Thunder Run (43 page)

No one in the Spartan Brigade was able to define with any certainty the moment when the balance tipped, when the second thunder run reached that point in any battle where men on both sides realize that the outcome has been ordained. It may have been when the first fuel and ammunition convoy reached Objective Curly at the height of the battle there. It may have been later, when the same convoy resupplied the beleaguered combat team at Objective Larry, or still later, when the tank battalions' relief convoys rolled into the palace complex. It may have been when tanks from Objective Moe stole into the city at night for fuel and ammunition. And if there was an emblem for what they had achieved, it was probably the American flag that Rick Nussio had waved in the parade grounds, or perhaps Jason Conroy's kill shot into the equestrian statue of Saddam Hussein.

They couldn't say. They knew only that their experience was bewildering and shattering and utterly unique, and something that no one who had not been with them could ever comprehend. It occurred to Staff Sergeant Tom Slago on the eighth, as he was eating an MRE of beef and mushrooms inside his Bradley in the downtown district, that all the killing he had accomplished had left an indelible mark on him. Through his sights, he caught a glimpse of an Iraqi soldier, armed with an AK-47, poking his head around a building. Slago watched and waited, certain that the Iraqi would draw closer. And the soldier did creep closer. At last Slago fired a burst of coax that tore the man in two, and with barely a pause he resumed his beef and mushrooms. Those same involuntary impulses also affected Specialist Benjamin Agee, the infantryman who had used his big M-240 machine gun to help his four-man team kill at least twenty men in the gloom beneath the overpass at Curly on the seventh. By April 8, Agee was deployed inside the downtown parade grounds complex. The firefights had eased considerably by then, and it was clear to him that the war was ending. Agee was uneasy, and he found himself actually wishing somebody would take a shot at him so that he could get back into the fight. He missed the wild intensity of it all, the purity of effort and will.

The next day, the ninth, the marines fought their way into the downtown neighborhoods of the east bank of the Tigris after a punishing two-and-a-half-week march of their own. At Firdos Square, just across from the Palestine Hotel, television news crews captured a scene of celebration and triumph. With the help of a marine armored recovery vehicle, the marines and a mob of Iraqis toppled a towering statue of Saddam Hussein that had dominated the square for years. The figure crashed to the pavement and shattered. Men and boys stomped the remains and pelted them with garbage. Some Iraqis swatted the statue's fallen head with their shoes, a grave insult among the Arabs. The images were relayed live around the world, symbolizing a startling and decisive military victory for millions of Americans watching back home. The men from the Spartan Brigade did not see the footage until much later, but it made no difference. For them, it wasn't the end of anything, only the beginning of something worse than war.

EPILOGUE

B
y the middle of the day on April 8, the firefight was over at Objective Moe. Captain Josh Wright's company had spent the morning responding to sustained enemy fire, but by early afternoon the combat team had managed to expand and secure its hold on the intersection. The Iraqi and Arab fighters who had been attacking the interchange for two days melted away, dragging away their dead but leaving those who still lay in the fields of fire. Wright did not conduct a BDA, a battle damage assessment, and thus he did not know how many fighters his men had killed. Major Roger Shuck, the battalion operations officer, figured they had killed as many as two hundred and had destroyed at least forty-five vehicles. The company had not lost a man, though eight soldiers had been wounded, all during the fierce battles the day before.

By late afternoon, civilians began to emerge from their homes in the poor, densely packed neighborhood of Ummal and from the middle-class district of Al Qadisiyah. They had the lost, dazed expressions of flood or hurricane survivors, for the battle had approached the scale of a natural disaster. Some of the residents were relatives of soldiers killed in the fight, and they scoured the sandy ground for their corpses. The English speakers among them, and there were many, told the Americans the names of Republican Guard or Fedayeen fighters they were seeking. The soldiers, of course, had no idea who they had fought, and they certainly did not know who among the enemy had lived or died.

A few of the residents led Wright's men to ammunition caches in their neighborhoods, and others complained bitterly that the Syrian mercenaries had turned their homes into fighting positions. Some families left with the bodies of relatives, but no one touched the corpses of the Syrians or other foreign mercenaries. Wright thought some of the dead Arabs looked like college students, with their jeans and sneakers and polo shirts, all accessorized with ammunition bandoliers and cloth combat vests with ammo pouches. Later the engineers dug graves and buried them.

Wright and his men were exhausted, but also euphoric at having survived and having held the interchange in the face of surprisingly robust resistance. Some of the men said they never, ever wanted to endure a battle like that again. Wright thought he would do it all over again if he had to, and he would fight just as hard. But he also knew that when he got back to the States and back behind the wheel of his car, he would never look at a highway interchange the same way again.

Down the highway, at Objective Larry, Lieutenant Colonel Twitty had been confident when the fighting eased around sundown on the seventh after a full day of fighting. He was convinced that the enemy had given up and would disappear overnight. But just after the sun came up on the eighth, the Republican Guards and Fedayeen and Syrians were right back at it, firing volleys of RPGs that were just as intense as the day before. Twitty radioed Colonel Perkins in the city and told him, “Sir, you're not going to believe this—we're back in contact!”

