Thunder Run (10 page)

Colonel Perkins, joined by Captain Hilmes, walked over to Gibbons and Gilliam. The two crewmen leaped to their feet and saluted. Perkins saw that they were still smeared with Booker's blood. He returned their salutes—it was his honor to salute them, he told them—and he said he had never been more proud of any two men. He told them they had played a central role in helping the battalion achieve a defining moment in military history.

Jeffrey Ellis, the gunner who had roomed with Booker, went over to say good-bye to his friend. He found Book's body bag in the hull of the medic's track, and he had a quiet little conversation with his old friend. The two of them had always talked about taking a cruise after the war, just sailing off to Bermuda or Cancún, someplace warm with lots of cold beer. Now Ellis told Book that he would take the cruise for him. He cried a little bit, and that made him feel better. He said good-bye and told Book as he left, “I'll drink a beer for you.”

To spare Booker's young crew the ordeal of cleaning up the mess inside their tank, one of the lieutenants from Second Platoon came over with a couple of soldiers carrying buckets and rags and sponges. It was important to get the tank cleaned up right away, before the rest of the battalion came by and saw the whole awful splash of blood and tissue. It took a long time. The inside of a tank turret is a cramped place, with crevices and levers and handles. But finally the lieutenant, Ryan Kuo, and his platoon sergeant, Eric Olson, got it all cleaned out, and the tank was good to go.

Across the tarmac, Captain Hilmes had run over to the medical track that held the bagged remains of Sergeant Booker. He saw the physician's assistant, Mike Dyches, sitting on the ramp and shaking his head. “There was nothing I could do for him,” he told Hilmes.

The captain let his emotions rise up and overflow. He didn't try to stop them. He had known Booker for three years. Booker was more than just his best platoon sergeant—he was a good and loyal friend. Hilmes looked up and saw Rick Schwartz, his face caked with tan dust.

“Sir,” he said, “Sergeant Booker is dead.” And he began to weep. Schwartz put his arms around Hilmes and led him away. Schwartz had fought in the first Gulf War, and he knew what it meant to lose a comrade.

Hilmes was crying, but not just for Booker. He was crying because he felt guilty—guilty for feeling so relieved to have survived, and guilty for the elation that had swept over him as he brought his soldiers back alive, save for one man. It was a confusing, conflicted feeling, and it overwhelmed him. He wouldn't feel right about the whole thing until days later, after he had written a long letter to Booker's mother, after he and his men had sat around and traded stories about Booker, and after he had delivered a eulogy at Booker's memorial service without breaking down.

American military doctrine says tanks cannot fight effectively in an urban environment, but Rogue's thunder run had stood doctrine on its head. The armored column's fight up the highway had shown that, on this day and under these circumstances, tanks could not only fight in urban areas, but prevail. The Desert Rogues battalion had just killed between eight hundred and a thousand enemy soldiers. They had destroyed whole networks of bunkers on both sides of the highway. They had taken out thirty to forty vehicles and unknown numbers of artillery pieces and antiaircraft batteries. It had cost them one dead, several wounded, a burned-out tank, a busted turret, and a damaged Bradley. Schwartz was convinced that they had rattled the Iraqi leadership, hitting their forces in a way they had not expected. They had exposed the limits of Baghdad's defensive fortifications. And now, he knew, they would have to ratchet up the pressure, to go back in for more.

Perkins knew it, too. On the tarmac, Schwartz had saluted Perkins and told him, “Mission accomplished.” The two commanders exchanged an awkward hug, their bulky flak vests bumping. Perkins told Schwartz that the next time they came up Highway 8, they were going straight downtown to the palaces. Schwartz gave Perkins a sharp look. This time, he believed him.

At a Republican Guard command center north of the airport highway that morning, Brigadier General Mohammed Daash was dispatched by his commander to check out a report of fighting at the airport. The center had no radio communications with Iraqi units at the airport, and no one knew the situation there. To guard against coup attempts, Saddam Hussein had balkanized his armed forces. Each military unit had a separate chain of command, unconnected to any other unit. The Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards commanded by Quasi Hussein did not communicate with the regular army, which did not communicate with Uday Hussein's Fedayeen Saddam or the Baath Party militia. In fact, the units competed for resources—for the best weapons, the choice supplies, the rare working radios and cell phones. The only glue binding these competing armies were the Saddam cronies and loyalists placed in charge—many of them tribesmen from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit.

For commanders like General Daash, the only source of information at this moment of crisis was the government's bombastic minister of information, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf. That very morning, Sahaf appeared at the Palestine Hotel wearing his trademark beret and pistol. He told the international news media that Iraqi forces had repulsed an American attack, that the airport was still in government hands. But now Daash was told that three or four American tanks had been spotted at the airport. He was ordered to conduct a surveillance mission and report back. He had to find a military vehicle and persuade the driver to venture out into the streets.

Less than an hour later, Daash returned to headquarters in a panic. He stormed through the offices, cursing his fellow commanders. “Four or five tanks!” he yelled. “Are you out of your minds? The whole damn American army is at the airport!”

