Thunder Run

by David Zucchino

  A native of Keene, New Hampshire, he was a West Point officer, graduating in 1980 and commissioned as an armor officer. While in the military, he had attended graduate school at the University of Michigan. He had had a taste of Washington politics in the mid-’90s, accepting a military fellowship to serve on the staff of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Perkins advised Gingrich’s staff on how to apply the military model for organizing a staff and assigning responsibility during a volatile political era in Washington. And although Perkins had served on peacekeeping missions in Macedonia and Kosovo, he had never been in combat prior to crossing the berm into Iraq. He taught mechanical engineering at West Point during Operation Desert Storm, watching the war on CNN like everybody else. Now, rolling down Highway 1, he figured he probably had just one day to devise a tactical plan for a brigade-sized thunder run into a hostile Arab capital of 5 million people.

  At the brigade command tent a few hours later, an American reporter asked Perkins what Rogue’s thunder run had accomplished. As the brigade commander, Perkins was the unit’s chief spokesman. Part of his job was dealing with the media—and with the Pentagon’s new embedded-reporter experiment, reporters were always around, asking questions, probing for information. Perkins tended to speak in interviews the same way he spoke to his commanders—in spare, logical, pointed sentences. He told the reporter that the attack was more than just a tactical victory. It was also a “psychological blow,” he said, “a way to showcase our ability to go anywhere in the city at any time. The world saw today that the American army is in fact not bogged down. We hold the airport and the main highway into the city.” He mentioned Saddam Hussein. “This is supposed to be his city. But we just got here—and we drove right through it. No part of the city is safe for him anymore.”

  The reporter asked Perkins about civilian casualties, an issue that was receiving considerable attention in the international media. Some of his tankers had said, without equivocation, that civilians had been killed on Highway 8—either caught in crossfires or fired on when their vehicles failed to heed warnings to stop. Perkins didn’t deny it. He blamed the Iraqis for attacking with civilian cars—taxis, sedans, pickups, even ambulances—and for dressing many of their fighters in civilian clothing. “The de facto uniform of combatants here is civilian clothes, so we have to judge people on the battlefields by their actions, not their clothing,” he said. “They are putting their populace at risk by not having a clear delineation between civilians and the military. In effect, Saddam has made his civilian populace combatants.” He spoke without rancor, and with little evident emotion until he suddenly mentioned his wife and children. “If I put my family in a Humvee and drove them into Baghdad,” he said, “I would be to blame if they got blown away.”

  At the brigade command tent, Perkins reviewed the morning’s thunder run with Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley, his executive officer. Wesley was a brisk, intense, highly organized officer from southern California, and a committed Christian. Both his father and grandfather had been military men. A West Point graduate, he had been involved almost his entire career in the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, a group that helps Christian officers integrate their faith and their profession. He was married and had three young children.

  Like Perkins, Wesley had never been in combat before arriving in Iraq; he had been taking an armor officer advanced course at Fort Knox during Operation Desert Storm. Wesley, thirty-nine, had been with the division since 1998, working his way up from battalion operations officer to deputy division operations officer, and finally to brigade executive officer. He had a master’s degree in international relations and had spent time in a psychological operations unit. He had been thinking about Iraq—and how to best wage war there—for years, ever since the first Gulf War in 1990. He and Perkins shared similar convictions about the use of armor and the importance of training units to synchronize their movements under simulated battlefield conditions.

  Now Wesley was Perkins’s right-hand man and confidant. The two officers had been discussing the best way to attack Baghdad for more than six months—since arriving in Kuwait for desert training and prewar planning the previous autumn. It had been to a certain extent an academic exercise, for the role envisioned for the Spartan Brigade was to set up a blocking position at the edge of the capital while infantry and Special Forces cleared the city. But regardless of which units were ultimately designated to take the city, they thought, it should be done not in a slow siege but in a single, violent strike.

