Thunder Run (29 page)

As the convoy prepared to pull out on Highway 8, the scout who was supposed to be in the gunner's mount had disappeared. He had hustled over to the side of the highway to urinate. Marshall was furious—this was no time to take a leak. Krofta had never seen Marshall so annoyed. Marshall climbed into the gunner's mount, took over the grenade launcher, and told the wayward scout to zip up and get into the back. Krofta hopped into Marshall's customary spot in the front passenger seat, where he could monitor the radio and the combat computer.

They rolled north, Captain Bailey and his three vehicles at the front, followed by Polsgrove's extended convoy, which was led by Marshall's Humvee. Marshall focused on staying close on the tail of the last of the three vehicles in Bailey's group, an armored personnel carrier with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the top hatch. Marshall was manning the grenade launcher on his Humvee, working the radio, scanning both sides of the highway for signs of the enemy. He wanted to be able to radio back quickly and warn Polsgrove and the rear of the column the instant they came under fire.

Manning the .50-caliber on an armored personnel carrier behind Marshall was a thirty-six-year-old mechanic, Staff Sergeant Robert Stever, whom everyone called Catfish because of his mustache and a pair of thick spectacles that magnified the size of his eyes. Stever was known as a guy who could fix anything, mechanical or otherwise. Once, he figured out a way to tie a cargo strap to repair a dented cargo hatch that had prevented Polsgrove from traversing his grenade launcher. He was well known in the battalion for using ether to get balky engines to turn over, and some of the mechanics had nicknamed him Ether Queen. He was a coffee hound, too, and everybody knew to go find Catfish when they needed a caffeine jolt.
And even though Stever was a mechanic, not a combat infantryman, he loved firing the big .50-caliber. He was a fine shot.

Lieutenant Colonel Twitty considered Stever the hardest-working mechanic in the battalion. He had known Stever since their days posted together in Germany, and the two men often had sat and chatted in Twitty's office back at Fort Stewart or in the motor-pool bays. Some nights, Twitty would walk to the motor pool late at night and find Stever working alone, covered in grease, and he would have to order him to go home. When the unit was sent to Kuwait to train for the war, Twitty and Stever continued their regular chats. Just before they rolled into Iraq, Stever thanked his commander for the rigorous training sessions Twitty had imposed on the battalion. Stever said he felt prepared for war, and prepared to die. “Sir,” he told Twitty, “I'll take a bullet for you any day.”

The head of the convoy passed beneath a tall archway across Highway 8. Krofta thought it looked like the St. Louis arch. He yelled up at Marshall in the turret. “Hey, sergeant, we just passed into St. Louis!” Marshall let out a little laugh. “Right, Big Time!” he shouted.

The convoy had been rolling for less than five minutes when Polsgrove noticed several knots of men in civilian clothes gathered in front of a complex of two-story and three-story buildings about two hundred meters to the east, across a set of railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway. There was something odd about them—about the expectant looks on their faces. Bailey noticed it, too. He wondered why so many men would be congregating just as an American convoy was approaching. He radioed Polsgrove and said, “This doesn't look right.”

Polsgrove was about to reply when gunfire erupted from somewhere across the railroad tracks. He could see muzzle flashes just in front of the low buildings and from the rooftops. Directly in front of him, Marshall opened up with the MK-19, launching grenades in a high arc over the railroad tracks and into the buildings.

Polsgrove looked over his right shoulder and saw the blazing red fireball of an RPG, trailed by thick white smoke. It was head-high, about three meters off the ground. He thought it was going to hit him in the head. The fireball streaked in front of him and exploded on top of Marshall.

Polsgrove watched Marshall's body fly out of the turret. It was like he had been launched. The grenade had struck the sergeant squarely in the torso, ripping out his midsection. Polsgrove saw Marshall hit the roadway
with an awful thump. There was a gaping cavity where his chest had been. Polsgrove had never seen a man killed in combat, and the sight of Marshall's body smacking down on the pavement was shocking. Until that moment Polsgrove had been a confident and gung ho young commander, fired up about leading men into combat. Now he was overwhelmed by a sudden, tight terror. He had always envisioned himself as the kind of soldier who would charge a machine-gun nest or jump on a live grenade. But now he knew he wasn't that man, and he felt a terrible disappointment. He was afraid and confused, and not as fearless as he wanted to be.

