Thunder Run (20 page)

Inside a sandbagged bunker in north-central Baghdad, Nabil al-Qaisy spent the morning of April 7 trying to find out what was going on in the center of the city. Qaisy was a Baath Party militiaman, a member of the Al Kuds squad, a local civil defense unit charged with defending the neighborhood. He was no soldier. He was a painter and calligrapher who taught art to elementary-school kids. He had joined the Baath Party only because a party card—stamped with the message THE PARTY IS ABOVE ALL—was required for his teaching position at a government-run school. Qaisy was thirty-one, meticulous in dress and manner, with smooth skin, perfect teeth, and the tapered fingers of an artist. Qaisy resented the Baath Party and the demands it made on his time. He had been manning the bunker since March 20, when he was summoned to active duty. He was issued an AK-47 but was required to buy his own uniform. He was supposed to be fed three meals a day, but the money for the food had been appropriated by the local militia commander. He walked home every day for lunch and dinner.

Qaisy had been given no specific orders, other than to man the bunker twenty-four hours a day, except for meal breaks. He and his fellow militiamen—merchants, accountants, office workers—had undergone perfunctory training. They were shown how to fire AK-47s and how to load and fire an RPG. They had been told to anticipate nighttime helicopter and paratroop assaults from the Americans. Their orders were to climb onto rooftops, await a signal—the cutting of the local power supply to plunge the neighborhood into darkness—and then fire their rifles at helicopters and paratroopers. Qaisy didn't think he could possibly hit anything in the dark with an AK-47. He thought it was more likely that the helicopter gunships would kill anyone foolish enough to expose himself on a rooftop in the middle of an air assault.

But now, lounging in the bunker with his fellow militiamen, Qaisy did not feel a particular sense of urgency. His unit had no radio and no way to contact the neighborhood party leader. Qaisy had no idea where the man was. From time to time, a car was dispatched to drive toward the city center to forage for information. There had been rumors of American tanks in the government complex. But even after three forays, no information was forthcoming. Qaisy could hear the distant rumble of tanks and artillery, but in his neighborhood it was a fairly quiet spring morning. Everything seemed so ordinary. He had anticipated a great rush of emotion and fear when the Americans finally invaded. Qaisy settled down with his rifle, waiting for the Americans to descend on his neighborhood—and silently prayed that they would leave it alone.

Just south of the city, near the spaghetti junction, retired army general Juawad al-Dayni had volunteered to help Fedayeen and Syrian fighters manning bunkers along Highway 8. Dayni was fifty-six, retired for the past four years, and streaks of gray were creeping into his black mustache. But as a former officer he felt an obligation to answer the call for volunteers to fight the Americans. He walked from his comfortable two-story stucco home, which was about one and a half kilometers west of the highway, and climbed into a bunker with an AK-47. Dayni had survived the American armored attack along the highway on April 5, but he had been deeply disturbed by the carnage inflicted by the tanks and Bradleys. He had served in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and in the first Gulf War, but he had never seen such lethal weapons. The tanks and Bradleys were remarkable. They were able to fire in a 360-degree radius, and from incredible distances, even while on the move. Their guns reduced some of the Fedayeen militiamen to hunks of meat; their remains had to be slopped into plastic bags for burial.

Dayni was distressed by the way the regime was defending the capital. He thought the highways and bridges leading into the city should have been destroyed to deny the Americans easy access. He had heard from former colleagues in the military that Saddam and his advisers had not originally expected an American invasion; they had expected to delay, to bluff, to negotiate their way out of a military confrontation. But even after the invasion began March 20, Dayni was told, the leadership believed Republican Guard divisions arrayed south of the city would blunt the American advance. The roads and bridges were kept open to allow for supplies of fuel and ammunition, and for commanders to report back into the government complex downtown. Dayni thought the leadership had learned nothing from its humiliating defeat in Kuwait in 1991. The country's leaders seemed to be in denial. They seemed unwilling to accept the hard truth that the American military was vastly superior and could not be defeated in a head-to-head confrontation. It seemed to Dayni that they were repeating the mistakes of a decade earlier.

