Thunder Run (37 page)

“I have about thirty to thirty-five dismounts walking down the road straight toward you,” Lustig said.

“How far out are they—are they in RPG range?” Wolford asked.

“About five hundred meters.”

“Okay, don't fire till I get the company ready,” Wolford said. It would take a few minutes for the crews to get into position and start up the tank engines.

Wolford reached down to put on his boots—and he couldn't find them. He would have to command his company in his stocking feet. He got on the radio and issued orders to his platoon leaders. He wanted them to start their tanks all at once as soon as their crews were up and ready. Wolford knew the RPG teams would be able to identify the tanks the instant they turned over their big turbine engines, so it made sense to crank them all at once. The crews scrambled into position and Wolford gave a short countdown.

The tank engines roared to life. The gunmen on the roadway were only a couple hundred meters from Lustig's tank on the northeast perimeter when his driver, Private First Class Donte Pirl, cranked the engine. Pirl had just slammed his hatch shut when the tank was rocked by a thunderous explosion. An RPG had rocketed in from the front, exploding against the steel frame where the gun tube is attached to the turret.

Lustig heard Pirl scream.
Oh Christ,
he thought,
Pirl didn't get the hatch
closed in time.
Then Pirl yelled that he was okay. He wanted to know how to position the tank. The turret was still locked up from a previous battle and would not traverse, so Pirl and Lustig had worked out a way to pivot the tank from side to side in order to position the main gun.

Lustig was climbing up to fire the .50-caliber machine gun from the cupola when another explosion jolted the tank. He ducked down. Something had slammed into the main gun tube. Lustig looked to see if any hydraulic fluid was leaking. There was nothing. The main cannon seemed fine. It was locked in the forward position, a multipurpose MPAT shell loaded in the breech. The RPG teams were moving closer. Lustig decided to fire the main gun, hoping to at least knock the gunmen off their feet with the concussion. He squeezed the cadillac triggers. The round exploded into the roadway, scattering some of the men.

But other fighters had managed to launch antitank rockets and more RPGs. One RPG slammed into the palace, just below one of the Saddam busts. The explosion jolted Kent Rideout awake. He leaped up from his mattress thinking,
That's no frigging engineer explosion
. Still in his underwear, he ran inside the hull of his Bradley to get on the radio. Then he realized he wasn't in uniform, so he hustled back and got dressed before getting back on the radio to help direct the fight.

Inside the palace, the exploding RPGs awakened Captain Ballanco in his darkened bedroom. He got dressed and rounded up two soldiers from the support platoon who had also taken refuge in the palace. Ballanco, fearing the palace had been overrun by Iraqis, told the soldiers to have their M-16s ready to fire. He slung his own M-16 across his back and took out his 9mm pistol so that he could hold the pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He cursed his own stupidity for leaving his helmet outside.

The palace hallways were pitch black. The three men tiptoed down the marble hallways toward the northeast portico, one of two main palace entryways. But once they found the portico, they decided not to go outside for fear their own men would mistake them for infiltrating Iraqis and open fire. They backtracked, trying to find the southwest portico. Their footsteps echoed off the marble walls. They kept wandering down the wrong hallways, getting lost in the maze of corridors. It took ten minutes to find the portico. Ballanco peeked outside and caught a glimpse of Captain Rich Blenz, the support platoon leader, crouching down behind the fuel and ammunition trucks. He ran over and grabbed Blenz, followed by the other two soldiers.

Blenz was worried about friendly fire—that the support platoon drivers and mechanics would mistakenly fire on the tankers. Ballanco started to tell the support platoon guys to keep weapons tight, meaning not to fire unless a target has been clearly identified. But then he realized that they might not be familiar with the term, so he just told them: “Don't fire a round unless you know he's an enemy soldier.” Ballanco wanted them to be wary, but also ready to open fire in order to keep the RPG teams away from the tankers. A single grenade fired into the fuel trucks might torch the whole line of vehicles clustered in the main palace driveway. The support platoon soldiers held their fire and let the tanks do the fighting. Rideout called on the radio and told Ballanco to make sure he protected the fuelers. Ballanco assured the major that he was on top of it.

