Thunder Run (42 page)

Perkins still wasn't satisfied. He decided to go over to the bridge and personally have a look at the situation across the river.

Meanwhile, deCamp got on the radio to Wolford. In a loud voice that was unmistakable over the net, he asked the captain whether he had fired on the “Palestinian Hotel,” as deCamp called it. DeCamp ordered Wolford to make absolutely sure his company didn't fire on the hotel. Neither man realized that the hotel had already been hit. Wolford, like deCamp, had never heard of the Palestine—or Palestinian—Hotel. He told deCamp that his men had been firing at the beige high-rise directly across the bridge. DeCamp had difficulty deciphering the captain's descriptions of a building with a “brown stripe” running down the side and “a pyramid” on top. He decided to get into his tank and go to the intersection to speak with Wolford directly—and to look across the river himself.

It did not take long for the news of an American attack on a Baghdad hotel filled with journalists to hit the international news wires. Between soldiers monitoring BBC radio and reporters embedded with the Second Brigade, the first reports of the deaths at the Palestine soon reached Colonel Perkins. It was not immediately clear to him whether the hotel had been hit by a bomb or a tank round. The reports confused Perkins. He hadn't been cleared for an air strike on any building across the river. He checked with the air force controllers, who told him that the bombing mission on the high-rise building had not taken place. Perkins hoped the reports were mistaken—perhaps, he thought, the Palestine had been hit by an RPG. Then deCamp, based on his discussions with Wolford, radioed that an Assassin Company tank had earlier fired a round at a building across the river that housed a suspected Iraqi forward observer. Perkins gave an order not to fire on any other buildings across the river until further notice. Soon he got a confirmed report that the Palestine had indeed been hit by an Assassin Company tank round and that two journalists were dead.

Perkins was dismayed by the realization that an American tank had killed two journalists. He didn't blame Wolford or Gibson. Assassin Company had been under heavy fire. The crews had been warned that a forward observer had spotted American tanks and was calling in mortars. Mortar rounds had already exploded near the tanks. Enemy fire was coming from the opposite bank. Cut off from news reports since leaving Kuwait almost three weeks earlier, the crews had never heard of the Palestine. Under attack in the heat of battle, Wolford was not required to seek higher approval to fire on a building with a suspected forward observer. Given the circumstances, Perkins thought, it was the right call—with tragic, unintended results.

Earlier, as he was trying to get a description of the Palestine, Chris Tomlinson had asked his editor in Doha to get word to the reporters inside the hotel to hang bedsheets from their windows as a way of identifying the building. By early afternoon, the bedsheets were out. (Iraqi soldiers later ordered the reporters to remove them.)

From the bridge, Wolford saw sheets fluttering from the building his men had hit, and his heart sank. He glanced over at Middleton, and he saw from the look on his face that the lieutenant knew it, too. It was a miserable feeling.

Shortly after Shawn Gibson hit the Palestine and fired on the RPG teams in the alley, enemy fire from the east bank began to taper off. Assassin Company had by now seized control of both the intersection and the bridge, and the rapid shift from full-scale war to relative calm was startling. The stream of vehicles delivering gunmen had dried up. There wasn't as much movement across the river—just whirls of smoke drifting past burning vehicles and clusters of debris. Many enemy fighters had fled north, where they were soon fired on by Captain Barry's Cyclone Company at the next two bridges.

From time to time near the Jumhuriya, sniper fire rang out and an occasional RPG sailed overhead. But the Iraqis on both riverbanks were beaten now, and the Assassin crews knew it. They came up out of the hatches, filthy and exhausted, but relieved to be done with it. Some of them lit up cigarettes. A knot of vehicles was gathering at the foot of the bridge, where Colonel Perkins was in his M113 command carrier, joined by deCamp and other officers from the Tusker battalion. Some of them were on the street, talking to the crews.

Behind them, in the two city parks, the stiff corpses of the Iraqi dead were splayed in awkward poses in the dirt next to their fighting holes. Some of the faces were smooth and young and almost peaceful. If viewed from a distance, where the congealed black blood and the half-burned uniforms and the torn pink flesh were not so apparent, some of them could have been men resting in the sun after a hard morning's work. It was past midday. The sun was fighting through the blanket of haze, and a warm breeze was beginning to disperse some of the smoke from the battle. It was developing into a fine April day in downtown Baghdad.