FIVE

THE PLAN

A
t the Baghdad airport on the morning of April 5, Major General Buford C. Blount III had watched the progress of the thunder run on Blue Force Tracker, the satellite communications system that depicts friendly forces as blue icons on a computer screen. Blount, a tall, laconic southerner known to close friends as Buff, was the Third Infantry Division commander. He had been up at the airport entrance all morning, ready to send out a rescue battalion from his First Brigade if the Rogue battalion had been overrun. Blount had watched on his screen as the column stopped to deal with the burning tank and when it took the wrong turns at the spaghetti junction. Every time the column slowed or stopped, Blount worried that Iraqi soldiers and Arab guerrillas would cut it in two and isolate a company or a platoon and hammer it.
Another Mogadishu
—that's what he and Dave Perkins had talked about avoiding, and so far they had pulled it off.

Now, as the tankers and the Bradley crews rested in the shade of their battered vehicles, Blount stood on the tarmac next to Perkins and plotted his next move. Blount wanted to keep the pressure on Saddam's regime. He knew the Iraqis would reinforce Highway 8. He knew they would dig in and defend the capital. The Fedayeen Saddam, the Arab volunteers, and some Special Republican Guards—there were several thousand of them still in and around the city—had fought ferociously, even as some Republican Guard and regular army units were throwing off their uniforms and fleeing. Blount expected them to mine the highway and erect barricades.

Fifty-four years old, with thirty-two years in the army, Blount had spent virtually his entire adult life as a tanker—ever since he was commissioned as an armor officer after graduating from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1971. The military was in his blood. His father had been an air force colonel—Buford Blount II was now the mayor of little Bassfield, Mississippi—and an uncle had been an army general. Buff Blount had earned a master's degree in national security and strategic studies, and he believed tanks could do more than a lot of people assumed. They had proved themselves in the south, where they had blown past the main cities and raced directly to Baghdad. They had proved themselves again that morning, ramming past a determined enemy dug in at the edge of a sprawling metropolis and fighting off speeding vehicles on a superhighway. Now Blount wanted to maintain momentum and send his tanks and Bradleys right back into the city.

The general had seen intelligence suggesting that Special Republican Guard units were being sent into Baghdad to reinforce the capital. But in truth, he really didn't have good intelligence. It was too dangerous to send in scouts. Satellite imagery didn't show bunkers or redoubts inside buildings, or camouflaged armor or artillery. Blount's division had access to only one unmanned spy drone, and its cameras weren't providing a whole lot either. Enemy prisoners of war in Najaf and Karbala had told U.S. interrogators that the Iraqi military was expecting American tanks to surround the city with what the Americans called FOBs—forward operating bases—while infantry from the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne cleared the capital block by block. And that
was
the U.S. plan, at least until the thunder run that morning changed the equation. The Iraqi quartermaster colonel the battalion had captured that morning was saying the same thing. One of the Arabic translators had just told Blount and Perkins that the colonel had believed his own military's propaganda—that U.S. forces had been stopped cold south of the Euphrates River. Until the very moment that he drove his Passat into a Bradley, the colonel had been convinced that his army was
winning.

Blount wanted another thunder run, and quickly. He thought his superiors at V Corps would agree, especially after Rogue's charge up the highway that morning. Blount told Perkins that he might send him back into the city in two days, on Monday the seventh. Instead of one battalion, Blount was considering sending in the entire Second Brigade, with two tank battalions and a mechanized infantry battalion. Blount wanted them to test the city's defenses, kill as many troops and equipment as possible, then come back out to prepare for more thunder runs and, ultimately, the siege of the capital. That morning, he sent the proposal up to V Corps and the rest of the chain of command for approval.

At midday, the Rogue column lined up for the short trip back to the brigade operations center south of the city. The crews took the back way, down a secured highway—Highway 1—that led south and east from the airport. The brigade had seized the intersection of Highways 1 and 8 two days earlier and had set up the command post there because the interchange controlled access from the south to the city and the airport. It had been the staging area for Rogue's thunder run that morning, and now it would be the starting point for any subsequent strike into Baghdad's city center, eighteen kilometers north.

As Perkins rode down Highway 1 in his command vehicle, he thought about the best way to put his tanks and Bradleys into the city. Even before talking to Blount, he had anticipated another thunder run. He welcomed the opportunity. Like Blount, he didn't accept the conventional wisdom that tanks were at a disadvantage in urban terrain. That morning's thunder run was proof of that. He was eager to go back into the city, but not for a thunder run. He wanted to stay.

Perkins was a calm, patient, perceptive New Englander with a deceptively placid demeanor. He was six feet tall and, like most tankers, slight of build. He had a smooth face and rosy cheeks that made him look younger than forty-four. But Perkins also had the grave and studious manner—focused, curious, intent on results—of a much older man. He was a devout Catholic, with a wife and a teenaged son and daughter at Fort Stewart. His wife, Ginger, sent him regular issues of
Our Daily Bread
devotionals, which he tried to read daily.

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.