  Perkins had attended a major military planning conference in Kuwait in January, in which the Forward Operating Base (FOB) model was adopted: armored units would surround Baghdad at strategically located forward bases while airborne infantry conducted raids designed to steadily destroy enemy resistance. Perkins and Wesley were not fans of the approach. It reminded them too much of Vietnam, where U.S. forces bunkered themselves into forward bases and conducted endless thrusts and patrols that left them bogged down and forever under siege. It didn’t make sense to keep advancing and retreating, seizing ground only to give it up. They believed that once enemy terrain is seized, it should be held. To retreat not only magnified the loss of life and equipment required to seize terrain, but it also allowed the enemy to portray any withdrawal as a defeat.

  Wesley had been monitoring BBC radio that morning to find out how the news of the thunder run was playing. He had listened to al-Sahaf, Iraq’s information minister, deliver a taunting news conference at the Palestine Hotel on the east bank of the Tigris, just six kilometers from where Robert Ball had made the wrong turn off the spaghetti junction. Sahaf claimed that no American forces had entered the city and that Iraqi troops had slaughtered hundreds of American “scoundrels” at the airport.

  “Today, we butchered the force present at the airport,” Sahaf had said. “We are hitting them with rockets and artillery and surprising them with operations that I said are new”—apparently a reference to suicide cars and trucks. “Today, the tide has turned,” he went on. “We are destroying them.” Sahaf instructed Iraqi civilians to alert the armed forces to any American troop movements and to maintain “calm, good organization—to confront the enemy effectively, conquer them and force them to retreat accursed and defeated.”

  Wesley related Sahaf’s outlandish claims to Perkins. He also told him that the BBC was reporting that its reporters had not seen any American tanks in Baghdad that morning, and had concluded that there had been no American presence inside the capital. Perkins pursed his lips and shook his head. Sahaf was starting to irritate him. It galled him that his soldiers had driven so hard to penetrate the city, only to have a buffoon in a beret belittle them to the world. And the BBC wasn’t even disputing Sahaf’s rants. Worse, Perkins thought, enemy fighters who had not actually seen his brigade’s tanks that day would now believe their own propaganda. That only motivated them to fight harder in a doomed cause. He felt like driving his tanks up to the Ministry of Information in the city center to shut Sahaf up.

  Perkins looked at Wesley and said, “You know, this just changed from a tactical war to an information war. We need to go in and stay.” At that moment, before a formal order had even been issued, the Spartan Brigade began planning not only to strike fast and deep into Baghdad, but also to stay there and dig in. The top brass expected the brigade’s tank battalions to sprint in and then sprint out, but Perkins and Wesley thought they could change the thinking of their superiors once the battalions were established inside the city. They had no intention of turning around after fighting their way into the city. They were going to topple Saddam’s regime from within.

  That evening, as Perkins had expected, Blount called him from the airport and said the thunder run had been approved for Monday, April 7. Perkins was ordered to take his tanks and Bradleys into the city center, show that American forces could penetrate to the very heart of Saddam’s regime, then pull out. It was to be another recon by fire, with the strategic goal of demonstrating to the world that American troops
not only were in the Iraqi capital but were able to come and go as they pleased. It would be the first time the brigade’s three maneuver battalions were in combat on the same battlefield simultaneously. It was up to Perkins to develop a tactical plan to make it happen.

  Rogue’s thunder run had taught him two important lessons. First, the interchanges were critical. Perkins didn’t want snipers and technicals firing down on his men from the overpasses on this mission. He decided to pound the four main interchanges between the command post and the city center with artillery that would be fired just ahead of the column. Second, momentum had to be maintained—even at the risk of losing a tank. If a vehicle were disabled by enemy fire or mechanical problems, they weren’t going to waste time trying to get it going again. If it was burning out of control, they would abandon it. If not, they would tow it right away.