To the north, Barry's men moved to secure his two assigned bridges, and the sounds of the firefight echoed along the riverbank. The Iraqis were able to mount several intense volleys against Barry's company, but were unable to sustain their counterattack. It seemed to Wolford, who had fought them all night and all morning, that the Iraqis had such poor command and control that each group of men was essentially fighting on its own. The soldiers apparently had been told that holding the bridges was crucial, so they fought bitterly to keep them. When they were at last driven off the Jumhuriya Bridge, they fell back to the next bridge to the north. And when they encountered Cyclone Company there, they leapfrogged north to the next bridge, where they fought Cyclone all over again.

Barry called in two mortar missions of twelve rounds each that drove out Iraqi soldiers dug in along the riverbank between the bridges. His tanks fired HEAT rounds to destroy three Russian-made BMPs that had tried to maneuver and attack. His infantrymen spent the rest of the day chasing down and killing small groups of fighters moving through the streets. At one point, one of Barry's crews fired on a boat full of armed men trying to cross the river, sinking the vessel and killing everyone aboard. The firefights were infused with moments of intensity but they lacked the sustained ferocity of Assassin's battle at the bridge. Barry had seen the carnage at the Jumhuriya. When he pushed past Wolford's intersection, he had asked him over the radio, “Assassin Six, what the hell were you fighting up here—World War Three?”

At the Jumhuriya Bridge, Wolford's request for an air strike on the beige high-rise directly across the bridge had been held up following the deaths at the Palestine. Early in the afternoon, as Perkins was in his command vehicle at the foot of the bridge, two missiles fired from the building sailed over his head. At the same time, pilots overhead were reporting armed men moving in and out of the rear of the high-rise. Gunfire was starting to pick up again from across the river.

By this time, Major Rasins had arrived with the Iraqi civilian and his information that Iraqi military intelligence was in the building. Rasins got out of his Bradley to talk to Wolford, whose tank was at the base of the bridge. As he climbed up on Wolford's tank, Rasins realized that the captain was in “open protected” position, with only a six-inch opening in the hatch. The battle seemed to be over, so Rasins asked Wolford why he was still in open protected. “Because it's fucking dangerous out there,” Wolford told him. “They're still shooting from across the river.”

Rasins climbed down into the safety of the turret and told Wolford what the Iraqi civilian had said about the high-rise. As Rasins ran back to his Bradley, two Iraqi gunmen opened fire from a building just north of the bridge, on the near side of the river. Assassin Company returned the fire, and Rasins fired his 9mm pistol, killing one of the men.

Concerns about civilian casualties and possible friendly fire had delayed approval of the air strike. But now, with hostilities on the increase, the bombing of the high-rise was approved. Marine Major Mark Jewell and his mixed air liaison crew of marines and Third Infantry soldiers had been parked on the bridge inside their Bradley since shortly after noon, awaiting clearance to guide the fighter planes in. It was hot and airless inside the Bradley, and Jewell let the crewmen step outside for fresh air. But when an RPG screamed overhead and exploded against a wall next to the planning ministry, everybody hustled back inside and buttoned up. Then Jewell got word that the planes were tasked and ready.

“Three minutes, men!” Jewell yelled. “We're taking this building down.”

Jewell was on the radio to pilots who had been pulled off the “stack,” a sort of parking lot in the sky for pilots awaiting orders, and assigned to attack the high-rise. Jewell was having trouble understanding one of the pilots, a British officer flying a Tornado. The pilot was speaking English, but it was British English, and the accent was throwing Jewell off. But he worked through it, and finally the two found a common, military language.

It was Jewell's job to mark the targets for the pilots. His laser range finder had been destroyed in a battle against the Medina Division three days earlier, so he had to ask a lieutenant in a fire-support Bradley nearby to fire a laser at the high-rise and pass its GPS grid coordinates on to him.