The terror was something that would paralyze him if he did not get it under control. He knew he had to take charge—of himself and his men. He had to get the convoy out of the kill zone. He couldn't stop his vehicle to recover Marshall's body. If he stopped, every vehicle behind him would stop. That was the way they had trained. Polsgrove screamed at his driver to speed up, knowing the vehicles behind him would follow his lead and accelerate. He was focused now—focused on getting his men out of the ambush alive. He had overcome his fear, and he had taken charge, trying to will himself into the combat leader he had always longed to be.

In the front passenger seat of Marshall's Humvee, Krofta had seen a flash of light and had felt a tremendous thump that flung him against the radio mount. He heard somebody scream. The Humvee pitched and rocked. Krofta thought they had crashed into something. The Humvee was filling with black smoke. He looked up into the turret to ask Marshall what had happened. He couldn't see him. Sergeant Marshall had disappeared.

Next to Krofta, in the driver's seat, Private First Class Angel Cruz was stunned and disoriented. The smoke was burning his eyes. He didn't know what to do. Normally, Sergeant Marshall would issue orders, but Cruz couldn't see him anymore. Nor could he see well enough to drive. He pulled over and stopped at the edge of the highway. It had just begun to dawn on him that Marshall had been hit and blown out of the vehicle.

Cruz and Krofta got out onto the highway to look for their sergeant. They couldn't leave him there. That was the code—you left no man behind, dead or alive. It would be a devastating thing for them to let Sergeant Marshall—or his remains—fall into enemy hands. The two men checked the turret. It was still smoking, and it gave off a pungent odor, like the smell of burning flesh. Marshall's two hand mikes, which had connected him to the radio, had been blown off. The stripped wires were
dangling over the edge of the turret. On the handle of the grenade launcher were scraps of flesh and fatigues, and dark smears of fresh blood.

Cruz and Krofta looked up and down the highway. There was no sign of Marshall. They could see gunmen moving toward them, and they heard rifle rounds ricocheting off the highway and off the frame of the Humvee. Cruz fired his M-16 across the road. Captain Polsgrove pulled up in his Humvee, slowing down, yelling something at them.

“Sir!” Cruz said. “Sergeant Marshall's gone! He's not in the vehicle! We don't know where he's at!”

Polsgrove's heart was racing. He didn't want to have to stop and explain that he had seen Marshall's body, because then the whole convoy would stop behind him. He just wanted Marshall's Humvee out of the kill zone.

“I saw him! He's dead!” Polsgrove shouted. There was no other way to say it. “Let's go! Keep fucking moving!”

It pained the captain to leave Marshall like that. He hated doing it—it violated every instinct in him. But he feared more men would die if they stopped to try to recover the remains. As soon as possible—as soon as they got to safety and could mount a sizable search party—they would come back for the sergeant. Polsgrove would not rest until Sergeant Marshall was found and sent home for burial. But right now he was forced to make a snap decision, and he decided to save the living, not the dead.

Polsgrove's driver was speeding away as the captain shouted over his shoulder to Krofta and Cruz, two small, forlorn figures in the roadway: “We'll come back and get him later!”

FOURTEEN

CATFISH

W
hen the fuel and ammunition convoy was ambushed, everyone manning a weapon in the lead vehicles opened fire. Staff Sergeant Stever worked the butterfly triggers on his .50-caliber, trying to aim the big rounds at the gunmen massed across the railroad tracks. He fired off several hundred rounds toward the muzzle flashes. Inside Stever's armored personnel carrier, Chief Warrant Officer Three Angel Acevedo was up in the crew hatch, firing his M-16 across the right side. Beside Acevedo was Sergeant Eric Gubler, pumping away on his M-4 carbine. And behind them, in what was now the lead Humvee because of the death of Sergeant Marshall, Captain Polsgrove was launching grenades from his MK-19, trying to detonate them on the rooftops, where he could see muzzle flashes from automatic rifles.

