Thunder Run (11 page)

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 chaotic 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.

Twitty was in the middle of a firefight south of the brigade operations center on the afternoon of April 6 when he got a radio call from Perkins telling him that he had a mission for him. Perkins didn't say what the mission was; he wanted Twitty to send someone to receive it in person. Twitty pulled his operations officer, Major Roger Shuck, away from the battle to go see Perkins. He couldn't go himself because his battalion had not quite finished destroying the remnants of the Medina Division's Fourteenth Brigade, which was putting up a bit of a fight and actually had crews still manning several T-72 tanks. It took the rest of the afternoon to kill them off.

The fight was still under way when Shuck radioed to tell Twitty that the brigade was attacking into Baghdad the next morning—and that China had been ordered to secure Highway 8. Twitty was surprised to hear that tanks were going into the city. Like other commanders in the brigade, he had been told that airborne units would clear the capital. But he was not surprised to be told that China would go in behind the tank battalions. His guys were infantry, and what infantrymen did was clear and hold ground. They had been ordered two days earlier to hold a key bridge over the Euphrates that had been seized by a tank battalion, and they had been drawn into a nasty little fight when Iraqi units counterattacked. Twitty expected a much worse fight on Highway 8. Just by glancing at a map, he could see that the highway was as significant to the Iraqis as to the brigade. It was the only direct route into the city, and the regime's last line of defense. The Iraqis would fight to the death to hold it. He was sure of that.

Twitty was a supremely confident man—confident in his abilities as a commander and confident in the capacity of his men to fight and prevail. He was thirty-nine, a polished speaker with a frank, engaging manner. Raised in the tiny town of Chesnee, South Carolina, Twitty had graduated from the military studies program at South Carolina State University and earned a master's degree in public administration from Central Michigan University. A career officer with a wife and fourteen-year-old daughter, he had fought in Operation Desert Storm. That experience, combined with the previous two weeks of firefights in Iraq, had afforded Twitty a certain sureness of purpose in the way he planned a mission. He knew, even before he finished up with the stubborn Fourteenth Brigade and pushed north to the Spartan Brigade command center, that he would require a guaranteed reserve force in case everything went to hell on the highway. And he knew, too, that he would have to meet face-to-face with his commanders to make sure they realized what they were being asked to achieve.

By late afternoon on April 6, the brigade planners had completed the detailed mission orders and Perkins was ready to lay out the attack for his commanders and senior NCOs. The brigade command staff had moved earlier in the day, tearing down its tents and tarps and moving about a kilometer across Highway 8 from the dusty field to an abandoned warehouse compound just off the highway. The warehouses apparently had been used to store agricultural products; huge bales of red and blue plastic grain sacks were stacked in the cement courtyard. The compound was dirty and bedraggled—part of it was still under construction—but it contained a two-story building with a ground-floor room big enough to accommodate Perkins's battle briefing.

The brigade leadership cadre filed into the room, their tan desert boots leaving footprints in the dust of the cracked linoleum floor. Many of the officers were still recovering from the shock of being told that they would be going into Baghdad in a few hours. Even with the thunder run the day before, most of them still assumed that the brigade would serve as a blocking force for airborne units—not as the strike force itself. Now they were suddenly being asked to lead the charge into the capital for the entire coalition. The weight of this responsibility showed in their clenched jaws and in the intense way they studied the operation orders thrust into their hands as they sat down to await the battle briefing.