At the opposite end of the palace, along the main roadway at the building's southwest corner, Shawn Gibson was down on the pavement next to his tank, squatting on the roadway. His pants were down and his rear was, literally, exposed.

From inside the tank, Gibson's loader yelled out, “Sergeant Gibson! Where you at?” He had just heard Lustig's whispered warning over the radio.

“I'm using the bathroom!” Gibson hollered.

“Hurry up! Here they come! They're coming!”

“What?”

An RPG flashed through the night, punching straight through a blue metal road sign on the palace road. It shot directly over Gibson's head and exploded against the side of his tank, just above the left front fuel cell. Gibson dove to the pavement and crawled under the tank. He could hear bullets pinging off the steel skirts. He hid behind the road wheels, hitching up his pants, and pulled out his 9mm pistol. He didn't know who was firing at him or where they were. He could hear his gunner firing the tank's coax. He screamed up at him, “Keep shooting at those guys! I'm going to come up there as soon as I hear a break in the fire!”

Gibson waited a few moments until the enemy fire seemed to wane. He climbed into the commander's hatch and got on the radio to Lieutenant Maurice Middleton, the platoon leader who had led the company's charge up Highway 8. Gibson was worried about a road that ran down the southwest side of the palace to the riverbank. He was afraid enemy soldiers had infiltrated the roadway. His tank was exposed from that direction. Gibson knew the company's infantry platoon had been posted somewhere along the shoreline behind the road, but he wasn't sure they were still back there. He didn't want to fire on them by mistake.

“Let me know where those guys are at, because if I see somebody coming down that road, I'm going to take them out,” Gibson said.

Middleton wasn't sure, either, so he radioed Wolford and found out that the infantry was still behind the palace. “They're still down there,” Middleton told Gibson. “If you see somebody running across that road, it's them. So don't shoot.”

Gibson was still worried about his rear flank, and still disoriented. He focused his .50-caliber machine gun on what he assumed were RPG teams on the far roadway, and he had his gunner lay down suppressive fire with the coax. He didn't want to use the main gun with the tanks from Lustig's platoon so close by.

Just down the roadway, Middleton was still getting his crew together. When the RPG slammed into Gibson's tank nearby, Middleton had been in the commander's hatch of his tank. His loader had been jarred awake, and was still half asleep as he leaped into his hatch. Something on his Nomex jumpsuit caught on the hatch and he was left dangling in the turret, screaming for help. Middleton thought he had been shot. The gunner reached up and yanked the loader inside, ripping his entire jumpsuit right off him. The loader fought for the next several hours wearing just his boxer shorts, tanker's vest, a T-shirt, and combat boots.

The platoon commanded by Lieutenant Jason Redmon had all four tanks on Readiness Condition Two, with two men up and two down. The crews were scrambling now. Redmon was young and enthusiastic, a 2001 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University with short-cropped blond hair and a slight gap between his front teeth that gave him a wholesome, boy-next-door look. He heard the first two RPGs slam into Lustig's tank on the far end of the perimeter and tried to get Captain Wolford on the radio. He couldn't make contact. He tried Middleton. No luck. Then he heard Lustig say he'd been hit. Redmon wasn't sure if Lustig meant himself or just his tank. For an instant he thought,
Oh, my God, they're coming down and killing us all.

Wolford wasn't available on the radio because he and his crew were trying to get his tank to start. They had been having problems with bad batteries for several days, but they had been unable to locate replacements. The slow and spotty supply lines had been a chronic problem the entire war. The crews had learned to either bring their own replacement parts or horse-trade with other crews.

Wolford's gunner and driver were yelling at each other, trying to get the tank started. They were under fire. Lustig's tank had just been hit twice, and RPGs were exploding into the roadway and up against the palace walls. Wolford had just been on the radio to Lustig, trying to get a read on the enemy, and now his tank was stalled and his crew was bickering. His feet were hurting. He had finally found a pair of boots to put on, but they belonged to his loader.

“Listen!” he screamed. “Shut the fuck up! Let's go!”