But the enemy fire only escalated, a sustained volley of automatic rifle rounds and hissing RPGs. The bright flaming grenades whooshed between the vehicles and exploded on the pavement. It was remarkable that the RPGs kept missing, Polsgrove thought, given the accuracy of the direct hit on Sergeant Marshall just a minute earlier. He was afraid another vehicle would get hit—perhaps a fuel truck, which would ignite in a massive fireball and explosion that would almost certainly block and trap the vehicles to the rear.

Polsgrove was firing the grenade launcher when he caught a glimpse of an RPG streaking in from the right side. He saw it skip across the top of the armored personnel carrier directly in front of him and rip into Sergeant Stever's head. There was a sickening explosion. Pieces of something flew out onto the highway. What was left of Stever collapsed down into the hatch.

The explosion blew the driver, Private First Class Jarred Metz, out of his seat. Metz couldn't feel his legs. He thought his body had been blown in half. He looked down and saw streaks of blood. Shrapnel had torn
through his lower back and buttocks. His legs were tingling. He scrambled to his feet and realized the vehicle was careening off the highway. He tried to get the big carrier under control but it crashed into the guardrail on the left side of Highway 8.

Metz heard Chief Warrant Officer Acevedo's voice over the radio. “You all right?” Acevedo had been up in a hatch next to Stever.

Metz wasn't sure. He told Acevedo he thought he was okay. He was bleeding, but he could move his legs—and he thought he was in good enough shape to drive.

Acevedo was bleeding, too. His back had been lacerated by shrapnel from the RPG, soaking his uniform with blood. He got on the radio to tell Captain Bailey that Stever was down, but he couldn't get it to work. He gave up and took command of the carrier, trying to direct Metz through the ambush. He wasn't able to fire Stever's .50-caliber. The RPG had smashed the handle. He opened up with his M-16.

Inside the crew hatch, something had hit Sergeant Gubler in the leg and knocked him down, but he was able to get back up. He heard Acevedo asking if he was okay, and he said, “Yeah.” He found his weapon. He got back up in the hatch and fired at the muzzle flashes coming from the buildings on the right side. Stever's corpse was crumpled on the floor of the turret. Gubler knew he was dead; he had practically been decapitated. It was horrifying to see his friend like that. He and Acevedo wanted to treat their sergeant with dignity, but they were under fire and fighting for their lives, so they just left his body where it had fallen.

With Acevedo yelling instructions from up above, Metz managed to get the carrier back on the highway. He steered it into the column, where Captain Polsgrove was desperately trying to keep the vehicles together and lead them out of the kill zone. The captain was screaming at his driver to speed up. The Humvee was probably going forty-eight kilometers an hour, but it seemed to Polsgrove that they were barely moving. RPGs were raining down, and small-arms rounds were hissing and cracking overhead. Polsgrove got Captain Bailey on the radio and told him that both Marshall and Stever were dead. Bailey already knew. From the hatch of his armored vehicle at the head of the convoy, he had seen both men go down.

Polsgrove was feeling guilty about abandoning Marshall's corpse and about having let Marshall take the lead. He fought with himself to maintain his focus, to keep the rest of his men alive. He was still launching
grenades from his MK-19 to suppress the RPG teams across the highway in order to protect the fuel and ammunition, still screaming at his driver to speed up. It was less than one and a half kilometers to Curly. The convoy sped on, the drivers gunning the engines on the lumbering fuel tankers and ammunition trucks, willing the vehicles forward. Some of them were driving with one hand and firing their automatic rifles on full burst out the driver's window with the other.

Through the thick haze, Polsgrove could make out the outlines of the cloverleaf at Curly. The gunfire from the ambush was fading, but now he heard the thunderous racket of the ongoing firefight at the interchange. They were driving straight into a battle—with no safe place to park the vulnerable fuel and ammunition trucks. Polsgrove could see that the command and medical vehicles from the combat team at Curly were occupying the only protected space—the part of the highway beneath the overpass.