Much of the fire was coming from the southwest, from the neighborhood of Hay al Qtisadiyin. First Lieutenant Mark Brzozowski, a twenty-six-year-old West Point graduate from Hampton, Virginia, ended up leading two forays into the neighborhood to eliminate the threat. Brzozowksi hadn't expected to spend more than a few hours at the interchange. Like his commander, Captain Dan Hubbard, and most of the men in the company, he had assumed they would stay just long enough to hold the highway until the Tusker and Rogue battalions returned after a quick thunder run into the city on the seventh. Now Brzozowksi was gearing up for another day of fighting after having spent the seventh in full-scale combat, losing his CD and DVD players and a CD containing his fifty-page personal war journal when his rucksacks burned up on the outside of his Bradley.

On Brzozowski's first foray into the adjacent neighborhood, his team of two Bradleys and seven soldiers discovered three trucks packed with RPGs, AK-47 automatic rifles, and ammunition. They rigged up explosives, then had to jump back in the Bradleys and pull out under fire to escape secondary explosions as the weapons caches detonated. The ammunition cooked off for several more hours.

The second foray was more treacherous. The team stumbled across a mosque courtyard stacked knee-high with weapons and ammunition. Brzozowski got out of his Bradley and went into the compound to set up demolition charges of C-4 explosives to destroy the cache. He needed both hands, so he put his automatic rifle down. As he added incendiary grenades to the cache, an Iraqi soldier stepped around the corner of the mosque and fired an AK-47. The shots missed Brzozowski but tore into an incendiary grenade and set it off. Brzozowski drew his 9mm pistol from his thigh holster and fired, killing the soldier.

As the grenade burned, Brzozowski ran back outside to the two Bradleys to get everyone loaded up and back to the interchange. Then he realized he hadn't initiated the timing fuses on the four C-4 charges he had set up. He had to run back inside, initiate the fuses, then race back outside and climb into his Bradley. The team had traveled most of the way back to the intersection when the C-4 charges went off, triggering an enormous explosion. Chunks of shrapnel and weapons and debris rained down on the southwest corner of the intersection in what Captain Hubbard later described as a “Nagasaki-Hiroshima black mushroom cloud–type explosion.”

The detonation put an end to the threat from the neighborhood. By early afternoon, there was a lull in the fighting. Hubbard could feel his body shutting down; he hadn't slept in days. He was soaked through with sweat, and his legs and feet were swollen and aching from standing in the turret for two days straight. At one point he felt himself nodding off, so he handed off his duties to his executive officer and fell into a hard sleep. He woke up an hour later, refreshed and ready to get back into the fight.

Enemy gunfire picked up again late in the day. Hubbard had seen enough. He got permission from Twitty to call in three artillery missions of six big 155mm rounds each. The artillery exploded on top of enemy fighters dug into the date palms to the northwest and the southeast, and the ground shuddered each time the shells slammed down. Afterward, there were no more RPG volleys and only a smattering of small-arms fire by the time the sun went down. The battle for Objective Larry was over. Hubbard figured his men had killed up to four hundred enemy fighters and had destroyed perhaps eighty vehicles. A single American soldier had been injured—a minor shrapnel wound.

The highway was littered with corpses and with the burned-out hulks of vehicles. Piled among the trucks, cars, and motorcycles that had been packed with soldiers and armed men were the smoldering remains of a tan 2003 Toyota Camry. The car, driven by Bashar Hindi, had sped into the interchange on April 7, bound north to Baghdad. Hindi, twenty-eight, and his brother Waddah Hindi, thirty-four, who was in the passenger seat, apparently had not realized that they were driving into a firefight. They were leather dealers returning to the city from a trip to pay their employees, unaware that American forces had invaded. The Hindi brothers were partners in a leather business that exported skins to Italy and Spain—two wealthy, expensively dressed, educated men with an older brother who had attended George Washington University. Waddah Hindi, whose wife of three weeks was pregnant, apparently was struck in the head by fire from the combat team at Objective Larry and killed instantly. Bashar Hindi was severely wounded and bled to death on the highway. The brothers' relatives, who recovered their corpses on April 11, did not know whether warning shots had been fired at the two men, or whether the brothers simply had not realized they were supposed to stop and turn around. Captain Hubbard was certain that his men fired warning shots at every vehicle that approached the interchange, and he did not recall that any civilians had been killed in cars there.

Farther south, at Objective Curly, the men from 2-7 Infantry had come under sustained fire shortly after relieving the combat teams from the China battalion on the afternoon of April 7. Major Rod Coffey, the unit's operations officer, whose leg had been broken by a shrapnel blast, gave the arriving commanders an assessment of the enemy threat as the new combat team took up positions in place of the men from the China battalion. At sunset, thirty to forty fighters, backed by a BMP, began firing on the interchange from bunkers behind a wall about three hundred meters to the south. As engineers moved in to destroy the wall with a combat excavator, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Hollinsaid, twenty-seven, was killed by enemy fire. Later that evening, after the wall had been toppled and the bunkers cleared, the interchange was attacked by four BMPs and a group of soldiers. The men from 2-7 destroyed all four armored vehicles and killed or drove off the soldiers. The next day, the unit killed several more fighters who had attacked the forward aid station about eight hundred meters south of the interchange.

