Thunder Run (13 page)

Later Eric Wesley set up his cot in the same tight space. The two officers wanted to get a couple of hours of sleep before the dawn mission. Sitting on their bunks in the dark, finishing up the operation order, they discussed the various ways the Fedayeen and Special Republican Guards might attack the palace complex if the tank battalions managed to get in and set up for the night. They did not doubt the wisdom of the goals they had set or the ability of their men to achieve those goals. But they did wonder what it would cost them. Perkins stared out a window and said, “Damn, it's dark out there. If we end up staying tomorrow night, it could get pretty tough.” Wesley nodded. There was nothing more to say. They stretched out and tried to steal a bit of sleep.

SIX

A COVERT BREACH

I
t was hot inside the tent at the battalion command post, so hot that Phil Wolford was having trouble concentrating. The tent seemed to draw in the heat and radiate it back against the flaps, leaving streaks of moisture on the dusty canvas. Wolford stripped off his flak vest. Underneath, his fatigues were soaked through with sweat. He tried to focus on what Lieutenant Colonel Flip deCamp was telling him and the other commanders of Tusker battalion. Wolford was a captain, the commander of Assassin Company, the battalion's lead company on the planned thunder run into Baghdad the next morning, April 7. DeCamp was telling him to lead the way to the Republican Palace—what deCamp called the four-head monster palace for the four bronze busts of Saddam on its roof. “Don't stop and fight on the highway,” deCamp told Wolford. “Just hit it, kill it, keep moving. Don't stop for anything, just keep moving.”

DeCamp was sweating and talking intently, jabbing at a map of downtown Baghdad spread out inside the command post. It seemed to Wolford that deCamp was trying to frighten his commanders, trying to build up the enemy into something intimidating and lethal—despite the fact that these were part of the same forces the battalion had just obliterated on the wild gun run against the remnants of the Medina Division the day before. If the colonel
was
trying to scare him, it was working. Wolford was a confident combat commander. He had led his company through several harrowing firefights on the march up from Kuwait. But this was Baghdad, the heart of the whole Iraqi regime. As deCamp spoke, Wolford kept thinking,
Holy shit, we're going straight into fucking Baghdad! Are you crazy? What are
you thinking?
He didn't say it out loud, of course, but he did admit to himself that the thought of leading his men into this vast, dark unknown left him . . . if not exactly afraid, then very, very concerned.

Wolford was thirty-six, a sturdy, big-boned man, bulkier than most tankers. He had a pale complexion and short, straw-colored hair that was plastered flat against his head in the heat. Growing up in a small farming town in central Ohio, he had always wanted to be a soldier. His father had served with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam, and his grandfather had fought in World War I. Wolford played with toy soldiers as a child, setting them up in formations and then shooting them down. He read every book on war and military history in the tiny town library. He joined the army in 1987, two years after graduating from Marysville High. He spent six years as an enlisted man, serving as a scout in Operation Desert Storm. Later he went to college and earned a commission. By 1995, he was a second lieutenant. Now, in the spring of 2003, he was in command of a tank company, responsible for the lives of scores of men—and he had about seven hours to figure out how to carry out the most important mission of his career.

That night, six of Wolford's tanks were down for repairs—including his own, which had a bad gyroscope and a turret malfunction. His mechanics had been working on them all day and late into the night. All the battalion's tanks had taken a beating on the 120-kilometer charge against the Medina Division on April 5. Their suspension systems were collapsing and some of the road wheel arms were popping off. The mechanics had torn apart the operations officer's disabled tank, cannibalizing it for parts to repair the other tanks. DeCamp's own tank was down for repairs, and the mechanics worked furiously through the night to get it going again. They had to scrounge around for parts. One of the war's dirty little secrets was the crippling lack of spare parts. They just weren't getting pushed forward to the combat teams. After Tusker's charge attack against the Medina Division, only half the battalion's tanks qualified as “combat capable.”

Inside the command operations center, deCamp issued a warning to all his tank commanders: “Guys, I want to tell you right now, if you have a tank you don't think is going to make it, tell me right now and we won't bring it. We're not going in with any tank that's not going to make it.” They were going to have enough to deal with in the palace complex without having to sacrifice a working tank from the fight in order to tow a disabled tank. And if they were not able to hold their positions in the city and had to fight their way back out, deCamp certainly didn't want to do it while towing a tank.