Polsgrove and Bailey decided to pull the vehicles over on the right shoulder, just south of the overpass, where the raised entry ramp afforded some protection. As soon as Polsgrove's Humvee rolled in, the Bravo Company first sergeant ran over, screaming and cursing. He couldn't believe the support platoon was bringing fuel tankers and ammo trucks to a firefight. No one had told him that the resupply convoy had been dispatched to Curly.

“Sir!” he screamed. “What the fuck are you doing here? What are you doing, bringing fuel and ammo trucks to my objective? You're gonna get us all killed!”

Polsgrove told the sergeant he didn't have any choice—and he didn't have time to argue about it. He ran back to check on the convoy and was astonished to discover that every last vehicle was still intact. He and Bailey had a hectic discussion about how to arrange the vehicles. It was hard to hear over the roar of the battle. They decided, finally, to just park the trucks motor pool–style, side by side, until they figured out a better way to protect them. They didn't want to leave them that way for very long; if one of the tankers or ammunition trucks were to be hit, it would become a huge exploding grenade, spewing hot shards of metal that would ignite the adjacent trucks.

The enormous relief Polsgrove had felt upon escaping the ambush was now draining away. The tankers and ammunition trucks were even more vulnerable and exposed now because they were stationary targets.
While on the move, they at least had had a fighting chance. Now Polsgrove felt helpless to protect them from the RPGs exploding up and down the highway. It didn't help his frame of mind when he noticed the blackened remains of Charlie One Two, the Rogue tank that had burned on the highway just north of the interchange two days earlier. If the enemy could burn an Abrams, Polsgrove thought, imagine what they could do to a soft-skin fueler.

Within minutes, RPGs were sailing over the tops of the trucks. Polsgrove and Bailey realized that the RPG teams firing from the buildings east of the highway were targeting the trucks, trying to ignite them. One truck was hit by an RPG that failed to explode. The dud grenade bounced off and rattled down the highway. Bailey rounded up one of the engineers and asked him to try to clear rubble from the west shoulder of the highway so that some of the trucks could be moved to a spot partially protected by the raised curve of the western on-ramp. The rate of enemy fire from the west was less intense than from the east now that the mortar teams had demolished the troublesome building there.

At the same time, Polsgrove ordered the gunners on crew-served weapons to stay in the vehicles and lay down suppressive fire to the east, where RPG teams were in the windows and on rooftops. He ordered the rest of his men out of the trucks and into the trench system that had been cleared by the infantrymen. They were needed to help hold the perimeter. The men ran, ducking and weaving, and crawled into the trenches with their automatic rifles. Some of them had to shove aside enemy corpses to make room.

Dr. Schobitz's medics treated the wounded men from Stever's personnel carrier. They bagged up Stever's remains and lay him behind the aid station, next to one of the concrete support beams beneath the overpass. It was a protected spot, as safe as any other place around the aid station, given the fact that occasional rounds were smacking into the support columns, spraying the medics with flying bits of concrete. It seemed somehow disrespectful to just stick Sergeant Stever off in the corner, but the firefight was in full throttle and there was no time to think of a better way.

The arrival of the supply convoy triggered a surge of confidence for the commanders leading the fight at the interchange. For Captain Hornbuckle and Command Sergeant Major Gallagher—and for Captain Johnson, who was now in charge of the entire combined combat team at
Curly—the fresh fuel and ammunition eased their fears. Separately, each man had harbored a dread that the situation was deteriorating into another Mogadishu. They had envisioned being overrun, short on combat power and ammunition, with no way for reinforcements to get through. Now their men were unloading ammunition for the Bradleys and the infantrymen, and Lieutenant Woodruff's mortar crews were getting fresh loads of the high-explosive, 120mm mortars that had been so effective in demolishing the buildings housing RPG teams. Hornbuckle, Gallagher, and Johnson knew they were now in a position not only to hold the interchange, but also to eventually kill, capture, or drive off the gunmen surrounding them. Johnson figured his men had killed at least 130 enemy fighters and destroyed two dozen vehicles. Hornbuckle thought his men had probably killed another 150 fighters and destroyed perhaps a dozen vehicles.

