Thunder Run (33 page)

Twitty told Johnson to make sure the entire convoy stayed in the right-hand lanes. The Bradleys at Larry would clear the way by firing in the left-hand lanes, eliminating any threat from the western side of the highway. The roadway itself was now clear. Twitty had sent his engineers out earlier to shove aside the smoking wrecks of the suicide vehicles littering the highway. There were so many of them—technicals and taxis and buses—that they had completely blocked the roadway from the south.

It was only three and a half kilometers from Curly to Larry, and the convoy was moving briskly, probably forty-five kilometers an hour. Captain Polsgrove, in one of the lead Humvees, was surprised by how quickly the interchange at Larry came into view through the haze. He was pumping grenades from his launcher into upper-story windows along the highway when he suddenly realized they were already approaching Larry.

From his tank hatch up on the overpass, Captain Hubbard saw rounds smack into the sides of the support beams and kick up dirt next to the curving on-ramps, where his infantry was dug in. He realized that the gunfire was coming from the advancing resupply convoy. He got on the task force radio net and started screaming for the gunners to shut down, to stop firing at friendlies. He managed to get them to stop shooting before any of his men was hit. Hubbard was delighted to see the fuel and ammunition, but he would have preferred that it had arrived in a less dramatic fashion.

On his Bradley, Twitty felt a rush of relief. For hours, he had been agonizing over his tenuous hold on all three interchanges and his combat teams' steadily dwindling supplies of fuel and ammunition. Now two of Polsgrove's ammunition trucks and two of his fuel tankers were pulling in under the overpass with enough supplies to last Twitty and Hubbard through the night and well into the next day. Even with the loss of the five trucks in the conflagration at Curly, there was still enough fuel and ammunition left over to resupply Captain Wright at Moe. For the first time
that day, Twitty felt confident not only about holding the interchange at Larry, but also about securing the entire resupply route all the way up Highway 8. He thought to himself, “I've got this now. It's mine.”

Twitty told Johnson to escort the rest of the convoy to Moe, then continue on, as Perkins had ordered, to secure the highway that ran east from Moe to Perkins's command post at the Sujud Palace. It was an opportune time to launch the convoy. For the first time that day, there was a lull in the fighting. Twitty sank back in the hatch of his Bradley, overcome by a sudden sense of weariness bordering on exhaustion. He felt overwhelmed. For nearly eight hours straight, he had been fighting and screaming into the radio and drawing up a battle plan and worrying about the resupply. Now he felt his body starting to shut down. He had not had a decent night's sleep for more than a week. He had not slept at all the previous two nights. He was filthy with dust and soaked with sweat. He lay back and shut his eyes. For fifteen blissful minutes, even with his gunner still firing below him, he sank into a fitful sleep.

First Sergeant Jeff Moser was surprised to find himself out on the perimeter and under fire at Objective Moe. He was in charge of the company trains—two medical tracks, a maintenance vehicle, the operations officer's command Bradley, and Moser's own M113 armored personnel carrier. Moser had expected the company trains to be in a more protected spot, perhaps under the overpass, where the medics could work in relative safety. That was the way it usually worked, and he assumed that's the way it was laid out in the mission brief. But, in truth, Moser had missed most of the mission brief the night before. He and his men had come under RPG fire as they were preparing for the mission, so things were a bit disjointed. He barely got a chance to glance at the map imagery to see where they were supposed to go. He ended up having to tell his driver just to stay on the tail of the Bradley in front of them all the way up Highway 8 that morning. The next thing he knew, they were setting up just past the northwest on-ramp at the big spaghetti intersection—at Moe—with RPGs zooming over their heads.

Moser was thirty-seven, an experienced NCO, a seventeen-year lifer. He had joined the army right out of high school in Dearborn, Michigan, where his father worked the assembly line for the Ford Motor Company,
putting together Mustangs. Moser had grown up with Arab neighbors, and he had learned a few Arabic phrases, which he thought he might put to good use in Iraq. He had combat experience, too, in Panama, but that was nothing like what was confronting him now, at Moe.