The company executive officer pulled up in his tank and tossed out his slave cables. They were like jumper cables—they connected one tank battery to another. The two crews managed to hook up the cables under fire and get the company commander's tank started.

Now Wolford was able to function properly. He realized the RPG teams had seized control of the fight. He had never seen the Iraqis lay down such an effective volume of fire. They were really taking it to his men, and at the moment Wolford had only two tanks in the fight—Lustig's and the tank of Lustig's wingman, Staff Sergeant Kennith Leverette.

But then Gibson opened up, followed by Redmon. Wolford radioed Lieutenant Middleton and told him to pull up to support Lustig and Leverette. He also called Lieutenant Jeff McFarland, whose Bradley infantry platoon was still manning the riverbank behind the palace. Wolford ordered McFarland to bring his Bradleys to the front of the palace. He knew he would need the infantry to clear the woods across the road. Some of the RPG teams had fled into the woods to escape fire from the tanks.

Lustig and his driver had managed to position their tank so that the main gun tube was pointed down the roadway. The RPG teams on the right side of the road had moved so close that they were now trapped between the tanks and the two-meter wall that ran down the right side. Lustig's gunner fired several main gun rounds and Lustig worked the .50-caliber. Several gunmen went down, and the others scattered.

Lustig thought they were retreating back to the small stone arch about three hundred meters up the road. He wasn't certain. He had spent so much time squinting through the bright thermals that he had become night-blind. When he tried to look out from the top of the cupola, everything was black. There was no moon, no streetlights. He had to keep ducking back down and looking through the thermals.

Wolford radioed Lustig and told him to push forward toward the small arch to get a better idea of how many fighters they were up against. He told him that the infantrymen were now on the ground, moving through the wood line to the left of the roadway. Wolford had ordered them to clear the woods on foot, and he wanted to make sure Lustig didn't fire in their direction.

At the arch, Lustig was able to see through an opening in the wall along the right side of the road. Men carrying AK-47s and RPGs were moving around, slowly and deliberately, apparently unaware that an American tank was moving up behind them. Lustig's gunner asked for permission to fire on them, but Lustig told him, “No, wait. These guys are going to walk right into us.” He put the targeting reticle on the sidewalk and roadway just in front of the opening in the wall. Moments later, four of the men walked through the opening and onto the roadway. Lustig squeezed the triggers and all four men went down, torn apart by a blast of coax.

Wolford and Lustig had some of the crewmen toss grenades over the wall to kill or maim anyone hiding behind it. They didn't want RPG teams sneaking out from behind the wall later to fire at the tanks' rear ends. Wolford believed in using every weapon available to keep dismounts away from tank crews. He had often fired his automatic rifle and even his pistol from the commander's hatch. He had lobbed so many grenades into trees and shrubbery down south that Kent Rideout had nicknamed him Hedgerow Phil.

Wolford brought up more tanks from the palace. He swung his gun tube over the left side and told McFarland, the infantry commander, to clear everything behind the tube. The tank would roll slowly up the road, guiding McFarland and his men as they cleared the woods. The infantrymen went at it with methodical precision, pumping automatic-rifle rounds into each flimsy bunker and fighting hole, then finishing things off with grenades. It took them at least forty-five minutes to clear the wood line, killing some of the gunmen who sought refuge there and sending the others fleeing north toward the Jumhuriya Bridge.

One of the gunmen crawled out of a bunker on the left side of the road, ahead of the advancing infantry. He was holding an RPG launcher. The company executive officer, Lieutenant Mark Tomlinson, spotted him from the commander's hatch of his tank. He radioed Wolford and asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Kill him,” Wolford said.

Tomlinson opened up with coax, killing the man where he lay.

Wolford came to a stop. He believed he had now eliminated the immediate threat to the battalion command post at the palace by securing the roadway and woods between his position and the front of the palace. He called Lieutenant Redmon and told him to push forward past the small arch with his platoon of four tanks.

As Redmon rolled up the roadway, he could see that the infantrymen were flushing more gunmen out of the woods and onto the road. His gunner, Sergeant John Heath, saw the outline of two men through his thermal sights. They were about a hundred meters away.