DeCamp was also concerned about getting lost on the way into downtown Baghdad, especially after hearing about Rogue's wrong turn at the spaghetti junction on the April 5 thunder run. Even if they successfully negotiated that junction, there was another confusing interchange just to the east, where the main highway into the city center split into two separate roadways. Rogue would take the northern route, the Qadisiya Highway, and Tusker the southern route, the Kindi Highway. DeCamp didn't have any photos from the UAVs, the unmanned aerial vehicles, or spy drones, that were up over Baghdad. He did have satellite imagery, which showed bridges and rooftops in black and white but did not clearly show highway interchanges. He was relying on a road map, which depicted highway exits, and he drew lines on it to indicate the routes and areas of responsibility for the various companies. The battalion's lead tank would be commanded by Lieutenant Maurice Middleton, a sharp young officer who was good with a map. Middleton had studied his 1:100,000 military map, and he knew that he had to take one ramp, then a service ramp, to reach the Kindi Highway, which would take him directly to the palace gates. Middleton had been leading the battalion for much of the war, and he hadn't been lost yet.

There was one more thing deCamp had learned from Rick Schwartz's thunder run: any gear stuffed into the tanks' external bustle racks tended to catch fire and burn when struck by RPGs. While the gear absorbed some of the impact, deCamp didn't want his tankers dealing with fires of any kind. The tanks and Bradleys had proven they could withstand RPGs, so he ordered his crews to download everything off the bustle racks. They would go in naked. The crews could take a few personal items, but the rest of their gear would have to be brought up Highway 8 later with the fuel and ammunition packages.

By the end of deCamp's briefing, Wolford was drenched in sweat. He grabbed the operation order and stepped outside, where there was a hint of a breeze, and then he walked in the dark to his tank to collect his thoughts. For the next half hour, he sat on top of his tank, going over the mission in his head, writing up a time line and a mission order for the company. He thought, too, about what he was going to tell his officers and NCOs. He thought it was important to convey just how important and dangerous this mission was—probably the ultimate mission for their careers, really. But he did not want to betray his own disquiet and alarm or, worse, panic his men. He felt a sense of urgency, and a fear that events were being rushed. In all his training in the United States and in Kuwait, he had never imagined that he would have only a few hours to prepare for the pivotal battle of the war.

There is a certain art to presenting a difficult and dangerous combat mission to young soldiers. The night before the April 5 thunder run, Captain Larry Burris, the infantry commander attached to Task Force 1-64, had wrestled with how to best lay out to his men the jarring news that they had been ordered to attack into Baghdad. Finally he decided to give what's known as a hood-top brief, gathering his men in a simple, straightforward session around the hood of the command Humvee. (Civilians, and even some soldiers, referred to the vehicles as Humvees, although the acronym was actually HMMWV, for high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle). The captain plopped down his military map board in the dark and shone his flashlight on the map title at the top: BAGHDAD. Burris didn't say a word. He kept the flashlight beam steady until the message sank in and his men understood where their mission would take them. Then he briefed the mission.

Now, late at night on April 6, Wolford gave his own hood-top brief. He walked over to his Humvee, spread out his maps, and gathered his key people in a tight little circle. Wild desert dogs were barking in the distance. It was so dark that nobody bothered maintaining “light discipline”—using red-filtered flashlights to avoid “white light” that might attract enemy fire. Several white-light flashlights shone down on the map overlays on the Humvee hood.

Wolford briefed his men on the details, laying out the mission and describing what was expected from each platoon. Then he delivered the speech he had composed in his head—delivered a performance, really, because a combat commander needs to perform for his men, to inspire them and persuade them that the mission at hand is the most important thing on earth at that moment. On this night, on this dusty field in the middle of the night, Phillip E. Wolford needed his men to believe that.

“Men,” he began, “we've been through a lot these past few months, and it ain't over yet. We're the Assassins of Fourth Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor Regiment, and you should be proud of that. Tomorrow morning, we're attacking into Baghdad. We are going into the heart of Saddam's regime and we are going to take it and keep it. The enemy situation is sketchy at best, but higher expects contact as soon as we LD”—the minute they crossed the line of departure past the final friendly checkpoint on Highway 8.

“I have some concerns for tomorrow's fight,” he went on. “First, if we have a tank breakdown or a tank get hit, we're going to surround it with other tanks to shield the crew. Then we're going to fire every fucking machine gun we have, we are going to lay down a wall of steel until we get the crew out. No Assassin is going to go down, and you better believe that no goddam Assassin is going to be left behind. If they fire one round at us, we fire a thousand back. If they shoot one of us, we kill them all.”