Their little group out on the northwest perimeter was getting pounded. Moser saw exploding RPGs and small-arms tracers, plus antiaircraft guns lowered to direct-fire mode and an occasional mortar round. He figured there were several hundred gunmen unloading on them. Moser's men were protected from the rear by the elevated concrete on-ramp, but they were exposed to their front, where a field and a park led to an enormous mosque with twin minarets. It was the Um al-Tabul Mosque, one of the biggest in Baghdad, a towering pale yellow structure where hundreds of Baghdad's middle-class Sunnis worshipped. It seemed to Moser that some of the enemy fire was originating from the direction of the mosque.

On the edge of the mosque compound closest to the interchange was a stout fence anchored by concrete pillars. Moser could see gunmen ducking and running next to the fence, and he opened up with an M-240 from the open hatch of his personnel carrier. He was still firing when word came over the radio of the first casualty of the morning. It was Specialist Steven Atkinson, one of the infantrymen. He had run into the open to grab a wounded enemy fighter who was bellowing in pain on the western edge of the company perimeter. Atkinson was trying to drag the man in for medical care when an AK-47 round tore into his abdomen, just under his combat vest.

One of Moser's responsibilities as first sergeant was casualty evacuation. He tried to get one of the medical tracks over to Atkinson, but enemy fire was too heavy. The infantrymen in Atkinson's platoon put him into an armored vehicle that delivered him to Moser's group. One of the medics treated Atkinson, but the wound was serious enough to require evacuation to the forward aid station three kilometers to the south, just north of Objective Larry. Moser put Atkinson in his personnel carrier and got one of the Bradleys to escort him. They took heavy fire all the way down the highway; an RPG destroyed an M-240 machine gun mounted on the Bradley, which got everyone's attention.

Moser made it back to Moe just in time to deal with another casualty. It was Sergeant William Staun, the gunner in a tank that had set up on Highway 8 just south of the interchange. His tank commander, Sergeant
First Class Robert Ford, had been up in the commander's hatch when he heard Staun scream. Ford couldn't figure out how Staun had been hurt; he was down in the turret, protected by several inches of steel. He looked down and saw that Staun's coax gun had jammed. Somehow, one of the rounds had cooked off and ripped through Staun's left bicep. Ford put on a pressure dressing and got him to the medics. Moser evacuated Staun, too.

The casualties kept coming. Two engineers were hit with shrapnel as they tried to tear down light poles and palm trees to build barriers to fend off suicide vehicles. Then a Bradley on the southern perimeter was rocked by an RPG that tore straight through a TOW missile launcher and exploded against the commander's hatch. A piece of shrapnel ripped a hole in the right shoulder of the Bradley commander, Sergeant First Class John Morales, while he was looking through his integrated sight unit. The medics treated Morales on the spot and got him returned to action, but it was the second time someone presumedly safe inside a tank or Bradley had been wounded. Moser thought things were starting to get out of control.

The fire from the mosque was getting heavier. Moser was certain now that fighters were taking advantage of the structure's protected status, using it for cover in the belief that the Americans would not fire back. From what Moser could see, the fighters were being supplied with ammunition and weapons stored in the mosque compound. He was worried that the Iraqis would fire on the trailer the engineers had parked at the edge of the perimeter. It was loaded with mine-clearing charges—the sausagelike links of powerful C-4 explosives. If gunfire detonated the charges, the explosion would probably level the mosque—and kill every American on the perimeter.

Moser radioed Captain Wright in his command Bradley to the east. “We're taking fire from the mosque,” he told him.

Wright was busy fielding radio reports from all his track commanders, but he was aware of fire coming from the direction of the mosque. He scanned the compound through his sights and spotted an RPG team on the roof and one team on each minaret. He was not eager to destroy a huge mosque in the middle of Baghdad, but he wasn't about to just stand by and let his men get pounded.

“Roger,” he told Moser. “Let me clear it up and see what's going on.”

From his command and control Bradley next to Moser, Major Roger Shuck had also radioed Wright to report fire from the mosque. Shuck was
the battalion S-3, or operations officer, in charge of monitoring the battle at Moe and keeping Wright appraised of events up and down the highway. At first, Shuck thought the enemy fire was coming from the park and gardens in front of the mosque. But then he scanned the mosque through the Bradley's sights and saw a two-man RPG team standing on a railing midway up one of the minarets. He described it to Wright. He was dying to take them out.