By the end of the day on the eighth, the battle was over. On the ninth, families began to emerge from their homes on either side of the highway. Some of them collected their dead from the tangle of corpses in the trench lines to the west. Others set upon the adjacent warehouses and businesses, dragging out supplies and office equipment. It seemed to Coffey a highly sophisticated form of looting, not at all frenzied or convulsive. The looters were orderly and intent, more opportunistic than predatory. Coffey watched old women and young children drag out bathtubs and office desks, and some of them waved gaily.

In addition to Hollinsaid, Sergeant First Class Marshall and Staff Sergeant Stever had died in the fight to hold Curly—Marshall and Stever during the ambush of the resupply convoy just south of the interchange. Nine American soldiers were wounded seriously enough at Curly to require medical evacuation, and thirty more were wounded but returned to the fight after treatment.

The friendly fire at Curly from the 2-7 Battalion became a contentious issue. Members of the China Battalion said it made the battlefield handoff even more complicated and dangerous. Lieutenant Colonel Scott E. Rutter, the 2-7 commander, later suggested that enemy fire—or fire from China itself—was actually responsible. Rutter said his battalion had rescued China, which he said had failed to fully clear Objective Curly.

On the morning of the eighth, Captain Anthony Butler, commander of the battalion's headquarters company, rode down Highway 8 with several other soldiers to try to find Marshall's body. Marshall had been left behind as the resupply convoy, under Captain Aaron Polsgrove, tried desperately to escape the ambush and avoid further casualties. Marshall's Humvee was still intact and still being used by his crewmen, Specialist Krofta and Private First Class Cruz. Across the roof of the vehicle, they had written in flowing black letters: “In memory of SFC Marshall—‘Big Time' not forgotten.”

Searching Highway 8, Captain Butler questioned American soldiers near the interchange at Curly. One told him that a local resident had claimed earlier in the day that he had seen the half-buried body of an American soldier nearby. But the soldier had not had the presence of mind to detain the resident so that he could lead the way to the body. Butler drove up and down the highway, searching north and south of the spot where Marshall had been blown out of his Humvee. His little search party came across an Iraqi civilian who said he had seen a dead American. He led Butler to a uniformed corpse that was swollen and overrun with flies. The body was dressed in an American uniform top with a US ARMY tag, but it also bore an Iraqi military web belt and Iraqi military boots. Butler looked closely. It wasn't Marshall—it was an Iraqi fighter.

The search party did not find Marshall that day, but they did find pieces of Stever, which one of the chaplains recovered and bagged for burial. The next day, Butler had flyers printed in both Arabic and English, offering a $100 reward for information leading to the recovery of the remains of Sergeant First Class John W. Marshall.

Four days later, on April 12, a young Iraqi boy approached soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were patrolling along Highway 8. He told them he had seen the remains of an American soldier in a shallow grave not far from the cloverleaf at Objective Curly. He led the soldiers to the grave, where they saw an arm and a leg protruding from the dirt. The corpse in the grave wore desert tan American combat fatigues. The rank—Sergeant First Class—was still on the sleeve, and over the right breast pocket was the name: MARSHALL. The remains of John Marshall were gently laid into a body bag and draped with an American flag to be shipped to the United States for burial with full military honors.

The recovery of Marshall's remains was a balm for Aaron Polsgrove, who had been consumed by guilt and regret for leaving Marshall behind during the ambush. He did not second-guess himself for his decision under fire; he believed it was the right call, and that it had almost certainly prevented further casualties. But he knew that if Marshall had not put himself at the head of the column—Polsgrove's usual position—it would have been Polsgrove's own corpse there on the highway. And even now, with Marshall's remains on their way back home to his family, there was still a troubling question for Polsgrove: Why hadn't God protected Sergeant Marshall, too? Polsgrove promised himself that when he reached heaven, he would ask God why.

The following winter, Polsgrove and his wife were told that she was pregnant with their first child. Polsgrove believed with all his heart that the small life growing inside her would not have been possible without the sacrifice of John Marshall.

In downtown Baghdad on April 9, the tanks and Bradleys of Captain Chris Carter's Attack Company were killing off the last holdouts among the soldiers and miltiamen who had infiltrated Rogue's sector from across the Tigris River. The company was hit by several volleys of RPGs and small-arms rounds during the day, returning fire each time until the volleys stopped. From across the river, RPG teams hiding behind a wall next to a mosque opened fire. Carter's Bradleys tore down the wall with several blasts of Twenty-five Mike Mike, and the fighters fled. By the end of the day, there was only sporadic contact, and the two northernmost bridges were secured.