Now, on the morning of April 7, Dayni was back in the bunker, fearing the worst. When the American column sped up Highway 8 just after dawn, the tanks and Bradleys shot at everything on either side of the roadway. The Fedayeen and Syrians—and a few small units of Republican Guards—fought furiously, but even their recoilless rifles and antiaircraft artillery pieces had little effect on the column. Their technical vehicles were pulverized by tank and Bradley cannons. Dayni could not see anything from inside the bunker, but he could feel the impact of the rounds and hear the cries of men dying. At the far end of his bunker, there was a sudden explosion and a flash of flame. Dayni saw the burning body of a man who lived on his street, a middle-aged retiree like himself. Dayni moved to help the man, but it was pointless. He was dead. There was not much left of him.

Dayni stayed down. Thirty minutes later, it was over. The Americans had moved on into the city center. The Fedayeen and Syrians climbed out to collect their dead. There was talk of reinforcing the interchange, of moving in behind the Americans and cutting off Highway 8. Dayni thought it was futile. Now that the Americans were inside the city, he thought, the regime could not survive. And when it fell, there would be chaos. He thought about his home. He had evacuated his family, and the house was unprotected. As one of the few residents still living in his neighborhood, Dayni had taken it upon himself to watch over his neighbors' abandoned homes. As the fighters around him geared up for another confrontation with the Americans, he debated whether to stay in the bunker or walk back to check on his house. After a while, he got up and walked home.

In the city center, civilian cars were blundering into the fight. Many residents were not yet aware that American tanks had penetrated downtown districts, and they went about their normal business. Government-run radio was announcing that American forces had been defeated outside the capital. Traffic was lighter than usual, but some shops and gasoline stations remained open, even as Fedayeen and Baath Party militiamen surged through the streets.

Salah Mehdi Baqir al-Muosawi, a translator and driver for the
Daily
Telegraph
newspaper of London, listened to the radio reports inside an office building in the well-to-do Mansour district on the western edge of the city center. He was debating whether to try to reach the Palestine Hotel, where the British reporters who had hired him were staying. Muosawi had heard that American forces were attacking the capital, but the government radio reports persuaded him that it was still safe to venture out. He took his job seriously, and he knew his services were needed on this important news day. Muosawi was proud of his impeccable English. He was fifty-two, a distinguished-looking man, a father of four with silver hair and a black mustache. He had been working for Western correspondents for more than a decade, and he considered himself a progressive. He often told his wife that he welcomed the American invasion and looked forward to the fall of the Baath regime.

Sometime after 8 a.m., Muosawi decided to drive into the city center. He got behind the wheel of his white Oldsmobile and headed east toward the Palestine, taking the same route he had used to reach the Palestine the day before. He made it as far as Zaidtoun Street near Zawra Park. There, coax rounds fired by an Abrams tank hidden beneath an overpass tore through the windshield, blowing off the driver's door and ripping into Muosawi. Witnesses who recovered his body told Muosawi's widow, Zubida Rida, that Muosawi had not appeared to notice the tank. His car, and two or three others behind it, had driven straight toward the tank and were fired upon, they told her. Several other civilians died along with Muosawi. Because of the chaos and danger, they told the widow, no one noticed whether the tank had first fired warning shots. But later, they said, the Americans dragged the cars across the road—with the bodies still inside—to create a barricade.

Half an hour later, Mohammed Hassan Jawad, sixty-two, a retired policeman, drove his blue Mercedes toward a gasoline station near the zoo at the edge of Zawra Park. Jawad had loaded his car with food and bottled water to deliver to his daughter, Mervet Jawad, who had been evacuated from the family's home to the northern city of Kirkuk. He was hoping to find gasoline at a station next the zoo, near a junction that connected to the main road to Kirkuk. As he approached the gas station, machine-gun rounds from an Abrams tank at the edge of the park shattered the car's windshield and collapsed the hood. Jawad was hit several times in the chest, and three fingers of his hand were blown off. Later, witnesses who led Jawad's relatives to his corpse told them that they had not seen the tank fire warning shots. It appeared to them, they said, that Jawad never noticed the tank and drove directly toward it. His car, too, was used by the Americans to create a barricade.