  Perkins was still upset about abandoning Charlie One Two—and the issue wasn’t entirely settled. V Corps, the brigade’s higher command, wanted the air force to bomb the tank to prevent the Iraqis from learning anything about the inner workings of an Abrams. The brigade argued against it, saying the tank had been stripped of all sensitive items—and a demolished tank could be offered by the Iraqis as proof that their forces had destroyed it. Wesley and others believed they could eventually recover the tank. V Corps won out. An air force fighter first tried to bomb the tank that evening—and missed—but then scored a direct hit with a Maverick missile. The next day, minders from Sahaf’s Ministry of Information escorted foreign journalists down Highway 8 to Charlie One Two. The reporters interviewed Iraqi soldiers who claimed they had single-handedly destroyed the tank. The camera crews got dramatic footage of Iraqis dancing and celebrating on the tank’s decks. But even after the fire, after the HEAT round from Shane Williams and after the Maverick missile, Charlie One Two still looked like an intact Abrams tank. In dark letters stenciled onto the gun tube was a clearly marked message: Cojone Eh?

  That night, Perkins and Wesley sat down with the brigade’s planners. They came up with a list of objectives—key “nodes,” as they called them—that were to be seized and held. It was like planning a Third World coup: you take the presidential palace, the top ministries, the TV station, the security headquarters . . . and boom, the government falls. In the case of Baghdad, these nodes were conveniently centralized in or around Saddam’s palace complex, a walled city within a city about three kilometers long and a kilometer and a half wide. Ordinary Iraqis had never seen the complex, which lay in a restricted and heavily guarded zone wrapped around a bend in the Tigris River. Hidden behind its walls were Saddam’s main palace and executive seat of government, the massive Republican Palace, which was topped by four, thirteen-foot-high bronze busts of Saddam wearing an elaborate pith helmet. Smaller palaces and mansions contained homes and offices of the Baath Party and Republican Guard elite, all set on manicured lawns and landscaped grounds graced by rose beds and swaying palms.

  At the edge of the complex were Saddam’s military parade field and reviewing stand, flanked on either end by enormous crossed sabers held by fists said to be modeled on a cast of Saddam’s own hands. At the base were scattered hundreds of green helmets taken from fallen Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Many of the helmets were embedded into the pavement like cobblestones. Nearby were Iraq’s tomb of the unknown soldier, Baath Party headquarters, the Ministry of Information, another ornate palace built by Saddam a decade earlier, the convention center, and the Rashid Hotel, a meeting place of the Baath Party leadership. All reflected Saddam’s love of the severe and forbidding neo-Stalinist architectural style.

  The targets had been selected not only for their strategic value as the power centers of the Iraqi regime, but also because they were in open terrain. The palace complex consisted of broad boulevards, gardens, and parks—and very few tall buildings or narrow alleyways that could conceal enemy positions. The tank battalions would be able to set up defensive positions, with open fields of fire in all directions. Blount and Perkins did not want a repeat of Mogadishu, where U.S. forces were trapped and picked off in dense urban slums. The armored column had distinct advantages over the lightly armed Rangers and Delta Force soldiers who had conducted the Mogadishu raid. There would be no soft-skinned vehicles like the Humvees and trucks devastated by RPG explosions in Mogadishu. The tanks and Bradleys and armored personnel carriers had proven, with the exception of Charlie One Two, that they could withstand anything the Iraqis threw at them.

  Eric Schwartz’s Desert Rogues battalion was assigned the targets just beyond the walled complex. Because Rogue was familiar with Highway 8—and with the main highway leading into the city center, thanks to the wrong turns that morning—it would take the lead. The battalion was ordered to race up Highway 8, follow the Qadisiya Highway into the city center, and seize the parade field and reviewing stand, Baath Party headquarters, the tomb of the unknown soldier, and other targets.

  Everything inside the palace complex, including the Republican Palace, was assigned to the Tusker battalion—the Fourth Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor Regiment, and the core unit of Task Force 4-64. Tusker would follow the Desert Rogues battalion into the city, peeling off just past the spaghetti junction onto the Kindi Highway and straight into the palace complex. In the heart of the Tusker sector was the Fourteenth of July Bridge, which controlled access to the city center from the south. The bridge also had symbolic value. Named for the day in 1958 that Baathists overthrew King Faisal II, it was Baghdad’s first suspension bridge. The battalion intended to block the bridge by seizing and holding a traffic circle at the base of the elevated roadway, where a massive stone arch led into the palace complex. They also planned to seize the Sujud Palace, an ugly cement and granite structure built in 1990 and referred to by the brigade planners as the “new palace,” to distinguish it from the older, larger Republican Palace one and a half kilometers to the east.