In the rear of Jewell's Bradley, Marine Captain David Cooper had painstakingly converted the GPS grids to longitude and latitude coordinates used by the pilots to program their bombs. Cooper's face was dotted with red welts and cuts, and an ugly crimson bruise snaked across both eyes, which were badly bloodshot. The day before, shortly after Cyclone Company had taken the Fourteenth of July traffic circle, Cooper had been standing in the street, consulting with Captain Barry. Geoff Mohan, the embedded
Los Angeles Times
reporter, was standing beside them.

Cooper and Mohan heard someone shout “RPG! RPG!” A grenade exploded against either a street sign or a tank turret, and Cooper and Mohan went down hard. It felt like hot iron filings were being blasted into their faces. Mohan reached up and felt his face, but he was afraid to look at his hands because he thought he'd be holding pieces of his face. He asked Cooper, “Is my face okay?”

Cooper said, “You're fine.”

Mohan looked at Cooper and told him, “You've got a cut on your cheek.” Cooper smirked and wiped it away. He told Mohan they had to get back to their vehicles.

They ran back to Jewell's Bradley, Lightning 28, where Jewell washed out Cooper's eyes. A medic worked on Mohan's eyes, which were clogged with dirt and grit, and told him he'd live to die another day. Cooper escaped with a bad headache and two black eyes, but it had been a sobering experience. Now, on the bridge, he was glad to be inside the Bradley.

From the turret, Jewell fired a laser toward the top of the high-rise, indicating the target. The laser shot just over a portrait of Saddam Hussein mounted on a small arch stretched across the crest of the bridge. A British Tornado GR4 fighter-bomber roared over the city, somewhere high above. A pair of thousand-pound Mark-83 JDAMs swooshed down. Their inertial navigation systems, programmed with the three-dimensional location of the target, directed the bombs to the high-rise. They tore two black gashes into the tan face of the tower, unleashing a spiral of gray smoke. Jewell's voice came over the radio inside the Bradley: “Outstanding hits!” The Bradley crewmen scrambled out to watch the smoke pour from the building. One of them pulled out a disposable camera and snapped off a few photos.

For the next strike, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Scott Toppel, known to his colleagues as Skweez, was piloting a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet high over the Tigris. Toppel and his wingman, also in a Super Hornet, had taken off that morning from the USS
Nimitz
. They had their “kill box,” the area designated for close air support. Ground controllers had told them to switch to a frequency that connected them to Lightning 28. Toppel heard Jewell's voice describe the target as a tall building on the east bank of the Tigris. Jewell also warned that an A-10 Warthog had been shot down in the area that morning.

Toppel's wingman went first, banking over the river. The gray form of the jet was barely visible from the bridge against the curtain of smoke. A bright flash burst from beneath a wing, and a black streak slammed into the building, unleashing a ball of orange flame framed by white smoke. A second laser-guided Maverick missile ripped another jagged hole in the tower. Toppel followed, his first missile locking on to the laser beam. He pressed the red
PICKLE
button on the control stick, heard the
whoosh
of the missile, and watched it shoot toward the building. He thought it was going to miss high, but then it pitched over and exploded against the top story. The second missile misfired and locked up on the rail. By the end of the mission, five missiles from three F-18s had scored direct hits on the high-rise.

Over the radio came Cooper's voice: “Good effects on entire building. Building still standing, but I guarantee you there's nothing left inside.”

The bombing of the building was an oddly anticlimactic coda to the battle for the bridge, and for the city itself. The tank and Bradley crews cheered and slapped palms at the sight of the burning black holes ripped into the building, but they did not feel the same satisfaction they had experienced upon driving the enemy back across the bridge. It was beginning to dawn on them that the war was rapidly drawing to a close, and weeks earlier than anyone had anticipated. It was something they wanted, something they had risked their lives to achieve, but somehow they were not quite prepared for the finality of it. It was so sudden. They were sleep-deprived and stoked up on adrenaline and fear, almost giddy with relief at having survived. Now the thunder run was over. They knew what they were supposed to do next—to set up a perimeter behind new berms being built by the engineers from burned-out cars and toppled lampposts, to stay alert and hold their positions through the night, and to fight another pitched battle if it came to that. That much they knew. But they did not know what was coming next, in the half-light between war and what passed for peace, and this uncertainty weighed heavily on them for a long time.