Wright radioed Twitty and described the RPG teams firing from the mosque, and the ammunition and weapons cache within the mosque compound. Opening fire on a mosque was a sensitive subject. The rules of engagement clearly listed mosques as protected targets. Along with schools and hospitals, the houses of worship were the sites most often discussed by combat commanders. But the rules of engagement also permitted American forces to return fire from the enemy—even if the enemy was firing from a mosque. Twitty and Wright had a brief discussion. Twitty knew Wright's team was getting hammered. He gave the captain permission to return fire from the mosque.

Shuck was a senior officer, but he didn't mind being in the middle of a firefight. Eight days earlier, near Karbala, his Bradley had been ambushed by an RPG team. A grenade had torn through the back of his turret, severing the heater hose and punching through to the ammunition rack inside the turret. Two high-explosive Twenty-five Mike Mike rounds exploded, slamming Shuck into the turret. The concussion had ruptured his eardrum, and now he couldn't hear anything out of his left ear. He could monitor only one radio net at a time, so he had to have his gunner monitor the brigade net while Shuck listened to the task force net with his good ear.

But Shuck was still able to fire a weapon, and he thought of himself as a pretty fair shot. On the way up Highway 8 that morning, he had shot and killed two enemy fighters with his M-16. One had been lying on the right shoulder of the highway, playing dead, and Shuck got him from about seventy-five meters. Later, as he passed under an overpass, Shuck noticed an orange-and-white taxi parked on the elevated roadway. He thought it was odd that a taxi would just be sitting there in the middle of a firefight. He had his gunner traverse the turret to the rear. As he looked back, Shuck saw two men get out of the taxi and lean across the vehicle with an RPG launcher. He braced himself against the turret, aimed his M-16, and shot one of the men through the head. His gunner chopped down the second man with a burst of Twenty-five Mike Mike.

Now, staring at the mosque, Shuck was trying to point out the RPG team on the minaret to a .50-caliber gunner on the personnel carrier next to him. The minaret was about 250 meters away. Shuck aimed his M-16 and fired. One of the men on the minaret went down. The .50-caliber gunner saw where the M-16 rounds had hit and opened up with the big gun, sending the second man toppling from the minaret. Then Shuck's gunner let loose with the 25mm main gun, blowing up two ammunition and communications trucks parked in the mosque compound. Moser followed up with his AT-4, the antitank rocket launcher. He hit a small trailer in the courtyard, unleashing a tremendous explosion as the ammunition stored inside cooked off.

The fire from the mosque stopped, but gunmen were still moving up and down the fence in front of the mosque compound. Moser sprayed them again with his mounted M-240 medium machine gun. The gunmen were dressed in black, and Moser assumed they were Fedayeen. They were poorly organized. They didn't coordinate their fire. One man would pop his head up and shoot off a few rounds or an RPG, then hunker down and let somebody else fire. But several of them stayed up too long, and Moser was able to kill each man as he rose up. The others would try to recover the dead men's bodies and weapons, only to expose themselves to Moser's M-240.

Some of Moser's soldiers started laughing and making cracks like, “How stupid
are
these guys?” Moser thought he should reprimand them, because it really wasn't funny. They were killing people. But he had to admit that his men were right. These people were inept. Moser had been harping on his men to be smart, to stay alert, to remember their training. They had all seen dead Republican Guard soldiers hauled off the battlefield down south, their boots poking from the trunks of cars. Moser often told his men, “Don't be the guy with his boots sticking out of the trunk.” Now it was the enemy doing stupid things, and it struck everybody as comical.

Moser did not enjoy killing these men. He hated the carnage. Earlier that morning, along Highway 8, he had seen a dog feasting on the spilled entrails of a dead Iraqi soldier, and that image poisoned the fight for him. He couldn't get it out of his mind.

*    *    *

The interchange at Moe was more complex than the simple figure-eight intersections at Larry and Curly. Several highways merged at Moe into a tangle of on-ramps and overpasses that took motorists in all directions—north toward the exclusive neighborhood of Yarmouk, east to the palace complex, west to the airport, and south down Highway 8, the desert route to the city of Hillah. The overpasses were stacked on top of one another, their concrete support pillars overlapping in a maze of light and shadows. Below them were neighborhoods and shops and markets. Objective Moe wasn't part of a clear open highway. It was a dense urban cluster, and a nightmare to defend.