Wolford paused here and mentioned that Tusker Six—deCamp—had ordered each company commander to identify a stretch of terrain big enough to accommodate the entire company and open enough to provide fields of fire in all directions. They would set up in front of the Republican Palace and defend it. But if they came under sustained attack and things started to fall apart, they would drop back to the open beach behind the palace, on the west bank of the Tigris River. It was clearly marked on the maps.

“Fellas—look at me!” Wolford said, and he slammed his fist down on the hood of his Humvee. “If all goes to shit we rally right here on the beach. We get in a three-hundred-sixty-degree perimeter and we fucking fight with everything we've got, and we make them regret the day they joined the Iraqi army. Talk to your soldiers. Let them know what we expect of them. Tomorrow we fight.”

It was a hell of a speech—one that some of the men from Assassin would still be quoting six months later. When the officers and NCOs fanned out across the field to brief their crews, Wolford walked around to the positions and spoke quietly in the dark to as many Assassins as he could, as much for himself as for them.

For the men of all three battalions, it was a pivotal moment. They had trained for months, in the piney woods of American bases and in the bleak Kuwaiti desert, to reach this precipice. They had fought for almost two weeks, pushing north through the deserts of southern and central Iraq. They had become conditioned to fear and deprivation, and their lives were narrow and circumscribed. It was difficult for them to look beyond the prevailing operation order because the demands of those orders were so insistent and debilitating. In their rare moments of downtime between missions, when they wolfed down their pasty meals-ready-to-eat and cursed and scratched themselves, there were elliptical discussions of the political and diplomatic forces that had sent them off to war. With a sense of foreboding, some of the men remarked on the president's warning the previous autumn that Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes. There were vague allusions to terrorism and to the brutality of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and to the notion of somehow delivering freedom to the Iraqi people. These topics were mentioned often but were not deeply probed, for these were esoteric concepts, too remote and cryptic for young men whose immediate focus was on the twin tasks of destruction and survival. They were fighting for their country, of course, and for the inherent nobility of their profession. But mostly, they were fighting to come home alive and to ensure that the men beside them came home, too. The military works assiduously to build unit cohesion, in part because a man will fight harder beside someone he knows, someone with whom he has built a bond from shared danger and sacrifice and fear. A few men spoke of “getting some,” that peculiar, sexually tinged reference to confronting the enemy and killing him. But most of them spoke of getting out of Iraq alive, and their buddies with them.

The men of the combat teams were as tight as brothers now. They had lived in filth for weeks, as each hot, punishing day slid into each cold, unforgiving night. They had pissed in the sand, crapped in slit trenches, burned their own shit. They had gagged on sand and picked it out of their eyes and their ears and their crotches. It was a fine, talcumlike sand that seeped into weapons and engines and radios. Some of the men used pantyhose as a sand filter, and those who had the foresight to pack resealable plastic freezer bags were able to protect their laptops and CD players for a time. But soon the bags were themselves reservoirs of dust and grit, and the dust had conquered all. The men had endured day after day of sweat and grime, weeks removed from a proper shower. They wiped their armpits and asses with sloppy wet Joey wipes, but still they stunk of sour sweat, and the skin between their toes sloughed off and rotted. Guys would sniff the air in crowded Humvees and ask, “Is that
you
or
me
?”

As the days grew hotter, they became more miserable inside their suffocating chemical and biological warfare suits. They had been required to wear the suits until just a few days earlier. After they had breached the so-called red zone around Baghdad without coming under nuclear, biological, or chemical attack, the order had come down to dispense with the suits. The suits were formally known as JSLIST suits, but most soldiers called them MOPP suits, for mission-oriented protective posture, as if a soldier wearing one could assume a protective posture while still orienting his attention to the mission at hand. It took several minutes to pull on the heavy, charcoal-lined pants with suspenders, and then the charcoal-lined jacket, the two pairs of gloves—one cloth, one rubber—the thick rubber boots with metal clasps, and, finally, a floppy rubber gas mask with a tangle of head straps. The soldiers bitched about taking them off and putting them on, about the endless warning sirens in Kuwait that had sent them diving into trenches until the chemical officers screamed, “All clear!” Waiting in the trenches, the soldiers would joke about “doing the funky chicken”—choking on their own blood in the spastic convulsions brought on by chemical weapons. They killed time by nominating one another for “least mission critical”—that hapless soldier designated as the guinea pig to remove his gas mask to test the air after a suspected chemical or biological attack. Sometimes they nominated the embedded reporters.