  The Tusker commander was Lieutenant Colonel Philip Draper deCamp, nicknamed Flip, a fast-talking extrovert from Georgia. DeCamp was forty-one, trim and compact in the tanker tradition, with a ruddy complexion and a crooked smile. Blessed with enormous energy, deCamp was never still. He rarely seemed to require sleep. He was a drive-by conversationalist; he would often discuss several topics at once, bouncing from one to the next in a free-form monologue. Reporters embedded with the Tusker battalion could count on deCamp for vivid quotes and high-speed verbal gymnastics. He was a highly intelligent officer, with a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech. DeCamp had an impish sense of humor and loved a good joke. Some of his officers, overwhelmed by his frenetic personality, joked that deCamp suffered from adult-onset attention deficit disorder. But deCamp became a different person in combat, where he was aggressive and focused, his orders loud but also clear and instructive.

  DeCamp had a rich military pedigree. Both grandfathers were West Point graduates, in 1917 and 1929. One, Philip Draper, was an All-American tailback and a basketball point guard for Army teams who retired as a two-star general. DeCamp’s father was a two-star general and a professor at West Point, and two uncles were West Point graduates. His older brother was an army tanker colonel. Like Schwartz, deCamp had served in the first Gulf War as a tank company commander.

  While the Rogue battalion was fighting its way to the airport that day, deCamp had directed Tusker’s spirited charge southeast against the remains of the Medina Division. His men had destroyed more than a dozen T-72 tanks, thirteen armored personnel carriers, and twenty technicals, effectively completing the destruction of the Republican Guards’ finest division. Now he was trying to get them ready for another charge, this time into the city.

  For the attack on Baghdad, Perkins wanted the two tank battalions to create chaos, to strike with such violence and speed that the regime would be incapable of a coherent response. He believed his men had the requisite training and the equipment to operate successfully on a ch
aotic battlefield. And he knew from that day’s thunder run that the Iraqi military had poor command and control. It was clear from the haphazard, if intense, resistance on Highway 8 that many units were unable to talk to one another—or, if they could, they didn’t listen. Perkins doubted the ability of Saddam and his military commanders to deploy troops and mount an effective defense, especially after two weeks of pounding by coalition aircraft.

  While Perkins was confident that the two tank battalions could hold their ground inside the city, he knew they could not survive without a steady supply of fuel and ammunition. Each tank would suck down 56 gallons of JP8 fuel an hour just rolling up Highway 8 and at least 30 gallons an hour maneuvering inside the city. With a 504-gallon capacity, the tanks would probably need refueling by the end of the day. And based on Rogue’s experience on the thunder run, the tank and Bradley crews could expect to fire off most of their ammunition loads as they blasted their way into the city and fought to hold their ground.

  No army survives without secure lines of supply. The American march up from Kuwait, in fact, had been slowed by Fedayeen attacks on the vulnerable supply trains trailing the armor columns. For the attack on Baghdad, Highway 8 itself would be the supply line. It was the all-important LOC—pronounced “lock”—the line of communications. It was the only direct route into and out of the city. If the highway wasn’t secured, the tank battalions could not spend the night—and they would have to fight their way out while low on fuel and ammunition.

  Perkins assigned the job of keeping Highway 8 open to Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Twitty, commander of the brigade’s mechanized infantry battalion, nicknamed China, the Third Battalion, Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, and the core of Task Force 3-15. The China battalion would follow the two tank battalions up Highway 8, dropping combat teams at each of three main interchanges. The teams would clear and hold the intersections, keeping open the crucial ten-kilometer stretch of Highway 8 between the brigade command post and the spaghetti junction. The battalion planners, apparently in a jocular mood, had code-named the interchanges Objectives Moe, Larry, and Curly. Once Highway 8 was secured, trucks and tankers loaded with ammunition and fuel would be waiting near the brigade command post for the order to speed north into the city center to supply the tank battalions.