As Shawn Gibson's tank crashed through the metal gates of the Republican Palace complex at mid-morning, RPG teams opened fire from a series of bunkers dug into the woods on the left side of the palace roadway. Straight ahead, on the road in front of the palace, soldiers were unloading from troop trucks. A few fired automatic rifles toward Gibson's tank, but most of them tried to jump back onto the trucks. As Gibson surged forward, he could see that some of the soldiers in the bunker were climbing out of their holes and fleeing through the woods. Gibson had a name for soldiers who fired off a few rounds, then ran away. He called it “shittin' and gettin'.” Gibson managed to kill quite a few of them, and his gunner got more of them with the coax.

Over the radio came Lieutenant Maurice Middleton's voice: “Hey, Sergeant Gibson, slow down! I need to get back up there with you.” Gibson had pulled away from the rest of the column after blasting through the gates at the main archway, and now the other tanks were rushing to pull up behind him. He let Lieutenant Middleton swing ahead of him, then fell back into Assassin's regular formation, with Sergeant First Class Jonathan Lustig's tank directly behind him.

Farther back in the column was Captain Wolford, the company commander, whose tank had just rolled over the metal gate that had been smashed by Gibson. Wolford could see Iraqi soldiers scrambling out of the bunkers. They were poorly constructed fortifications—just holes in the woods covered by planks or metal sheeting topped with dirt and brush. The Iraqis' fighting positions were oriented to the northwest, with the soldiers' backs to the palace. It was obvious to Wolford that they had anticipated an attack from the north, through the woods. It seemed to him that the logical point of attack was the roadway from the west—the roadway Assassin had just taken. The miscalculation crystallized for Wolford the outlines of the entire battle for the city. Colonel Perkins's battle plan was designed to penetrate behind the Iraqi defenders, then to fight from the city center outward, attacking the enemy from the rear. That was precisely what was happening at the Republican Palace. The Iraqis had left their rear end exposed.

While many of the soldiers were fleeing, others were crawling out of the first sets of bunkers and turning around. They flopped on their bellies, facing the roadway, firing madly with RPGs and automatic rifles. The rate of fire was intense but inaccurate. They were completely exposed. Wolford ordered the tanks to open up with MPAT rounds and the Bradleys with coax. It was a slaughter. The soldiers pitched backward and died, and the bunkers exploded. Soldiers in the next set of bunkers leaped out and fled north through the woods, some of them toppling as the coax rounds tore into them. Dozens more escaped, running through the broad gap between Assassin Company and the Rogue companies to the north and west near the parade grounds and the park, or south across the palace ground to the riverbank. Butchering all those men left Wolford with a hollow feeling. It was his job to kill the enemy, but he got no satisfaction from mowing down soldiers who seemed so incompetent, so vulnerable, so poorly led. He didn't exactly feel sorry for them, but whatever he was feeling, it wasn't good.

The tanks moved on to the palace, past gardens and walkways and imposing stone mansions tucked behind walls draped with flowering vines. There were two entrances to the palace, each framed by guard shacks and wrought-iron gates that were left wide open. Wolford was amazed. It was like an invitation to walk right in. A couple of tanks rolled through the gates and stopped in the shadows of the four bronze busts of Saddam on the roof. The rest of the column set up in defensive positions on the main roadway; some of the crews were still killing a small group of Special Republican Guard soldiers who were firing from a small bunker complex directly across from the road.

In front of the sprawling palace was an expanse of manicured lawn that surrounded a circular fountain and beds of roses. The two main entryways led past stone porticos and towering palm trees into the palace itself. The complex was deserted. There were no bunkers, no gun emplacements, not a single soldier. It looked like a museum that was closed for the day. The palace walls rose up against the hazy morning sky, an expanse of pale tan stone and polished marble, silent and implacable. On the rooftop at each of the palace's four corners stood the huge bronze busts of Saddam. They depicted the dictator wearing a pith helmet over an Arab headdress, with a plume of feathers at the peak. Shawn Gibson wanted to put a tank round through one of them, but it was forbidden. The palace was a protected site.