enroll in a combat lifesaver’s course. All he could do now was to keep squeezing and talking, squeezing and talking, as the carrier lumbered toward the airport.

  Behind the PC, in Charlie One One, Gruneisen and his crewmen listened later to First Sergeant Mercado trying desperately to guide the track to the airport and a waiting medevac helicopter. The vehicles in the column were still being pounded by small arms and RPGs, but they managed to swing over to one side to let the first sergeant’s track speed past them. But once Mercado reached the airport, no one could tell him over the radio how to reach the tarmac where the helicopters had landed. Mercado described a long wall that was blocking his way. He kept asking how to get around it. Nobody could tell him.

  Later, listening to Mercado’s pleas over the radio, Gruneisen and his men were frantic. They were overcome by feelings of helplessness and rage. Shipley and Schafer were hurt and bleeding—and nobody could find the medevacs. They rolled on, listening and wondering if their bleeding crewmates would ever reach the helicopters.

  In the lead tank, Lieutenant Ball was approaching the airport entrance. He and his gunner were still firing at dismounts in the tree lines and on the overpasses. They were almost home free. Ball was relieved that they had not encountered more obstacles. All the platoon leaders had been warned by the S-2, the intelligence guys, to be prepared for mines or obstructions, but it seemed to Ball that the Iraqis had been caught by surprise and had not been expecting a column of tanks and armor to roll right up the main highway into Baghdad.

  So far, all the Iraqis had thrown at them in the way of obstacles were a few RPG rounds wrapped in rags. They tossed them onto the highway, apparently believing that they would somehow explode and disable the American vehicles. The tanks and Bradleys rolled right over them, setting off muffled explosions, like polite little belches. The tracks lumbered on, unscathed.

  At the final overpass before the airport, Ball saw something in the highway. As he rolled closer, he realized that the Iraqis had dragged concrete highway dividers across the westbound lanes. They were the kind of dividers he had seen on American interstates—what some people called Jersey dividers, after the New Jersey Turnpike. The dividers were about three and a half feet tall and perhaps a foot thick, with a broad, tapered base. Enemy dismounts and RPG teams were dug into fighting holes on either side of the columns supporting the overpass, and on the bridge were more gunmen. It was an ambush.

  Ball slowed and radioed back a description of the barriers to Captain Hilmes, who asked if there was any way to bypass them. Ball looked again. The barriers were arranged in solid rows, blocking access to the shoulders on either side of the highway. It was a fairly effective blockade, a rare indication that someone in the Iraqi military actually had come up with something approaching a defensive strategy. Whether the blockage was designed to keep the Americans from breaking out of the airport to the west, or to block the Rogue battalion’s charge from the east, was anybody’s guess.

  “There’s no bypass,” Ball told Hilmes. “I’m going to ram it and try to create a lane.” He thought the tank’s seven-ton plow, with its protruding lip and massive steel teeth, might hit the obstacle with such force that it would separate the barriers and allow the tank to crash on through. It seemed to him that the situation dictated brute force and a direct approach. Ball ordered his driver to speed up to forty kilometers per hour and look for “a soft spot.” It was an odd choice of words, but it was the only way Ball could think of to describe any potentially vulnerable section on a hunk of solid concrete. The driver hollered back, “Sir, there’s no soft spot. I’m just going to ram it.”

  The gunmen at the barricade opened up with small arms and RPGs. Ball’s driver revved the engine and the tank chugged forward. Ball and the rest of the crew were buttoned up inside the turret, hatches locked. Everybody reached for something solid to brace against. The tank’s front plow smacked into the barrier at forty kilometers per hour and pitched up. The tank rode up the obstacle, plunged forward, and went airborne. It sailed across the barrier and slammed down with a tremendous jolt. The crewmen rattled around inside the turret. In the driver’s hole, the driver’s helmet flew off. The plow was bent backward and the end connector on one of the tracks was hanging by two bolts, but the tank survived. Ball was astonished; he had never entirely believed the direct approach would work so well. The driver retrieved his helmet and kept the tank moving forward.

  The Iraqis stopped firing, transfixed by the sight of a seventy-ton tank sailing through the air. Then they opened fire again, tr
ying in vain to stop the column. But Ball’s tank was pulling away and rolling toward the airport, bullets pinging off its hull. The impact of Ball’s tank had sheared off the top of one of the barriers. That provided a lower obstacle for Gibbons. He was now commanding Sergeant Booker’s tank equipped with its own mounted plow. Alpha One Three reached ramming speed and collided with the barrier, pitching up and over and slamming back down. The huge machine righted itself, the tracks biting into the pavement, and the tank chugged on toward the airport.

  In the third tank, Specialist Joseph Kalinowski had watched from his driver’s hole as both tanks in front of him sailed into and over the obstacle. He had been certain that the tanks’ tracks were going to snap. He was amazed that they had held together. The barrier was being ground down, and it was by now only a couple of feet high, but Kalinowski was still worried about popping a track, even with a plow up front to absorb most of the impact. It would be just his luck, he thought, for his track to pop, leaving the tank disabled and surrounded by enemy gunmen.

  In the commander’s hatch, Sergeant First Class Gaines briefly considered flattening the rest of the barrier with a main gun round, but he knew there wasn’t time. The entire column was starting to bunch up behind him. He ordered Kalinowski to hit the barrier. Kalinowski sped up to about sixteen kilometers per hour and slammed into the concrete. He hit the brakes and the tank rolled up and over. It landed with a heavy thud, driving Kalinowski’s helmet into the driver’s hatch and popping it open. The helmet flew off. Kalinowski was dizzy and disoriented, and it took him a few seconds to get his bearings. Then he threw his helmet back on, slammed the hatch shut, gunned the engines, and pulled away.

  The barrier was slowly being ground to dust. Each subsequent tank pulverized what remained of the obstacle, and soon the Bradleys and the M113s were grinding and crunching over the mess, harassed by small-arms fire. They were now less than a kilometer from the airport entrance.