They were now superior in every respect—armor, infantry, ammunition, and fuel. They thought they had seized control of the fight.

Beneath the overpass, hunched over the radio inside his command vehicle, Major Denton Knapp had been monitoring the radio nets, keeping abreast of developments up and down Highway 8 and inside the palace complex. As the executive officer for Task Force 3-15—China battalion and its assets—Knapp was the number two man below Twitty. More than anyone at Curly, he had absorbed the full scope of the Spartan Brigade's battle for Baghdad that morning. Knapp had monitored Twitty's conversations with Colonel Perkins on the brigade command net and, on the task force net, the discussions between Twitty and his commanders at the three interchanges. He had also monitored the Rogue and Tusker thrusts into the city. It was Knapp, in fact, who passed on to Twitty the reports that Tusker had seized the palace.

Knapp hated being stuck inside his command vehicle while the battle raged outside. He wanted to be part of the fight. It was hot and stuffy in the hull, and he felt trapped and claustrophobic. He could hear the RPGs exploding outside, and the vehicle had pitched and rocked when the short 155mm artillery round detonated next to the overpass.

At one point, Knapp's driver came tumbling down into the hull from the upper hatch of his M577 armored command vehicle. The driver had been firing a .50-caliber machine gun north up Highway 8, trying to subdue
the gunmen in the trenches and inside the buildings. Knapp's vehicle didn't have a gun mount, but he had rigged one up by tying the .50-caliber tripod to the top of the vehicle with green parachute cord. Now his driver was crashing down beside him, his arm bleeding. It had been torn open by shrapnel. Knapp took a look at the wound, but before he could do anything about it the driver yanked his arm away and said he was okay. He climbed back up top and resumed firing.

Knapp had not anticipated a fight of such intensity. On the march up from the Kuwaiti border, the battalion had always taken the fight to the enemy. He and his men were the aggressors, seeking out enemy positions and surprising them and killing them. Curly was different. The Iraqi soldiers and the Syrian mercenaries had surprised the battalion with their tenacity and their ability to attack from all sides. Knapp had never imagined that they would deliver fighters to the front in civilian buses and taxis and even motorcycles. Nor had he anticipated the sophisticated trench system or the prepositioned weapons caches dug into both sides of the highway.

Knapp was not a man who was easily cowed, but there were moments, especially early in the fight before Ronny Johnson arrived with reinforcements, that he feared being overrun. Knapp was a veteran officer, thirty-eight years old, with nearly seventeen years in the army. He was a West Point man, commissioned in 1987. He had grown up in Gillette, Wyoming, the son of a surveyor and part-time country-and-western musician. He played army with the kids in his neighborhood, where his next-door neighbor went off to attend the Air Force Academy. Knapp decided in high school that he, too, would be a military officer.

Until he crossed the border into Iraq, Knapp had never been in combat. Even after several firefights down south, he had been edgy and apprehensive as he sat through Lieutenant Colonel Twitty's impassioned briefing the night of the sixth. He sensed that the fight on Highway 8 would be like nothing he had experienced before. He lay down in the middle of the night, still wearing his helmet and flak vest, and tried to get a couple hours' sleep. It was impossible. He was too agitated.

Now, with the fight raging in all directions, Knapp couldn't stand it inside the vehicle any longer. He had to see what was going on. He climbed out and stood beneath the overpass in the command and control area framed by armored vehicles backed up butt to butt, their rear hatches
touching. He couldn't see much because the air was a milky yellow, with swirling dust and pungent black smoke from the massive loads of ammunition being expended. From time to time, Sergeant Major Gallagher and Captain Hornbuckle ran over to discuss the progress of the fight. By this time, late in the morning, they all agreed that the situation had stabilized. The infantrymen and Bradleys were slowly extending the perimeter. In military terms, Knapp felt, they had established “positive control” of Objective Curly.